Transcript: Richard Lindzen & William Happer on Joe Rogan Podcast #2397

And it was cooling from the 1930s. The 1930s were very warm and it was getting cooler until the 70s. And that’s why they were saying, “Well, this is going to lead to an ice age.” And they focused on that for a while.

And then in the 70s, at that time, well, what do you say if you’re worried about an ice age? They said, “Well, it will be the sulfates emitted by coal burning because that reflects light, and the less light that we get, the colder we’ll get.” But then the temperature stopped cooling in the 70s and started warming. And that’s when they said, “Well, you have to warm now. Scare people with warming, and you can’t use the sulfates anymore.”

But the scientist called Suki Manabe showed that even though CO2 doesn’t do much in the way of warming, doubling it will only give you a half degree or so. But if you assumed that relative humidity stayed constant so that every time you warmed a little, you added water vapor, which is a much more important greenhouse gas, you had doubled the impact of CO2, which now gives you a degree, which still isn’t a heck of a lot. But still it was saying you could increase it. And that’s when people started saying, “Well, now we better find CO2. It’s increased because of industrialization and so on.” That began the demonization of CO2.

Political and Economic Motivations

JOE ROGAN: Do you think there’s just always people that are going to point to anything like this that’s difficult to define and use it to their advantage?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh, yeah. And this was a particular case you wanted to deal with – the energy sector is trillions of dollars. Anything you can do to overturn it, change it, replace fossil fuels, big bucks. And one of the odd things, I think, in politics, I don’t see it studied much. Congress can actually give away trillions of dollars.

If you look at the McKinsey report on eliminating CO2, net zero, they’re saying it’ll cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. Well, if you’re giving out that much, you don’t need that much of your politician. All you need is millions for your campaigning. And all you’re asking are the recipients of people who are getting the money that you are giving them a half percent, a quarter percent, you’re golden. So that’s much better than giving out 100,000 and having all of it back.

JOE ROGAN: Well, the key, though, is also making it a subject that you cannot challenge. There’s no room for any rational debate. And if you discuss it at all, you are now a climate change denier, which is like being an anti-vaxxer or fill in the blank with whatever other horrible thing you could be called.

The “Settled Science” Paradox

RICHARD LINDZEN: Now that’s a very interesting phenomenon. I mean, I was looking at it. On the one hand, you’re told the science is settled, thousands of the world’s leading climate scientists all agree, which often makes you wonder. I mean, you went to college, how many climate scientists did you know?

But on the other hand, if you read the IPCC reports, they’re pointing out, for instance, that water vapor and clouds are much bigger than CO2 and we don’t understand them at all. So here you have the biggest phenomena we don’t understand at all, but the science is settled. Who knows what that means?

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also, there’s this very bizarre dynamic of the Earth’s temperature itself, which has never been static.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No. How would it remain static? That would involve a hugely reactive system.

JOE ROGAN: Doesn’t make any sense. But everyone seems to be buying this narrative that the science is settled and the Earth is warming. We have to act now.

RICHARD LINDZEN: You say everyone.

JOE ROGAN: I’m not saying everyone. A lot of politicians, a lot of…

RICHARD LINDZEN: Politicians are very attractive to this because it gives them power.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s hard to define and if you argue against it, you’re a bad person.

Public Skepticism vs. Elite Opinion

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, you do all that, but we spend part of a year in France, my wife is French. Ordinary people, once you get to the countryside, don’t take this all that seriously.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Here too, I suspect ordinary people have more skepticism than many people who are more educated.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, but unfortunately these ordinary people sometimes are impacted by these politicians decisions. Where they have… In the UK they were getting rid of cows, they were forcing people to kill cows, they were paying three times more for their heating and their electric bills.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Right, right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, it makes people poorer. It’s making it almost impossible to electrify parts of the world that need it. And that involves billions of people. I mean it’s doing phenomenal damage and pain. But I think for politicians and for many people who are well off, they need something that gives meaning to their life. And saving the planet seems sufficiently grandiose. But they’re ambitious.

Net Zero Policies and Global Development

JOE ROGAN: How are these net zero policies stopping people from getting electricity?

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

JOE ROGAN: Right, but what I’m talking about is like third world countries, parts of the world that are undeveloped, they can’t afford it. That’s all it is. They can’t afford it. But they also, if they didn’t follow these net zero policies, what kind of plants are we talking about? Are we talking about coal plants?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Coal, anything. Whatever’s available.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, so you think…

JOE ROGAN: Even though coal does pollute the environment and releases particulates. Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: That’s an issue.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: How shall I put it? It’s always a matter of cost. We have a plant, I think, in Alabama that has basically as clean as any other plant that burns coal. You can clean it, you can scrub it, you can get rid of almost everything except CO2.

JOE ROGAN: Okay. So the particulates aren’t as big of an issue as they used to be in the past. They’re more efficient. Okay.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So stopping… So this net zero thing is stopping them from installing modernized coal plants in parts of the world that do not have electricity. And the overall net negative weighs much heavier in not bringing these coal plants and not bringing these people into the first world.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I think so.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

Political Overreach and Market Solutions

RICHARD LINDZEN: And there are, of course, the alternative natural gas and so on, which are available in places. There are places where you have… You’re lucky, like in Norway or Canada, Quebec, where you have hydro, which is intrinsically clean.

But there’s a problem with politicians. I remember once being in D.C. and some Republican politicians came and said, “You know what we just did? We banned incandescent light bulbs. Wasn’t that a great thing?” I said, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard today. What’s the point?” Because at the time, what was replacing it? Compact fluorescents, which were awful. All they had to do was wait and do nothing. And LEDs would come along and people would say, “Okay, I prefer that.” Instead, they feel they have to do something.

The Problem with “Trust the Science”

JOE ROGAN: Something, and they would switch the fluorescence, which turned out to be terrible for people. So incandescents aren’t bad for you.

RICHARD LINDZEN: They were simply less efficient than the, in terms of the number of watts of heat they generate versus light. I mean, LEDs are phenomenal that way, right?

JOE ROGAN: They’re the best.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s interesting when they have these decisions that they make like that that do turn out to be negative ultimately, and that yet people still allow them to make silly decisions that don’t seem to be making sense.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I think there’s an old cliche. Money is the root of all evil.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s what I was going to get to. This is the disturbing thing that I think a lot of people have a hard time accepting, especially a lot of very polite, educated people that have followed the narrative that you follow if you’re a good person and if you’re a person who trusts science. And that is that, like, we have a serious problem, we have to address it now or there will be no America for our grandchildren. This is the thing that we keep.

RICHARD LINDZEN: You mentioned a tough thing there, the business. Trust science.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

RICHARD LINDZEN: It’s not a great idea because that isn’t. Science is not a source of authority. It’s a methodology. It’s based on challenge.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Where’d this narrative come from then? Trust the science.

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

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that’s a very good point. Because try finding a good politician that everybody agrees is rock solid. You can find plenty of science that everybody thinks is amazing. Cell phone technology, nuclear power, so many things that people go, that’s incredible that they did that.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, that’s also confusing technology with science.

JOE ROGAN: The result of science. Right, absolutely. Yeah. Which is also an issue.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And when you can get politicians to attach themselves to narratives that are supposedly connected to science.

Historical Climate Data and CO2 Levels

RICHARD LINDZEN: You mentioned Gore at the beginning, with that thing he was showing this cycle of ice changes and CO2 and temperature going together, and it never bothered him that the temperature changed first and then the CO2.

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s not like we can point to, like, look at the dinosaurs. We don’t want to live the way the dinosaurs lived. Look how much CO2 they had. Like. And then the other really inconvenient thing with CO2 is that the Earth is actually greener than it has been in a long time.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, I think we’ll speak to that. But I mean, essentially the increased amount of CO2 in the industrial era has added greatly to the arable land. And in fact, there’s a funny story. Do you know the name E.O. Wilson? Have you ever heard that name?

WILLIAM HAPPER: I do.

JOE ROGAN: I have heard it, but I don’t know where.

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

JOE ROGAN: That’s an inconvenient truth, sir. To me, it’s very strange to see an almost unanimous acceptance of. Of that we have settled this, the science is settled from so many people in both the left and in academia and even on the right. There’s a lot of people on the right that believe that.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, I know. And it should be the first thing that makes you suspicious.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, right. There’s a consensus.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, this is not how science is done.

Temperature Changes and Historical Context

JOE ROGAN: The weirdest thing is when you look at the charts of the overall temperature of Earth that have been from core samples over a long period of time. It’s this crazy wave and like no one was controlling it back then. We’re supposed to believe that we can control it now.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Something else about it which I find funny, and you might have some insight into it. People pay no attention to the actual numbers. Yeah, I mean, we’re not talking about big changes. In other words, for the temperature of the globe as a whole between now and the last glacial maximum, the difference was 5 degrees. But that was because most of the Earth was not affected much of the earth anyway, very much. But somebody says one degree, a half degree, what’s his name, Gutierrez at the UN says the next half degree and we’re done for. Doesn’t anyone ask a half degree? I mean, I deal with that between 9:00am and 10:00am it does seem crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just that kind of fear of minute change that they try to put into people. And what I think people need to understand that are casual observers of this is what you discussed earlier, how much money is involved in getting people to buy into this narrative so you can pass some bill that’s called Save the world Climate, something crazy like that, where they call it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: They call it the Inflation Reduction Act.

JOE ROGAN: Even better, who doesn’t want to reduce inflation? And then next thing you know, there’s windmills killing whales and all kinds of nonsense. But the point being, it’s. It is a fascinating science. Like the science itself is fascinating.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: You get rid of the ideology and you stop attaching this thing versus, you’re either pro science or anti science. Just look at the actual data of it. It’s absolutely fascinating. And these minute changes, the fact that the procession of the equinoxes or the Earth wobbles like the whole thing is nuts. The whole temperature. And it has to stay relatively stable in order to keep us alive in terms of like, can’t go too low, can’t go too high. We’re in this Goldilocks zone.

RICHARD LINDZEN: The interesting thing is during the Ice ages, we almost get wiped out.

JOE ROGAN: Got really close. Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And what’s interesting about that is as far as temperature goes, okay, yeah, the poles have gotten much colder. You have ice covering Illinois, 2 kilometers of ice, that’s uninhabitable. But you get south of 30 degrees latitude, not very different from today in terms of temperature. And so you would think at 100,000 years, people would sort of migrate to an area where it was now pleasant Trouble was without CO2, which went down to about 180. There wasn’t enough food for the people.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, so there wasn’t enough plant life. Yeah, yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Get down to 160, 150. All life would die. There would be not enough food for anything.

JOE ROGAN: What’s it at now, like 240?

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, we’re now 400.

JOE ROGAN: 400?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, 400, 430. Maybe today. Yeah.

Academic Pushback and Censorship

JOE ROGAN: Okay. When you first started discussing this and when you first started getting interested in this, how much pushback did you get?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Interesting question. Actually, quite a lot. But, I mean, it took very funny forms. So, for instance, in, let’s see, 1989, for instance, I sent a paper to Science magazine questioning whether this was something to worry about. And they sent it back immediately saying there was no interest. So I sent it to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and they reviewed it and published it, and the editor was immediately fired.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

RICHARD LINDZEN: About 10 years later, working with some colleagues at NASA, we found something called the Iris effect, that clouds, which were greenhouse effect at the upper levels, contracted when it got warm, letting more heat out, so cooling as a negative feedback. And we got the paper put, it got reviewed, it was published again. The editor was fired immediately. But the new editor came on immediately and said he’s inviting papers to criticize it. And suddenly there were tons of papers criticizing it, looking for anything that differed from what we did, including one that found a difference that actually made the CO2 even less important, but it was different. So he thought he could pass it through. No, it’s insane. And even now there is something called gatekeepers. I don’t know. Are you familiar with the release of emails from East Anglia?

JOE ROGAN: No, I’m not.

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

JOE ROGAN: That sounds like that should be illegal.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, well, the whole business with, how shall I put it, peer review, it is not ancient. Before World War II, very few journals had peer review. And in fact, when I have students look at old journals from the 19th century, one of the big surprises is they are less formal than today’s papers. They are literally discussions among scientists about their results, their questions, their uncertainties and so on. Real communication today, I mean, there’s much more formality in the papers. There’s also in my field, the Meteorological Society actually did a poll or a study. How often are papers referred to? It turns out the average paper is referred to once. I mean, so you have these things. Papers are written to satisfy the funding agency. Nobody seems to pay attention to them.

Getting Involved in Climate Science

JOE ROGAN: How did you get involved in this?

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

JOE ROGAN: Did anybody engage with you?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, they had to because I threatened to cut off their funding if they didn’t come. And so they would come, you know, and be very sullen and they wouldn’t answer questions and you know, you can’t have a seminar without asking questions. That’s how you learn.

JOE ROGAN: So they would come to try to get funding from you and they wouldn’t answer questions?

WILLIAM HAPPER: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds crazy. That sounds like people that don’t think they have to convince you that what they’re doing is important. So they’re entitled to that money.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, that’s right. Well, you know, I was working for President Bush Sr. And when Clinton and Gore won the election, you know, Gore couldn’t wait to fire me, you know, at the behest of all of his proteges.

JOE ROGAN: Clinton and Gore.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Clinton and Gore, yeah, that’s right. So he, you know, Washington. Fortunately, it’s very hard to make anything happen, including firing someone you want to fire, because you can’t find them in the org chart. It took them two or three months to find me, but they finally did fire me. I was glad to be fired. I wanted to go back to do research. I was tired of being a bureaucrat. So I’m grateful in some sense for that.

The Scientific Community’s Response

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

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

JOE ROGAN: Climate science.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Climate science, I should say. Yes. So once I had this experience in Washington, I started looking to it a little bit, but I didn’t have time to look a lot because my own research was going still at Princeton, and we had discovered some things that we were able to form a little startup company. And so, you know, forming the company and getting it going and funded used up most of my time. I didn’t have time to look at climate.

But eventually that was behind me and I invited Dick to come give a seminar at a colloquium at Princeton. And that’s really when I began to get very interested in it. And I realized that it’s just completely different from normal science, you know, it completely politicized. If you can’t ask a question, you know, that’s a bad, bad sign. And if you have 100% consensus determining the truth, that’s an even worse sign because, you know, the truth in science is whether what you predict agrees with observation. And that wasn’t true of the science. The climate science community, you know, they would predict all these things and none of them ever happened. And there was no consequence, you know, one failure after another, and nothing ever happened. The funding kept pouring in.

JOE ROGAN: Now, is this behind the scenes? Is this discussed amongst physicists and other hard scientists? Do they talk about how climate science has been politicized and the issue that that causes, or do they just accept it?

The Financial Incentives

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

So it’s like, you know, this famous drama of this Norwegian playwright, “Enemy of the People,” Ibsen. And the point of the drama was there was this resort town in Norway where you would come and you would be treated at the spa, you’d drink the water and go home healthy. Well, people would come and drink the water and they would die of typhoid. A local doctor said, you know, we’re killing people, we’re not curing them. And he was declared an enemy of the people because he was cutting off the source of funding for the city. So it’s that syndrome. It’s an ancient human problem. So it’s always been there, and it’s there in spades with climate.

RICHARD LINDZEN: It’s part of it. Another part of it is the politicization has made it a partisan issue. I mean, in the US And I think that’s in a way fortunate. It’s almost a right versus left issue. And as a result, you have people. Universities are almost entirely on the left. And so it’s something they support. You know, the money end of it is sort of funny. I mean, I have the feeling at MIT that our president, Sally Kornbluth, you know, probably spends her time worrying about how she can use climate money to support the music department. I don’t know.

JOE ROGAN: So when they get funding for climate, they can allocate it as they wish.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, you know, it is fungible, okay?

WILLIAM HAPPER: You get this huge overhead, you know, 50%, 60% of your grant goes to the administration and not to your research. You know, they can do what they like with the orientation.

JOE ROGAN: And if they take a step outside of the narrative and say, “I think we need to re-examine what’s going on with CO2 in the atmosphere. And it seems there’s a politicalization of this subject and that’s bad for science, that’s bad for education, it’s bad for everything. Let’s take a step back.” They would immediately lose so much money.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, the main thing it’s bad for is for overhead income to the university.

JOE ROGAN: Exactly.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Some of the administrators, by the way.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, this is something that the press didn’t deal with very much. Trump was cutting the overhead. He was saying that he didn’t want to have that included in grants. I don’t think the public realized how significant that was. For better or for worse.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: I think most people have no idea where grants go. They don’t even think about it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, I mean, the amount of money that’s involved. Yeah. When I was active, if I got a grant, I’m a theoretician, so I didn’t need laboratory work. It mainly was for support of students. And so. But then 50% of it went to the administration.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. It’s like a lot of charities, almost.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: A lot of money goes to overhead, A lot of money goes to executives. A lot of money goes to the administration on grants.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And some of it is reasonable.

JOE ROGAN: Sure. But it’s also, you’re kind of attached to keeping that money flowing in. And there’s a gigantic incentive to not rock the boat and not discuss it the same way you would discuss nuclear science, right?

Academic Pressures and Institutional Loyalty

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

JOE ROGAN: Right? Yeah. That is kind of what’s going on. It gets real weird when you bring that kind of stuff up and people get very reluctant to have these discussions. They don’t want to rock the boat. I’ve talked to a lot of friends in academia, and they say people pull you aside, like in quiet corners to discuss how this is kind of nonsense.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But there’s also the alumni. I find this with Harvard especially. A lot of the people who graduate from Harvard really love the place, for better or for worse, and they will do anything to protect it.

JOE ROGAN: Does that make sense?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Especially since to stick your neck out there’s not a whole lot of benefit. Unless you’re writing a book about how ridiculous current climate change models are.

RICHARD LINDZEN: A lot of people did at first. A lot of politicians wrote books saying this is a hoax. And they managed to ride that out. I mean, by just keeping on demanding that it be accepted. It’s interesting.

Public Understanding and Ideological Attachment

JOE ROGAN: It is interesting. It’s because it’s universally accepted on the left. Any discussion at all. I’ve had conversations with people and I say, “Why do you think that? Like, what do you know about climate change?” And almost none of them have any idea what the actual predictions are, how wrong they’ve been. What Al Gore predicted in this stupid movie which is so far off he thought we were all going to be dead today, there’s very little change between 2006 and today.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, as I mentioned before, I think for some people its importance is it gives quote, meaning to their life.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. It becomes a part of an ideology and it’s a very cult like ideology that encompasses a lot of different things, unfortunately. What do you think are the major factors you talked about? Water vapor, CO2, there’s methane. There’s a lot of different factors that would lead to the temperature of the earth moving in any direction, correct?

Understanding Climate vs. Weather

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, let me back off that a little because one of the things that is sort of strange is the narrative itself deals with global temperature. Not clear what that is. I mean, some average over the whole globe. How do you take it? What do you do with it? But more than that, what is climate? And you know, there is a definition, it’s an arbitrary definition and it’s that it’s time variation on time scales longer than 30 years. It’s pretty arbitrary, but it distinguishes it from weather which changes from day to day.

JOE ROGAN: Day or week to week, right? So if they can see a rise in temperature over 30 years, they start getting concerned, they start calling it climate.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Okay, now you can take data from every station and filter it to get rid of everything shorter than 30 years. That’s called a low pass filter. And you can look at that and each station and see how does it correlate with the globe. And it turns out very poorly because most climate change by that definition is regional.

So for instance, in this area, let’s say the states like Louisiana, Alabama, Gulf states, they had a period of cooling when the rest of the country was warming. Nobody paid much attention to it because that’s normal. Different areas do different things. You have reasons why it’s local. I mean, if you’re near a coast, near a body of water, the circulations in the ocean are bringing heat to the surface and away from the surface all the time on time scales ranging from a few years for El Nino ENSO to a thousand years. And so this has nothing to do with the global average. The whole business that the global average is at issue was something that was created for people studying different planets. And so you’d look at the average for each planet, and that varied quite a lot. So it was useful. But for looking at the Earth’s climate, I’m not sure a global mean is.

Solar Influence and Climate Cycles

JOE ROGAN: A particularly useful device that makes sense. How much of a factor does the sun play? Obviously, a lot. It heats us up. But like the changing, you know, that’s…

RICHARD LINDZEN: Something there’s argument about, I think. You know, for instance, a man called Milankovitch around 1940 made a convincing argument, and I think now it’s correct, that orbital variations created a change in insolation, incoming sunlight in the Arctic in summer, and that controlled the ice ages.

And the thinking was pretty simple. He was saying that every winter is cold, every winter has snow, but what the temperature or the insulation or the sunlight in the summer is determines whether that snow melts or not before the next cycle. And if you’re at a point where it doesn’t melt, you build a glacier. Takes thousands of years, but eventually it’s big.

And in recent years, for instance, there have been young people who have shown that that works. It’s interesting. There was even a national program called CLIMAP to study this around 1990 or so, and they found something peculiar. They found that there were peaks in the orbital variables that were found in the data for ice volume, but that the time series were not lining up right.

The young people looking at this said, “You’re looking at the wrong thing. If you’re looking at the insulation, you want to look at the time rate of change of ice volume, not just the ice volume.” And then the correlations were excellent. So this was a theory, Milankovitch, that I think has been reasonably sustained. But the people doing this got no credit, nothing. Because early in my career, these people would have been rewarded. Now, it didn’t contribute to global warming. Nobody pays attention to it.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Joe, let me add to what Dick has said, which I agree with, but you asked about the sun, and as Dick says, that is a controversial issue. The establishment narrative is that the sun has very little to do with it. It’s all CO2. CO2 is the control knob. Don’t confuse me with other possibilities.

But nobody is quite sure about the sun. We have not got good records of the sun for a long time. So we’re stuck with proxies of how bright was the sun 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago? And one of the proxies is when the sun activity changes, it changes the amount of radioactive isotopes that it makes in the atmosphere, things like carbon 14 or beryllium 10. These stick around for long, thousands of years or longer. And you can from that infer how many of them were made 500 years ago or 5,000 years ago.

And they don’t give any support to the idea that the sun has been constant. It’s very clear, for example, that the amount of carbon 14, this radioactivity that’s produced changes from year to year. If you don’t take that into account, you get all the dates wrong from carbon 14 dating. You know, where you take an Egyptian mummy and you burn up the cloth and you measure the carbon 14 in it and you get the wrong answer. Unless you assume that the rate of production then was different from what it is today. Because you know what the right answer is from the Egyptian mummies. There’s a pretty good historical record of that.

So it’s clear the sun is always changing. And over the last 10,000 years, since the last glacial maximum, there have been many warmings and coolings, very large warmings and coolings. And that’s particularly noticeable near the Arctic. In high latitudes in the north, for example, my father’s home in Scotland, I was a kid, I would walk up into the hills south of Edinburgh, and you could see these farms from the year 1000, where people were able to make a crop at altitudes where you can’t farm today. It’s too cold today. But it was clearly warm enough in the year 1000, which was the time when the Norse farmed Greenland.

So what caused those? It was not people burning oil and coal, and so I think the best guess as to what it was, it’s some slight difference in the way the sun was shining in those days, because they do correlate with the carbon 14.

Historical Climate Patterns

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: So we can go back 65, 100 million years.

WILLIAM HAPPER: You can go 500 million years. 500 million years and be precise evidence of ice ages. Absolutely. They’ve come and gone.

JOE ROGAN: There’s always been. There’s always been an ice age and…

WILLIAM HAPPER: A warming, and they don’t correlate very well with CO2. You can also estimate the past CO2 levels and they don’t correlate with ice ages.

RICHARD LINDZEN: What’s special about the recent ice ages is they’re pretty periodic. So for 700,000 years, almost every hundred thousand years, you have a cycle.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

RICHARD LINDZEN: If you go back further than that, you begin seeing that fall apart. And for about 3 million years, 40,000 years is the dominant period. And then you go back further than that and you don’t have ice ages for a long time.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Very poorly understood, I would say.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s also no way to track it. Like there’s no way to tell what’s going to happen to the sun. They have some sort of an understanding of it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Clear that solar activity was the issue.

JOE ROGAN: Could have been many factors.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, how should I put it with the ice ages? As I say, orbital theory was the main thing. The fact that you have various factors determining the orbit of the Earth versus the sun and so on, give you periodic changes in the incoming radiation as a function of geography in the Earth.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Joe, let me add again to what Dick has said, that he correctly said that the current ice ages, which are quasi periodic, really only began 3 million years or so ago. And at first they were oscillating a lot faster than today. And that was approximately the time that the Isthmus of Panama closed.

So one of the suspicions is that when the Panama isthmus closed and stopped the circulation of water from the Atlantic to the Pacific, that made a huge difference in the transport of heat in things like the Gulf Stream, for example. Gulf Stream would have been completely different if water could have flown into the Pacific instead of to North Europe. And that was about the time that these fluctuating ice ages began.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

The CO2 Funding Problem

WILLIAM HAPPER: But we’ve set back the serious study of climate, I think, by 50 years by this manic focus on CO2. If your theory doesn’t have CO2 in it, forget it, you won’t get funding. And so the true answer, I mean, to me, there was a period 200 years ago when everyone thought that heat was phlogiston, there was this magic subject, non existent, but everyone had to believe in phlogiston and it turned out it was nonsense, it wasn’t there at all. But you couldn’t get anyone to support you unless you believed in phlogiston. So I call this phlogiston era of climate science where phlogiston is CO2.

JOE ROGAN: Well, this is what confused me. You gentlemen are academics, you’re obviously very intelligent people. There’s other very intelligent people that are involved in academia. How does this problem get solved? Like how do they start treating this as what it is instead of attaching it to a political stance?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, I think stopping the funding for this massive funding for climate would help because it’s certainly been driven within academia by the availability of funds. If you’re willing to support the narrative, you will be handsomely rewarded and you’ll be elected to societies, you’ll win prizes.

JOE ROGAN: And you’ll be shunned again if you don’t.

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

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, Dick would have made a lot more progress and his colleagues would have made a lot more progress if they hadn’t been forced to deal with this CO2 cult. And we might understand climate today without that.

Scientific Freedom vs. Conformity

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: There they are.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Not quite. It’s not the same.

WILLIAM HAPPER: But that’s a Solvay conference. Absolutely.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Now, the 1929 had the Curies.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, Pierre might be there.

JOE ROGAN: Either way.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I guess we can. Yeah, but I mean, I wondered at times, when you had the Soviet competition with the U.S. and they were the first ones into space, and we suddenly began a program to get more and more kids to get into STEM, that has its downside. First of all, you’re going to dilute the field if you increase it too much.

And the second thing is with peer review, I mean, peer review is new. I mean, it wasn’t that common before World War II, but people have pointed out it has its virtues. But the Royal Meteorological Society, for instance, used to give you instructions. And the instructions were, you can only reject a paper if there is a mathematical error that you can identify or if it’s plagiarized, it’s repeating something that already exists. And that was pretty fair because how is a reviewer supposed to decide if a new theory is right or not or so on? That’s asking too much of that.

But today, peer review is almost a process to enforce conformity. If you’re not going with the flow, you can get rejected. And that’s a lot of things structurally need to be, I think, rethought a little bit. The physicists have done pretty well with archive, where they have a publication vehicle using the Internet that bypasses reviews and lets people read it and see what’s up on it. But all sorts of things like that need to happen. I mean, what Will is saying is true. I’m sure science of climate has been set back at least two generations by this.

Historical Precedents of Ideological Science

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: It’s happened many times in the past, Joe. Climate is only the most recent.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just a natural thing that happens.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, for example, there was the eugenics movement, America and Britain and Western Europe, where the claim was that the great gene pool of the Anglo Saxon race, was being diluted by all these low IQ Italians and Eastern European Jews and Chinamen. It was all completely nonsense. But they had learned journals where you could publish an article that proved that. And you had the presidents of Harvard and Stanford and Princeton, Alexander Graham Bell being great eugenicists, protecting the American genome.

And it was all nonsense. It was just complete nonsense. And the only thing that stopped it really was the Nazis, because they took it over with a vengeance. They were big fans of the eugenics movement in America and Britain and they took it to its absurd extreme.

The Historical Parallels of Scientific Manipulation

RICHARD LINDZEN: They also gave an honorary degree to the leading eugenic in America, a man called Laughlin. But, oh, my goodness. No, I mean, what Will is saying. I mean, it had a practical consequence, by the way. It actually led to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which held that America was going to restrict immigrants to percentages based on the population in the 19th century. So there would be a quota for England and Scotland, which was fine, a little bit less for Germany, almost nothing for Eastern Europe, almost nothing for Italy and so on. And that was used in the run up to World War II to allow Roosevelt to prevent Jews from escaping Europe.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Wow.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And it was only changed in 1960. So essentially you were keeping out Jews, Eastern Europeans, Chinese until then because of eugenics in 1924.

JOE ROGAN: You know, the average person that’s not involved in science always wants to think of science as being this incredibly pure thing amongst intellectuals, or they’re trying to figure out how the world works. When you hear stories like that, you hear that kind of stuff and you’re just like, oh, there’s always been a problem.

RICHARD LINDZEN: You’re dealing with people, human beings.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, that’s the problem.

JOE ROGAN: Right. That’s getting to the problem.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Joe says this famous quote by Emmanuel Kant, you know, “from the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made.” That goes for science as well as every other aspect of human society.

Protecting Science from Ideological Invasion

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, the trouble is, you know, when something like eugenics comes around, the population is told that this is science.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And how are they going to say no? I mean, you had various famous laboratories devoted to this. It wasn’t a fringe thing. And so I don’t know how you distinguish it at that time from science today. There are books on it and, you know, you have the correspondence of biologists who are saying, well, it’s a little bit dicey, but they’re saying it’s bringing it to the fore of public attention. So maybe that’s a good thing.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it just makes you shudder to think like what happens if the Nazis didn’t take over Germany and eugenics continued to progress in America? That’s terrifying to think of where we would be today.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right, right. We’d have been a much poorer country because so many leading Americans, you know, creative, productive people have immigrated, you know, fairly recently.

JOE ROGAN: Also probably would have led to some horrific actions in order to enact this.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, I mean, when you put things in the hands of politicians, there is a disconnect. I mean, the business with light bulbs I mentioned, it wasn’t malice, it was ignorance. And you combine ignorance with power and…

JOE ROGAN: You often get nonsense and the narrative that you’re doing something good fairly well.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, yeah.

The Salem Witch Trials and Modern Parallels

WILLIAM HAPPER: Dick has often made the point, which I agree with, that politicians and sort of society leaders are the worst. In situations like this, the ordinary person is often a little bit more skeptical and more reasonable. So, for example, I like to tease Dick because he’s a Harvard grad about the Salem witch trials, but they were orchestrated by people from Harvard. You know, it was not the common people.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever read into that at all?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, I’ve looked into it carefully.

JOE ROGAN: What do you think about the ergot poisoning theory?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, does it make sense? I don’t know. Most of the testimony was from young women, about the same age as Greta Thunberg, by the way. And, you know, they had these visions of the person they were accused consorting with the devil and doing all sorts of obscene things. And that was accepted as testimony. It was called spectral evidence. And so when…

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

WILLIAM HAPPER: When finally the trials were stopped, it wasn’t for the right reason, which is that there’s no such thing as witches. You know, they were stopped because spectral evidence, you know, was shaky. It was being used against the Harvard judges themselves at that point. So it was getting very dangerous, you know. But one of them was selling a book on how to detect witches. Cotton Mather, you know.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’ve read that as well about the printing press. When the printing press was first devised, a lot of people were like, oh, we’re going to get so much knowledge. No, a lot of the early books were like, how to detect witches.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right, that’s right. Malleus Malefactorum, you know, the Hammer of the evildoers. That was the first book on witches.

JOE ROGAN: What I’d read about Salem, though, was that they had core samples that detected a late frost and that they believed this late frost might have contributed to ergot growth. Because apparently that does happen a lot when the plants grow and then they freeze and then they get mold on them. And that mold could contain ergot. And that has LSD like properties, which totally makes sense. They’re eating LSD laced bread and they thought everybody was a witch. But either way, it took…

WILLIAM HAPPER: I think that’s a kinder explanation of what happened. I’m less generous.

JOE ROGAN: Well, you know more about the behind the scenes.

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

JOE ROGAN: Yes, sure. And if you could say your neighbor’s a witch, what better way? We can’t have witches in our neighborhood. Let’s burn them or drown them at the time. Right. That’s what they did to people.

The Human Need for Hatred and Fear

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, yeah. That’s one of the parts of Orwell’s 1984 that many people forget. But a big part of that was every day there was two minutes of hate. And so people seem to have this need for hatred. You know, you have to have a part of the day where you can hate something or somebody. And so if you’re hating CO2, at least that’s better than hating your neighbor.

JOE ROGAN: Well, if you’re on Twitter, you’re using up a lot more than two minutes of hate.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, you know, but even with political figures, I’m always surprised. I mean, it seems obvious that any political figure who is exploiting hate, fear probably does not mean well.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And yet we continually fall over and over again.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, all of them. And, you know, other countries do the same pattern.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: That’s what’s dark. It just seems like we’re terrified of being terrified. And we want safety. We want someone who comes along and scares the out of us and vows to protect us.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yep. Yeah. And children do this all the time. Go into a dark closet and frighten yourself.

Climate Anxiety Among Young People

JOE ROGAN: Well, there is also terrible things in the world and terrible people in the world, but when you have just everything scares the out of everybody. Everything is the end of the world. And climate being one of the key ones that I hear all the time with young people. In fact, there were some recent surveys that were done, you know, about these. Like the things that give young people the most anxiety. And climate is at the very top of that list.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, I mean, it’s really strange to think that this is causing young people not to want to have children, not to want to continue to have no hope for the future. This is bizarre.

JOE ROGAN: And just to live in constant fear of one day. But meanwhile, is anybody paying attention to all these rich people buying shoreline property?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, do you think they’re stupid? Do you think Jeff Bezos is a dumbass because he’s buying these giant mansions, like, right on the ocean? Like, you really think the water’s going to raise that much?

RICHARD LINDZEN: That’s why I put it. I mean, you know, even the people who are pushing it at MIT, I mean, buy houses on the shore.

JOE ROGAN: Obama did. He got that beautiful house and Martha’s Vineyard. It’s like, if you’ve looked at the timelines, I’m sure you have, like, time lapse video of the shoreline from, like, 1980 all the way up to 2025.

RICHARD LINDZEN: It doesn’t move.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, it goes a little bit in Malibu and there’s a lot of…

RICHARD LINDZEN: They go back much further than that.

Sea Level Rise and Arctic Ice

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

JOE ROGAN: And wasn’t there, like, an unprecedented amount of Arctic ice that’s increased recently?

WILLIAM HAPPER: That’s right, yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, that’s always variable.

JOE ROGAN: Right. But when that happens, how come that doesn’t hit the news? If the ice goes away, then it’s going to hit the news. Oh, my God, look at this. We lost a chunk the size of Manhattan and everybody freaks out.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, we were supposed to be ice freed 20 years ago.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No.

JOE ROGAN: You know, Al Gore was just off by a little bit. He’s just off. Give him some decades to be vindicated.

RICHARD LINDZEN: That is the point that I think people have made. A test usually means if you fail it, you’ve done something wrong.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Only in theology does it mean that you change the goals.

Climate Change as a Religious Movement

JOE ROGAN: Right, right. Especially when you invented theology, because climate is very much like a religion, or at least the adherence to it is very religious, like. Or I should say cult like, because it’s not like there’s a higher power. Everyone’s just terrified. And you have to change everything you…

RICHARD LINDZEN: Do now because you’re guilty.

JOE ROGAN: And it used to be that, like, the sign of virtue was to have an electric car. And then every. My favorite thing is going up behind Tesla’s now, and they have bumper stickers that say, “I bought this before Elon went crazy.” So now they don’t. I mean, it’s just everyone is trying to figure out what they’re supposed to do in order to still be accepted by their group. And the climate one is one that if you bring it up with people, it’s almost like you’re talking about witches. Like, they want to get out of there. Like if you actually looked at, oh.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a religious or a cult like thing.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: And they don’t really. It’s not like they’ve studied it a lot. And yeah, it’s really interesting. And this is why I think that we’ve got to reduce CO2. And you have like this informed discussion with someone and you go, oh, okay, so when did you start reading about this? What book was that? Did you see this? And did you see that? Okay, and now you have an informed discussion, but that’s not what it’s like. It’s like you bring it up and they’re like, oh, God, climate change is settled. Climate change is settled.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Okay.

JOE ROGAN: You don’t believe in. Even Bernie, when I had him on when he was talking about climate change is a real giant problem. And we started showing the Washington Post thing that says that we’re in a global cooling period. And it’s raised up sometime over the last hundred. But if you look at like the peaks and valleys people, the main thing is like, this has never been static. And I said to Bernie, I’m like, there’s a lot of money in this, Bernie. You’ve got to admit this. Like, this isn’t something that we have to act on now to save each other. It might be something that we’re being messed with. And that’s what it seems like to me.

RICHARD LINDZEN: It’s like, well, the question is, why does he find it so enthusiastic? Why is he so enthusiastic, wonderful for funding?

The Challenge of Scientific Complexity in Democratic Decision-Making

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: But you’re hitting on a problem. And I think Will knows this as well. A lot of this stuff is actually tough material.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, for instance, the question of what determines the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles, that’s actually handled in a third year graduate course. It deals with hydrodynamic instability, which is a complicated subject, and it’s a real problem in a field. It’s true throughout science where you’re trusting people to behave decently, but that material itself is not going to be entirely accessible to everyone and how you deal with it, how you approximate it. The same is true with nuclear power, with other things. These are technical issues. They’re not trivial. And you’re asking in a democratic society for people to make decisions. It’s a tough issue. It involves a certain amount of trust. And what we’re describing is a situation where the trust is being violated.

WILLIAM HAPPER: There’s this nice Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loved so much: “Trust but verify.” And it’s hard to verify if you’re an average citizen something about climate.

The Problem of Public Understanding and Activism

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: “How dare you?”

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right, there you go.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But you notice how quickly she changed.

JOE ROGAN: She flipped up. Now it’s Palestine. You got to mix it up. People get bored with the climate, you got to listen. You want to be someone that’s in the news, you got to keep moving. You got to keep it moving. You stop doing rap music, start acting, you got to keep it moving. And that’s, she’s an entertainer. Well, she had a very unfortunate experience with that blockade in Israel, so maybe she’s out of the business now, but I doubt it. But when you’re taking a 16 year old kid and having her as a face of climate change, and as you said, this is something insanely difficult to digest for the average person and she doesn’t have this data at her fingertips.

The Reality of Climate Models vs. Political Narratives

RICHARD LINDZEN: It’s not just digest. I mean, it’s how many people can solve partial differential equations. This is one of the complaints I have, which is sort of odd. People blame this on models. And what the models are doing is they’re taking the equations of fluid mechanics, something called the Navier Stokes equation, and they’re doing it by dividing it into discrete intervals and seeing how things change with distance and time and so on. And one of the things that we know is no one has ever proven that this actually leads to the solution, but it’s used for weather forecasting and all sorts of things.

At any rate, they do this, and I think many of the people doing it are doing it carefully or as carefully as they can, and they get answers that will often be wrong. But as best I can tell, none of these models predict catastrophe. Koonin made the point, I think correctly, that even with the UN’s models, you’re talking about a 3% reduction in national product or gross domestic product by 2100. That’s not a great deal. It’s not the end of the earth. You’re already much richer than you are today, so what’s the panic? And it’s true, the models don’t give you anything to be that panicked over. So the politicians and the environmentalists invent extreme descriptions that actually don’t have much to do with the models, but they blame the models. So it’s a confusing situation. The models have a use, they just shouldn’t be used to predict exactly what the future is. You can use them to see what interacts with what and then study it further.

The Mathematical Complexity of Climate Science

WILLIAM HAPPER: Joe, let me just say a little more about what Dick commented on. Navier Stokes equation, which describes fluid motion, the atmosphere, the oceans. And it really is a very hard mathematical problem to solve because they’re not only partial differential equations, they’re what are called nonlinear partial differential equations. And so there’s a joke about Werner Heisenberg, who was the inventor of quantum mechanics, a very bright guy, and he was the head of the Nazi atomic bomb program during World War II. And so he was captured by the Americans and the British, and because of this activity, was forbidden to work on nuclear physics later after the victory.

And so he decided to work on fluid mechanics, on solving the Navier Stokes equation. And he was, as I said, a tremendously talented physicist, but he found it very hard. He didn’t make very much progress because it’s much harder than quantum mechanics or much harder than relativity to solve those equations. And so one of his students supposedly said to him, “Well, Professor Heisenberg, they say that if you’ve been a good physicist when you die and you go to heaven, that the Almighty allows you to ask two questions, and he will answer any question you ask. And what will you ask him?” And Heisenberg supposedly said, “Well, I will ask him why general relativity and why turbulence?” Turbulence is the Navier Stokes equation, he says. “And I think he will be able to answer the first one.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s funny. That’s funny. And this is what’s the best assumption or the best measurements of what’s controlling the temperature on Earth?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, they’re asking you to have great confidence in a calculation involving this miserable equation that is so hard to solve, at least very far into the future. You can solve it for a short time, but it’s very hard to go much further. One of Dick’s colleagues at MIT, a man named Lorenz. Why don’t you tell him about Lorenz?

Chaos Theory and Climate Predictability

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, Lorenz is credited with chaos theory, but basically it’s a statement that these are not predictable. Whether that’s true or not is still an open question, but it has a lot of those characteristics in detail. I mean, for instance, it wouldn’t be a surprise if you’re looking at a bubbling brook and you have all those little eddies and so on. Are you actually able to track the whole thing accurately? Probably not. How accurately would you have to do it? If you scaled it up to climate, who knows?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, the typical description of this theory was that it’s as though a butterfly flapping its wings in the Gulf of Alaska causes hurricanes two years later in Florida.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that one’s funny. Yeah, people repeat that and they’re like, “No, that’s not how it works at all.”

WILLIAM HAPPER: I don’t think it works at all.

JOE ROGAN: It’s funny when people like to do it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, what I think he meant was rather simpler than that. The hurricane is likely to occur. The flipping of a butterfly’s wings might have actually changed it from one day to another. It wouldn’t. It would have an influence downstream.

Germany’s Energy Policy as a Cautionary Tale

JOE ROGAN: Everything has an influence. Everything is tied in together. Now, when we make models based on incorrect data about CO2 levels and what the temperature in the future is going to look like, at what point in time do you think another country needs to screw up the same way Nazi Germany ran with eugenics and it ruined eugenics in the United States, where they’re like, “Oh, my God, this is a horrific idea.” Do you think something like that has to happen in another country where they have to take this climate change, green energy thing to its full end?

WILLIAM HAPPER: I don’t think that’s how it will end. I think Britain or Germany may be the sacrificial country because Germany has shut off all of their nuclear power plants.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, God. And they did it all for green energy.

RICHARD LINDZEN: That makes no sense.

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

JOE ROGAN: That’s so crazy.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah. And so at some point, some country like Germany, they’ll lose all their jobs, all the industry will move. There’ll be no jobs. People will all be on welfare. There’s no money to pay them. And at that point, someone will realize, “We’ve taken a wrong turn here.”

JOE ROGAN: I can’t believe they blew their plants up. That is nuts. And what are they replacing it with? Right now you have Russian gas windmills.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Windmills, yeah, imported.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But you’re right, they’re importing fossil fuels.

WILLIAM HAPPER: And importing electricity from France, which still has a large nuclear power base.

JOE ROGAN: But how is Germany so smart and so dumb at the same time? Because they have tremendous engineers. They make some of the best automobiles ever.

RICHARD LINDZEN: They’re making them in Hungary.

The Problem of Collective Stupidity

WILLIAM HAPPER: But that’s a profound question, is how is it this country of poets and philosophers had the Nazis? Dietrich Bonhoeffer was one of the few German theologians who had the courage to remain in Nazi Germany. He was invited to come to the US but he said, “I’m going to stay with my people.” And he was eventually hung by the Nazis. He didn’t survive. But he had this theory that it was stupidity. And it’s a very interesting theory. If you look on the Internet, you can read about Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity, but his view was that all of these Nazi supporters, they didn’t really believe in it all. They were just dumb. It’s hard for me, when I first read about this, I couldn’t believe it. But the more I look at it, I think that every nation has the problem that most of us are pretty stupid.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a large percentage of us that will believe almost anything. And we could point to a lot of things that are subjects in the zeitgeist right now that people wholeheartedly believe in that makes zero sense. They could go with that. And you would go, “Okay, some part of this has to be attributed to low intelligence.” So what percentage of people in this country are incapable of thinking for themselves? It’s not a small number. Maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s 20. Whatever percentage, it’s enough where it’s a giant problem, that’s one thing.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But also, intelligence itself is a complex issue. There are people who, like us, may be idiots of aunts. There are things that we can do very well and other things we don’t.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, absolutely.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, math departments are famous, though.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think it’s a sign of almost any great person at anything. There’s usually areas in their life where they’re just completely lacking, whether it’s hygiene or relationships or whatever, they’re obsessed by what they do, and that’s why they’re great at what they do.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Look, there are great writers who can’t do arithmetic. I don’t know where you put them in that category.

The Intelligence of Different Pursuits

JOE ROGAN: Right, well, and there’s great physical athletes that they have an intelligence of moving their body in a way that they understand things at a much higher level than anybody else that does. Whatever their athletic pursuit is, they probably wouldn’t do that well on an ACT test. Doesn’t mean that they’re not intelligent. It’s just a different kind of intelligence.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah. That makes the world a more interesting place, by and large.

JOE ROGAN: It really does. But what’s scary is when you count on the people that are supposed to be the people that are obsessed and studying this one thing, like this climate change emergency that we’re supposed to be under, and then you find out, oh, wait a minute. This is not. This isn’t like an exact science.

Al Gore’s Academic Background

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh, we started with Gore, and Gore, you know, flunked out of Harvard.

JOE ROGAN: Did he?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, and his father, who was a senator, got him back in. I was teaching there at the time.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, really interesting.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And the person he attributes his awareness of CO2 to, Roger Revelle, was teaching a sort of Science for Poets course and he got a D in it.

JOE ROGAN: Has he made the most money off of this? Because he’s made a lot of money off of climate.

RICHARD LINDZEN: He’s made a few hundred million. I don’t know. These days, small change.

Social Media and Climate Activism

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: And it’s in a way a new problem given social media.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, the social media aspect of it is a new problem. Another new problem is AI and fakes. Like you see fake videos and fake news stories and fake articles and it’s like it takes time to pay attention to what’s real and what’s not real today. And so if somebody wanted to push any kind of a narrative about anything, especially climate change, you could scare people very quickly with a nice video. And it doesn’t even have to be real.

The Shift to Extreme Weather Narratives

RICHARD LINDZEN: Well, that was the reason for extreme weather being chosen. I mean, it’s interesting for quite a few years the climate issue was temperature. And you’ll have noticed the last 15, 20 years it’s extreme weather.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And that shows that you know, it was fake because it’s trivial. I mean we looked it up. The average month, there are four or five extreme events someplace in that month that are once in a hundred year events. So each of them makes for a good video. And you have four or five a month and they each only once in a hundred years. And people aren’t putting it together that you know, once in a hundred year events occurring four or five times a month. But you know, you always have a picture of a flood someplace or a fire or this or that. And those are used to scare people. It’s got harder and harder to scare people with numbers.

JOE ROGAN: Right? It’s extreme weather events. That’s what I keep hearing the hurricanes are getting stronger, they’re getting more frequent and they repeat that. And I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

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

Bill Gates and Atmospheric Intervention

JOE ROGAN: God, now when people like Bill Gates start talking about putting reflective particles in the atmosphere to cool off the earth and protect us from the sun’s rays, like where is all that coming from? Especially if like you would imagine.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I think even Will said it comes from dumbness.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m sure, but even proposing something like that should have the whole world up in arms, like hey, a few people can’t make a decision that will literally impact the entire world and possibly trigger a catastrophic drop in temperature that kills us all.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Why? Because you were made Microsoft. Like why do you get to do this? That seems like something you would have to have, have the whole world vote on. And they would have to be like really well informed about what the consequences of this going wrong could be.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, I’d have, I have to hope that most of the world agrees with you and me and that Bill Gates will never be permitted to do something like that.

JOE ROGAN: The fear is that someone would let him though. The fear is that a country would let him. You get the right politicians in place and the right fear mongering in place and you let them try or you let somebody try. And these people that do try get large grants and they’re making a lot of money to do this. And that’s what scares me, that this could be a way that people could try something out on the whole world that could be catastrophic.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, just technically it would be extremely difficult because the amount of material you have to get up to the stratosphere to mimic a large stratovolcano. You know, even Bill Gates probably can’t afford that. And I’m not sure the US Treasury could either.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s just theoretical at this point.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, I think, you know, it’s an interesting thing you’re pointing that someone like Gates has delusions of grandeur based on the fact that he’s fabulously wealthy. Yeah, but as a practical matter, that particular approach probably is not going to be as dangerous as you think. It won’t work.

JOE ROGAN: It won’t work.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just the idea that someone would even propose something like that based on what you gentlemen have discussed so far today.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, your point is right. I mean, you have people who have the means to try things, and they’re getting a free ride on this.

The Money Behind Green Initiatives

JOE ROGAN: Yes, that’s the thing. They’re getting a lot of money to implement these changes. That’s why these green new deals and these green energy initiatives and all these green things people have to understand. Why are you hearing about this all the time? Because it’s a PR campaign. It’s a PR campaign for a group of people that are trying to make a lot of money. That’s what this is all about. And the more you get on board, the more money they can get politicians to spend on this stuff and the more money these companies make. And the whole thing is about money.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Much of it is money.

JOE ROGAN: They’re not really worried about you. That’s what you have to understand. If they ever say that they’re worried about your future. “For the betterment of our people, we have to make sure that everybody’s okay. We got to protect the climate.” They don’t care. That’s not real. What they really want to do is make sure a lot of money comes in. And if a lot of money coming in is dependent upon them scaring you, that’s what they lean towards.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And, you know, money and its transferability and fungibility, its influence, its feedbacks. Yeah, but that’s always been true.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

Targeting Farmers and Ranchers

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: But there were consequences. In Ireland, they had to kill half their cattle, which is nonsense.

JOE ROGAN: Total nonsense and insane. And if you pay attention to what regenerative farmers will tell you is that, like, if you do it correctly, there’s. It’s actually carbon neutral.

WILLIAM HAPPER: At least carbon neutral.

JOE ROGAN: At least carbon neutral and possibly contribute. The whole thing is nature. This is how it’s all set up. Animals eat grass, they poop, manure. Manure fertilizes the plants. It’s all real simple. It’s been around forever. And this idea that all sudden cow farts and burps are a giant issue and they’re going to kill us all. We need to kill all the cows. Like, who are you? Like, who’s saying this? How’d you get to talk like this is. How’d you get to kill half their cows? You should go to jail.

WILLIAM HAPPER: They should go to jail.

RICHARD LINDZEN: You’re so stupid.

JOE ROGAN: You’re criminally stupid. You killed their cows.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But when it comes to attractive drugs, power is one of the worst.

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

The Methane Misconception

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, you know, Will has worked on this and others, but, you know, the methane thing is an example of innumeracy. In other words, what they argue is that a molecule of methane has more greenhouse potential than a molecule of CO2, and so cutting back methane will have a big effect. But there’s so little methane in the atmosphere that he got rid of all of it. It would have almost no effect compared to CO2. You know, somehow that step in the arithmetic gets lost.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, simple arithmetic. They just can’t do simple arithmetic.

Coordinated Narratives and Scientific Censorship

JOE ROGAN: It’s just weird how these narratives become so prominent in social media. It’s really weird how things like CO2 become this mantra that everybody chants. It seems very coordinated and actually kind of impressive that they’ve managed to silence questioning scientists and really put the fear of God into people that read things and don’t agree with it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: It began right at the beginning of the issue, as I was mentioning. I mean, already by 1989, Science magazine was limited. In fact, one of the ironies with Science magazine, which is, you know, important magazine, it had an editor who was Marcia McNutt, who actually had an op ed appear in Science magazine saying she would not accept any article that questioned this.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

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

JOE ROGAN: She was a good girl.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Follow the rules.

The Importance of Questioning in Education

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah. But you know, Dick’s point about forbidding questioning, it’s just unbelievable. When I was a young man, my first job was at Columbia, and the grand old man there was Robbie. Robbie came from Eastern European Jewish family, and his mother had a very poor education, but she was determined that he would get a good education.

And so he would always tell me, you know, when I would go home from school every day, my mother wouldn’t ask me, “What did you learn today in school?” She would say, “And did you ask a good question today?” So she was really more interested in whether he had asked a good question, which would mean that the wheels were turning in his head than whether he had memorized something. And I always took that to heart. I think that was a very wise mother. And he turned out very well as a result.

The Internet’s Unintended Consequences

JOE ROGAN: Do you think there’s more uniformity in thinking in academia now with the pressure of social media and the pressure of these echo chambers that people find themselves? That’s terrible because you’d have thought with the Internet, one of the things the Internet is going to be is a balanced resource of information. You’re going to have the answers to any questions you want, and we’ll be able to sort out what’s true and what’s not true. Nobody took into account echo chambers and then ideology being attached to science.

WILLIAM HAPPER: That’s right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, I mean, the Internet, not surprisingly, was an unpredictable phenomenon.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, completely.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah. I mean, you know, you saw it, but you’re seeing it yourself. I mean, you have media. They were looking for 100,000 subscribers. With the Internet, you’re dealing with millions, and that’s considered small in some cases.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, there’s people like Mr. Beast, some fun guy on YouTube that I think he has – what does he have? A hundred? And how many million subscribers does he have? Something insane. Way bigger than any television show that’s ever existed before. Yeah, nobody saw it coming. Did it on his own. Yeah, it’s a weird time. And then there’s a lack of trust in mainstream media, which is also disturbing.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Which is also deserved.

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

The Decline of Balanced Media Coverage

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

JOE ROGAN: Right, right.

RICHARD LINDZEN: And there’s something wrong with that.

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: Did you have to deliver it on Sunday as well?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I did.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yes, I did.

JOE ROGAN: But fortunately the ads didn’t work. So they didn’t get a big thick ad chunk like you do with the Boston Globe, because it’s like local ads. But the point being is that like, it was the paper of record and now today it’s just another blog. It’s just like it’s an ideologically captured online blog that’s very left leaning.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I think people have pointed out the correct reason for that. The end of the classified ads. They used to have to satisfy the people paying for ads. Now they have to satisfy their readers. And so the readers only want to hear one thing.

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: And it was, you know, it would be fine if the newspapers took different positions but covered the same items.

JOE ROGAN: Right, right, right.

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

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, this is an opportunity to put in a good word for Al Gore since he was an inventor of the Internet.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. He did kind of take credit for part of that.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Right, right, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: What did he say exactly?

WILLIAM HAPPER: I think he said, “I had a hand in that” or something like that.

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

Science as Methodology, Not Authority

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

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

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

The Importance of Multiple Funding Sources

WILLIAM HAPPER: Let me add to that. I think one of the great strengths of American science and technology over the last 50 years was that there was not a single funding agency in Washington. But, you know, you could get funding from the National Science Foundation or you could get funding from the Office of Naval Research or from some other organization. And they all competed with each other and they didn’t like each other very much.

And so if you couldn’t get a grant from NSF, someone would help you from the army or some other place. So I think multiple sources of funding has an enormously positive effect on the vitality of science and technology in a country. And people used to talk, “We need an office of science.” I thought that was a terrible idea. You know, to – that means one point failure. You know, there was someone in a position to throttle, you know, some important thing.

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

JOE ROGAN: Money starts talking, baby.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, money.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a lot of money. Department of Energy, wasn’t that the department where from the time Trump won the election to Biden leaving office, they gave out something like $93 billion in loans?

WILLIAM HAPPER: I think it was EPA or maybe it was no loans. Could have – must have been energy.

JOE ROGAN: Must have been energy, like more than had been given out in the last 15 years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m sure all those smart, well spent money that we definitely couldn’t get by without spending. It’s kind of funny.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Pathetic.

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, having spent time in Department of Energy headquarters, it doesn’t surprise me.

Personal Experiences with Academic Resistance

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

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

WILLIAM HAPPER: But I have to say, when I invited Dick to give his Colloquium on climate at Princeton, it’s a good university. And he gave a good colloquium. The next day a Nobel prize winner from my department walked in and said, “What son of a bitch invited Lindzen to give this talk?” I said, “Well I’m the son of a bitch. Get out of my office.”

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow. And what did you have to – did you try to engage with him at all about why you were upset? Why he was upset rather? No, just it wasn’t even worth it.

WILLIAM HAPPER: It wasn’t worth it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just hard to believe as someone who’s outside of academia, it’s hard to believe there’s closed minded people at universities.

WILLIAM HAPPER: The point was he didn’t know the first thing about the issue. Not a thing. But he was very left wing.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that’s the point.

RICHARD LINDZEN: That’s why I think this was the political polarization.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s also, there’s no deviation. There’s no people like, “Eh, you know,” everybody’s either one side or the other, all in or not. And if you’re not, you get cast out of the kingdom. It’s very weird. It’s just disturbing to someone like me that it goes on like that in universities. That someone come up to you and say –

RICHARD LINDZEN: I think it’s worse than universities.

JOE ROGAN: Wow, how did that get started? Like when did – so was it the same thing as like the climate? Was it with everything like somewhere around the 21st century? Like when –

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, you know, I’ll take something that was much less publicized. The – what was the program with your device?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Oh, the Star Wars. Star wars, the sodium guide star.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah, yeah. I mean universities treated that as something you could not discuss. The notion that you wanted to have a defense against nuclear –

Adaptive Optics and Defense Technology

WILLIAM HAPPER: Really? Yeah. What Dick is talking about is that I got called to Washington because early in the Star Wars era we were asked to look at every possible way to defend against incoming Russian missiles. And so that meant trying to shoot them down with rockets and also trying to shoot them down with high power lasers.

And so during a classified summer study in 1982, there were some people from the Air Force, some generals and technical people, and they talked about the problem. If you even have a beautiful blue clear sky and you try to shoot a Russian missile that’s coming toward Austin, by the time the laser reaches the incoming warhead, it breaks up into hundreds of little speckles, not one of which has enough power to cause any damage to the target.

And so that was a problem that was well known to astronomers. The inverse problem of a star does the same thing. When you focus it on a photographic plate, you don’t get a point, you get lots of speckles. And so astronomers knew how to solve that. The problem is the incoming wave gets wrinkled by the atmosphere. There are little warm patches and cool patches. And so what you can do is you reflect the incoming starlight from an anti-wrinkled mirror. So it comes in wrinkled, it bounces, it’s nice and flat, then it focuses and you get a point.

And you could do the same thing when you’re trying to shoot an incoming missile. You pre-wrinkle the beam so that when it reaches the missile, it actually focuses all the power onto the missile. So it’s called adaptive optics. And the mirror is called a rubber mirror. It’s a mirror that you can adjust. But to do that you need to know how to adjust the mirror. So you have to have some information – how do I wrinkle it, push here, pull there, etc.

And the way the astronomers did it was they used a very bright star in the sky. And then for nearby stars, you could use the bright star to correct your mirror for all the neighboring stars. But it only worked for a degree or two off the direction of the correcting stars. And so unless the Russians attacked us during the night from the direction of the brightest stars in the skies, we couldn’t do anything with our lasers.

JOE ROGAN: Oh wow.

WILLIAM HAPPER: So I said, well, I know how to fix this. All you need to do is make an artificial star wherever you like, because there’s a layer of sodium at 100km and we now have lasers that will excite that. And so you can make a yellow star that’s plenty bright enough to use that light to adjust the mirror wherever you like. And nobody had ever heard of the sodium layer during this top secret meeting.

JOE ROGAN: When you say make a star, do you mean like a satellite star?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Like a small source of light shining down through the atmosphere. Most of the problem is fairly close to the ground – the first kilometer or two up.

JOE ROGAN: And what would this be made out of?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Sodium. So if you go to 100 km, the earth is plowing through the dust of the solar system. And so we’re constantly burning up little micrometeorites and they’re all loaded with sodium atoms. And so they get released into the upper atmosphere and they stay there and make a layer that’s about 10 kilometers thick. And not many people know about that. I happen to know about it. And I knew you could use it for this method.

That’s why I got called to Washington – for making it. It was a highly secret invention for 10 years when the Soviet Union collapsed. Then this was declassified thanks to the effort of a Livermore friend and colleague, Claire Max, a woman physicist astronomer. But she finally persuaded the Department of Defense to declassify it. So if you go to any big telescope now around the world, it has one of these sodium lasers pointing up at the sky at night. You’ll see this bright yellow beam going up.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, wow, look at that right there.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Oh, there it is. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so the point where they come. This is actually green light. And so for the sodium. Most of them are yellow for sodium, but that’s the basic idea.

Academic Restrictions on Defense Work

JOE ROGAN: And so this was a difficult thing to discuss in academia.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, I couldn’t discuss it. It was highly classified, so I couldn’t even mention it until about 1995, I think. 94 or 95 when it was declassified. But I’d invented it 12 years earlier.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But, you know, the point was, in academia, you could not discuss…

WILLIAM HAPPER: You couldn’t discuss working for defense of the country. That was somehow immoral, defending the country. I wasn’t trying to attack Russia. I was trying to defend ourselves.

JOE ROGAN: That’s a ridiculous position to take. We don’t need defense against missiles.

WILLIAM HAPPER: They’re hard to defend against. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Exactly. I mean, at MIT you had all sorts of people saying you shouldn’t try, it’s silly, it’s impossible and so on. What was the point of that? I mean, you have a problem, you try and solve it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it seems like that’s what science is supposed to be for.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, it’s, you know, if you probe, I think, into these issues, you realize that climate is an extreme case, but politics interfacing science is not new.

Human Nature and Institutional Corruption

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: Don’t worry.

WILLIAM HAPPER: We’re as much part of the crooked timber of mankind as anyone else.

JOE ROGAN: Such a great quote.

RICHARD LINDZEN: You know, I’ve often mentioned. I mean, my family emigrated here from Germany in ’38. But when Hitler came to power in ’33, every university in Germany got rid of everyone who had Jewish blood before Hitler even asked. So universities are not bastions of independent thinking.

JOE ROGAN: What could be done to make them more so?

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

JOE ROGAN: Or at least a better idea.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yep. You know, Joe Dick just gave up.

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

JOE ROGAN: Better than all the other ones.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s amazingly astute.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

RICHARD LINDZEN: I mean, they’ve held up well.

Final Thoughts on Climate Change

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Anything else to add before we wrap this up, gentlemen? Is there anything else you think people should know?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Well, trust but verify.

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

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. You mean destroying the world with climate change? Yeah, it’s not really what it is. And it’s very over magnified.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Absolutely. I mean, how should I put it? Its origins were almost entirely political. I often find it strange that one talks about the science at all. You know, we’re discussing, can it happen? Is this, is it warming? Is it cooling? Is extreme weather increasing? Amazing. It’s amazing to me that politicians can put forward a concept that is purely imaginary and have the science community discuss it seriously.

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: You may be right. I mean, something was needed to make it catch on. It had been around for quite a few years without catching on quite that way. But it was also the confluence. You know, the UN really got interested in it. You had the World Meteorological Organization, all of them saw something they could gain in it. And so it began to seem almost overwhelming, but it did, you know, it reached the right people. I mean, the funding agencies, the NSF got taken over almost immediately. NASA took about 10 years, Department of Energy took 10 years, but they worked on it.

JOE ROGAN: It’s kind of stunning, at least from the outside. You know, from my perspective, it’s kind of stunning. It’s stunning how successful it is. And again, like I said, if you’re in polite company and you have a conversation and someone brings up, well, we’ve got to do something about climate change, the record skips. How much do you know? It turns out very little, most people, and then it turns out, according to you, it’s almost impossible to figure out anyway.

RICHARD LINDZEN: The actual notion that there’s a crisis has taken hold, even though nobody sees evidence of a crisis.

JOE ROGAN: And the main movie that started off that crisis from 2006 is entirely wrong.

RICHARD LINDZEN: All of its predictions and what’s supporting it now is the extreme weather, which is fake, but it provides visuals.

Historical Hurricane Patterns

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s very hard for people to swallow, but I encourage them to look at the data. Hurricanes historically, and you realize, oh, pretty stable. It’s up and down and all over the place. But it’s not any worse now than it has been before.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Oh. I mean, growing up in the Bronx in the 40s, every autumn there were hurricanes. You could wake up in the morning, the streets were lined with the trees that had been blown down. Interestingly enough, that has not recurred in New York for about 30 years, 40, 50 years.

JOE ROGAN: I think the last one I remember when I lived in Boston was Gloria.

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: They don’t get hit by hurricanes anymore. If they did, they’d freak out climate change.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But then ’38 was a gigantic hurricane, and I was born in a town on a lake in Massachusetts called Lake Chargogagogmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

JOE ROGAN: That’s the real name?

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yes, it’s a real name. But at any rate, in that lake were a couple of islands that were created by the hurricane of 1938. Just the hill, really?

WILLIAM HAPPER: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

RICHARD LINDZEN: But that also killed a lot of people because we didn’t have the information of it coming.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And I’m sure buildings weren’t really designed to withstand those either.

RICHARD LINDZEN: No, I mean, if. How shall I put it? I’m glad it came then, not now. I suppose if it came now, it…

JOE ROGAN: Would be proof, right?

Historical Weather Events and Their Impact

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

The reason it affected the war was the British just assumed that the French were incapable of restoring their fleet, so that when Cornwallis decided to try and escape from the Carolinas up into Virginia to the British fleet to be rescued, with all of the partisans coming after him, he didn’t worry about the French. But the French had managed to rebuild their fleet after the hurricane. They had had 12 months and they had enough ships that they were able to barricade the mouth of the Chesapeake.

When Cornwallis got there, he was trapped because the British couldn’t come in to rescue him from Rhode Island or wherever they were. So he had no choice. He had to surrender.

JOE ROGAN: Wow.

WILLIAM HAPPER: That was the end of the war. We can thank the hurricane for making that happen so neatly, as well as the French. God bless the French.

Temperature Records and Historical Context

JOE ROGAN: What are the warmest years on historical record in terms of recent years?

WILLIAM HAPPER: 1934, 1935.

JOE ROGAN: What was it like then?

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

RICHARD LINDZEN: You’re not going to see gigantic numbers. But again, that global metric is a little bit confusing. Locally, it was a huge effect.

JOE ROGAN: But globally, what you’re saying completely makes sense. It doesn’t make sense to try to have a global temperature once you’re studying other planets.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Yeah.

Closing Thoughts

JOE ROGAN: What matters is where people live. What’s the temperature there? Well, listen, gentlemen, I really appreciate your bravery in talking about this stuff and sharing all this information.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Hope for the best.

JOE ROGAN: Very enlightening. It really helps. These kind of conversations, they move the needle. They really do.

WILLIAM HAPPER: I really appreciate you guys. Thank you. Thanks for being here.

JOE ROGAN: I really enjoyed it.

RICHARD LINDZEN: Thank you.

JOE ROGAN: Okay, bye, everybody.

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