The Daily Signal - Fact or Fiction: Addressing the Talking Points of Climate Activists

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

Are rising sea levels a threat to our planet? Is global warming to blame for wildfires and hurricanes? Geologist Gregory Wrightstone, author of “Inconvenient Facts: The Science That Al Gore Doesn't Want You to Know," joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the truth about climate change. In our conversation, Wrightstone addresses these talking points by climate activists and much more. We also cover these stories: U.S. coronavirus cases surpass 10,000, doubling in two days. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin confirms a plan for $1,000 payments to Americans. The State Department advises Americans not to travel abroad, and to come home if overseas. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, March 20th. I'm Richard Dahl Judis. And I'm Kate Trinko. Today, we're playing an interview we recorded during the conservative political action conference last month. Our co-host, Virginia Allen, interviews Gregory Wrightstone, author of Inconvenient Facts, The Science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know. Obviously, they talk about climate change. Don't forget.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave Ruth. review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. The cases of coronavirus in the U.S. are now up to 10,000, doubling in the past two days. Officials believe the number to be even higher as testing is only just recently getting underway. Per CNBC, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that the state had 1,769 new cases, bringing the number of confirmed cases in New York to 4,152. At least 154 people in the U.S. have died from the virus. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke with Fox Business Thursday

about how the Trump administration is planning to send Americans' checks in the near future as the country's economy reels with the fallout because of the coronavirus pandemic. I think, as you know, this is an unprecedented situation. where for good reason, the government is instructed major parts of the economy to close down so that we can win this fight against this virus. This is not going to go on forever. We are going to beat this. And while we're doing that, we understand there are impacts on hardworking Americans,

and the president is determined that we are going to support them. So we've announced a trillion-dollar plan. The first part of this is $300 billion that goes to small businesses. that money needs to be used to hiring people, keeping people on the payroll. And if they do, there will be loaned forgiveness on that afterwards. The second component, and that's a really important, Maria, that's 40% of the private workforce, and we want to keep those people employed. The second component, and, you know, I refer to this as checks in the mail,

but that's the, it's really money direct deposited. Most people, we have all their information. And the plan is $500 billion in two tranches. The first one would be $1,000 per person, $500 per child. So for a family of four, that's a $3,000 payment. As soon as Congress passes this, we'd get this out in three weeks. And then six weeks later, if the president still has a national emergency, we'll deliver another $3,000.

So that's a lot of money to hardworking Americans who are at home, no fault, theirs. President Donald Trump said the only thing the country wasn't prepared for in terms of the coronavirus situation was the media. Here's what the president had to say during his Thursday briefing via the American Independent. You did say a few days ago, though, you did have a sense that this was a pandemic that was coming. So why was the United States not prepared with more testing? We were very prepared. The only thing we weren't prepared for was the media. The media has not treated it fairly. I'll tell you how prepared I was. I called for a ban from people coming in from China long before anybody thought it was, in fact, it was your network. I believe they called me a

racist because I did that. It was many of the people in the room. They call me racist and other words because I did that because I went so early. So when you say we weren't prepared, had I let these tens of thousands of people come in from China a day, we would have had something right now, that would have been, you wouldn't have even recognized it compared to where we are. How many people have passed away? How many people have died as of this moment? You could multiply that by a factor of many, many, many. So when you say that I wasn't prepared, I was the first one to do the ban.

Now other countries are following what I did. Trump also called out the media for siding with China during the coronavirus outbreak. Here's what he had to say via Fox. This administration has done a great job. But the press is very dishonest. They're siding with state propaganda. Well, I think they do. I mean, I mean, they are siding with China.

They are doing things that they shouldn't be doing. They're siding with many others. China is the least of it. So why they're doing this, you'll have to ask them. But if we had an honest media in this country, our country would be an even greater place. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. President Trump announced Thursday that the FDA would move quickly on a possible drug treatment for the coronavirus via C-SPAN.

A drug called chloroquine, and some people would add to it hydroxy, hydroxychloroquine. So chloroquine or hydroxychloroquine. Now, this is a common malaria drug. It's also a drug used for strong arthritis. Somebody has pretty serious arthritis. also uses this in a somewhat different form. But it is known as a malaria drug, and it's been around for a long time, and it's very powerful.

But the nice part is it's been around for a long time. So we know that if things don't go as planned, it's not going to kill anybody. when you go with a brand new drug, you don't know that that's going to happen. You have to see and you have to go a long test. But this has been used in different forms, very powerful drug in different forms. And it's shown very encouraging, very, very encouraging early results. And we're going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately. And that's where the FDA has been so great.

Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Republican Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin are introducing legislation that would reduce the U.S.'s dependence on drugs and other medical products coming from China. In a statement, Cotton said, the Chinese Communist Party threatened to cut off America's access to vital drugs in the next of a pandemic caused by its own failures. It's time to pull America's supply chains for life-saving medicine out of China and make the C-City. pay for contributing to this global emergency. The bill, which would become effective in 2022, would, among other things, have the FDA review drug ingredients and prohibit the federal government from buying medicine from China, as well as mandate that drugs be labeled with the country they were made in.

Hope you weren't planning a big international trip anytime soon. The State Department is reportedly set to ask Americans to refrain from any international travel. Politico reports, the advisory, which appears to be unprecedented, would instruct all Americans abroad to either return to the United States or prepare to shelter in place, given the global threat of the coronavirus outbreak. Americans also would be instructed not to travel abroad. Italy now has more fatalities from coronavirus than China. On Thursday, Italy announced that 3,405 people have died from coronavirus per USA today. The country of over 60 million people continues to be on lockdown, and Italians are only allowed to leave home for essential items

like grocery store and pharmacy runs. Well, if you're looking to ease the sting of quarantine with a drink, two states have taken steps to make it easier to get alcohol delivered to your front door. In Maryland, Republican Governor Larry Hogan issued an emergency order that allows restaurants, bars, wineries, and distilleries to deliver to your doorstep. Meanwhile, in Texas, if you want, say, a margarita to go along with your taco delivery, you're in luck. Republican Governor Greg Abbott tweeted, restaurants in Texas can now deliver alcoholic beverages with food purchases to customers. In response to coronavirus, I waive some regulations that hindered that. These next few weeks, it's important.

to support our restaurants. They're a great source of food for Texans. Next up, we'll discuss climate change with Gregory Wrightstone. Are you looking for quick conservative policy solutions to current issues? Sign up for Heritage's weekly newsletter, The Agenda. In the agenda, you will learn what issues Heritage Scholars on Capitol Hill are working on, what position conservatives are taking, and links to our in-depth research. The agenda also provides information on important events happening here at Heritage,

that you can watch online as well as media interviews from our experts. Sign up for the agenda on heritage.org today. I am joined by Gregory Ritestone, geologist, and author of Inconvenient Facts, the science that Al Gore doesn't want you to know. Greg, thanks so much for being here. Oh, thank you very much. Now, you actually wrote your book, Inconvenient Facts, in response to Al Gore's movie on Climate Change, called An Inconvenient Truth.

Why did you feel the need to write a book in response to what Al Gore had to say? Well, it was actually, I didn't set out to write a book, which is unusual. Most people say, oh, I'm going to write a book, and then they do. What I did, this was the result of my search, personal search for the truth. As a geologist, I heard so many conflicting things. It's too wet. It's not, it's drought. There's too much snow. There's not enough snow. Go back and forth. You've heard it all. And I heard all these claims of pending climate catastrophe and things were horrible. And I went back in, I just said, I'm going to find out for myself.

So this was a personal search for the truth. I went back and looked at the base data, finding out what's going to happen. And frankly, I was shocked when I got in there and actually enraged by what I found. And I found that in many cases, what we're being told by the media and the UN in many cases is just not so. And the science, the facts, and the data contradicts so much of what we hear in the media. climate change. And make no mistake, I agree we're in a warming trend. Yes, we are. But the fact of the matter is it started over 300 years ago. And the first 200 at least of that, maybe 250, was 100% naturally driven. What we're being asked to believe is that those natural

forces that have been driving temperatures since the dawn of time, oh, well, they all ceased sometime in the 20th century. And that's just not the case. The debate and the debate, yes, Virginia, there is a debate, is it mostly man-made now since the mid-20th century? Is it or is it natural cycles that we've seen time and time again? And I don't dispute that the increase in CO2 is man-made, and I don't dispute that it adds a little bit of warming to the atmosphere. I believe it's modest and it's overwhelmed by the natural forces that have been driving temperature again since the dawn of time.

So if there are these sort of natural cycles in the earth of warming and cooling, are we experiencing a more extreme cycle of warming than we ever have before? If we look over the last, I like to look over the last 10,000 years of temperature data, and we find that there were nine other warming trends. And in fact, in my smartphone app and in the book, I take a detailed look at those other warming trends. We find out that all of those previous warming trends were warmer than we are today. and I also look at the rate of warming, and the rate of warming we're at over the last 100, 150 years is very similar.

In fact, five of the nine warming trends had higher rates of warming than what we've seen over the last century or so. So we're being told that, but again, it's not backed up by the science. So if it's not CO2 causing all of the warming, then what is causing? Yeah, that's a good question. There are so many forces that drive temperature. Big forces like Melanchovych cycles. They're things like the wobble of the earth, the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit. Those drive the really big ice ages.

It's probably solar, the amount of solar we see. We're entering in what's called the Grand Solar Minimum now with predictions of actually we might have 30 to 50 years of, of possibly extreme cooling. If you're going to ask me what's going to happen, I'm going to be honest and tell you, I don't know. I don't think it's going to be anything that we can do as man to influence that to any great degree.

But I will tell you, again, looking at the past 4,000 or 5,000 years of human history, there's a strong correlation between the rise and fall of temperature and the rise and fall of civilizations, and it's just opposite of what we're being told. The warming trends in the past always correlated with bountiful harvest, lots of food, great empires and civilizations rose up. You wouldn't have to worry about grubbing for your next meal, how you're going to feed your family tomorrow, and the warming trends, so people had time to think, to tinker, to dream, to invent.

And it was the intervening cold periods that were horrific, horrific. The most recent one was called the Little Ice Age. Half the population of Iceland perished. thought, one of my favorite researches thinks that one third of the entire Earth's population perished during the last cool period. So it's the cold that's horrific. Again, just opposite. We're being told, aren't we, that, oh my God, oh, my God, I'm going to get a degree and a half warmer, or we're going to have famine. But that's not been the case historically, not at all. So what I see is the, I see that the earth is thriving, prospering, and greening, in fact,

due to modest warming and increased CO2 that's driving the food production. And NASA says part of this is the Earth is what they call greening. Up to 50% of the Earth is greening or vegetation increasing. Less than 4% according to NASA is browning or loss of vegetation. That's a good thing. That's a huge, huge, huge good thing. We're growing more crops. And, you know, growing seasons are lengthening.

So you can get more seasons, more staples, killing frosts, arrive earlier and end later in the spring, arrive later in the fall. All those things are good. So Earth and humanity are prospering from what we're seeing. Just opposite. Aren't we being told of all these horrific consequences? And if you look at them, these are predictions or speculation about what might happen 50 or 80 years in the future based on failed climate models where actually I.

I live in the world world. I look at what's actually happening today, and we see by almost every metric, both Eurus ecosystems and humanity is prospering. Wow. You don't hear people talking about that. And it's not even close. Tell me what's getting worse.

If you look at the actual facts of drought, of fire, did you know in California the number of fires in California has declined almost 50% in the last 30 years? You would never know. The area burned has increased. but that's a forest management problem. They blow these things up and the need is to create a climate of fear

because we need a frightened population to enact otherwise horrific and economically crippling things like the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Court. Why in the world would the United States voluntarily impose something that's going to raise our energy costs which will then raise everything,

every commodity price, and that's the stated goal of the Green New Deal and the Paris Climate Court? The stated goal is to raise costs for energy. Because we want to force you away from fossil fuels over to wind and solar. And we just, one of the interesting aspects you don't hear about is also, if we were, if the United States was to avert or get rid of 100% of its carbon dioxide emissions, and this is according to EPA's own calculations,

we would only avert 400ths of a degree centigrade by the year 2050. 400ths of a degree centigrade. How many jobs lost is that worth? I'll tell you how many. Zero. Zero.

Four hundreds of a degree centigrade. I was in a debate back in November with a professor from Penn State, and I stated that, and he said, oh, well, yeah, but everyone in the world needs to get together and get behind this, and then we can really save the earth from this. Do you think China and India are going to decrease their, coal-fired electricity generation, no way. If you look at what they're doing, they're mining more

coal and creating more and more coal-fired electricity that are completely supplanting anything we can do here in the United States. And even if we did, it wouldn't matter to any measurable degree what the Earth's temperature is. Interesting. So you mentioned wildfires and that global warming has nothing to do with wildfires, but that has to do with forest management. Another talking point, though, that we hear a lot is hurricanes, that we're seeing. larger, more devastating hurricanes because of global warming? What do you say to that? Yeah.

The intergovernmental panel on climate change agrees with me. By the way, I've been accepted as an expert reviewer for the intergovernmental panel on climate change. The IPCC agrees that there's been no measurable increase in the number of hurricanes, but there might be a slight increase. Noah's top hurricane expert is the guy by the name of Christopher Land, What a great name for a meteorologist, almost as good as a geologist with the last name of Wright Stone. But Christopher, he says that, and he's their top guy, he says that it might increase hurricane intensity by 1%. I don't think anybody in Katrina would know the difference between 234 miles an hour and 236 miles an hour.

And according to him, the increase in intensity that he sees and predicts is below anything they can actually measure. measure. And we see that landfall in hurricanes in the United States are actually been in decline. And we see that if we look at the number of hurricanes and tropical systems, it's been pretty flat over the last 30 or so years. Rising sea levels is a common concern that we hear about. Are sea levels actually rising? And if so, do we need to be concerned? They are rising. They started rising in the early 1800s. Remember, we started warming. in the late 1600s coming out of the...

We've got, thankfully, warming, we saw coming out of the little ice age. It didn't get warm enough, though, until the early 1800s for summer ice loss to exceed winter ice accumulation, which is what you need to have glaciers retreat. Glaciers retreating are what drives sea level rise. So by about 1850, we saw that sea level rise and glacial retreat, which go hand in hand, both are about the same rate of sea level rise and glacial retreat is what we've seen over the last several decades, which is about 10 inches per year, or per decade, excuse me. So, you know, we've only got, we've got less than a foot of rise in the last 100 years,

which is it's not alarming. It's, again, part of this, if we look back in the 1800s, we weren't adding much CO2 at all. It really was the mid-20th century when we started adding CO2 in earnest to the atmosphere. So, yeah, there are things that we can do to mitigate against this modest rise in sea level. There are some places where the earth itself is subsiding faster than sea levels. And those places like Miami, in fact, they're subsiding faster than sea levels rising. So there should be concerns, but there are things you can do to mitigate this. What are some of those things?

Well, if we look at the Netherlands, what have the Dutch done? I mean, almost the entire country is below sea level. They've built sea walls over centuries, and this was with 17th, 16th century technology. So places like that, you can build that up. What's interesting, too, in 2005, the UN predicted that there'd be 50 million climate refugees by the year 2010. 2010 came and went, and in fact, they listed. these most at-risk islands. They had a map showing,

oh, these, and the Maldives was, where this is island nations, was one of those. And I looked at, in the book I cataloged population from 2005 to when my book was written.

And the population of these at-risk islands, instead of people fleeing the islands, people are moving to them. So there's been a great increase. They're going to this tropical paradise that is. And the Maldives, right now are building three new resort hotels and a new airport. They're funded by big equity companies,

and they're insured by large insurance companies. Do you think if that was really a risk, they would put hundreds of million dollars? These guys, they're very risk-averse. They're not going to do it if they don't. They're not going to put, you know, each one of these is tens of millions of dollars each. So we look at something like that.

So, in fact, some of the Maldives Island, are actually increasing in areas. It's a geologic process. Interesting. I take one of the biggest hoaxes that I've exposed, the most recent one was this UN report that came out in November that predicted a huge rise in extinctions. You've probably heard of the sixth mass extinction that's looming.

Greta Thumburg, every time she opens her mouth, she has something about extinctions. the UN reported that and predicted there'd be one million extinctions of species over the next several decades. Well, I just said, wait a minute. And I went back and I looked at the same date of the UN looked at. The UN looked at it on a century-by-century basis going back to the year 1500. I took a look at it and their chart showed skyrocketing extinctions. And they put one century cumulative on top of the other, so the chart looked horrible.

I went back and looked at on a decade-by-decade basis and found that actually extinctions, peaked in the late 1800s, and they've been insignificant and steady decline since. So to get to their one million extinctions in that time period, you have to have almost 30,000 extinctions per year. Do you know what it's been in the last 40 years average? I won't make a guess. It'll be two. Wow. Two extinctions per year. This is using the IUCN Red List, the same data source the UN used. Two extinctions per year. Oh, well, we'll get to 30,000 pretty soon. No, we won't. No, we won't. The big story that the UN, instead of this alarmist reporting and mischaracteration and misuse of scientific data, which they did, would, is the main theme of that should have been that we are doing, as humans,

are doing a really, really, really good job protecting our endangered species as we should. That should have been the story. Not, oh, my God. And think about it. They listed the number one risk of species is, habitat loss. So what's their solution to climate change? Pave over hundreds of square miles with solar and wind power to chop up more endangered species and eagles and hawks and to cover up forest and desert and grasslands with solar panel arrays. That's their solution is more

habitat loss. And so it's ironic, isn't it? It's very ironic. Now you mentioned Greta Thunberg. she really has become the face of climate change. Is there anything she's gotten right in her arguments? Apparently, because she just signed a lucrative contract with BBC to do it. You know, I've been wrong about her. I'm the first to admit it because I've accused her of being anti-capitalist, and apparently she's not since she just signed this big contract with the BBC. She's apparently a capitalist after all, so I was wrong.

I'm sorry, but yeah. Interesting. Interesting. All right. Well, can you quickly summarize what the true narrative of climate change really is? Ah. Well, I can tell you my philosophy. Yeah, please do.

My philosophy is that we should use all of Earth's resources for the betterment of mankind and do it as good stewards. Bam. I like it. Bam. That's it. Now, you created an app. Tell me a little bit about the app that you created. And also, why Apple removed it two days after it went live.

Yeah, we had, we created just a powerful, powerful app. It's got all 60 charts of my 60 Inconvenient Facts and the book backed up with video, original videos. It's awesome. I rolled it out on the Glenn Beck Show down in Dallas, and immediately thereafter Apple took it off the app store. The name of the book is Inconvenient Facts, The Science that Outvis. Gore doesn't want you to know. And I'm not going to make you guess which ex-Vice president sits on Apple's board of directors, but it begins with Al and ends in Gore.

So that might add something to do with it. Our app is state-of-the-art best climate change app available. The other ones out there look like failed middle school science fair projects. We got it out there. And thank you for the Daily Signal, wrote a story the next day, and blew it up. You guys broke the story of Apple weaponizing the App Store. They said, this is really the first we've seen it.

It ended up being number one story on Drudge for 24 hours. And it got me in the book sales just skyrocketed. We got up to the top 10 bestsellers overall on Amazon. And the book's been going just gangbusters ever since. So Apple removing the app kind of had the opposite effect of what they intended. Exactly. And we ended up getting. at my app developer said, I think I know what I can get it back up. And I said, no, no, no, not yet.

Let's give it two months because we'll milk this for everything we got. So we got, he ended up adding a camera function for the iPhone. So it puts my I love CO2 banner across the bottom of any picture you take using the iPhone. And I think we think that's what got it back up. So it's available now. And remind me what it's called. The app itself, you just search for inconvenient. Inconvenient facts. Okay. That's perfect.

Great. And how can our listeners find your book and learn more about what you're up to? Well, search. I have a great website, inconvenientfacts.x. XYZ. So you've got, I've got original videos. And you can learn, if you don't look at anything else, look at the video I have on the relationship between the witch hunts of the late middle ages in Europe and climate change.

Fascinating. On it, I've got a chart documenting which is killed per decade compared to, temperature and they actually kept records of that. It's fascinating, fascinating. So inconvenientfax.x.X.Y. Perfect. Greg, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it. And that'll do it for today's episode.

Thanks for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. We really do appreciate your patience as we record remotely during these weeks. Please be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or Spotify, and please leave us a review or a rating on Apple Podcasts to give us your feedback. Robin Virginia will see you on Monday. We hope you and your loved ones are doing okay and made it through this first tough week of social distancing and remote work.

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