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

Episode Date: December 31, 2020

Top 5 of 2020 Day 4: During this Christmas season, we're sharing some of our favorite interviews of the year to allow our team to take time off for the holidays. 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. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the fourth of the Daily Signal's top five of 2020. Today is Thursday, December 31st. I'm Rachel Del Judas. And I'm Virginia Allen. Happy New Year's Eve. And there is no better way to ring in the new year than a look back at some of your and our favorite podcast episodes from this very wild year. Is climate change real? 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 true. about climate change. If you haven't done so already, please do be sure to leave us a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. It's the perfect gift to the Daily Signal this Christmas season. I am joined by Gregory Wrightstone, 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 and 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 contradict so much of what we hear in the media about 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 on a time, oh, well, they all ceased sometime in the 20th century. And that's just not the case. So the debate, and 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 just, 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 warming trends. 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 it? Yeah, that's a good question.

There are so many forces that drive temperature. Big forces like Melancho, they're called Melanchovich cycles. Things like the wobble of the earth, the eccentricity of the Earths 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 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.

It'll be, 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 four or five thousand 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 bouncing, harvests, 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 in 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. It's thought, one of my favorite researchers thinks that one thing, third of the entire Earth 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, oh, my God, we can't let it 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 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 later in the spring, arrive later in the spring and arrive later in the fall. All those things are good. So Earth is in 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 live in the world. I look at what's actually happening today. and we see by almost every metric both Urosse 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 Accord.

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 in the Paris Climate Court. The stated goal is to raise costs for energy. because we really want to force you away from fossil fuels over to wind and solar. And we just, we just, it's not, one of the, 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. How many jobs lost is that worth?

I'll tell you how many. Zero. Zero. Four hundreds of a degree centigrade. And 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 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 Landsee. What a great name for a meteorologist, almost as good as a geologist from the whole. last name of Wright Stone. But Christopher, he says that, 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. So it's, and we see that landfall in hurricanes in the United States are actually. they've 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 in 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 time? 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, well, 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 it 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 Islands 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 this 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 day to 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 it on a decade-by-decade basis and found that actually extinctions peaked in the late 1800s. And they've been in significant 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, 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 her solution is more habitat loss. And so it's ironic, isn't it? It's very ironic. Yeah. 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. Sorry, but yeah. Interesting.

Interesting. All right. Well, can you quickly summarize what the true narrative of climate change really? is. 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 power.

powerful, powerful app. It's got all 60 charts of my 60 Inconvenient Facts in 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 Al 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, and 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 it, 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 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 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.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. dot XYC. 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. You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeartRadio.

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for the final day of the Daily Signal's top five of 2020. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation. It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, visit DailySignal.com.