Shaun Newman Podcast - #319 - John Robson

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas and has worked as an historian, policy analyst, journalist and documentary filmmaker for three decades. He has been examining the climate change issue for many years, including both the science and the policy debates. November 5th SNP Presents: QDM & 2's.   Get your tickets here: https://snp.ticketleap.com/snp-presents-qdm--222-minutes Let me know what you think   Text me 587-217-8500

What's up, guys, it's Kid Carson. This is Alexandra Kitty. This is Danielle Smith. Hey, everybody. This is Paul Brandt. Jeremy McKenzie, Ragingdissident.com. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast. I'm ready to rock.

How about you? I'm doing well. Welcome to the podcast. It is Friday. I'm joined alongside Tews. We're having a fire. We're deciding to do the ads via fire tonight. So wherever you're at, I hope you're enjoying a fire.

Well, let's be honest, Tuesdays. It's Thursday night. And the listener is probably driving to work, contemplating the weekend and what they're going to get into. Am I wrong? I think you're absolutely right. And hopefully it sounds something like the crackling you're probably hearing distantly in the background right now. You know, of all the things I've done in my life, I never thought I'd have a job where it's like, hmm, you want to do the intros around the campfire? And you're like, that sounds like a lot of fun.

And I'm like, yeah, it does. I can't think of another occupation where this. happens. Yeah, you don't really see a lot of people saying, hey, let's do the spreadsheets in front of the campfire. Well, let's get to today's episode. Today's episode sponsors, Upstream Data. Stephen Barber was literally just on.

He is the owner. And, you know, if you haven't listened to that episode, I suggest you go back to Wednesday because he's an interesting cat. Talks a lot about Bitcoin, Fiat, but just more so than that. He was the guy who put me on, you know, today is John Robson talking about the green agenda and things like that environment, blah, blah, blah, you get the point and you're going to hear about it here soon enough. But Stephen Barber was a guy when I go back to episode 163 when he was first on. He was a guy that talked about it, and I just didn't clue in. It's funny how, you know, you go 100-some episodes ahead of that, and you start to clue into things.

And Stephen Barber is a guy like that. Well, of course, owner of upstream data, which is an interesting company. Because, you know, for the last five years since 2017, they've been a pioneer. I put that in parentheses of creating solutions for vented and flared natural gas and upstream oil and gas facilities, a problem that's persisted the area, you know, since the very beginning. And what they do is they, you know, they take a Bitcoin miner. They put it into that. You take the wasted energy and all of a sudden you're mining Bitcoin.

and under the terms, you know, of the world now, you're creating a cleaner environment. Absolutely. It's funny. Like, I've had so many conversations over the years where you're standing 50 feet back from a flare stack in the middle of winter and there's no snow. And you're like, there's got to be a better use for this. And apparently there is. And it took a guy with a beauty of a mustache to figure it out. I tell you what, pull that mic in a little closer to you. You got to point it up to your nostril.

All right. Yeah, right there. Do I need to repeat what I just said? No, you sound great. You sound great, but you're fighting the mic. You know, you're fighting the mic, you know, you think twos. I don't understand the mic, folks. But, hey, what are you doing?

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And so we got a fob, you know, instead of a key, you just swipe, you know, and then you're in, and I'm like, in a rainstorm, if you're fumbling around, you know, with all the damn keys, you're like, what the hell is it? Instead, you just got this nice little slice and in you go. Remember when everybody used to walk around like a janitor? Those are the days of the past. Keys. We'll stop in today, 39.02.52nd Street or give Brody Kim a call at 306 825.

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They haven't been a sponsor of the show for the past 80 years. Delivering Deer Farm, commercial oil field locations. For more information, visit them at hancockpetroleum.ca. He has his Ph.D. in American History from the University of Texas. He's worked as a policy analyst, journalist, and documentary filmmaker for the past three decades. He's been examining the climate change issue for many years, including both the science and the policy debates. I'm talking about John Robson. So buckle up because there we go.

This is John Robson, and you're listening to the Sean Newman podcast. Welcome to the Sean Newman podcast today. I'm joined by John Robinson. So first off, John, thanks for giving me some of your time. It's a pleasure to be here. Now, I've certainly been doing a lot of reading on John, which has been actually some of your videos are quite fantastic. And I'll make sure we give time for people to find that and find out where they can subscribe and all that good stuff. But to the average listener who's never heard of John Robson, how about we start with who we are and what you're all about?

I am, obviously the person you're looking at. I'm actually a historian by training, by sort of a family tradition. And I got into public policy years ago with the view that if you want to know what's likely to happen in the future and unravel what's happening now, the best way is to look at what's happened in the past. To get a sense of the sorts of things that happen, the way people think about policy, the sorts of things they've tried that have worked and the kind of things they've tried that haven't. And I did a PhD in American history focused on foreign policy because this was during the Cold War. and I was very concerned about the threat to freedom and decency from the Soviet Union, from communism, and from the tendency of people in the West

to be more sympathetic to our enemies than it seemed they were to us. And I continued, I became a journalist. Apparently academia didn't much care for me. And I was very fortunate. Editors who gave me all kinds of leeway to talk about all kinds of things. And among others, I got more and more interested. in where our system of government had come from, how we'd evolved representative institutions that

really did do a decent job of protecting liberty, how we went wrong anyway and what we tried to do about it. And so I had made a documentary back in 2015 on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta. And then more and more my attention got diverted to climate alarmism or directed, I should say, that a particular menace to our way of life was this sincere. And I do. insisted it's sincere, but nevertheless, frantic and intolerant belief that we were somehow destroying the planet, that we were bringing down the sky on our own heads and flaming chunks. And because I'm historically trained, when this became a big thing about 25 years ago, I thought, well, hang on, what was the climate like in the past? What was the weather like in the past?

What was happening on the earth long before humans could credibly be thought to have had any influence. And I said, hey, you know, the medieval warm period. What's, what's the alarmist theory on that? And apparently there are theories that never existed. But we, the Minoan warm period, the Holocene climatic optimum, there's been all kinds of warmer conditions just since the last retreat of the glaciers than we have today. And it didn't cause catastrophe, mass extinction. It didn't cause this sort of tipping point runaway greenhouse effect. And of course, you know, before the glaciers showed up around two and a half million years ago, it was a lot warmer. And so if these greenhouse conditions can come into existence and just run away with the planet, how on earth could a warmer

planet have suddenly cooled? So I realized that their theory that man-made CO2 was driving disastrous changes in weather was wrong on two grounds, one being that CO2 doesn't really drive weather, and the other being that we weren't experiencing disastrous weather. We are not seeing worse storms and so on than we did, well, particularly during the Little Ice Age, a terrible weather. So I've been working more and more on this, running the climate discussion next and trying to get people to have a calm and rational argument that focuses on what's happening outside your window, not what's happening inside a computer, or on insulting the motives of people who refuse to join the panic.

So what you're saying is, is that every news station that keeps running the story that this is the worst or the hottest summer or the... the worst storm or whatever their headline is, isn't exactly based in fact. Yeah, the journalists, generally speaking, do not know what they're talking about, which is, I mean, it's a problem. Obviously, journalists are scrambling to cover stories. A lot of things happen, and it's hard to be an expert on everything. But for instance, in the United States, if you look, there's a map you can get of what decade most states set their temperature records. And far and away, the leading decade is the 1930s. Though there were very, it was very hot weather in the 1930s.

But you also have to realize that there are natural cooling and warming cycles, going back, not just to the retreat of the glaciers, but as far back as you go in history or prehistory, you find these things. So the evidence gets a little blurrier. So we had unusually cold conditions from the end of the medieval warm period through the depths of it is really in the seven, and early 18th century, and then you get a natural rebound, especially after about 1850. So yes, the planet warms naturally. When the planet warms naturally, it's warmer than it was. So it's warmer today than it was when Prince Albert was around. But it's not warmer today, probably, than it was when William I was around. And it's very certainly not warmer than it was, you know, 7,000 years ago.

And we just didn't get these catastrophic conditions. So when they say hottest ever, what they mean is probably hottest in the last 150 years. Even there, it's not entirely clear because you have to watch out for how you measure it. When you get record temperature readings at airports, you've got to give some credit to the capacity of runways and asphalt to absorb heat. There is, in fact, a network in the United States of weather stations that are, they were very careful only to have them in rural air. areas where they're not subject to the so-called urban heat island effect, and they really don't find much evidence of warming. But even if there has been some warming, that's what you'd expect. If you look at these cycles, you'd say, of course it's going to get warmer after an unnaturally cold period. And thank goodness it did because, you know, if it just kept cooling as people were very afraid in the 1970s that it was going to, the glaciers might come back. And then we'd really find out whether warm or cold weather is bad. But the main thing is that they think hottest ever means hot. hottest in the last 25 or 30 years. They don't think in terms of centuries, and they really need to,

because the earth is a big and complicated object. And so, for instance, people are now talking about this glacier, the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, and oh dear, you know, it's doing this, that, and the other thing, there's been this melt going on for at least 200 years. Well, hold on, though. If it's been going on for 200 years, how is it our fault? Like if you look at this sort of retreat of the glaciers elsewhere story, I actually went to Glacier Bay in Alaska, gosh, there's some time ago now, about a decade ago. And they handed us this brochure about, oh, yeah, climate change is melting the glaciers. But what it showed you was that in the very late 17th century, the glaciers are right out into the Pacific.

And then they start this precipitous retreat so that by the late 19th century, they've pretty much gone up the fjords to close to where they are now. And then they say, and this last little bit is a disaster caused by human beings. But this huge previous retreat over centuries is neither worrisome nor relevant. Well, of course, it's relevant. If the glaciers have been retreating since 1750 and they keep retreating, you can't attribute it to something that started really happening in 1950, or whenever supposedly our influence became dominant. You have to look at this stuff in proper perspective.

And journalists just don't do that. They've never even heard the other side of the story. And unfortunately, the modern education system isn't very good at getting people interested in hearing challenges to their accepted ideas. They feel like it's a threat to their identity as a committed social justice warrior instead of being another opportunity to become wise, well-informed, and balanced. Hmm. That's, it's difficult because you look at, you mentioned cities, and I'll look at cities for just a second. Um, the growth of cities over the course of the last hundred years, I think is pretty evident, right? Like, I mean, I don't know, you're, you're the big historian. And actually, I was really excited about it. I, uh, a lot of your stuff, uh, I was almost, um, more intrigued by some of the talks you have when you get deep into history and, and different things of 100, 200, 400 years ago.

That stuff is just as fascinating to me as, as anything. But the, the, what's been the impact then of having cities like these giant metropolis pop up all over the place. Even in small little Lloydminster, which isn't that small. I mean, it's 20-some thousand people, which I don't think is tiny by any stretch of imagination.

You could almost see on a weather and pattern how the city affects cloud movement and storms when they come in. And it reminds me, and maybe this is a wrong way to look at it. I used to go to school in northern Wisconsin on a bay of Lake Superior. and the bay was really interesting to watch how storms went around the water source. And if it finally, you know, penetrated it, so to speak, man, you got one heck of a storm. And I almost see that happening with cities.

But maybe I'm wrong on that. I just, that's a, you know, anecdotal observation, I guess. What has been the impact of cities on, you know, like some of these giant places that got millions about millions of people? We don't truly understand it. It is important. It's an excellent thing to bring up, but weather patterns are very, very complicated. And there's some thought that cities have an impact on how much moisture there is in the air, which affects cloud formation when cold and warm air meet. But the most fundamental one here is actually the one about measurement. And yes, thank you for giving me a good opening for a historian. The 1920 United States census reveals that the U.S. in that year,

And this is the first time that had happened anywhere in history was it was the first place to have more than half of its people live in urban areas. And by urban area, they meant 2,500 people or more. So for most of human history, people live in small communities. Most people didn't meet more than a few hundred people in their lives. Most people died within sight of the place they'd been born. But when it comes to climate, the critical point to understand is that as cities expand, you get more and more concrete and ashboard. bolt and these things absorb heat. And in a lot of cases, a weather station, if they've been monitoring temperature for a long time, it was out in a field somewhere. And then the city grew and it surrounded

it and it paved it. And so the same weather station with all the care that's often used to measure temperature is suddenly surrounded by man-made things that absorb and radiate heat. And one of the One of the ways you can detect this effect is if you find that your average nighttime temperatures are rising faster than your average daytime temperatures, it's a very good sign that what you have isn't warming of the planet, but warming of your local area because of all this heat absorbing stuff. And I'll add as a side note, another thing about cities is that mostly they're built on or near floodplains. People have always lived near water for very good reasons. And so as we pave them over, you seem to get more floods. people say, oh, well, see, it's climate change. There's more floods than they used to be.

But you go to a rural area and you don't find that unless, as in Pakistan, say, you've had massive deforestation, which again is a manmade thing, but nothing to do with CO2 or climate. But cities get more flooding because we haven't planned properly to manage the runoff. We've been quite dumb, in fact, in our municipal planning. But it isn't proof that the climate has changed. It's proof that we've changed the locality. But again, to come back to, you know, if you look at a temperature station at an airport and you think yourself, what was an airport 100 years ago? You know, if there even was one, it's probably a grass field and a few biplanes. Now, it's this huge expanse of cement and asphalt with these massive jet engines running.

And in Britain, when they had their huge heat wave, and the record was setting Koningsby in Lancashire. And I thought, well, that's kind of rural. That sounds pretty convincing. But then somebody contacted me to say, hey, there's an RAF base there. Where's the thermometer? Yeah, it's at the RIF airfield. And you look at a modern fighter jet and you say, if I were trying to figure out if the temperature changed in 100 years, I wouldn't now be measuring it where there's a lot of those things blasting off. I'd be out somewhere in the countryside where conditions haven't changed. And it really is important if we want to understand what the temperature is doing to eliminate the stations that are creating an artificial warming effect

and only look at the ones that are measuring temperature under the same kind of conditions that it would have been measured 60 or 80 or 100 years ago. Because, for instance, again, in Britain, there's some indication that the urban heat island has increased temperature readings by about a degree and a half. Well, when they're telling us, there's been 1.1 degrees of warming since pre-industrial times, you know, that's a pretty significant introduction of noise into the signal. Hmm. You know, you bring up floodplains. It's funny because, you know, coming from a farming background, I feel like the rural part of the, the world and maybe I'm wrong on this.

Maybe I'm speaking too bluntly for for everyone in that area. But you know, we stare at different cities, different parts of our country here in Canada and look and go, they realize they just built in the floodplain, right? And when the storm comes, because it will come, the first place that's going to get hit is the said floodplain. And I took a, from one of the articles on your, on your site, it said, so it is here in Canada, a federal task force is proposing mandatory flood insurance, even for homes that don't need it because everyone needs it,

even if they don't. And Blacklock's reporter points out that 80% of cities have neighborhoods built on floodplains by official estimates. So 80% of everywhere we've built, we've built in the floodplains, which is I laugh a little bit because I'm like, we just don't think it's going to happen again. Because to us, if we get five good years, we think, ah, it never happened again.

But the truth of the matter is, even my short life out on the farm, we've had extreme drought to where almost we had no water anywhere around our farm to the complete opposite, where almost every, you know, water's running everywhere because of, you know, a string of good five, six years that filled everything back up. And now we're seeing that right now. We're, I don't know what we're in, but the lakes are for the most part full. And I remember as a kid, dead seagulls absolutely everywhere. You could walk every pond. You know, they're trying to plug in dugouts as quickly as they can to try and grab any rainwater at all humanly possible because it was just that dry. Yeah. So I should just clarify, it's not that 80% of what we've built is on a floodplain.

It's the 80% of cities, some of them is on a floodplain. Sorry. But you raise the spiritual point. If you grow up in the country, one thing you notice is that weather is variable. And it's funny, even Canadians, you have this mythology of ourselves here heating the call of the loon. But more and more Canadians live in cities. Our population is very concentrated in urban areas and we don't get out there and experience it. And we don't remember, for instance, the 1930s dust bowl.

When you see a drought, people say, oh man, caused this drought. It must be so. There were never droughts. Fooey, there were never droughts, right? Of course there were droughts. Of course there were floods. No matter how far back you go, you get evidence of this terrible weather variability. They had this drought in Germany that exposed these hunger stones in the Elbe River,

dating back to 1616. Well, that means the river was that low in 1616, when people put the marker there and said, if you see this stone, you're in big trouble, buddy. And indeed you are. But again, if you live in an urban area, I mean, I think there is no more sort of soul-destroying thing than an underground parking lot. But even an above-ground parking lot, as you walk into it, you're thinking,

where did they think the rainwater would go? Why aren't there periodically grates that let water drain into the ground? Why don't we have tree planters that instead of being cement boxes are continue straight down into the soil? I live in Ottawa and there's this Carling Avenue. An avenue is a technical term for a street line with trees. But Carling Avenue is the most hideous cement wasteland you could imagine for miles and miles. And I don't understand why doesn't the city plant trees get some shades. over the cement, mitigate the weather, cut down the wind, let children see a tree. Trees are good for the soul, all the stuff that we could do. And I'll mention it's a bit of a sideline, but my lawn, which was always a bit of a sorry affair. In the last few years, I've let native plants take hold. I've let the grass grow up. I've made it into more of a meadow. And you get all these natural flowers, I've got all kinds of pollinators. My lawn is a, at my meadow, is a noisy place. There are crickets and things.

And you go to the other lawns and they're just dead. They're sterile, chemically driven monoculture. And our cities in a way have that same failing that instead of thinking we should live in a urban, sophisticated, prosperous, human friendly, but also nature friendly setting. We thought we'll just get rid of all that nasty green stuff and we'll put cement and asphalt everywhere and see how that works out. And the planners now want us all to live in high rises downtown and things like that. just killing every plant in sight. But even from the point of view of just managing floodwater, places where plants are growing are much better at taking an excess water

and then retaining water in dry periods. But to get back to the climate thing, yeah, you look at the, I mean, the mega drought in the American Southwest 1200 years ago that wiped out entire cultures. If people understood that this sort of thing happens, and I'm not saying it's good, obviously, cultures wiped out by drought, but to realize that nature is variable, nature has always been variable, and left to its own devices, nature can be pretty surly.

Again, you look at the end of the little light, at the end of the medieval warm period, as it gets cooler. You get terrible storms in flooding. There are Grota Mandra, this huge onset of storms that washed entire villages into the sea and killed tens of thousands of people. This sort of stuff is not new. And again, if journalists spent a bit more time doing research, which I realize in a newsroom with three people is hard, they would understand, for instance, that this idea that climate change causes more hurricanes is especially silly because we're not getting more hurricanes. The trend in Pacific typhoons and all these things that have been down for the last 40 or 50 years. And it is for complicated reasons to do with ocean currents, patterns going on over centuries, and patterns too complicated for a computer to model. of the computer modeling is another thing we should get into because the idea that we have precise

understanding of what's happening and why is driven by a kind of fetish for linear algebra that's just not appropriate to the subject okay i put a note about computer modeling sorry um i had a couple things in what you're talking about there one is uh you know you go back to the 1930s i think um when it comes to drought and and uh you know back then there would have been um i um i I always point to this. It was in Saskatchewan, it was close to rural outnumbering urban, right? It was a 50-50 splitter. You know, you kind of get the point very close.

And so back in the 30s, Saskatoon, I always point to Saskatoon, gave everybody a garden plot. That was, you know, to try and sustain everybody against food shortages and whatever else. Everybody got given a garden plot. I can just imagine what that would look like today, how many people would have no clue what to do with a garden plot. And I'm not even going to be hard on anyone else. stick my hand up because I, you know, I've become removed from the farm myself.

The other thing about the no trees and cities, it's become an argument. I actually literally just had this conversation about trees cause infrastructure problems, right? Because the roots over time grow into water lines, gas, sewer, blah, blah, blah. And I don't know, John. And so I have the argument of, okay, so then you're saying no green space. in a city because you're worried about infrastructure underneath. There certainly has to be something you can do about that.

Like, does anyone want to grow up in a place where there's no trees anywhere? And we certainly go back to older parts of cities where that was obviously something they wanted. There's big trees everywhere, at least where I am. And I assume one of the things that newer generations saw was, yeah,

but they cause issues with roadways and sidewalks and whatever you got root. Now, what do we do? And so what did they do? They removed them. And now they don't have the big trees growing along all the streets and everything else. I don't have the answer for that. I just go, I don't want to live in a place where there's no greenery. Like, I mean, come from the farm where that's what it is.

There's an ecosystem. There's life happening. And that's what, you know, we're being removed from. It feels like almost year by year. Well, yeah, the Cheston's jive about the guy who preferred his milk coming from a nice, clean shop instead of some dirty cow. And I do think, I think it's bad for people. I mean, it's a classic mid-20th century solution like, you know, irradiated bacon, say, well, if trees get in the way of the march of progress, too bad for the trees, whereas it seems to me that our attitude more recently ought to be

the march of progress will help bring back the trees, we'll find ways. We have so much ingenuity, so much wealth at our disposal. It cannot be the case that we cannot have livable cities that include because they must include nature. You know, again, I have, it's a small thing, but in the backyard, this bush came up. I don't even know what it is because I know nothing about these things, right? It's all hit and miss, but, and I do have a backyard garden, which again is hit and miss, but it had the golden flowers that appeared. And then we got these little green things, which I eventually discovered were green metallic

sweat bees, which I have, again, no real idea what they are. But you see, the incredible flourishing of life, it's fascinating and it's wonderful. up every morning you go out and say, what will have happened next? And then what happened next is it turned out that cucumbers love to climb. A cucumber is a climbing vine and they love these bushes. And so you could go out and, you know, hunt for the cucumber. You'd find these huge cucumbers. You didn't even suspect we're there. So it's something that I really think kids are being cheated of as even Canada gets more and more urban and the urban areas become less and less natural. Again, the silence of the lawns. This has really started to strike me over the last few years.

And I think, again, when it comes to climate, it's one of the reasons why people are willing to believe these campfire scare stories, except nobody sits by a campfire anymore either, about what's happening out there in nature because they just have no idea what used to happen out there in nature. People who lived in it understood, it's bigger than you are, and it's moody, and it's wonderful,

but you also better be ready for the bad stuff. Again, you think about the movie The Wizard of Oz, what happens, a tornado comes along. Well, you better have a storm cellar. But what we now have this weird idea, too, I think, of what nature would be like without human influence. One of the questions that people like me like to ask climate alarmists when they say, look, it's one by 1.1 degrees. And if it warm was by another 0.4 degrees, we will pass four tipping points and head for 12 others or whatever it may be. That this is incredibly fragile.

But then you want to say, okay, you know the temperature has changed, right? Okay, if you really could control it, if CO2 really was the thermostat. And you could set global temperature anywhere that you wanted to with this marvelous technique modern people possess. What temperature would you choose? Was 1950 the ideal temperature for us, for nature, for whatever? Was 1850 perfect? I was talking about since pre-industrial times. Do you want to go back to the little ice age?

Or what about the medieval warm period? Was the medieval warm period good? Or the Holocene climatic optimum? This, again, is 7, 8, 9,000 years ago now. North Africa wasn't a desert. It was green, it was lush, it had that charismatic megafauna. They had giraffes and hippos and things like that. Also crocodiles, can't win them all.

But if you really could decide what temperature the planet would be, what makes you so sure that whatever date you're going to pick, 1975, that's how nature should be. That's the Garden of Eden. But again, I think part of the problem is that young people who are so urban, and I insulated from it, literally as well as figuratively, think that nature would be the Garden of Eden if humans hadn't gone and done some terrible thing to it. And this is just, this is so a historical. It's going to bring me back to my history training, you know,

even the medieval warm period, which had fairly stable weather, actually, warm weather seems on the whole to be more stable than cold weather. But still, there were bad years. There were years the crops died. There were droughts. There were floods. There were windstorms. All kinds of stuff happened because it always has. You know, again, it doesn't matter how far back you want to go. Like, how about the end of the pleocene, the coming of the Pleistocene? That's the last two and a half million years, this ice age that we're actually still in because we have significant polar ice. We're just in a warmer interglacial. When that showed up, animals weren't modern humans at that point, but whoever was around seen the glaciers coming would have said, oh, man, I didn't ask for

this. What, what do I do about this problem? And again, you look at these kind of dramatic changes with CO2 much higher than it is today. The earth went into the first ice age it had seen since before the dinosaurs and you say, wow, nature sure gets up to a lot of stuff, but who on earth would look at all this and say, you know what? It never used to change until people came along. But you do get that. If you, Al Gore, in an inconvenient truth, he says, the weather and the Holocene was basically stable until very recently. And that is an amazingly ignorant statement about the past. I don't know how on earthy got away with it.

I don't know how legions of Earth scientists didn't leap up and say, this man is a dunce. Well, I'm curious, then. One thing is this climate change theory that it might be the most dangerous thought human beings, or what's what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. Is it narcissism or something along that lines that we can control it? That we have the ability to, like you say, turn the thermos up or down. The earth has been here a long time, a very, very long time.

And to think that we are the masters of it is a dangerous thought. Would you agree with that? Oh, yeah, very much part again, this mid-20th century sort of illusion of techniques. as William Barrett calls it. This idea that anything that can happen naturally, we can do to the application of basically mathematical knowledge and make it better. We can fix anything, including the human soul or, you know, abolish the soul and then fix the psyche or something. We can completely control our surroundings and we'd be happier if we did. And the funny thing is it's a vision that you'd think by now is more or less confined to certain

parts of the right in politics, that the left had gone organic and environmental. And yet, when you look at their proposals and their approaches, you find that, yeah, this hubris, this incredible sense that we shall eat the apple and become as gods, including we shall entirely control the environment in which we live. We shall make it precisely how we want it to be. It seems to be a very powerful impulse. And one that when you compare what we've actually managed to do, For some reason, it always comes back to me. I read the book Henderson, the Rain King when I was much, much younger than I am now. And he goes off to try and help people in the third world.

And they have all these great schemes and technical understanding. But it keeps going wrong. And in one classic episode, they get frogs in their cistern. And he decides that he's going to dynamite the cistern and the shockwave will kill the frogs. And in fact, it badly damages the whole water system and fills it with dead, disgusting, rotting frogs. And every time I see one of these great plans, like, oh, let's geoengineer, let's spray things in the sky to reduce the temperature. I think of all those dead frogs in that system and say, you have no sense of the limits of your powers or of your knowledge. This is staggering arrogance that there really are people. Bill Gates gets into this mood sometimes where we'll just change the planet to make it nicer.

And you look at what humans have done, the incredible bungles they've carried out, and the horror. they've inflicted on themselves. And you say, if we really managed to change the climate, what are the odds that it would be an improvement? And I think they're vanishingly small. Again, I think, you know, cultivate your own garden, this business about get back to holistic gardening, get back to organic farming, but not in the crazy, let's all, you know, starve in the dark way.

But like Joel Salatin, people like that who are making intelligent application of modern techniques to work with nature instead of just trying to dominate it. And that, it seems to me, it's very curious to me when I look at, to the modern Green Party, whose policies, when it comes to economics or gender or anything else seem to be to be absolutely disregarding anything that could conceivably be regarded as natural and holistic and organic. I mean, a capitalist economy is organic, right? A central planning is a giant machine and it doesn't work for obvious reasons, in fact. but why on earth, why are Green Party so consistently not pro-free market? It's a very strange mentality, and I think a lot of it does have to do with this arrogance, this thing you talk about, that we think we can do anything, that we have magic powers,

that we dominate nature, we dominate our fellows, we dominate everything. And, you know, an older tradition would say you seem to have succumbed to the sin of pride, and I think you're in a heap of trouble. Well, then I wonder... you know, I had on different men, Mark Morano and Patrick Moore, and both of them started their journey with

they were believers. I mean, geez, Patrick Moore protested against nuclear war and about the whales and a whole bunch of stuff, right? It's not like he was just like, we don't do anything. So I come back and I go, okay, so we can't control,

the world because that even to me I'm just like it seems a little bit just ridiculous uh john it just I think that's a dangerous thought prospect too but can we improve yeah like there's things we can do to improve and are there ways that human beings are impacting the the natural world certainly I mean just look at some of the ways we've improved but instead of focusing on improving and maybe some of the things we've done right and and maybe this just is a general across everything. We love to point out the fear and the horror and everything else. But I just, I go like all the young people today aren't wrong in certain things. There probably are things we need to do better at. We can get better at. But putting everything we do into one lump

sum of its climate change is kind of where I get to like that feels like the dangerous part. that eight billion people, which, I mean, look at the population rise, population rise chart. You want to see a chart. That's a chart. To act like we have no impact on anything is a bit silly. But to lump that all under climate change seems a bit silly, too. Does that make sense? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned Patrick Moore, right? Well, when he was a young man, he was against nuclear war and in favor of Wales, you know. Well, if you talk to Patrick today, he's still against nuclear war and in favor of Wales.

absolutely. You know, I've talked to him about that iconic picture of him protecting the seal, and there's nothing about that that he regrets. What changed him is that he began to realize that his colleagues in Greenpeace were actually anti-science. They were not interested in hearing what was really happening and what would really work. And I think one of the great dangers of climate change as an obsession is that it takes all the oxygen out of the discussions into the CO2. All the time, the energy, the idealism and the money for research and mitigation that need to go to other things are absorbed by the notion that carbon pollution is going to set the sky on fire. And a classic thing that I all come back to is plastic in the oceans. I mean, this is a big

problem. And we know where that plastic is coming from. Essentially, it's coming from 10 rivers, most of them are in Asia. We know who's dumping plastic into the oceans. And instead, we go around banning single-use straws in North America, which is an absolutely fatuous thing to do in the first place. It has no value on its own, but also distract us from what really matters. Or this ban on plastic bags and supermarkets. And as I pointed out in a column, you know what? I use those as trash bags. So now that I don't get plastic bags at the supermarket, I go and buy plastic bags to use as trash bags.

What an idiotic thing to do. what an absolutely trivial and marginal thing to do. The other thing that I think is a huge issue is habitat loss. How many species in this world, including a lot of the charismatic megafauna, again, the wonderful large animals, for instance, in Africa, are in horrendous danger because the places they live are getting squeezed out. And the thing is, when people are poor, they can't afford to think about the environment. They live wherever they can.

They create these huge, gas-leave shanty towns that, become the dwelling of millions of people who live in sickness and misery a lot of the time as well. What we need is rapid growth so that people can have satisfying lives and look out for the environment. And for that among what a critical requirement is cheap energy. And instead, the first world and the financial structure that it's created is telling the third world, oh, no, you can't have power plants. And so instead, you know, they do what they can and they rely heavily on coal. And when you talk about things we've done and done right,

If you think back to the pea soup fogs in London, I mean, in the Sherlock home stories, they have a kind of air of romance, but in fact, that was very unhealthy air. Or Los Angeles in its smogs, which there's a famous picture of the optimist club in the mid-20th century meeting with gas masks on. Well, yeah, you'd have to be an optimist to think that was good. But we've dealt with that. We have managed to impose controls that got the pollution out of the exhaust without forcing us to give up energy. Or even you look at, rivers and Lake, Lake Erie or the Thames, that were basically dead when I was very young. And we fixed it. One of the ways we fixed it was by sort of going upstream to the headwaters and seeing, okay, clean here, clean here, oops, here it's getting dirty. Ah, there's the source of that contamination. A practical step by step, work your way down the river, getting rid of things. Find the root of the problem.

And letting nature revive. And again, an iconic moment in the 1960s when the Cuyahoga River caught fire in 1969. And what was really striking about this, if you go and research this, you find pictures of the river on fire, but they're not from 69. Nobody bothered to take a picture because it was by then routine. That river was basically a snaky, oily, slick, smelly, just current of industrial waste. And it caught fire repeatedly. But the 69 when people went, hey, wait a minute, no, we've done something wrong. And you can now fish in the Cuyahoga River.

And, of course, Western civilization being the way it is, you can also get burning. river beer. But we did fix these things, and we fixed them by taking small practical steps by identifying real problems one at a time and going after them. And of course, back then, there were people who said the first step to saving the environment is to end capitalism. But luckily, they didn't get listened to. And again, if you look at the climate change people today, the real alarmists, very often you discover that they have this massive agenda where climate is not insignificant or insincere, but clearly not to them the main part of the story. And this, again, is a matter of enormous overreach of a sort that eventually, I mean, I remember

Patrick Moore at one point getting into high, dudgeoned about the fact that Greenpeace had dubbed chlorine, the devil's element, and they wanted to get rid of it. And he said, it's on the periodic table, right? You can't get rid of an element. Plus, it's, you know, it's half of salt, right? It's critical to the oceans. Chlorine is vital to life, obviously, if it's concentrated and blown in your face. Again, you're going to get very, very sick to die. But it was that we didn't go with the tried and the true, the small, and the practical. We went for the cosmic and the utopian and went to war against sin and others instead of guarding against it and ourselves.

And that way is a proven path to disaster. Well, I just think I see the same thing starting to play out over and over again, which is, like debate is is no longer had. So, uh, to keep things realistic, um, you know, I look at yourself and Patrick and, and, and others. And I just go, I don't think you're against you, like, you can still be pro planet and still be pro human being, you know, like, I don't think that's such a wild thought. And yet in today's world, it seems like you either are pro planet or pro human being because if you believe in a whole bunch of different things that are going to make human beings thrive and their population and continue to grow, then you're against the planet

because you kind of understand that human beings are nefariously bad and we exploit the world and we're doing bad things. And I listen to it. I just keep hearing these different people talk about how there's no debate. Like there's just no way to make goals realistic. It's like, Do you want things better for the planet? Does everybody want clean lakes to go swimming? I don't know, John, do you want a clean lakes to go swimming? I assume yes. Yeah, in fact, if people go and look at my 2017 documentary,

The Environment, A True Story, which was crowdfunded, so you can now find it free on my website, which is johnrobson.ca. I start out where I grew up on the shores of Georgian Bay in a cottage that was nine miles from the nearest road and didn't have electricity. And I talk about how I consider myself a passionate environmentalist. I cannot live out of contact with nature. I just, I wither. And I am desperate to preserve the ecosystem so that future generations can have that.

The idea that I would be anti-environment, I've got this holistic meadow in my yard. I do have a cottage today, and I sometimes get grief for being rich. Look, it's under a thousand square feet, okay, if I were rich, it would be bigger. But the fact is that I need to get there. And we have, we're very careful about our impact. We, you know, we leave the shoreline natural. We have the very advanced septic system, all these kinds of things. And I am deeply committed to all of that.

But where I think we go wrong, and this is true, I meant, because I told you, I started out, you know, interested in the Cold War. And when you said, look, I'm concerned about the Soviet behavior. I'm worried about their military buildup. I am alarmed by their tendency to press forward and try and take over other places in the world and their system is a basically genocidal nightmare of repression. And people would say, oh, you want a nuclear war. I thought this struck me as an almost unbalanced response. But then I read Thomas Sol's book of Conflict of Visions, where he talks about the persistent way in

which arguments take place or fail to between people who think that what matters is good methods and people who think that what matters is good intentions. And if you tell the good intentions crowd, you think they've got it wrong, they instantly assume that you don't want it to be right. And it's amazing on climate discussion nexus, this website that I run puts out a newsletter and does videos and so on, the number of hostile comments that we get from people saying, oh, you're lying because the oil companies paid you. They look at this, they realize we don't agree with them, and they instantly assume that we must be both insincere and evil.

And it's hard to argue with people like that because they're not talking about what you actually said. They're not talking about the factual claims you made. They're not talking about the logical connections you pointed to. They're saying, if you disagree with me, you must be evil. And that, a lot of people with high IQs think that way, but it's not an intelligent way to think. It's astonishingly, it's like a substitute for thought and then abuse rushes in to take the place of argument. And I always, if the people aren't completely unreasonable, I say, look, we all want a healthy environment. We think it's essential to human well-being. We think it's essential to human well-being. it's good in itself. But what we're saying is that what your diagnosis if the problem is wrong

and the solutions you propose will make things worse. And we want to talk about that, not about whether the Koch brothers are sending me money. I mean, I wish the surviving Coke brother would send me money. I would be happy to receive a check from them. So if anybody knows him, point him to this video and to our website and say, send them some cash. But it's not about who's evil. It's about who's mistaken. And in some sense, that is the instinctive disposition of every conservative in this world, is to think that the major problem we face is error. And the instinctive disposition of those on the left is that it's malice. But again, I find that way of thinking, funnily enough, among its other defects, it's quite nasty. Because you drop the civility and start ripping strips off people

for their deplorable character virtually as soon as any kind of discussion happens. If you say, I don't think we should raise the minimum wage. I think it prices young people out of the job market and others who don't have impressive resume as to say, oh, you want people to be poor. You like people starving. Where did you fish that up from? Some sinister place inside yourself. I mean, I've got my share of failings, but no.

Or that, oh, you want the planet to burn up. It's like, no, I don't. I live on it. How can I possibly want the planet to burn up? But when you try to, and I will say this, though, a lot of people who find our material appealing insist that climate change is a hoax, that the alarm is through up to something sinister. And again, I always tell these people, no, if someone says things you don't agree with and does things you don't agree with, it's because they think things you don't agree with.

And what you need to do is convince them that they've got it wrong and they should think about it differently. But because, I mean, it makes people feel important to be conspired against, I guess, but the truth is no, the powerful aren't conspiring against you. They don't know you, you're alive. if they did know they wouldn't care. It's just it doesn't work that way. But the climate debate very often is between people who say,

look, I don't think CO2 is causing runaway warming and associated disasters and people who say, oh, you're in the pay of the oil companies. And that is not, you know, that's not a helpful way to approach the matter. I think that's a good people thinking differently. Sorry, I'm just thinking what you said there. that struck me enough to to write it down

because I think you get on a side a team and you think the other team is conspiring against you at all times and then I go back

to an episode I had with Chris Montoya professor from Thompson Rivers in British Columbia and he walked in and he has a little

story he talks about Donald Trump you think Donald Trump knows who you are well no right he doesn't give a crap about you it's Donald Trump he's worried about

these things, right? Not about Sean Newman sitting in Lloyd Minster or John Robson sitting in Ottawa, right? He's got his own things. So to understand that people think differently than you and therefore are going to approach different issues

from different points of view and enact on them is kind of the name of the game, so to speak. The difference though in saying all that is media portrays it from one side, John, and that's what gives fuel to conspiracies because the media doesn't balance the argument,

at least not right now. Right now it is full on, I don't know, five or ten different things, and they point directly to climate change. And if you do not agree with climate change, then you become a nutter. And that's where the other side, people that probably sit and listen to you,

have a real hard time agreeing with that because to sit down from across from from paul and have a discussion about climate change i think it would be really healthy for everyone the problem becomes when media will only allow uh him to have his say and not you to have your say that you're silenced or moved off to the side that that that would be my my thought on yes it is i think it is true and i think i think that the media has failed itself as well as I mean, I do still write for the National Post. I'm in the Eap of Times, which is not exactly traditional media. They're doing what traditional media did, but in a very different and I think better spirit.

But there's a piece that Friedrich Hayek wrote years ago. He's called The Intellectualism and Socialism. We made the point that if you are essentially conservative in disposition, if you find that the established order is on the whole healthy one, then there are all kinds of ways that you can find satisfaction. There's all kinds of careers and hobbies and things that you can pursue. But if you're a discontented person, if you just find for some reason that you don't fit into the world, then what talents you have, considerable or mediocre, are very likely to be drawn into a narrow range of professions

that are focused on public affairs. You become a professor. You become a journalist. You get into politics. And so the media is so left-wing that they don't know their left-wing. They really don't. They honestly think that's a strange. thing to say because everybody thinks like them and they know that all decent people think like them.

And so I will, on one of our videos, by the way, we're on YouTube, people keep saying you're going to get D platform, but so far YouTube has hosted us and we're grateful. We've had nearly 7 million views for our videos and but one of them is just suddenly, for some reason, drawn a lot of attention, it's just gone over 100,000 views, just one of our weekly roundups. But on one of our videos, they put a warning saying, oh, boo, these people are idiots. Climate change is a real serious problem. nation says so. And of course, this to a lot of the people who like our material, the fact they were citing the United Nations is like, ah, here they come. To which my response was, look,

if they were really doing this as part of a plot, they wouldn't mention the UN, right? They would take its orders and hide the bodies, so to speak. But I do think that in a modern news in particular, on issues, you know, it almost doesn't matter. There's so many different issues, including on gender, certainly, but also free market economics, I spent a substantial part of my career, even foreign policy and definitely on climate, where they think because they have this, it's good intentions, not good methods, all decent people agree on this. And why would we give any airtime to the indecent? And what they need to get over, it's something that needs to get over themselves. You are not the absolute

standard of virtue in this world. And they need to try to understand that there really are intelligent, well-meaning people who don't share their point of view. And it's important that these opinions be heard, even if only, to see through them. But I'll mention, I think one of the things that got the media on the wrong track, ironically, was it was the Civil Rights Movement of the United States in the 1960s, because there was this very important news story on which there really was only one decent side. And journalists became crusaders, and they became crusaders for something vitally important, which I'm very glad happened.

But more and more it meant that the kind of people who went into the professor, were the kind of people who thought there was only one side to a story. And this has made things very difficult. I mean, during the Cold War, the press and the New York Times and institutions like that were very, very resistant to the notion that the Soviet Union was a menace, whereas they thought Ronald Reagan was an idiot who was going to blow up the world. If you look back at press coverage of Reagan during his time in office, especially the first four years or so, it's astonishing how wrong they got it and how sanctimonious they were in their errors. And I really think if the press wants to increase their circulation, if nothing else, appeal to self-interest here, they need to stop being so one-sided. They need to make the newspaper something that a person who wants a good sense of what's going on and how people, unlike themselves, see the world. They've got to open up their pages to more of this stuff because they're increasingly dealing with a dwindling group who are exactly like them, not just in thinking in one particular way, but in not wanting to hear from the other.

side at all. And again, I know this is a problem across the board. You mentioned Donald Trump, right? I've been, I was a never-trumper before it was cool, and I'm still just appalled by Donald Trump. I've lost friends and I've lost subscribers over it, but I'm not backing down. The man is a moral leper. But the people who back Trump were driven, I think, into this corner by this condescending one-sided attitude coming at them from major institutions. And in a sense, they are the mirror image of the establishment in their closed-mindedness. And so I think that the establishment papers and the great and the good need to take more ownership.

And again, you look, Pierre Poliver, the more they sneered at his campaign, the more popular he became. Jean-Carré was the establishment candidate. And clearly, there simply wasn't a constituency among people that the Laurentian elite doesn't even try to understand. And that's just another example of this closed-mindedness among people who think of themselves as tolerance. So there's a strange mix of moral and intellectual issues here. But I just want to bring it back to that old thing.

I often quote John Sturm-Mill about this, that one of the key arguments for free speech is the Dracula effect. Mill didn't call it that. Dracula, not having been written, he didn't talk that way anyway, but that sunlight destroys evil. If you think an idea is wrong, if you think it's intellectually and morally wrong, well, debate. it. Have a fair fight and surely you will win. Now at the climate discussion nexus, that's what we say. We are quite confident that if we have a proper debate about this, the alarmist side will not prevail because they're wrong. Their facts are not on the whole. They don't point where they think they point. Their logic isn't sound. So we're happy to have an open debate. We draw the line at

Bulgarity. We draw the line in abuse. We draw the line of conspiracy theories. But other than that, our comments are wide open to people who want to take issue with us because we're not worried that we're going to lose if we let them in. That's where we think we're going to persuade them. And if we're wrong about that, well, the chips fall where they may. That's how open society's work. You know, you mentioned early on about policies, that you follow policies, read a lot about that. The group that won't engage for the most part in any debate on climate change, what have you. When it comes to policies here in Canada, you know, one of the things that obviously has got a real light shined on it out west was the 30% emissions reduction with

farmers. When you look Canada in general, just on the policy side of it, this group of people have a lot of influence. I think we're seeing that play out right now. What is it some of the things that you're paying attention to in policies that the average. average day Canadian is going to start to see or hear more about. Well, let's hope they do. I'll tell you, I'm a big picture guy. And so the first thing I'm going to mention is that if you take the alarmist's own computer models and you plug into them, what if everybody meets their Paris Accord targets?

The change in temperature in the year 2100 is less than a tenth of a degree. So even if we did all this stuff, it would be of no use whatsoever. So that's point one. Point two is that Canada is missing its emissions targets and has been for 25 years because the implications of really carrying them out would be so drastic in terms of people's going hungry and cold and being sick. You're going to run your hospital on wood. And even wood, of course, gives off CO2, going to have a windmill on your hospital. So there's a huge sacrifice needed in order to achieve what the alarmist's own models say would be absolutely

useless. And you look again at the fertilizer thing. It's not enough, though it does matter that they didn't know that farmers are careful with fertilizer use because fertilizer is expensive and farmers have often got very tight margins for their businesses. So there wasn't a lot of wasted fertilizer. If you cut fertilizer use, you cut food production. And so you're talking about the price of food going up because the supply of food is going down. And that means hardship for Canadians and starvation for people in poorer countries. And all of this, we'll miss the target on reductions. And if we hit the target on reductions, it would be no use. Or you look at the carbon tax, right? What's the price of gas? Well, it got up over $2 a liter here. Now it's down around $1.50.

And thank goodness it is. But people were still buying gas because there aren't a lot of substitutes for gas. So they want to make you stop using gas. They're going to have to bring in taxes of $8, $9, $10, $40 a liter because they really want you to stop using gas. And when people understand that, as they're starting to see in places like Britain and Germany, they're going to feel cheated. They're going to be very upset. And then there's this push for electric vehicles. Again, there's a couple of things about electric vehicles that just don't get talked about. First of all, if we really did electrify all our cars, the grid would collapse. We can't generate enough electricity for these things. But secondly, the extraction of the minerals necessary, particularly for the batteries, is horrendously

bad for the environment and takes place under appalling labor conditions, often involving essentially child slave labor. So there are huge costs to this stuff. And when you finally get it, the car doesn't work very well. It bursts into flames. And how do you dispose of this stuff when it's lifetime's done? California is starting to get this with wind turbines. There are huge environmental cost to these measures, all of which, if implemented, wouldn't do what the alarmists say that they would do. And so, and once upon a time, it was 40, 50 years down the road. this felt like a lifetime. But now they're saying, you know, by 2030, by 2035, by 2040, and suddenly objects in the calendar are closer than they appear. And they're going to either

have to put in these very draconian policies or else admit that they're not going to stop the sky from catching fire or admit that the whole thing was a big mistake. And that is going to be, of course, it's not easy to climb down. People have committed themselves in such a, again, in such a sanctimonious way. They have been so superior and angry and insulted. about it, that it's very hard to say, you know what, sorry about that. All those people we smeared were actually right. But the other thing that I always keep an eye on here is that we do have reasonably good measurements of global temperature, the satellite record. And the satellite record shows very little warming in the last 20 years. And so one of the things that may happen,

of course, is simply that people will suddenly realize the planet's not warming. And then all these theories about why it's warming will become very, very uninteresting. So there's so much going on. We put it a newsletter every week and I always start the week thinking, oh my goodness, what are we going to talk about? And by the time I'm writing the thing, I'm saying, stop adding material. You must stop. People won't read it if it gets any longer. But there's always so much to talk about from the nitty gritty details of policy gone bad. There's a thing about New York City is thinking of banning these electric bikes from residential properties, rental properties, because of all the fires. But the fact that electric batteries burst into flames, this is not a

trivial thing. Those are nasty fires. But all the way up to the big one, which is that according to their own models, if we did everything they want us to do, it would be no use. Now, in my own view, the models are no use. So this doesn't really tell us anything about what would happen. But I also just don't see much evidence. You know, we've seen 1.1 degrees warming since 1850. Some of that, surely any reasonable person would say some of that's natural. We had a down swing. We had an upswing. Some of it's natural. So even if you're one of these sort of lukewarm, who says, yeah, humans probably caused half a degree of warming. And if things keep going, we'll probably cause another third of a degree.

Because the effect of CO2 diminishes as you put more of it into the atmosphere. You have to double the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, the relative proportion of CO2 to get the same absolute increase in temperature. If you go from, you know, 200 to 400 parts can lead and it goes up half a degree, you have to go not from 400 to 6, but 400 to 8. to get the next half degree and then from eight to 16. So, you know, the whole thing is very likely just to fizzle out. But in the meantime, what you're looking at is policies that will be enormously painful. I mean, Britain, they're talking about, you know, a third of businesses are in danger of

closing. People can't eat their homes. It's real misery and death is going to occur here in return for nothing, nothing in terms of changing the weather. And at some point, I think you're going to find that people have no appetite for that. All that said, you go, so why are we doing it then? It's just that they believe in it that much, that things have to change and that you literally just said, nothing's going to change. Maybe we should talk about computer models. They're following the computer model. Is that what they're seeing? They're seeing the computer model and they're going, if we don't do this, this is what's going to happen. And if we do do it, we're going to start to direct it this way. And the Titanic's going to move from the ice.

so to speak? Well, first of all, I think that the reason they're doing it, yes, they're true believers and they're true believers in two parts. One, that human beings are causing a crisis, which must be averted or we're all going to die. But the second part is they really believe in this Green New Deal. They think there's a better economy out there that businesses are too dumb to spot, but they, the politicians have spotted. And while that may be an absurd view, it seems to me they're quite sincere. And until now, they've been able to do it because the cost of their policies was trivial. You know, from 1997, when Jean-Cretchen signed on to Kyoto, up to 2013, what did it hurt? It didn't matter. They could have this little game of theirs.

Voters didn't much care about it. They tell pollsters that you love the environment and didn't want it to burst into flames. And that was sort of that. It was, you know, it was all fun in games. But now the policymakers are in a bit of a trap because the policies that they said needed to be brought in aren't producing the results. They thought they. would economically, let alone in terms of climate, but it's very hard to back down. Pride is involved here. As for the computer models, again, I think there are two things going on. One is that they believe the models because the models tell them what they want to hear. There's a certain sort of vanity there. And the people making the models understand, you know, instinctively, they program the models

as they see the world. And then the models come back and tell them their vision of the world is right. So they say, ha, the computer knows what's going on because it meets their and intuitive understanding. But the other thing is something we talked about much earlier. This what the Germans call it, machbarquite, this idea that anything nature can do, we can do better, and that mathematics is the language in which truth is written, Galileo's motto, that we can really understand the entire world by putting equations into computers. And this is how we do economic forecasting, which works brilliantly, as you know. It's how we did our COVID modeling, which worked brilliantly, as you know, and it's how we do our climate modeling. And the reason it all

doesn't work. There's this thing that was very trendy. I tell you what, I'm going to, right there should be your entire argument. Right there. Done. Right. Like the computer modeling for those three things, everyone should just be able to, yep, I think that's, that should be our argument for the next hundred years is right there on everything, right? The computer modeling for these three things. Anyways, that rate there is just that, that sums it up, brilliantly, John. Yeah, they don't work. And the reason they don't work is back in the 90s, chaos theory is very trendy. and then climate change came along and everybody forgot they'd ever own James Gleke's book. But the problem is that there are a lot of things that happen in the world and weather is the,

in fact, it was the iconic example where the outcomes are sensitively dependent on initial conditions. That very, the proverbial thing, a butterfly flaps its wings in Central Park and they have sunshine instead of rain in Beijing three weeks later. And it was Edward Lorenz who discovered this back in 1961 on a very primitive computer. these model simulations of weather. And back then, computers were super slow. And he wanted to pick up the run and see what would happen. But he didn't want to have to wait for it to generate the whole thing. So he just took the outputs from near the end, plugged them back in and started it up again.

And to his amazement and horror, right away, what was coming out of the computer didn't match the end of the previous run. And he was staring at this and thinking his computer must be broken. And then it dawned on him that the computer was working to six decimal places, but only output into three. So he'd put in three decimal placeout inputs going oh oh for the last three where the computer had had like 216 or 428. And those tiny differences immediately made a huge difference. And anytime something like that is happening, you can't model it. You just literally can't.

You can seem to model it because your intuition makes you put in plausible variables so that it'll give you results like what you're expecting. But this is why you can't tell what GDP is going to do. I mean, if you're trying to guess will the economy grow 2% in the next year and you say, yeah, it'll grow 2%. If it normally grows between 1 and 1.5 and 2.5, you're going to look smart. But really, it's just because you made an obvious guess and disguised it as a computer projection. And so I think, yeah, if you want to look at the practical results of computer modeling, there's some things computers are really good at, right? Like no human being can now play chess against a good computer.

Nobody. Magnus Carlson is a helpless child before these blasted engines. But when it comes to modeling human behavior or the processes of nature, they can do the orbits of the planets, sure, but ocean currents, no, they can't do that. They'll never be able to do that. And so you look at the laughably bad results of computer modeling, and you look at the reasons why linear algebra can't crack certain kinds of problems. And between them, you say, we've got to stop believing computers. And then again, I put on my mortar board and say, and that's why we should all look at the past. We should all see what the climate did in the past.

And if we can draw plausible conclusions about factors that are important from the past behavior of the climate, then we'll have some idea what's probably going to happen in the future. And what this tells us is climate's always been hugely variable. And as far as we can tell, for most of the last half billion years, the planet was about 10 degrees warmer than it is today. So right now the Earth is unusually cool. And if it should warm back up, in some sense, it's just going back to equilibrium. And whether we like it or not, we didn't do it and we can't stop it. So we better get ready for it because that's the prudent thing.

There's no Russian saying there's no such thing as too cold. There's just improperly dressed. Now, I don't know, parts of Siberia maybe would challenge that. But on the whole, that seems to me to be our attitude, should be our attitude for climate. We need to be ready for what the weather's going to do because we actually can't control it. And the computers are no help. They're just sort of parodies of actual knowledge. When you talk about history and you and, you know, in your vast knowledge of it, what's a lesson you lean heavily on or, yeah, something that you stare back in a history that when you stumbled on it, you thought that was brilliant?

First of all, I think the first lesson is human nature is flawed. I think that people who think the doctrine of original sin is a bunch of theological nonsense can't really explain the way we've behaved ever since we started recording how we've behaved. Another one is very much the conservative, you need to stick to methods that have proven themselves over time because our speculative abilities are not nearly as powerful as our ability to learn from experience. The third thing is that humans respond well to being given responsibility and very badly to being ordered around. Peace through strength, as the Romans said,

C. Wispack and Parabellum, if you want peace, prepare for war. I think that one stands up as well as virtually anything. There's no free lunch. You're just never going to get something for nothing. It's not going to happen. And anybody who's offering you something for nothing, including the climate alarmists, you say, we can give up fossil fuels and our life will get better. No, that's not how the world works. If we need to give up fossil fuels, if we really need to, then we'll do it, but it's going to hurt. Don't tell us it'll actually make our lives better. The people who think they're better than other people should not be given power. That to me is another very powerful lesson. The C.S. Lewis scene where Prince Caspian tells Aslan, he doesn't think he's ready to be

king. And Aslan says, that's proof that you are. If you thought the other way, we'd have a problem. weather always changes. There's another one. I mean, it's just amazing to be. The whole climate thing first came up, because again, as a historian, and I studied modern American history. My mother studied 19th century Britain.

My grandfather was a medieval historian. But I knew about the medieval warm period, and I knew about the Viking voyages, and I knew about all the growing grapes in England and all this kind of stuff. And I thought, how do all these smart, well-educated people not know that we know it was warm back then, that we have irrefutable evidence.

And you go back and you take a more scientific approach and look where the tree lines were and all this kind of stuff. And it confirms, yeah, there was a medieval warm period. And no, it wasn't just regional. We see more and more evidence that it was worldwide. But to me, it was astonishing that people would ignore the past. And one of the lines that Thomas Sowell quotes in a conflict of visions is George Bernard Shaw saying, We are made wise, not by our knowledge of the past, but by our responsibility for the future. That's not verbatim, but that's the base of thrust.

That is a very powerful, that's sort of the left ring mentality in a nutshell. And it's tied in with this good intentions or what moves mountains. That there are a lot of people out there who think the lessons of the past are just misleading. And these people are very dangerous. So there's another lesson I put for you. Anybody who thinks the lessons of the past are unimportant is going to give you dangerous. bad advice one forward. And I sit in the seat of, I think the lessons of the past is how you prepare for the

future, right? Like, I mean, the lessons of the past are really important. Somebody has done something silly, have actually experienced it. Chances are they either wrote about it or whatnot. You get to read it and go, okay, if I do this, that's what's going to happen. Let's not do that, right? Like, that's the whole point of that. I actually, oh, that kind of scares me that there are people who read that.

and go, oh, no, don't, don't worry about that. That won't happen again. That's a scary thought. Yeah, that was then, but this is, but the world has changed. You went into that constantly, which is funny, I just came across, I think it might have been Eleanor Roosevelt, who is not a person who's advice I would normally take, but she said you should learn from other people's mistakes because you won't live long enough to make them all yourself.

But it's also probably worth bearing mind that if you were going to live long enough, you would. And you know what? You remind me another lesson of the past, a specific thing, which to me is a very, important one is the story of King Canute, which people always get wrong in a revealing way. You know that, oh, ha, ha, Canute thought he could stop the waves, what a yacht, so forth and such like. This isn't the story of Canute at all. Canute is a king of England in the Saxon period, that was actually a Danish interlober, but he was a good king. And one of the reasons why is that

his courtiers were flattering him and telling him, you're the greatest, you're the most marvelous, your beloved of God, why you're so holy and wise and smart that you could even command the waves. And Canute said, gee, that's an interesting theory. Let's submit it to the evidence-based decision-making process. Take my chair down to the tidal flats at low tide. And so they did. And he sat in it. And when the water started to commit, he said, I am Canute.

I command you to halt. And the waves came up and salt water poured into his boots. And then Canute stood up and he said to his cordios, listen, you idiots, I am the king. I get flattering morning, new to night, free of charge. What I need from you is honest feedback. What am I doing wrong? What can I not do? Because if I am not continually reminded of my limitations,

I can't possibly govern these people as they deserve. And then he said, and never forget that there is only one who can command the waves, and that is God. That's the real story of King Canute. And it was told at dinner tables in the English-speaking world for a thousand years to remind us that rulers ought to be humble. And now, remember when Barack Obama clinched the nomination, he said, this is the moment when the water ceased to rise.

I mean, he was literally in the position of the fictitious king canoot that's come up in modern times because we think we're smart and people in the past were stupid. But it's the opposite of the real canoe. The real canute would have tapped him on the shoulder and said, excuse me, sir, there's only one who commands the waves. And if you're surrounded by people who are telling you can change the weather, you better get some new advisors in a hurry. And we used to have these stories. The story of Alfred and the cakes is another one, that monarchs in the English-speaking world, rulers needed to be humble and pious.

And instead, we've thrown all that away. We've even forgotten how the story's meant to go. We've turned it on its head. And this is, you know, we're navigating without a map or a compass. And you know what that ends up with. It's funny. I ask a historian to give me one lesson of history. And you gave me about 10,

which I'm going to have to go back and weed through because certainly there's some good things there. There's a lot there. I mean, that's why history is so important, right? I think that's why so many people love reading history. But one of the ones, and you might have to say it again for me, you talked, I think it's very applicable to right now. People don't want to be told what to do.

They want to be empowered or, you know, given purpose in life. that type of idea is hopefully what we have on the horizon. I don't know. Is that possible? I don't know if that's coming or not. I hope it is. I don't just, to me,

that makes a lot of sense because that's the way I am. I don't want to be told, even if I'm going to, you know, I want to go out, experience things, learn and be given kind of a purpose of job. Like,

we've got to figure this problem. All right, let's figure it out. Like to me, your entire population is extremely smart. In Canada, I think there's a group of extremely smart people that are engaged. And if you just engage them further, like you say, you could probably move mountains. Yeah, one of Robert Conquest's laws of public affairs is that everybody's reactionary about things they actually know about.

So one of the great advantages of decentralization is that you let people work on things they actually know about and they stop believing these stupid projector schemes. But, you know, I often when people ask me, what are we going to do? things look bleak, I say, well, I discourage optimism because it's a psychological condition and usually fatuous, but I encourage hope because hope is a theological virtue. And when you look at the history of the Western civilization of the free societies, it is astonishing how frequently things have been going so badly that it was clear they were about to end in a complete smash up. And yet they never did. I mean, you look at all these kind of things from the early history of Christianity to the fall of Rome to the model.

jungle invasions to the French Revolution to the Second World War. Time and again, we've looked like we had our backs to the wall and we're our own worst enemies. And yet we have always somehow pulled it out. And one of the things I hope people will go and look at my documentary on Magna Carta, which again is you can find it on my website, johnrobson.ca. And again, it's free, thanks to the generosity of all the people who crowdfunded it. And it tells us this remarkable story of liberty under law. at all the bleak moments, including under King Alfred,

that Alfred of Wessex, I won't try and cram it into this interview, but he's an amazing character out of the Dark Ages, worst, the Danish invaders were coming there, burning everything, these terrible pagan gods, and there's Alfred fleeing into the marches of Atholene, and yet he does rally his men. He does defeat the Danes.

He gets their king to convert to Christianity. In adulthood, he teaches himself Latin, so we can translate important books into Anglo-Sax. It's an inspiring tale of victory against long odds. So, yes, I believe that we can do it again. If Alfred could retake London, if Churchill could defy Hitler, then we can re-invigorate the free society and we can get back to those things that make humans that flourish.

I'm sure that we can do it. And I'm sure that we can find in the pages of history the inspiration and the advice that we need to make it happen. Well, I appreciate you coming on before I let you slide out of here, John. I want to do the crude master final question. Just shout out to Heath and Tracy McDonald. They've been supporters of the podcast since the very, very beginning. If you're going to stand behind something, then stand behind it.

What's one thing John stands behind? That there is such a thing as truth, that it is not a matter of opinion that everybody does not get their own truth, that there is one truth that it's given to us from the God who is truth. well there's something i haven't heard at the end of an episode yet most people would argue against what you just said but they can't because they don't believe in truth they can't believe their arguments true it's an incredibly fatuous position to say there's no truth it is true that there's no truth is mind-bogglingly foolish and we all know that there's truth we all know if we were to see a child being beaten to death in the street that we would have to intervene we know that that is

wrong, absolutely, unequivocally, and it's not a matter of perspective. And so we know there's truth. And then we just have to ask ourselves, how is it possible that there's truth? Where could such a thing come from? And what must I do in the presence of it? And that to me, you know, as Ronald Reagan might say, it's not easy, but it is simple that he is the way, the truth and the life. And that's where you go. Well, I've appreciated this, John. I appreciate you giving me some time this morning and and well i'm sure we'll stay in touch and we'll see uh we'll see how things play out over the next little bit it's been a pleasure