TRIGGERnometry - Net Zero Must Go - Matt Ridley

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

Matt Ridley is a British science writer, journalist, and businessman. He is known for his writings on science, the environment, and economics. Follow Matt on X - https://x.com/mattwridley SPONSOR. We’re honoured to partner with Hillsdale College. Learn for free at https://hillsdale.edu/trigger SPONSOR: Manscaped. Get 15% Off PLUS Free Shipping with the code TRIGGER15 at https://manscaped.com Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] 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. 00:00 Introduction 02:36 The Covid Lab Leak Lies In The Scientific Community 08:13 Was It A Coverup? 13:25 Will People Listen If There's Another Pandemic? 23:14 Is Gain Of Function Research Worth It In The Long-Term? 27:06 Getting Funding 30:09 Climate Change 34:18 We're In A Period Of Warming 42:12 Would You Scrap Net-Zero? Should We Reduce Carbon Emissions? 47:55 Greta Thunberg 50:00 The Great Man Theory Of Science 01:00:14 What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we've got a crisis of confidence in scientific truth, and I think it's largely self-inflicted. I've never thought that carbon dioxide has no effect at all. I've never thought that we're not in a period of warming, but I've been blacklisted by the BBC. We're not in a period of unprecedented warmth. We're not in a period of unprecedentedly fast warmth. We're not in a period of increasing extreme weather.

I think what the UK has done is unbelievably foolish, and we should tear up net zero. Lord Matt Ridley, welcome back to the show. Thanks very much for having me on. It's great to have you on. We want to talk about science, and particularly one of the big things you were at the forefront of, of course, was the COVID-Lab League thing.

We also want to talk about the climate conversation. Those are two, I think, major issues where there are a lot of concerns from very sensible and reasonable people like you, not lunatics on the internet, about the way that science is effectively being corrupted. And we want to talk about that through the lens of those two issues in particular, and we'll talk about your book and other things as well. So where are we with the COVID lab leak? It is sort of anecdotally pretty clear that it came from a lab in China.

Is that basically true? Yes, for most of us. So the CIA thinks that, the FBI thinks that Robert Redfield, the former head of the CDC in America thinks that most of the world thinks that, ordinary people think that the evidence is overwhelmingly strong, that it's not a coincidence that it broke out in the only city with a huge research program on COVID-like viruses. But the exception is the scientific establishment, which has not budged an inch. So the journal science, the journal nature,

they keep publishing things saying it's not a lab league. The Royal Society, they refuse to have a debate on the topic, the National Academy in America, likewise. I and a couple of colleagues, who are both academics, keep submitting a systematically argued review paper or versions of it with all the arguments for a lab leak spelled out with references in the most objective and careful terms that we can to journal after journal, six journals so far.

They reject it within weeks. And the reason they gave, to start with, was this is a conspiracy theory, it's nutty, it's wrong, you can't believe a word of it. The reason they now give is, knows this stuff, so we don't need to publish it. Now, you can't both, both of those can't be true. And the obvious question that a lot of people will ask is why is that happening? Well, within science, there's a huge number of scientists who recognize that the evidence

points strong into a lab leak, and they say things to us like, keep going, you're on the right track, but I daren't put my head above the parapet because I'm worried about my funding, I'm worried about my reputation with my university, that kind of thing. but there's a group of senior scientists and editors of journals and things who decided early on that if they gave an inch on this topic and conceded that it might have come from an accident in a laboratory the damage to the reputation of the whole of science would be so great that it would threaten their funding in lots of different fields

I think there are 180 degrees wrong on that I think if they'd come out quite early and said this is a serious hypothesis we need to take it seriously and look at it and discuss it, then the damage would be confined to one corner of very idiotic virology, which was doing extraordinarily risky experiments that should never have been done, let alone at that by a safety level in that lab. And, you know, this was a very, you know,

this was 1% of 1% of 1% of science. You know, this wasn't, you know, the rest of science is fine in terms of safety. It's just, you could have confined the damage to one corner of the discipline, and then you'd have got full marks for investigating yourselves, looking into it. As it is, they're saying,

how dare you review biosafety and laboratories? It's up to us to decide whether something's safe. Well, I'm a libertarian, but even I don't go that far, if you know what I mean. It's remarkable what we're hearing from these people. So I think they made a mistake early on at a time when it was all going to blow over in a few weeks. It's just going to be a little local outbreak in China.

and nobody didn't know about it. They knew among themselves that it was very likely to be a lab leak, but they kept that quiet. They published a paper saying the opposite, which became very influential, and then they found themselves out on a limb and they couldn't get back. And so they're now, they're doubling down on a lie

that they know they told defective, or a mistake they made, let's say. Let's be charitable. Yes, but of course, things are changing in America because this week, Jay Baticharya, my good friend, has been confirmed as the head of the National Institutes of Health responsible for the whole funding apparatus for all biomedical research.

And the head of the CIA, the new head of the CIA, yes, is John Rackcliffe, who led an inquiry into this very topic for the Heritage Foundation and came to the conclusion. It's probably a lamb leak. So suddenly in Washington, you've got senior people saying the opposite of what they were saying a year ago. Now, that means we're going to get more information coming out. We're getting bits of it already from within the US. we may get some decent intelligence from whistleblows in China at something, we may get close to being able to say case closed

this is definitely what happened. But five years have gone by and there's been a lot of track covering and the hope of those who don't want to admit it was a lab leak is that this gradually gets memory hold and never gets resolved and it just fades into the back

And how much of the reason for these, you know, call it a cover-up, call it unwillingness to adjust course or whatever, is to do with the fact that the lab in China was being funded by quite a lot of scientists and the sort of scientific organization in America. And so the people who are in charge of funding that are the very same people who are then saying it didn't come from that lab. Exactly. Well, I mean, Dr. Fauci, as I understand, it was. heavily involved in all of this.

Anthony Fauci was responsible both for promoting this kind of research, for bringing to an end of moratorium on this kind of research in the US, for allowing some of the funds to go through the EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profitable body in New York City to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. So yes, you know, his fingerprints were all over it. So when Jeremy Farrow of the Welcome Trust, a number of other people came to him very early in the pandemic and said, we need to have a conversation about whether this thing started in the lab.

His initial reaction was, let's have the debate and talk about it and we know that at that meeting they discussed whether to discuss it. And within a day or two, Fauci is basically giving instructions to shut it down to make sure this never gets mentioned. And he's at the podium in the White House talking about this. And he never admits that he's just had a meeting with a dozen other scientists at which they very seriously discussed the possibility that it did start in the lab.

He says it's conspiracy theory, it's debunked, all this kind of thing. And they savage anyone in the press who comes out and says that. So, yeah, you have to ask yourself, did they worry about the fact that they might have been partly responsible? And then you find some of the emails

that have come out through congressional investigation and you find that Fauci is sending emails to colleagues saying, we need to have a serious conversation about the grants we gave to this lab. Now, why is he having that conversation? He's concerned. So, yes, I'm afraid there is an enormous amount of motivated reasoning going on here.

You know, if you worry that you might be partly responsible for the death of many millions of people, then of course you're going to, your brain is going to tell you that it's very unlikely that that's the way it happened. There is a term for what you're describing, Matt, a cover-up. Well, frankly, I personally think this makes Watergate look like a picnic. Because at Watergate, yeah, there was a break-in, there was a bit of burglary, there was some financial corruption, involved a president, yes, but it didn't involve the death of somewhere between 7 and 28 million people. It didn't involve the turning of the world upside down.

The worst industrial accident in the world is probably Bhopal, about 25,000 people died. This was probably an industrial accident, in a sense. The scientific laboratory accident is much the same thing. We're talking about a thousand times as many people dying. It's a very important issue. And that there was a cover-up is not in doubt, because we've seen the emails, we've seen the slack conversations, between the people who were writing the paper, so-called proximal origin paper, which came out pretty well five years ago this week,

which said there is no possibility it came out of a lab. And they were saying to each other, in private, in their emails, I still think it's friggin' likely that it came out of a lab. I hover one way or another, one of them said. And they went on saying that even after they published the paper. So their current excuse, which is, oh, we changed our mind in the light of new information, doesn't that out? because even after they published the paper,

they went on in private saying, I still think it's a possibility. So I'm afraid that's the very definition of a cover-up. You are covering up information that you have available and suspicions that you have about what happened. Now, we, when I say, me and a number of other scientists, well, scientists and journalists, I'm not a scientist, but I'm a commentator on science,

we are pushing the journal, Nature Medicine, to retract that paper because it was clearly not just factual, wrong. There was no, the arguments it gives for why it couldn't have gone out of lab, don't stack up, but it was written by people who didn't believe it. Now, in my view, writing a scientific paper that says the opposite of what you actually think in private is the very definition of scientific misconduct. And Matt, this has damaged, and obviously millions of people have lost their lives, have you said, but it has also damaged people's faith in

science. The amount of people now who were told follow the science and now are rabidly anti-vax, rabidly anti-institution, saying that they can't trust scientists anymore, they can't trust doctors. This has done a tremendous amount of damage to the scientific institutions themselves, hasn't it? Absolutely. And this is a point I struggle to get across to my scientific friends. they think that it's the fault of RFK and anti-vaxxers that people have turned against vaccines and I'm saying look in the mirror

who was it who built up who gave RFK the the viability to make his arguments how did his numbers shoot up because you made claims for the vaccines that were way overblown about whether they prevented transmission about whether they were safe for children

etc etc which have damaged vaccines. I'm pro-vax. You know, I think it's a vaccines are a good thing. But the damage that's been done to the reputation of that technology and, as you say, of science in general. So just to take another very simple example, five years ago this week, the World Health Organization was still saying in capital letters, this virus is not airborne. Quite why they were so obsessed with saying this, I don't know. And from that flowed all the stuff about if you stand six feet apart and if you wash your hands all the time, you know, it'll be fine. Well, that was nonsense. It's airborne. It doesn't matter where you stand. I'm breathing at you now. You know,

if I had COVID, you'd get it. I don't, by the way. At least I think I don't. And so, you know, giving out genuine misinformation and then not saying, sorry, we were wrong, leads people to say, well, I wonder what else you're wrong about. And I'm someone who's covered science all my life. I've championed science. I'm a passionate about science. I love science. But I find myself now taking any scientific announcement on any topic

with more suspicion than I used to five years ago. It's had that much effect on me. Now, imagine if the effect it's had on other people who are not such fanatically pro-science people. So I think we've got a crisis of confidence in scientific truth, and I think it's largely self-inflicted. To paraphrase a Republican strategist in America who's saying something, I think, just this week,

there isn't a mirror big enough for the scientists to see the damage they've done to scientific reputation. And the worrying thing is, Matt, is that we all going to have another pandemic. These things happen every 100 years or maybe less than that. So if we do have another pandemic and we have scientists coming out, my concern is, and I'm sure yours is as well, how many people are actually going to believe them this time round?

I hadn't thought of that, but it's a very good point. And I personally think that proving this was a lab leak will be quite reassuring in one way, and that is it will be the exception that proves the rule. It will be the case where because it was already trained on human beings in the lab, it was infectious from the start and therefore nothing we could do to stop it. Lockdowns didn't work, etc., etc. Whereas if it jumps out of nature, it stutters like verd flu is doing at the moment.

You get a few infections and then it dies out. It's quite easy to contain. It's not very contagious. You can institute controls that will stop it. And therefore, there is every reason to think we can stop natural panace. but we can't stop artificial ones. Now, that's a very important lesson to learn if we want to learn it. But what's happening in virology labs at the moment?

There are more opening than ever before. There's no increase in the biosafety regulations in any country on this. They're accelerating. The Wuhan Institute of Virology lab that is at the center of this, run by a professor called Dr. Xi Zheng Li announced a new experiment on a MERS-like virus the other day. Well, that's comforted. Now, you know, maybe they sat down and said, let's do it in a more safe way. But actually, in the paper they published in nature the other day about this, they said,

we used biosafety level 2 plus. Well, we've never heard of 2 plus. We know 2 is not good enough for these kinds of viruses. We know 3 is probably okay, but we don't like the sound of 2 plus. us. So what are these Western journals doing publishing this stuff without saying, hang on, are you sure it was safe to do this experiment? You know, there's an enabling factor in the West here that needs to be looked at. And I just want to examine China's part on it, because how much responsibility does China have to take for being opaque about the virus, not disclosing what

happened as to to us to really understand what was going on. What I guess what I'm really trying to say is, Matt, can we absolutely say for certain that it came from a lab without Chinese cooperation? Sorry, without Chinese cooperation. Can we prove that without the Chinese cooperating?

Yes, I see what you mean. I thought we meant without, they didn't cooperate in making the virus. I wouldn't agree with. Probably not. we probably won't get to 100% without some kind of whistleblower or other opening up of the records in the laboratory. But in terms of beyond reasonable doubt,

I think we're pretty well there, frankly. I think the evidence when you look at it is so extraordinarily strong. I mean, the coincidence of this thing happening without leaving a trace in any wild animals in the very city, that is doing an extraordinary range of experiments that includes a plan to do the very experiment

that would have put a fearing cleavage site for the first time in a virus, you know, I would go into the details, but you know what I mean. Now, what happened in Svedlovsk in 1979 is relevant here, if you don't mind me, going into that for a second. And that is that there was an outbreak of...

65 people died. The American... said, we think you've just had a leak from your bio-warfare anthrax plant in the city. The Russians said, no, they've died of food poisoning. Come and look. And an international team went in and looked and said, yeah, the Russians are probably right. And it all died down. And then the Soviet Union collapsed about 12 years after the event.

A scientist came to the West and said, you were absolutely right. it was an anthrax lab. We left a filter off one day and we sent a plume of anthrax over a suburb. If it had gone the other way, it would have killed hundreds of thousands. In fact, it only killed 65 people. So it took a long time that the truth eventually emerged. Now, it's going to be, I still maintain, it's going to be quite hard for the Chinese authorities to keep the lid on

what happened in those months in the autumn of 2019 in that lab in Wuhan where they had some kind of drill, they had some kind of emergency that caused them to close down their database offline, where they called for new ventilation equipment for the lab, where they suddenly banned the sale of experimental laboratory animals

in markets as food. You know, there's a whole string of events that happened that autumn that we would like to know more about. There are people who know exactly what happened. Are they still a lot? Well, one of them isn't. The guy who was developing a vaccine from very, very early in the pandemic,

so early that he probably started developing the vaccine before we knew about the outbreak, because otherwise it's just impossible to see how he worked that fast. He fell off a building, the roof of a building, and died. And these new labs are coming back a little bit that you're talking about, because this is the thing that concerns me. We all make mistakes. We all do stupid things.

governments do stupid things, scientists do stupid things, we all make mistakes. The mark of someone who is dangerous is someone who refuses to learn from their mistakes. And in this instance, are you saying gain of function research is ongoing? Well, gain of function can be quite a broad term. It can mean enabling a plant to fertilize, to photosynthesize more efficient. Let me rephrase. Are we still doing things that could lead to another pandemic? Gain of function research of control, goffrock is the sort of narrower category that we're talking about.

Sorry to be pedantic. Please be pedantic. Isn't it pronounced pedantic? Is continuing, I think, in the West, with more caution. I think, I'm sure lessons are being learned even while they may not be being acknowledged. But we have no such confidence about Chinese laboratories. We certainly have no such confidence about laboratories in places like Iran and North Korea where they would actually quite like to start another pandemic, if you see what I mean.

And in general, as I say, calls for stiffer regulation of virology experiments that cause increases in lethality or influence. effectivity of viruses are being resisted by the scientific community. So there's a famous meeting called Azelomar, which happened in 1975, soon after the invention of genetic engineering in California. And at Azelomar, they agreed as a set of self-policing principles that the biotechnology industry and research would do. And one of those was not to work on highly pathogenic creatures. Well, somewhere along the line they gave up on that.

Asylomar too happened a few weeks. weeks ago, the 50th anniversary of that meeting. Yeah, it was 1975, so yeah, the 50th anniversary. Nobody who has been arguing for a lab leak in this case was invited to that meeting. The people who went were all the people who were saying, it was definitely not a lab leak. So there's a real danger of science turning in on itself and talking to itself and thinking it doesn't need to listen to the concerns of the public or of informed.

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And enroll today. You'll come away with a deeper appreciation for the story and the promise of America. Are we missing something in this analysis, Matt? Is there a holy grail at the end of this type of research? the trade-offs of killing a few million people are just so worth it. Well, that, of course, is the phrase that if actually used in a paper, you know, the risks are worth the benefits. Right.

So there must be some massive benefits on this. A long time ago. We can't see it. I mean, the benefits in theory are being able to predict and prevent the next pandemic. Well, that went well, didn't it? But even at the time this stream of research was kicked off 15 years ago, there were other virologists saying,

look, going out and finding viruses in bats in the real world and bringing them into a laboratory and souping them up to see how dangerous they are, you're very unlikely to find the one that actually is going to cause the next pandemic anyway. And if you do, you might make it more dangerous. It's not really a very good use of money this.

Why not just beef up surveillance and testing and tracing so that when there's a local outbreak we're quicker onto it. Why try and predict it? Why not just be better at stopping it when it first starts? And that has always seemed to me

a very good argument because if this kind of research can lead to 20 million deaths, then it's got to have an enormous upside for it to be worth it. And the upside they talk about is pretty small. Well, in that case, I am in a position where

I don't understand. I always think, why are people doing certain things? And people generally respond to some kind of incentive structure within the culture and mentality they operate in. So if what you're saying is this type of research is ongoing, in one form or another, why are those people doing it? To get papers in nature, to get promotion, to get scientific fame and renown.

That's the big motivation. for most scientists in most fields. Most humans and most fields. Most humans. Yes, exactly. So that's... You don't need to get complicated about this, if you know what I mean.

That tells me it's incentive structure within science is all wrong then. Yes. In that area. Well, and in quite a lot of areas. Because, you know, I think if you examine what gets you fame,

renown and promotion in science, it's publishing a lot, it's doing something that nobody's done before, et cetera. It's not necessarily solving a problem that humanity wants you to solve. I mean, they'd like to do that as well. And I'm not here to say that all scientists are evil. I don't think that evil's the wrong word here, but I think there are misaligned incentives

that have become very out of control. And for me, the big problem is the monolithic nature of the funding and publishing system. the fact that basically all the money flows through one government agencies in this country, UKRI, in America, NIH or whatever. And you say, well, there's the Welcome Trust. Welcome Trust just falls in line with UKRI. You know, there's no attempt to be the red team to their B team and to fund different things. And then when it comes to publishing, you know, you don't find science says, well, I'm not going to publish that.

And nature says I will, except in a sort of competitive sense, like to do it first. You know, they all have exactly the same criteria. So it's become very monopolistic science. And for me, monopoly is the big theme of what's wrong with this world. What's wrong with government? What's wrong with crony capitalism, etc. You know, that wherever you get monopoly, you've got a problem. It's a fantastic point because I have a lot of friends who work in science. And what they say is, if you want to get funding, which is actually the most important thing for a scientist, is to get funding. And people will be very sure. shocked to hear that, and so was I, but apparently it's true. If you want to get funding,

you know the avenues that you need to go down, you know the research that is looked upon favourably, so you're not going to do something, which is deemed to be, you know, slightly conspiratorial or, you know, slightly dodgy for whatever reason. You were going to stick to the current paths. And that's a tragedy for science and human innovation, isn't it? Well, to take another example from a different field, Alzheimer's research decided some years ago that the hypothesis they liked best was the amyloid plaque hypothesis that these, that if we could find a way for these features not to form inside brain cells, then we would be curing Alzheimer's. And at various points along the way, scientists have said, hang on a minute. I'm not sure you're not

just treating the symptoms rather than the causes here. We don't seem to be getting anywhere with this hypothesis. And they have been excluded. There's been a really shocking degree of, we refuse to publish you if you don't subscribe to the amyloid black hypothesis. You're a nutcase, you're a conspiratorial, blah, blah, blah. There are other hypotheses out there and they get ostracized. An even more striking example, which is admitted from longer ago in the 1980s, is the stomach ulcer story, I don't know. The guy who proved the bike swallowing the thing and giving himself a stomach ulcer.

So Glaxo and others were making an absolute fortune out of these antacid drugs that fought the symptoms of stomach ulcers but never cured them. And this guy comes along and says, look, I think they're caused by a bacterium called Helicobacter. And they wouldn't publish him and they wouldn't fund him

and they wouldn't give him grants. Barry Marshall was his name in Western Australia. And eventually, in order to prove his point, He swallowed a glass of helicobacter and got the most ferocious stomach ulcers, and he then swallowed an antibiotic and cured himself. And at that point, the world had to sit up and take notice, and he eventually got the Nobel Prize. But the degree to which he was pushing uphill for most of his career is quite shocking.

So in order to disprove what was a commonly thought hypothesis, he had to give himself literal stomach ulcers. Yeah. that's demented there's a great tradition of self-infection I think the

Robert Ross, the guy who made the link between malaria and mosquitoes he deliberately infected himself too they're quite mad some of these doctors or brave is the word I should so moving that along to a subject which is even more

controversial than COVID which is climate change or the climate crisis. I mean, that's going to be even worse, isn't it? Well, I've covered that topic for 45 years now. I wrote about a lot of science editor of the economist in the mid to late 80s. And I have watched a perfectly reasonable hypothesis that carbon dioxide might cause runaway warming, be tested and discussed and debated, and for 10 or 20 years, you could argue both sides of and then gradually get closed down to the point where if you say something like,

yeah, I think carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but I don't think there are positive feedback effects, and I think it's a diminishing effect. So I don't think we're going to get runaway warming or dangerous warming, and I don't see any evidence that it's causing more extreme weather, which is basically what the facts show after 40 years. If you say that, you are a denier. Now, what does that word even mean in this context?

It's an extraordinary thing to level at someone. And now, you're not just a denier if you say, I think climate change is not as bad as you think. You're a denier if you don't use the word crisis. You know, you and I have always been in meetings, I'm sure where people say the climate crisis is very important. If you stick around and say, look, can we talk about climate change but not the climate crisis?

Because I feel that's a motive. language. It's like you farted. And as I say, you know, I've never thought that carbon dioxide has no effect at all. I've never thought that we're not in a period of warming. But I've been blacklisted by the BBC because I once said some of these things on the today program, etc. And the idea that, you know, and someone with my view in a university would never get funding, would never get published, and would be quite quickly cancelled. Now, I don't think that's healthy. I mean, I'd love to hear. There are other people out there who say there's no carbon dioxide warming, it's all caused by the sun. I think they're wrong too, by the way.

But I don't see why they couldn't occasionally be allowed one job in a university or one paper in a journal, which we can then criticize, if you see what I mean. And is it your assertion, therefore, that the consensus that we are often told about that exist within science? You know, 90x, and it changes every day, whatever that percentage is. But basically, the way it lands with a member of the ordinary general public like me or Francis is basically all the sane scientists agree, and there's this guy who thinks, you know, the sun revolves around the earth and he's a bit weird.

That's why no one listens to him. Yeah. Well, are you saying that's manufactured by the fact that basically you can't say a different opinion and therefore, therefore 93% of scientists agree? Yes, it's partly that, that it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But also the very study that got to 97% of scientists think climate change is happening said they think it's happening. Well, I'm in the 97%. They didn't say they thought it was a crisis.

You cannot find any study that says 97%. of scientists think it's a crisis. Literally. You can probably get to 50 or 40 or 60. So what's the, in your assessment, what is the reality of climate change and the human impact on that process and therefore the measures that we ought to be looking at and taking to mitigate that problem? Well, that's a very big topic. But to be blunt, I think we are in a period of warming.

I think we're going to have to adapt to that anyway because it's every, chance that we're not going to be able to stop it continuing. Can I just stop you there, Matt? You said we're in a period of warming. What does that mean? What does that actually mean in terms of data, et cetera? Because there'll be people going, I don't know what that means. I mean, by the way. Exactly. Well, the average temperature of the planet does seem to be going steadily upwards. Since when? Since the mid-80s. It went down in the 70s. I remember all the fears about the ice age coming. Yes, in the 70s. So we were told the planet's about to freeze in the 70s. Yeah, it was very, and that wasn't a fringe view, by the way.

It was, you know, covers of time and newsweek and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, people have forgotten that. Yeah, and it was going to be six degrees of cooling and, you know, it was going to be amazing changes. And that didn't happen. It bottomed out and started warming gently. And since then, it's warmed at, you know, about a quarter of a degree per decade on average across the last 30, 40 years. and it's maybe, they say it's 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels now, but pre-industrial levels did this, you know, so which bit do you want to prove?

I mean, we know that in the medieval period it was warmer than today, because you find whole forests that are emerging from melting glaciers now. Well, there were forests in 1500 where there's no glass, there would have been no glacier there now, so the glaciers come and then gone away again since. So we're not in a period of unprecedented warmth. We're not in a period of unprecedentedly fast warmth. were not in a period of increasing extreme weather. Floods, drought, storms,

there's no increase in their either frequency or severity. Floods, you need to take into account the fact that we're building on floodplains and making it harder for rivers to lose their energy and things, you know, so there are, of course, there's man-made factors, but that's not the same as saying

that it's the climate that's making them worse. So for me, climate change is really, real, it's happening, it's producing an effect, some of which is deleterious and we need to work out what to do about it. But at the same time, the carbon dioxide we're putting in the air is having a very measurable effect that's beneficial.

And we refuse to take that into account. And that is global greening. There is more green vegetation on the planet now, compared with the 1980s, equivalent to a continent the size of North America that's been added of green vegetation. That's an enormous impact.

It's approximately 16 or 17% more green vegetation on the planet now than there was in the 80s. There's lots of ways of proving that. It's satellites. It's the variation seasonally, but on the ground too. You take

photographs in deserts. You can see how much greener they are than they were then. And that's because carbon dioxide is plant food. And when there's more in the air, the plants grow better, particularly in arid areas. years. Now, that's had an effect on crop yields. It's not the only effect on crop yields, but it's 15% is quite a good improvement. And if you add the dollar value of that up, it's very hard to make it smaller than the dollar value of the increase in warmth that has

done damage. Because even the warmth, you know, that means fewer people are dying in winter. Most of the warmth is concentrated in winter at night in the north, not in. in summer, in daytime, and in tropical areas. So for me, the cost-benefit analysis is not clear. And yet, there are so many vested interests now in continuing to talk about it as a crisis and funded as a crisis that I'll not get a hearing for what I just said.

Well, you're getting it here, and I find it very interesting because it sounds to me a little bit. And, you know, as part of the media ecosystem now, I kind of start to see human behavior, over time and I begin to see patterns. And I think one of the patterns is, particularly among the commentariat, the people who may be not informed, is to kind of go, well, you know, the line is moving in this direction.

And if we continue moving in this direction for the next 50 years, things are going to get really bad. And then the line starts moving in other direction. And we're like, well, if it moves in this direction, 50 years, and we forget that, like, the line moves up and down. And that's where I think the real concern about climate change. is, which is the runaway effect. Yes.

Which is, if this carries on for a long time at this rate, we really do have a problem. And I don't think you would deny that. Absolutely. So what is the reality of the runaway thing? Because that's really the big piece of it. Yes, you're quite right. The tipping point where it's a little bit of warmth creates a lot more warmth. That would be the worry.

You start to collapse the ice sheets. That makes everything darker and therefore warmer because ice is white and water is dark. you know things like that um maybe when you make it warmer you get less clouds and therefore you get more sunlight coming in most of the evidence on that is that the positive feedbacks are pretty small and diminishing we know for example that for every extra bit of carbon dioxide you put in the air you get a diminishing effect the first bit has a big effect the second bit has a smaller effect and so on um so there are negative feedback effects and positive feedback effects. Most of the attempts to find

tipping points, you know, the collapse of the Atlantic circulation, collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, etc. The acceleration of sea level rise, that's another possible threat. After 40, 50 years, we can be much more relaxed about them than we were. It was reasonable to worry about them in the 80s. I did. I wrote some alarmist articles in the 80s saying this thing might go haywire after a certain point.

I now think that's pretty unlikely. But if we had a technology that said we can stop emitting carbon dioxide tomorrow and it won't cost you a penny, fine. No problem. You then have to say, well, how difficult is it to stop emitting carbon dioxide? And we've tried for 30, 40 years now to do that. And what today, 82% of the world's energy comes to? from fossil fuels, the year 2000,

83%, roughly, we've hardly changed. It's gone up a bit and then down a bit, you know, may have got to 84 at one point, down to 81 at one point, but, you know, we can't find a replacement for fossil fuels

that is both reliable and cheap. And, you know, just think about hitting your home or driving your car or whatever. You know, it ain't that easy. And if you're living in Burkina Faso and you're burning brushwood which you've collected from the surrounding forest or scrub to keep yourself to cook food at night, and the World Bank says

you can't have money for a bottled gas program in that country because it's a fossil fuel, then I think you should be pretty cross about that because your burning fire is killing your kids. Indoor air pollution kills 4 million people a year. It produces more carbon dioxide than burning gas. It steals the wood from beetles and other creatures who want to eat it, whereas gas doesn't do any of those things. So that's the reality of our obsession with trying to stop using fossil fuels

is that we are doing genuine harm today. have to put that in the balance against the potential future harms of runaway warming. And what are the policy, sorry, Francis, just on this. What are the policy implications of what you're saying, Matt? If you were the chief scientific advisor or chief advisor to blah, blah, blah, would you go full trump, drill, baby drill, no net zero, scrap all of that stuff? Should we be trying to reduce carbon emissions at all? I think it's relatively simple.

The advice I'd give was, don't put it. Don't set a deadline. I mean, 2050, net zero, UK, only country doing it. We only produce 0.87% of the world's emissions anyway. It won't make a damn bit of difference whether we hit that or not. And the technology to do that, as I say, is not here. And it might come along in 2015. And then you'd look a fool, wouldn't you? You'd spend a fortune trying to get rid of emissions and you could have done it for free. So I think that's a crazy way of going about it. I think what the UK has done is unbelievably foolish. And we should tear up net zero, get rid of the the Climate Change Committee and instead fund research into energy technologies that might be able to solve the problem in the future. Because if you could get fusion going economically five years earlier than it would otherwise by a bit more funding, or if you could get small nuclear reactors cheaper five years sooner, that would make far more difference than heat pumps and electric vehicles and all these kind of things. So, you know, for me, it's about researching the problem to find solutions rather than enacting deadlines today.

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That's trigger 15 at manscape.com. Precision tools, unbeatable results, and smooth skin that doesn't come at the cost of your dignity. One of the things when we talk about climate change is that people tend to fold it into pollution and damage to wildlife. the environment, which I know you're very passionate about. I am so as Constantine. How do we disentangle these things? Because it's very important. Because I think we can all agree

that we need to do more to preserve our wildlife and our ecology, not only for ourselves, for our children and our grandchildren. So how do we essentially disentangle this and makes sense of this? Well, I was in a meeting the other day where a presentation was made in which the importance of preventing nature decline and nature depletion was talked about, comma, as a result of the climate crisis. And I stuck up my hand and said, look, wherever I go in the world,

and I'm a keen birdwatcher and, you know, love nature, the threat to wildlife that I see is nearly always not climate. It's nearly always invasive species or habitat destruction. So I was recently in India. And I said, what's your biggest problem in this lovely habitat in the edge of the Tar Desert? And they said, well, we've got this new invasive tree that's coming in. A couple of years ago, I was in Africa.

I said, what's your biggest problem? There's an invasive ant, which is displacing the... And then when I think about my own farm in Northumberland, the water vowl has gone extinct because of invasive mink. The red squirrel is going extinct because of invasive gray squirrels, etc. And if you look at extinctions of birds and mammals, invasive alien species that compete with them, particularly on islands, are the biggest threat.

That topic gets neglected. But you're right. People think of it as part of the same. They say, oh, I didn't mean just the climate crisis. I meant man's impact generally. So they're sort of, they're already there, if you know what I mean. They're just using that as a shorthand for human impacts, which is fine. but I do think it distorts our priorities

because if you climate change can be a very convenient excuse for politicians yes we can't do anything about nature to climb because it's climate change yes we can't stop fires destroying Malibu because it's climate change politicians love talking about climate change

because then they don't have to take any responsibility for not doing preventive burns in California not designing better flood mitigation schemes in Britain or whatever it might be, not doing anything about the grey squirrel. And it becomes this, it becomes like a doomsday cult where you

can't do anything or you can't say anything against it because there is going to be this day where the fires are going to engulf us all. Well, I think there is a sort of love of doom in the human spirit and if you want to

get attention on the media, which you guys do, then it really pays to do the sackcloth and ashes profit on a hill thing about how we're all doomed were doomed. People have said to me, you keep writing these books saying people are wrong to be so pessimistic about things. You realize you could make more money if you said the opposite. Does that I guess explain the phenomenon of Greta Thumburg? Well, she's moved on, mate. We're getting left behind.

So she was the head of the climate thing. Yeah. Now she's got a whole different issue. She's on Palestine. She's on Palestine, mate. So your references are behind the times. But I mean, I'm sorry, that was peak strangeness. I was going to say a rude of word of word.

But it was. It was weird. Let's just call it what it was. It was deeply weird. That photograph of Lela Moran and Michael Gov and at Miliband, standing, looking at a 14 or 15 year old girl as if she was Joan of Arc, hanging on there every word when she came to Parliament here. I mean, I'm sorry, she knew relatively little about the topic.

I love how diplomatic matters. A 14-year-old knew relatively little about one of the most complicated scientific subjects in human history. Yeah. She didn't quite understand the climate models at 14. It of course showed that, you know, there is an element of religious dogma into this topic. And it's got all the features of a religious cult. Now, that doesn't mean there isn't any science there either. Of course there is. But, you know, if you're banning Nigel Lawson,

from the BBC, which happened to him before he died, but you're allowing Greta Thumburg. Something's wrong with your priorities about truth. Yes, indeed. We had Nigel on the show during the pandemic right before his death, actually. Very interesting conversation. We didn't talk about climate.

Matt, one of the things you talk about in your latest book, which is there, is, you know, one of the things that we wanted to explore is the kind of maverick, the maverick theory of science. Like the great man theory of science, if you like, which is, you know, the idea that quite a lot of progress does get made, you call them brave, stroke, mad people.

Is that an exaggeration? Is that a story we like to tell our kids so they think anything is possible? But actually, most science is sort of a bunch of people working together on a thing and eventually come into a conclusion. Or is quite a lot of it genuinely, you know, the crazy guy coming up with a theory.

Everyone thinks he's an idiot for 20 years. and go, oh, actually, he gave himself an answer, he's right. Where's the balance between those two? It's a very good question, and one that I wrestle with, and I don't fully know the answer to. On the one, yes, of course, an awful lot of science is incremental improvements to knowledge by perfectly sensible, normal people working in the Orthodox mainstream. You know, one can't deny that. And I'm not a huge fan of the Great Man theory of history.

I do think there's an inevitability about certain. things happening in history. But you cannot deny that an awful lot of scientific theories start out as heresies and are advanced by mavericks and those mavericks have a tough time being heard.

But you also can't deny that that doesn't mean that every maverick is a genius. Not everyone is Galileo, not everyone is Charles Darwin. But in the book I've written Bird Sex and Beauty, it's about the debate on sexual selection, which is an idea that Darwin had that the choice of your mate can drive evolution in interesting ways that survival of the fittest can't.

Seduction of the hottest versus survival of the fittest is the way I put it. And it's a much more creative and different force, and it often doesn't help you survive, but it does help you get a mate and therefore have attractive grandchildren, which can attract others, et cetera, et cetera. so it can result in peacock's tails and flamboy and plumage and all that. Now, Darwin had that idea quite early. He pushed it quite hard. All his friends said he was wrong.

Wallace completely disagreed with him. Alfred Russell Wallace, his rival co-discoverer of natural selection. Even his chums like Thomas Henry Huxley and Herbert Spencer thought he was talking through his hat. But we now know he was basically right that make choices an important force in evolution and not to be underestimated. And so I was very curious about the idea that we think of Darwin as triumphantly successful, but actually one of his favorite ideas

that he's devoted a lot of energy to, he lost the argument in his lifetime. And partly because in Victorian England, if you say female lust may be behind male coloration, it doesn't work for crusty old Victorians who are sitting around discussing these things. don't understand about female lust. If you should, I mean, they certainly don't want to talk about it.

So there's a cultural background there that's quite interesting. But partly this was an excuse to go birdwatching for a year and write a book about it. Partly, I'm fascinated by the colours and flamboyant plumage of birds. Francis, you're a birdwatcher. You know what I mean. And it's genuinely difficult to explain why should birds be so conspicuous. Why do they dance so much? Why do they sing so much?

And maybe it has a story to tell about human beings too because we are selective about our mates both ways. Males are very selective in which females they mate with and vice versa. And Chuck will Jeffrey Miller has written a book called The Mating Mind 20 years ago. Former guest on the show. You've had Jeffrey on the show? Yes, we have. Big fans of his.

Yeah, he's a great guy. And it's a really good book. And in it, he argues that, we think the human brain exploded in size over the last couple of million years because of natural selection. It helped us survive on the savannah. Well, why? I mean, A, why did it do that? B, why didn't baboons or gazelles need bigger brains, too?

They were also on the savannah. So maybe it wasn't about surviving in practical terms. Maybe it was about social survival. Maybe it was about working out what's going on in other people's heads was an important part of our life. And so there was a sort of social arms race between us to have big brains to figure out what each other was thinking. That's a perfectly good hypothesis. People discussed that at nauseam. Jeffrey says, well, maybe actually it was about seducing each other.

Maybe once we got into the habit of saying the guy who sings well or makes good jokes is the one I want to mate with, that could drive an explosion of the human brain that could suddenly take off in the way that it did. did take off. It's such an interesting idea, I think, but nobody takes it very seriously, and nobody has thought through the implications of it in terms of how we rethink social sciences, economics, sociology, all these things, if it is what we devote a lot of our mental energy to. But having a good sense of humor is an incredibly important part of seduction as you're comedians, aren't you, so I shouldn't really tell you that. Well, he's single mate, so it hasn't worked.

By the way, I was just thinking, Francis, that book title in your accent takes on a whole different meaning, doesn't it? What, bird's sex and beauty? Birds, sex and beauty. Yeah, exactly. Why is that a different take? Birds, I mean, is it cockney to talk about women as well?

Women, yes. Birds, sex and beauty. Yeah. So if you've written that book, it would take on a whole different meaning. Yeah, more like a nature-ish approach. was, you know, I'm at Northumbrian, if I spoke in Jordan, bored, sex and beauty, like. But it's an interesting point you make, and it's, there was a term for it on the internet many, many years ago, which was called peacocking.

Really? Yes, yes, and the term peacocking in the kind of dating slash manosphere culture of the time was you displaying your peacock feathers in whatever, in like making jokes or displaying a particular talent, that women would. then become interested in. Right. So it's interesting that you say that when it comes to birds because it makes complete sense.

And by the way, it's quite an important point that I make in the book because we've done experiments show that in some birds it goes both ways. You know, that males have to be brightly colored

to attract females and females have to be dry brightly colored to attract males. So this isn't necessarily about saying it was the male brain that did all this. It could have been just as much the other way.

I think it's quite important to say that. Well, bird feminists will be very happy you've made that point, the avian feminist movement, it will send you a letter of thanks for that meaningful contribution. Quick question, though.

So why is it that in some species it's a female that's colourful? Why is it in some species it's the male that's colourful, or is it arbitrary? No, well, the answer to that was brilliantly spotted, and we should have spotted it years earlier, by a guy called Robert Trivers at Harvard in the 1970s. He said,

whichever species invests most time and energy in bringing up the offspring ends up being dullly coloured and competed for by the other one that gets brightly coloured because he's got the spare time, as it were, to show off. And so the exceptions prove the rule again here, which is there's a bird I used to study and I mention it in the book called the phallarope

in which it's the females that are brightly coloured and do a lot of the displaying and they do a lot of the harassing of the males, and the males sit on the eggs. And it's because the males sit on the eggs, that they're the scarce resource that the other sex is going to fight for. Do you see what I mean?

Grabbing a mate who's going to look after your eggs for you for two weeks is so valuable that it makes sense for you to invest time and energy and being seductive. Because there was something that I used to think when I used to see these brightly colored tropical birds in Venezuela, where I was like, I understand there's a beauty aspect to it, and then you're demonstrating to your potential,

you know, how healthy you are, how strong you are. But doesn't that then make you more vulnerable to predators? Absolutely. And this was one of the points that got Darwin interested in this, because he's saying, how does this help survival? I mean, it's supposed to be survival of the fittet. And the answer is, yeah, no, if you can win the jackpot in the next generation, by fathering beautiful sons who all get lots of mates,

then it doesn't matter if your life is short because you get hit by a hawk, as long as you've managed to mate first. Do you see what I mean? So it's a price you pay for winning the seduction lottery is you lose the survival lottery. And obviously there's a balance. But it makes perfect sense within the selfish gene.

explanation of these things, doesn't it? Because it's not about the unit Matt Ridley or Constantine Kissin. It's about me passing on my gene. So if I can live to 50 and have 10 kids, that's a hell of a lot better than living to 100 and having none, right? Exactly that. You put it beautifully. Yes, I don't think I would.

Matt, you should come on many, many more times. Just keep saying, you put it beautifully. See, this is why Matt is a regular guest on the show. He's so spot on about everything, isn't he? He just knows how to just, you know, Say it exactly how it is. And he does it at the end of the interview so we remember it, so then we invite him back for the next time. Matt, always a pleasure to have you on.

We're going to take some questions from our audience in a second on our substack. Before we do, we always end with the same question as you well know. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be? Is it Anthony Fauci getting that pardon? Pre-pardon? Wasn't it a pre-pardon? It was a pre-empting pardon? Yeah. Yeah, it went back to 2014.

I'm I'm there's something in the on the tip of my tongue and the back of my mind um I I think we're not talking about that asteroid that's aiming at us in 2032 or something what there's an asteroid well yeah I mean it's any point one percent chance it's going to hit us all point or 1 percent I can't remember but you know so why why you're scaring the public man At one point, at some point. We're all going to die. Well, we're going to have to work out how to deflect one. It's not an Earth killer, but it could be a city killer, this one.

Now, I gather they've downgraded its chances. It was 2%, it's now 1% or something. So we probably don't need to worry about that. Do we know where it's going to hit? No, no. I mean, it's a long way off yet. I mean, you know, whatever. The planet spins.

No, sorry. That was a very non-scientific way. That was the plane of the ecliptic. Yeah. No, sorry, it's a better one, actually. I don't know if you can edit that out. We can, but why would be? Yeah, exactly.

There's a guy called Avi Loeb, who's the professor of astrophysics at Harvard University. And he is convinced that a... an object came in from another solar system vertically sort of through the plane of our solar system and passed between us and the sun in 2017. It was called something like Umu Mia. It's got a Hawaiian name.

And this is true. I mean, that's a fact that it did that. But he's convinced it might have been an artificial object, not a natural object. because it was flashing on and off. It was bright, then dark, bright then dark, bright then dark. Probably that means it was long and thin, and so it was spinning, and when it was pointing towards us,

it was dark, and when it was sideways on, it was brighter. It then did an acceleration that is quite hard to explain, not impossible to explain, but quite hard to explain. Now, most of the astrophysics community says, he's talking through his hat and he doesn't know what he's talking about, and it's far more likely to be natural. Well, why? He's saying we don't know the Bayesian prior logic here,

whether it's more likely to be natural or artificial. If it's come from another solar system, an interstellar trajectory, the chance, you know, it's possible that it was sent to our solar system. And it's possible it had a solar wind collector to speed it up. So as it gets past the sun, it does speed up. You know, you can imagine a technology that would do that.

A solar sale, I think, is the word. And he read a wonderful book about this. And all his colleagues think he's a complete nutcase. And I like nutcases. Clearly. Well, thanks for being here with two other nutcases. We'll take a look at it. But, I mean, they part, they went,

the subject went past us, but didn't make any contact. And probably took a look at what's happening on earth and went off that. Just carried on. Yeah. Well, Matt, it's great to have you on the show. head on over to Substack where we ask, Manorily, your questions.

How much of this politicisation of sciences can be attributed to people just being unwilling to accept that life isn't fair? Huh.