TRIGGERnometry - Are We Being Told the Truth About Climate Change? Patrick Moore

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

Patrick Moore is an ecologist, author and former president of Greenpeace. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.PayPal.me/triggerpod https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is the co-founder of Greenpeace and the director of the CO2 Coalition in Arlington, Virginia. Patrick Moore, welcome to Trigonometry. Great to be with you, Constantine. And Francis, we're both here. It's good to have you on the show, Patrick. Oh, and Francis. I, Francis. That's right. That's right. Don't worry about it here.

You don't really need to talk to him. Patrick, but welcome. It's great to have you on the show. We had Roger Hallam, who is the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion on our show some time ago, and we had a chat with him about environmentalism and all of those things. So we wanted to bring in a different perspective, which is why we're delighted to welcome you to the show. Before we get into the conversation itself, tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been the journey that you've had through life?

Because it's an interesting one. You know, I introduced you as a co-founder of Greenpeace. You did, you were involved with that movement, then you moved away from it. And just tell us a little bit about how all of that has happened. Well, I grew up on the very northwest tip of Vancouver Island in a completely remote wilderness area with no road to it. So I grew up with boats.

I went to school by boat. I had a boat when I was six. I had a motor for it when I was 12. So I had a completely unique childhood in the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island in the rainforest by the Pacific. And I learned to love nature at an early age as a result. So when I was sent away to boarding school after the one-room schoolhouse here only went to grade eight, I had to go to Vancouver where I learned cityways and went into life science in a big way. biology, biochemistry, and genetics.

And by the time I got to university, I already was well-versed in those subjects and did a BSC honors in biology and forestry, the industry that I grew up in up here on the north end of Vancouver Island, where there are far more trees than people and anything else you can name. And so I then found out about the science of ecology during a lunchtime lecture by an expat Czechoslovakian who had come here to get away from the communists as he'd been in the underground against them after the Second World War. And he taught me about ecology and forest ecology. And that was it for me.

That's what I decided I wanted to spend my life studying. That word had not yet been printed in the public press. The environment was being talked about a lot by the early 1970s. when I joined this small group in a church basement in Vancouver, that's where Greenpeace began, to take a voyage across the North Pacific with 12 other people in a small fishing boat against the U.S. hydrogen bomb testing in Alaska. We had the temerity at that time, looked like a bunch of hippies, but actually we were all professionals of one sort or another by that time,

to take on the world's largest and most powerful organization, the U.S. atollary. Energy Commission at the time at the height of the Cold War. And we won President Nixon, partly as a result of providing a focal point for media attention to the nuclear tests. We had tens of thousands of people marching in the streets as a result of our voyage being shown on television around the world. And when that bomb went off, we didn't stop that one. but when it went off, people came from both sides of the U.S.-Canada border,

the largest undefended border in the world, to join hands against nuclear testing and the threat of nuclear war. And so this became kind of the cusp of the Cold War. We were right there at that time. We didn't do it, but we sure put an exclamation mark on it. And when President Nixon canceled those remaining tests, it began the de-escalation of nuclear weapons build-up and the talks to reduce nuclear weapons between the Soviet Union, as Russia was called them, and the United States of America. And we were just a bunch of Canadians trying to do something useful at that time in history. So I spent the next 15 years full time with Greenpeace in the top committee.

I was a director all the way through. I was the ostensible leader for a couple of years in between there. And then when we created Greenpeace International in 1979 to bring together all the different groups that had sprung up in Australia, New Zealand, France, Britain, Netherlands, Canada, and all over the United States, we became a quite, powerful force, going on eventually to stop French atmospheric nuclear testing in the South Pacific, the slaughter of 30,000 whales every year in the world's oceans, and then on to toxic waste. At that time, in the late 1970s, pretty well all the rivers in Europe and Britain were dead because of factories putting poison in through pipes coming in underwater.

And we created the riverboat named the beluga, a smaller boat than we'd been using on the high seas. And we took it up the rivers and frogmen went down and plugged the pipes of these factories and back the effluent up into the factory itself. And just the image of that made really good media. And today the Rhine, the Rhone, the Elb, the Thames have fish in them. And that's very much because of what we did back then. Well, as time went on, we evolved from a group of volunteers into a famous environmental organization with people throwing money at us. And pretty soon we had a fairly big payroll with lots of people working at doing good things. And then when you have a payroll, you have to do fundraising.

and fundraising suddenly over time became maybe more important than it should have been. And pretty soon you're a business, basically, and with a payroll to meet. And gradually, that sort of took over the importance of what campaign you were doing. And in the late 70s into the early 80s, my fellow directors, there were six of us in Greenpeace International as directors, decided, none of whom had any formal science education, as I did, decided Greenpeace should take on a campaign to ban chlorine worldwide. And I'm going like, hey, you guys, that's one of the elements in the periodic table, you know, like one of the building blocks of the universe.

And probably shouldn't be trying to ban that just now. Maybe a little more subtle approach would be in order. but in, you know, that bit of a joke there. But in fact, chlorine is the most important element for public health and medicine. Adding it to drinking water was the most important move in public health in history. And 85% of our medicines are based on chlorine chemistry. 25% of them actually have chlorine in them. We ingest it in order to cure ourselves.

So banning it worldwide was not a good idea. I tried to impress them of that. And they went on any ways to do it. So that was sort of the micro reason why I had to leave Greenpeace, as I couldn't be part of an organization that wanted to ban the most important element for public health and medicine. But that kind of reflected on the larger philosophical issue. By this time, many members of the Green Movement were beginning to call people the enemies of the earth.

humans are the enemies of nature. And as if we were the only bad species on the planet, that was just a bit too much like original sin for me. I'm not a fire and brimstone guy, not even particularly of a particular religious bent, more of a scientist. And I had to leave. And I was sorry that it had ended up like that. But I'm really glad I did now because over the years, it's basically turned into a racket-pedalting junk science and doing basically nothing other than trying to scare people into thinking the world is coming to an end and the whole ocean is full of plastic and it's killing everything and just a lot of lies.

It's interesting because we wanted to talk to you about the plastic and the global warming and all of that stuff and I know you'll have a lot to say on it. But one of the questions you just brought up yourself is this idea that humans are. a sort of plague on the planet. Isn't that, I mean, isn't that true, Patrick? Like, we're consuming all the resources. We're polluting everything. People would say the world is obviously populated. We're having to modify crops just to be able to feed the population.

We're messing around with all sorts of things. You know, we're probably going to end up having to go to Mars to try and, you know, you know, you get the picture I'm trying to paint here, right? Isn't all of that true? No, that would be a simple answer. No, it's not true. We are perfectly good species. And most of us actually try to be good people and good species.

There's always a few bad ones in, I guess, whatever species. There's probably bad mice and bad birds that don't like the other birds or whatever. But we are a perfectly fine species. We do a lot, especially since the era of mechanization ended up causing pollution because we were burning fuels without any control. We have done a lot to mitigate that. And I mean, if you were where I am today on the north end of Vancouver Island, you would not think there's too many people. And one of the reasons people think there's too many people is because most of them are crowded into dense urban sand. centers, which occupy about 2% of the land on this earth.

And the land is only 25% of the surface of the earth. So it's way less than 1% of the planet that is covered in concrete full of people. And those people in that concrete don't have a very good balanced understanding of what the whole Earth actually looks like. If they would go, they should fly more over top of the countryside where they live. Even Europe, which is one of the densest populations, if you fly over it, you see nothing but trees. You know, you see the odd city here and there when you land and when you take off. But Europe is 43% forested.

The EU, the entire EU, has 43% forest cover. 250 years ago, it was less than 10% because wood was being used as the energy source for everything and for building, of course, as it still is today. But in those days, the forests were disappearing in Europe, and that caused humans to invent the science of silviculture, often referred to as forestry. They like to call it deforestation. but if you plant trees after you cut the ones that are growing there in the first place, it is called reforestation, not deforestation.

And Europe has become very good at reforestation. In fact, getting right into it, the meat and potatoes of it, China and India are doing more to help green the earth than any other countries because they are so populated, because there are so many people, and they are emitting so much CO2, about as much between the two of them as the whole rest of the world combined, they are fertilizing the earth with carbon dioxide, which is causing the trees and food crops to grow 30 to 40% faster than they were just 50 years ago. And because they have so many people, they need a lot of food and they need a lot of wood.

So they are planting vast areas of forest in once denuded areas before they started thinking about what they should really be doing, which is planting more trees. And China and India, between the two of them, are responsible more for the greening of the earth than any other countries and are producing more biomass, more living material in the form of photosynthetic plants like trees and food and all the wild plants too. and are actually doing a great service to the planet. And that is the irony and why I am a member of the CO2 coalition because they've got it completely backwards. Carbon dioxide is not some kind of toxic poison brought by Martians to kill everybody. Carbon dioxide is the food of life. It is what plants eat.

And we have to start thinking like a plant because we're not a plant. were an animal that eats plants. And if it wasn't for the plants, we wouldn't be here. Animals could never have existed if it weren't for the fact that plants came first. They came first and made the oxygen because they consumed carbon dioxide, kept the carbon for themselves to build wood and fibers and fruits and vegetables. and then they gave off the oxygen into the atmosphere, which made it possible for animals to evolve in the first place. So we owe our entire existence to plants

and should therefore worship them regularly and make sure we understand just exactly what the formula is on this planet instead of thinking that by burning fossil fuels, which are in fact made from plants, do people understand this? Come on, people, plants made the fossil fuels. Fossil fuels were made by solar energy in the forests and in the grasslands of this earth. And they got buried.

Those forests got buried and turned into hydrocarbons. They started out as carbohydrates. All they did was lose their oxygen and became hydrocarbons like coal and oil and gas. and we are now releasing that solar energy that they captured. So hydrocarbons, fossil fuels, are the greatest storage battery of solar energy on this earth, and we should use them judiciously, which is why I favor nuclear energy, because it could actually supplant a great deal of fossil fuels in an effective way, unlike wind and solar, which don't work three quarters of the time, they could actually work all the time.

As they do, there's 440 nuclear plants operating around the world today. Nearly a hundred of them are in the United States, and no citizen of the U.S. has ever been harmed by a nuclear plant. And I don't believe any citizen of the U.K. or of the EU has ever been, well, Chernobyl did affect the EU, of course. and it was the only nuclear accident in the history of nuclear energy that killed people. And it was about 86 people, according to the World Health Organization. Greenpeace says it was 300,000 who died in Chernobyl, but they don't have gravestones or names. So I suspect something is amiss there in their calculation. So Patrick, before we touch on nuclear power, there is a narrative that is being spread at the moment.

by people at Extinction Rebellion, you know, Greta Thumburg and so on and so forth. That our planet is in grave danger. We have something like 50, you know, harvest left. If we don't do something now, we're facing a climate catastrophe are the words that they use. Is this accurate?

And if it's not, what is the reality of the situation that we face? Because global warming is a thing, isn't it? Yes, and we're in a climate emergency right now. Can't you see outside? the climate emergency, which is unfolding about you. It's complete hogwash. There is no climate emergency, obviously.

This is a prediction that they are making for the future, very near in the future, apparently. But it isn't here yet because even the IPCC, the intergovernmental panel on climate change of the United Nations, which is controlled by China, apparently, even the IPCC cannot hide the fact that there is no incremental, in any extreme weather event occurring since weather events began to be recorded, which is quite a while ago. Nothing is unusual about what is happening in the weather today in this world. Nothing.

So this cannot possibly be called a climate emergency if everything is more or less normal. Patrick, can I just stop you there? We're talking about rising sea levels, you know, the, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. is melting in the Arctic. All of these... Don't forget the polar bears. Yeah, and let's talk about the polar bears as well, you know. Surely, isn't that some...

Let's talk about the polar bears. That's a good idea. The polar bear owes its very existence to climate change. There would not be any polar bears if it wasn't for climate change. The climate change I'm referring to is not the weather. It is the reduction in global temperature that has occurred over the last 50 million years. We are at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period on this earth. The graphs are there to see.

The data is there to see. It's from marine sediment analysis showing that the Eocene Thermal Maximum, it's even got a name, peaked 50 million years ago, and since then the earth has cooled to where we are today. How many people actually know that we are in the Pleistocene Ice Age today? This is the Placetocene Ice Age. We are in an interglacial period, one of about 40 to 45. We don't know exactly because it goes back 2.6 million years,

which is when the people who are in charge of figuring out when to name, name and age, and then the next stage and the next one after that, they say we are in the place to see an ice age today, and that this is the Holocene interglacial period, which is a slight warming from when ice covers a very large part of the entire northern hemisphere, like all of Canada, for example, right down into the northern United States. 20,000 years ago, that's the picture of the earth, an ice sheet miles thick covering the whole of Canada and down into the U.S. That ice sheet melted over the last 20, well, for 10,000 years after that. And for the last 10,000 years, we have been in what's called an interglacial period, which is still colder.

note there are large sheets of ice on both poles. For the 250 million years before that, there was no ice on the North Pole, none, because it was warmer for 250 million years before that. So those are the kind of time periods that people have to consider when talking about the climate of the earth and it's conducive to life or not. It was very conducive to life when the whole earth was warmer than it is today because life then

existed where there is ice today. But let's get back to the polar bears depending on climate change. Patrick, I'm sorry to interrupt again, but before we get back to the polar bears, which I'm really keen to do, I really appreciate you setting this in the historical context, which I think is essential if you're going to discuss this. But there is a flaw in what you're saying, isn't there? which is the argument about the changing climate is that, yes, the Earth had its cooling and warming periods

for millions and millions of years before. But what has happened in the last 200 years with the Industrial Revolution is human beings have started to affect the climate in ways that are not natural for our planet. And if we mess with it, there's a runaway phenomenon where you simply don't ever get to go back

to the normal way of the planet being. Isn't that true? No, you simply can never go back, a runaway effect. Why hasn't that happened before? And people say, well, humans weren't here when it was warmer. Yes, but our ancestors were. Every single living thing on this planet today, every insect, every bird, every human, represents a continuous, successful reproduction since the beginning of the

life. We are the toughest, baddest-ass species that ever existed because we have lasted longer than any other species, all the species that are on Earth today, have come through the gamut of cold and heat and whatever nature threw at us. We are still here. And it isn't as if we just popped up out of the ground. We came from reproduction over millennia. From, you know, any time two people get together and don't have children, that line ends. That's the pruning of the evolutionary bush. And it's been going on since the beginning of life. So no, there's what we, what we have done is caused slightly more than one degree Celsius increase in global temperature.

If you believe the people who are trying to tell us we're all going to die if we don't stop putting C. into the atmosphere. They are manipulating these numbers all the time. The sea level rise. Two thousand years ago, the sea level in Britain was much higher than it is today. There's remains of Roman docks in the south of England that are way inland. That's where they were bringing in boats. I've been to some, Patrick.

It's interesting. I've been to, I think it's Pevency Castle here in the south of England, which used to be a fortress that would guard the sea. It's now about five or ten miles inland. Yes, many of the southern towns in Britain were ports at that time, 2,000 years ago. So it's gone up and down and up and down for the last 7,000 years. The sea did rise 400 feet, 120 meters as the ice sheet melted from 20,000 to 10,000 years ago. That was sea level rise, 400 feet. But what I say today, when the sea is rising less than an inch per year,

way less than an inch per year on average, is you have two choices if the sea rises to where you don't want it to be. Either move to higher ground, that would be a fairly logical choice. to make so that you were not inundated by the sea or hire the Dutch. They have been very successfully protecting 25% of Holland is below sea level. And you could do that with Manhattan, for example, because there's a lot of people in infrastructure there. It would be worth building dikes around Manhattan.

We can build things so fast these days. We can make whole new cities. Look what the Chinese have done in just the last 30 or 40 years. I mean, if you set your mind to it these days with the technology we have, it's no problem. So let's forget about that one for a bit. Can I go back to polar bears? Yes, you can. Because they actually highlight a lot of important principles.

As I said, if it weren't for climate change, there'd be no polar bears. I'm going to try to get that through extinction, rebellions, thick head. So before there were polar bears, when the earth was warmer, there were only brown bears. The Eurasian brown bear, as it is called. I'm sure you know what I mean. Over here we call them grizzly bears, but they are the same species because the grizzly bear came to the new world at the same time people did, 15,000 years ago or so. when the sea was 400 feet lower,

bearing land bridge occurred between Russia and Alaska. So along came the humans, the brown bear, which we call grizzly bear, the moose, which in Swedish is elke. So they sort of call it an elk, but we have another kind of elk over here that was here already. And the caribou, which you call reindeer, they came then to, and so did the timber wolf.

So those five species of mammals weren't even in the new world until 15,000 years ago. So then the world started to cool. And the Eurasian brown bear hived off as the Arctic began to freeze and ice sheets form and seals under the ice could be hunted by a bear. the Eurasian brown bear split into two populations. One population went to the Arctic to hunt seals under the ice. At that time, they were still brown, and they were still Eurasian brown bears. But they gradually evolved into a white bear for camouflage and developed a diet that was much more carnivorous

because there aren't many plants in the Arctic like there are where the brown bear lives. So the polar bear is actually the offshoot genetically of the Eurasian brown bear. And today, because they're not separated by much time, only a few hundred thousand years, because of that, they can still breed successfully between the two. They seldom find each other because one's in the Arctic and ones on the land down south. but if they are put together, they can produce viable offspring, which is actually the definition of the species. But we see the polar bear as being so distinct from the brown bear that we give it a separate species name. There you go.

If it wasn't for the descent into the Pleistocene Ice Age that began three or four million years ago and was finally said to be, this is now an Ice Age, 2.7, million years ago, that caused the Eurasian brown bear to evolve into a polar bear, and that's why they wouldn't exist if it weren't for climate change. Now, as to their population and the threat of extinction and all of that, here's the true story. In the early 70s, wildlife biologists went to the leaders of the polar countries, which is Russia, Canada, the United States, Norway, and Denmark, of all places because it owns Greenland, which actually has quite a lot of polar bears on it,

and told them that the hunting of polar bears had increased to such a level that is a threat to the population. They had been reduced to somewhere between 6,000 and 10,000 individuals at that time. So all the polar countries came together and signed an international treaty in 1973 to end the unrestricted hunting of polar bears. How many members of the public are aware of that? None of them are told this. The media never talks about the international treaty to end the unrestricted hunting of polar bears,

because by the early 70s, it'd become real easy to take a plane to the Arctic, hire an Inuit guide, and get yourself two or three polar bear rugs for in front of your fireplace. And lots of people had enough money to do that. and it was a thing to do. So the polar bears were diminishing. Since that treaty was signed, the polar bear population has grown to somewhere between 30 and 50,000. It's not easy to count them all because they're distributed all around the North Pole on the ice pack. And that's one of the reasons they can make up this fake story.

That's why my book is called fake invisible catastrophes and threats of doom, because the polar bears might as well be invisible to nearly everybody on earth. Same with coral reefs. So they're not invisible in the sense that if you could get there and see them and count them and look at them all, you could verify them. You could see them. But most people can't see the Great Barrier Reef or the polar bears. And those have become the two iconic symbols of the death of the planet when in fact they are both healthier than ever. So Patrick, you know, that is something as well that I've been told.

that the Great Barrier Reef is dead, where once it was, you know, pink coral, now it's bleached white, et cetera, et cetera. Is that true? Because if it's not... It's completely recovered from the bleaching of 2016, which itself was completely exaggerated. And when coral bleaches, it is not dead. They don't tell you that. You look at the headlines from that time. It said 93% of the Great Barrier's, you...

Reef is dying. They didn't say it was dead. They said it was dying, and the newspapers translated that as dead. They said that it was about to die. They said it was terminal. Forbes even said that it was in its final terminal stage, as if there are previous terminal stages to the final one. It was just a bunch of hype.

And the fact of the matter is Peter Ridd, Dr. Peter Ridd, who was fired from James Cookie, University for daring to counter the propaganda from his own fellow scientists in Australia who are exaggerating the threat to the reef in order to get hundreds of millions of dollars in research money. Now, how on earth can hundreds of millions of dollars save the coral reef? What are they going to do? They're going to go out there and look at it and take photographs of it and and dive on it. How does that fix the reef if indeed it was in trouble?

They are not coral reef doctors. They are charlatans sucking money out of the taxpayers on the pretense that the coral reef is dying. The main threat to coral reefs is cyclones, which we call hurricanes. That is what causes real damage to coral reefs, because they're right out there in the middle of the over. with no protection whatsoever except for their own selves.

And very often there's large damage cause. Now, bleaching is a really, I mean, it's a complicated phenomenon. The coral is a symbiotic union of an animal and a plant. And do you want me to go on from there and describe the whole life history of corals? Probably not. But when they bleach, when they bleach, they are. ejecting the plant. The coral animal, which is a relative of jellyfish, is transparent. As you know, a lot of jellyfish are basically transparent. You can see through them. That's the true of the coral

reef polyp, as it's called. And when they bleach, they are ejecting the plankton, which are the plants in the coral. And again, read two pages of my book and you will understand. this. But that's what happens is it's just a stage in the life cycle of the coral to eject these plankton and then eventually take up new ones. They do it when the ocean gets hot quickly and they do it when the ocean gets cold quickly. So it's not just the heating. But the truth is the Great Barrier Reef is not in the hottest waters in the world for coral reefs. The most biodiverse coral reefs are in the coral triangle in Indonesia, which my wife and I have dived on two occasions on 10 to 14 day trips. So we know the coral reef very well, the coral triangle

reefs very well. They are the most biodiverse in the world, and they are in the moremost oceans in the world. When the world cooled into the place to sea an ice age, the range of corals was drastically restricted from what it had been during a warmer earth and is now kind of a sanctuary in the Indonesian Ocean, which is an archipelago with a shallow sea, and no cold water ever comes there. So corals do better there than they do anywhere else in the world. There are 600 species of corals there, two-thirds of all coral species, and more reefish species there than anywhere else in the world.

This is also thoroughly documented in my book. which, by the way, is titled fake invisible catastrophes and threats of doom available on Amazon. Patrick, let me take a step back here. And look, you've got to understand we're asking you these questions because that is what a lot of people think and that's what a lot of people are being told. So the ignorance that we show probably from your perspective is because we have faith that other people out there are equally as ignorant as us. So in that very much in that spirit, let me ask you a broader question, which is, based on what you've said so far and your book, the change in global temperature is not significant. Polar Bell is thriving.

You know, all of the other stuff I listed before. Not true. You also mentioned plastic. I don't want to go 10 rounds with you on it. I mean, people say the Great Pacific Vortex is the biggest man-made object ever, which is just a bunch of plastic rubbish flow. floating in the Pacific, et cetera. No, it's not. There actually is no such thing as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

It is a fake thing. And again, it's because no one can see it. You can't stand on the beach in California and see the Great Pacific Garbage Patch because they say it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, far from land, right? Look at my book. There's a photograph in it which proves that there is no Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It is totally fake. They show a picture on the internet with underneath it, it says part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, and it's this huge patch of debris with a diver coming up holding some stuff.

But in the background there are mountains. And I looked at that and I thought, now just a minute, there are no mountains in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So where was this picture taken? Ah, the tsunami in Japan caused by the earthquake. that caused the Fukushima nuclear crisis. That's where that picture was taken. It is not the Pacific Garbage Patch. It is whole towns that were washed into the sea when 20,000 people died from that tsunami.

So they show that. That's the only real picture they show. Otherwise, if you go to the internet after Googling Great Pacific Garbage Patch, you find Photoshopped mockups where people have painted a blog, on the Pacific Ocean and put an arrow to it saying Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It's totally fake. There is no such thing. Okay.

Well, you're making my point for me, which is all of these things that I've given to you, you've dismissed, which is fair enough. So this is really perfect. No, no, no, no. I proved they didn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not disagreeing with you, just to be clear. I'm trying to set up the real question, which is if all of what you're saying is true,

why are we being told or everything we're being told? Why does every major European government and American government and every other government seemingly in the world, why are they all considering a green new deal? Why are we being told that we need to desperately, urgently invest in renewable energy before we all die? Why is this all going on in your opinion? If none of what I've put to you is correct?

Because the key to control a, the populace is fear and guilt, the combination of which is very effective. You're driving down the street in your SUV and you think you're killing your grandchildren. That's what you've been told. And that makes you feel guilty. So you send a big check to Greenpeace thinking they might do something to stop this from happening, which is garbage to start with because they're just hobnobbing with the rest of the crowd at Davos in the World Economic Forum. And, supporting global government, which I think amounts to bureaucrats in Beijing, unelected bureaucrats in Beijing. And so the whole thing is based on fear. Now, let's go back in history,

not so far as I did previously, not millions of years, but just thousands of years. Since people have been standing on street corners with signs saying, the end is near, and predicting apocalypse, end times, cataclysm, and all the rest. How many of those predictions have come true that the earth is coming to an end? I'd say they're batten zero on that one, seeing as though if the earth had come to an end, we wouldn't be talking with each other right now.

So the earth has never come to an end, despite hundreds of predictions through the ages that it was very soon coming to an end. And anyways, what does the end of the world look like? Does it implode, explode? Do the seas catch fire and then burn the whole land off and everything is dead? I'm not sure what the end of the world might look like. But I'm quite sure it has never happened and therefore is unlikely to happen anytime soon, especially due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels that were made by solar energy millions of years ago.

that we are now taking advantage of because we're smart. Imagine rabbits finding coal. What would they do with it? They would not have a clue what to do with it. And we actually are a pretty special species, actually. Look at what we've done. You have art on the wall behind you there. How many other species produce art so prolifically as the human species does?

or all the other things we do. And the idea that we are evil is at the root of all this, that the enterprise of the human species predicts the end of the world, that it's just going to happen automatically because of how awful we are, is a complete and utter lie. There is no possibility that the world will be. come to an end anytime soon from anything we are doing. As a matter of fact, what we are doing, the main effect of our use of fossil fuels, other than providing 82 or three or four, whatever

it is, percent of all the energy we use to stay alive each day and to get from one place to another each day, to, in other words, carry out our existence every day. The other most important thing that CO2 is doing, that fossil fuels are doing, is greening the earth. All you have to do is go to NASA greening the earth on the internet, and you will see the satellite photos. This was actually pioneered by the Commonwealth Science and Industry Research Organization, CSIRO in Australia, which is their peak science body. And they figured this out in the mid-2000s, or I think it was 2000s,

2014, actually, when they published their map showing up to 30% increase in vegetation growth, especially in the driest parts of the world. Because CO2 increased CO2 not only results in faster plant growth, because that's the food for plants. CO2 also makes plants more water efficient, in other words, more drought resistant. because when there's more CO2, it's easier for the plants to take it in, so they don't make as many holes under their leaves, which is where they take it in. And that means less water escapes from them. So they can survive on a smaller amount of water than they could when CO2 was lower.

So CO2 is performing miracles with the life on earth and making our, you know, why are there record food crops every year? The main reason is increased CO2. That is the primary reason. And people are not being told that. They're being told a pack of lies about CO2, like as if it's bad, when in fact, nobody can question that it is the main food for life.

It is the main food for plants, and it is the main food for animals, because animals eat plants. That is their food. And plants are main food. from carbon from CO2. So therefore, so are we. Patrick, I take your point. So then why is it that over the last couple of years, you know, we've been fed this narrative, we've had Greta Thumburg on the TV,

all over the news and media, saying, you know, that the planet is ending, is it really to instill people with fear? Because what you're saying is very Orwellian, if I'm being honest. If there is evil in this world, it's this movement to try to convince people that they should commit mass suicide by ending the use of fossil fuels. There's people living on the 30th floor of a condominium in 500 cities of over a million people. they sleep at night while the trucks bring the food in from the countryside. Big trucks that are not going to be running on batteries anytime soon. The food that those trucks are carrying was produced with the help of very large tractors

and combines and other mechanization that make it possible for less than 5% of the population to grow all the food for the rest of the people who are, living in the cities where there isn't any room to grow the food, not on a balcony on the 30th floor of a condominium if you're lucky enough to have a balcony. So they don't see the trucks coming in to resupply the stores every night with food. They don't even have a clue where their food is coming from. They don't understand a thing about it. This is the downside of mechanization.

Mechanization has been a wonderful thing to take the burden of labor, manual labor, off a huge percentage of the population. At one time it took 80% of the people to grow the food. And the other 20% lived with the other lords and ladies in the castle with the king. But the 80% of them were out-slaving every day, living in hovels. So that kids by six and eight had to become labor and didn't get educated because they were necessary to do part of the food production by hand. Everything by hand. Today, 80% of the people plus live in cities. And it takes only a much smaller proportion of the people to provide everything the people in the cities need to survive.

the energy, the food, and the materials, like concrete and steel, for example, and wood to build their homes. People in the cities think the people in the country who are digging and plowing and cutting and drilling and all the excavating and building huge mines. They are the enemies of the earth. They are the ones who are destroying the planet. They forget that the only reason those people are doing that is so that they can remain alive in their hives in the city. That's the only reason those people are doing that. Well, they take a little bit for themselves along the way. But not as much as most of the wealth is in the cities.

Most of the people in the cities have more fancy cars and travel more and all the rest. They got more money. So Patrick, someone who's not familiar with your work who hasn't heard you say these things before might be going, what kind of environmentalist is this guy? It doesn't sound green at all to me. What are the things that people who do care about the environment, ecology, you know, biodiversity, etc. if those things are important, what should we actually be doing? Should we be recycling plastic and tins and whatever? Should we be avoiding taking unnecessary trips? Should we be cutting down our energy consumption? What else should we be

doing is, first of all, we'll get to the nuclear power and other stuff on the second, but as individuals, what should people be doing from your point of view? You mentioned unnecessary trips. No trip is necessary with the technology we have today. So what you're basically saying is people can't go on holidays because they are really unnecessary. But I would argue that's not the case, that holidays are a break from whatever you're doing in your normal life. And the definition of necessary comes into question there. It's not a hard and fast word. What we should be doing is making sure the water and the air and the earth are clean and not polluted.

but they have twisted the meaning of so many words that they call a carbon dioxide pollution. You know, I used to laugh at people who said their plants liked it when they talked to them, as if, like, plants have ears or something and could listen to music or whatever. But I don't laugh anymore because I hadn't realized at the time that when you talk to your plants, especially if you're standing close to them or sitting close to them, which you normally would be, if you were talking to them, you are breathing out 40,000 parts per million carbon dioxide, which is 100 times the level it is in the natural air. Therefore, you are basically breathing super saturated fertilizer on the plant.

And that's why it grows better when you talk to it. It's a perfectly simple matter. And so they have now in the United States, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled under Obama that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, an air pollutant, when in fact it is the main food for all life and has no toxic properties whatsoever. So it's not toxic, it is the main food for life, and it is being called pollution. The same thing is true with plastic. they tell me that plastic is leaching toxins into the sea that when fish ingest plastic and when birds ingest plastic it's leaching toxins into their body is that why we wrap most of our food in plastic because it's toxic the disconnect here is unfathomably insane the reason we use plastic

to contain our food is because it's non-toxic, because it is sterile. And the reason adult albatross feed bits of plastic to their chicks, they're not actually feeding it to them, they are causing them to ingest it, because they're not eating the plastic, they can't digest the plastic. The bits of plastic that the adult albatross give to their chicks and indeed continue, the adults continue to ingest plastic all their lives, along with other hard bits that they can find in the ocean. There's no pebbles in the sea. They don't float very well. So whereas land birds use pebbles as a digestive aid in their gizzard, which is a second stomach that,

all birds have. Birds don't have teeth, therefore they can't chew their food and have to swallow it whole. Sometimes they swallow a whole squid, for example. In order to digest that whole squid, they send it to their gizzard, where it's a muscular organ, where they also put hard objects of a suitable size and shape so that the birds can use them to help grind the food. It's used in industry all the time for grinding things by putting hard objects in the grinder to help grind it. Birds figured that out millions of years ago. Sir David Attenborough, your lovely Sir David Attenborough, lies and says the birds are mistaking plastic for food and feeding it to their chicks. No, they're not.

they are not mistaking it for anything. They are using it as a substitute for bits of pumice, hard nuts, pieces of wood, and the squid beaks remain in the gizzard when the bird digests the flesh of the squid, because the squid beaks are a hard object, so they keep them there. And those objects all wear out over time and have to be replaced. That's why they have to continue eating, ingesting these digestive aids all their life. One would think that Sir David Attenborough, having written the secret life of birds, a large book, and having done a 10-part BBC series on birds, that he might know they have a gizzard.

He never mentions the gizzard. He never tells the truth. about the hard plastic bits that are being used as digestive aids in the chick's gizzard and in their own gizzard. He pretends that they are mistaking it for food and holds up a clear plastic bag on television saying that they're ingesting this thinking it's food. They never show a clear plastic bag being fed to an albatross chick because that's not going to happen. Then you go on the internet and if you Google plastic in baby albatross chicks, you will find baby albatross chicks that are mostly desiccated and half rotten. They've had their side cut open and they've been stuffed with plastic objects.

They are staged artifacts. They do this in order to make people think that birds are stuffed. stupid when, in fact, birds are not stupid. They are very intelligent, and they don't feed their chicks things that they mistake for food. They know what food is, just like we do. And we don't eat plastic bags or bits of hard plastic because we don't have a gizzard like birds do. And there's also the great walrus suicide pact where the walruses are filmed by. Sir David Attenborough, leaping from a cliff to their death. He says it's because there isn't enough ice in the Arctic.

That's why they commit suicide, because they're too crowded on the land. And actually, they don't belong on the land. They belong on the ice. Well, there must be some reason that this area of land on the northern Russian coast is called a walrus sanctuary, like it's designated as a walrus sanctuary. So walrus must go on it occasionally. As a matter of fact, that's where they go when the ice recedes in the summer north from the northern Russian coast. It happens every year.

So there is no ice to get on during the summer. Turns out the reason the walrus is left to their death was because a pack of 20 to 30 polar bears was coming up from behind them. And they were at the top of a cliff. They just happened to have gone up, walked up, waddled up to where they were at the top of a cliff, and they were trapped because this group of polar bears came. But Sir David Attenborough didn't show that. He said that the walrus's home is on the ice. No, the walrus's home is in the ocean and on the land and on the ice when they want to get out and rest.

But unlike the polar bear whose home is on the ice in the winter, hunting seals, walruses do not hunt seals through the ice. They are bottom feeders, sort of like Sir David Attenborough and his film crew of our planet. Walruses use their tusks to harvest clams from the seabed and other creatures that live there. They cannot dive more than 300 feet deep. So they have to stay near the shore. they are actually a shore animal. They're a seaside animal.

They don't go out into the deep sea ever because there's nothing there for them. Even seals and sea lions can go into deep water to fish. But walruses don't fish. They dig clams and they have to stay near the beach. They are a beachside species. And he just completely ignores that. Gotcha. Let me drag you back to,

So we've got to keep the rivers and the air clean. What else should individual people be doing to be environmentally friendly? Protect endangered species. Protect endangered species. That's a very important thing to do. You know, it wasn't until about 100 years ago that the average person even cared about endangered species. Only a few naturalists and biologists even knew about what it was.

and when the passenger pigeon went extinct, which is one of only two species that have gone extinct in North America since European colonization, people woke up to this because the media made a deal about it. Like passenger pigeons were a mainstay in markets all across the eastern United States in New York. They were hanging in groups of 20 outside the shops. And then there weren't any anymore.

and there had been millions of them. So this dramatic extinction that occurred over a period of not that many years, and they were easy to kill. They flew at low elevation in large flocks. And that's what really triggered the concern for endangered species in this world. And so it's only been a short time since anybody even cared about that. I mean, before that, everybody just thought, well, if a species goes extinct, it goes extinct. species have been going extinct forever.

Way more species have gone extinct than exist in the world today, like thousands of times more species. Some of the great extinction events, which were the last one we are quite certain, was caused by an asteroid piercing the earth's crust and throwing billions of tons of debris into the stratosphere where it blocked out the sun for many years and basically ended the food chain that it killed all the plants,

and therefore there was nothing for the animals to eat. Interestingly, one of the reasons birds survived through that extinction events. So none of the dinosaurs that walked on the earth survived. But the ones that flew did because they could fly hundreds of miles to eat the carrion from the ones that died. So they survived through that because of flight. And of course, today we realize how important flight is to animals. and you've got so many different bird species that have survived through all these ages.

That's just a little aside. But there's been five great extinctions of life. One thing that I'll... Patrick... But one thing that I will ask you about, and I think it's a final thing, is the Amazon and deforestation. Surely that is a huge problem.

No, it's not. 90% of the Amazon is intact. Again, it's a situation where not even many Brazilians ever go to the Amazon. There's no reason to go there. It is basically a very hot steaming jungle. It's been described as a human desert because there's so few people there. 10% of the Amazon has been developed into cattle ranching and other forms of farming. It is not a sea of factories spewing smoke.

It is a huge wilderness area. I have flown across it. It takes five hours to do so. I have been at the mouth of the Amazon. I've been at Jari part way up the Amazon. I've been at Manouse where the Rio Negro comes into the Amazon. So I've seen a huge part of it. It is still there.

It is not deforested. And the fires they show you that take up the entire frame, of course, nothing but flames. It doesn't take a very big fire to take up the whole lens of a TV camera. Most of those fires are reclearing land that is being used for cattle because the vegetation grows so fast there

that when they built a road to Manouse, it quickly disappeared as plants came up through the pavement and destroyed the road. It is an amazing living ecosystem. And they've rekindled the Amazon-is dying meme as a result of the election of a president who is not a communist. And therefore, they're just going after him saying that he's destroying the Amazon like they did 20 years ago. And as I say, I've been there.

I've been all over Brazil, right from the south to the northeast to the west. Brazil is an amazing country. It is nearly as large as the lower 48 United States. And the Amazon is a huge piece of it, which is largely intact. Look at a map that shows the reservations that have been made for the indigenous people of the Amazon and the national parks in the Amazon. and if you own a piece of land in the Amazon, you are only allowed to develop 20% of it.

And actually, Brazil, even in the south, where the main agriculture is, has some of the best land use practices in the world. They require that 20% of all agricultural land, private land, be kept in nature, and that all streamside areas be protected and left in natural, vegetation. Take a look in England. They farm right up to the bank of the river. Maybe a willow tree

finds a footing there that they can't, you know, that they leave alone. But Brazil actually has really good land use planning. You've been very critical of the United Kingdom in this. You've slated David Attenborough, our farming practices and all the rest of it. As well you deserve, but I'm sure you'll be happy to find out birds have a second stomach as you'd love one, wouldn't you? I'm just speaking to the home audience, you know. Yeah, Patrick, but it's great. Listen, let me ask you, we've got a final question to come, but very, very quickly, because we're running over,

in a couple of minutes, talk to us about nuclear energy because just for context, you're talking to somebody, I'm from Russia originally. My wife actually was evacuated from Kiev in Ukraine during the Chernobyl episode, the disaster that happened there. I have never understood why that one incident, which is, by the way, caused by human deliberate incompetence and stupidity and the sort of planned economy of the Soviet Union and which then generated human error, why that one incident has been used to essentially, you know, cause

such resistance to the idea of nuclear power. But tell us very quickly your view of it and whether we should. be using nuclear energy more or less than we are in the moment? Well, we are using nuclear energy a lot at the moment. There are 440 nuclear plants operating in the world. Europe actually has most of the countries that have more than a third of their electricity being produced by nuclear energy. But the big movement in nuclear today is in China, India, and Russia, where they are actively building new plants right now as we speak and plan many, many more, because they are actually thinking of the future.

Nuclear is the energy of the future because fossil fuels are limited. And one of the most important reasons to support nuclear energy is to reduce the rate at which we are burning the precious fossil fuels. And nuclear can do that more than any other technology we have today. Hydroelectric is wonderful where it is applicable, but it requires rainfall and topography to be correct in order for, you're not going to have hydroelectricity in Saudi Arabia anytime soon. So nuclear is applicable anywhere in the world. You can build it anywhere you want to have energy. Now, Chernobyl was an exceptional situation.

the Chernobyl class of reactors built by the Soviets behind the iron curtain without any input from Western science and Western nuclear understanding. Those reactors, there were more than 20 of them, spread out over the former Soviet Union in all the satellite countries as well, including Slovakia, for example. those reactors were basically the same design as they were using to make plutonium for nuclear weapons. And they were a flawed design in that they had a positive void coefficient, which would take too long to explain, as opposed to a negative void coefficient. What that meant was they were actually capable of a runaway nuclear reaction if things weren't done properly. And most people don't realize that the Chernobyl accident did not come during normal operating procedures like making electricity. It came when a group of when a group of scientists came

from nuclear headquarters, probably in Moscow, to do an experiment. And there was a lack of proper communication between the operators and these high-level guys who came in to do this experiment. Also, they told the operator to shut down the safety systems so that the safety systems would not interfere with their experiment. And it blew up. Three Mile Island and Fukushima were not nuclear explosions. They were meltdown of the core due to lack of cooling water after the reactor was shut down. So Chernobyl was an exceptional situation. It killed people, especially the people fighting the fire, which went on for 10 days. They had a 2,000 ton graphite moderator, which is pure carbon, which was very, very difficult

to put out. And indeed, it did kill over 80 people, including the children who died of thyroid cancer, which was a small number, but they were diagnosed too late to save them. A lot of people did get thyroid problems, but they were. diagnosed early enough that it could be cured. The death rate was not a nice thing, but those are the only people that have ever died from civilian nuclear reactors in the world.

That being the case, and this is a lot of... Yeah, that being the case, why do we seem to be so worried about nuclear energy? Why do we seem to recoil in horror when it's suggested as an alternative? Because it's as fake as the fear of carbon dioxide. It's that fake. There is no reason to be afraid of nuclear energy.

Nuclear energy, if you look at casualties versus energy produced, nuclear is the safest of all the electricity-producing technologies. And it also takes up less room. Like, look how much room wind and solar takes up. It takes up vast swaths. And if they make it 10 times as much as it is now, it'll take up a lot of agricultural land where we grow our food. They need flat land for these things. So that is what should be stopped. Patrick, I agree with you.

That's the one issue on which I will say that this is one thing I do know a little bit about having grown up in the Soviet Union. My father was someone who was familiar with these things. So that's the one thing I can definitely say that I know about that we can agree on. But listen, we're running out of time. It's been such a pleasure speaking with you and having a completely different person. to the one that we are being given elsewhere. We've got one more question for you. Which is always what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be?

Oh, yes, the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be. I think the fact that aquaculture, which is the growing of fresh and marine water fish in a farming context, as opposed to catching wild fish, that aquaculture is the way we will save the wild fish from being over-exploited. And aquaculture is being attacked on every front by the greens, as if it's poisoning the sea or something, when in fact it takes the pressure off the wild fish.

Wild fish have been overfished now for at least 30 years. They should let the wild fish recover in many cases. They should reduce the rate of catch of wild fish in the ocean, and they should increase the amount of fish being produced by aquaculture. It produces beautiful product. Almost all the shrimp you buy these days is produced in farms. Much of the salmon now, of course, Norway having led that effort, and now British Columbia and Chile and New Zealand have followed in their footsteps and are producing beautiful product with aquaics. culture. And tilapia is another one that is becoming very successful because it's easy to grow and it's inexpensive. So fish has the best proteins and oils of any protein food, any meat that we

can eat. So we should be eating more fish, but we can't eat more fish based on the wild fish because they have already been thoroughly over exploited. And I see Britain and France arguing over, who's going to get the fish. And it should be more like, let's not catch quite so many of them next year and let's share them equitably somehow. But however you do it, let's make sure we don't catch too many fish because the sea is only capable of producing so much. And these are wild animals. We stopped basing our food on land, our meat on land on wild animals 10,000 years ago practically. because we farm animals on the land, and yet the green movement seems to be adamantly opposed to farming fish in the sea, in the lakes, and in rivers. And that is a completely bass-acquards position.

They should be supporting aquaculture to take the pressure off the wild fish stocks. Gotcha. Patrick, thank you so much for coming on. Remind everybody where they can find your work online if they want to follow up this interview and read more. and find out more before we let you go. Please just Google me, Patrick Moore, and you'll find all kinds of videos, et cetera. But what I'd really like you to do is to read my new book,

Fake Invisible Catastrophes and Threats of Doom. It's the result of more than 50 years of learning on my part. I've been a lifelong learner all my life, of course. And please do read my book. It will change the way you see the world. and in a positive way. We should not be believing in the doomsday narrative. We should believing in the promise of this earth and of life upon it.

Thank you. And we didn't get a lot of jokes at you. I thought you guys were comedians. Now we're getting scolded as well. I tried to do a joke at the end there by saying, how dare you? But the internet got in the way. Yeah, how dare you? Yeah.

Patrick, listen, it's been a pleasure. We're going to do a couple of quick questions for. our supporters as a separate thing very quickly and then we'll let you go. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you guys for watching at home. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or a raw show. All of them go out at 7pm UK time. Take care. See you soon, guys.