So yesterday I saw this news story and I want to I want to just read part of it in a dramatic way to bring my next guest onto the show. It's from CBS News. Nearly four hundred scientists across the United States were in four Monday afternoon that their services were no longer needed to help write a major report
on climate change for the federal government. The report, known as the National Climate Assessment, is a major publication produced every four years that summarizes the impacts of climate change in the United States, and it is congressionally mandated under the Global Change Research Act of nineteen ninety. The sixth edition is scheduled for publication in twenty twenty seven, and preparations have been underway for months to meet their deadline.
And then it goes on from there.
But as I kept reading, the first person they got a comment from was from the Environmental Defense Fund, So already I knew exactly what the rest of the story was going to say. Okay, And they go on to quote climate scientists after climate scientists after climate scientists.
Doctor Robert Kopp, a climate.
Scientist and professors at rutgost University who was also working on the current assessment said, I feel badly for the federal leaders who have put a lot of time into this, but to some extent, I think the writing was on the wall when they.
Dismissed the support staff a few weeks ago.
I think now it's clear many of the authors would like to see an up to date evidence based report.
Do they really though?
Joining me now from the Irrational Fear substack, doctor Matthew Willicky, Doctor Matthew, Welcome back, first of all to the show. It was very interesting that I saw this article and then almost immediately saw your column from the other side. Should we say welcome back my friend.
Thanks Mandy. I enjoyed you turned into I think like a bit or englishly.
You know what though, that's my best dramatic reading voice. I think it adds gravitas to whatever I'm reading.
Well, thanks for having me back.
You're absolutely right, though, I mean, this is kind of peddled as a scientific document, and you can hear the scientists saying that, you know, this is this is the science, but it's not pure reviewed it. It does go through no critical analysis, and when I looked at it, I found blaring contradictions right inside of it. I mean, they showed, for example, heat waves as the observable data, and to my surprise, heat waves have gone down dramatically since two
thousand and two to twenty twenty one. In this time period relative to their baseline, they had gone down. I was like, oh, like, everywhere except the southeast, they've gone down. And so then I scrolled down maybe another page or two, and they had their projections of heat waves, and their.
Projections had it going up everywhere.
And so they're claiming the same thing has been happening over the same time period, but the opposite result will have And so then I was kind of shocked by that. I was like, you're kind of contradictory, contradictory in your own analysis. And so I went back to the very first National Climate Assessment that came out in two thousand and the biggest caveat on that, the large kind of conclusion was that heat waves were going to increase and
that was going to have a huge societal impact. And yet in the fifth assessment they came out in twenty twenty three, they admit the observable data doesn't show that, but they keep saying the same projection and the same mantra so it's almost as if the observable data has no meaning at all. There's just a narrative, and regardless of what the data says, the narrative is what is pushed.
So okay, so let me go back to the first thing that the example that you were giving, which is they showed that for the last twenty years, heat waves meaning periods of long extended heat in an area, have actually been really flat. We haven't had a significant increase in heat waves. But now in the next twenty years they're saying, oh, heat waves are going to be off the charts. But why did we have flat heat waves
in the first place. Do they even address that because it sounded like you said, look, we have the same conditions, but they're expecting a completely different result.
That's right. It gets even worse than that.
So they show in the National Climate Assessment, the fifth edition that came out twenty twenty three, that in the southeast, for example, there was eleven days less or over ninety five degrees from the period of twenty and two to twenty twenty one. Then happened in the baseline that they had from nineteen oh one to nineteen sixty, So they've showed a dramatic decrease in the time period. They're saying that we are increasing emissions, land use changes are also
driving up climate change. So the factors that are that are driving climate change are existing and accelerating. Yet we're seeing a decrease in the amount of hot days. But then they flip it on its head in one model, even though they've made making the same predictions for twenty five years now, the first assessment came out in two thousand and getting it wrong. It's I mean, it's really
the definition of insanity. I mean, you're doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result and just completely ignoring the observable data.
Maybe they're going with the blind squirrel finds a nut theory or the broken clock is right twice a day theory, Like if we just keep saying it, eventually it'll be true and they'll be able to go say, see, we knew it, that's what was going to happen.
I wish that was the case, because I mean, maybe we could just kind of pass it off to kind of ignorance.
But this is malice.
They these are the same people that benefit from funding from making the government believe that there is a climate crisis and funding this to the tune of billions, if not hundreds of billions, if not trillions globally. And so this is the same people that write it and it ignore the observable data, realize that there is an incentive for them to make sure they make it as as crisis or as as extreme as possible, regardless of what
they did. Says So I wish it was I could attribute it to ignorance, and maybe they're just missing some of the data, but it just can't keep going on and on like this without it being essentially I mean, it's fraud.
There's no other way to put it.
You're talking about taking siphoning off billions of dollars when the data says the exact opposite of what you're predicting.
The thing that's frustrating for me, and in the many many years that I've been doing this show, I've spoken with scientists who had alternative theories of why we were in periods of warming. I mean they were everything from the where we are in the ellipses around the sun to different kind of sun variations that were not used to taking into account, and they could not get money.
For their research.
They could not get any dollars because they weren't in the dogma, and they would come on my show like as a I don't want to say last resort, but just to like shout into the ether, like, look, there's other.
Things that.
Make sense for the glare errors because you know we and you've done this on your blog. You can go back to nineteen ninety six and to your point, you can show them over and over and over and over again where they've gotten it wrong. But there are other theories that their projections were more accurate, but they're not as dire, they're not as scary. And you can't tax the sun, right.
Well, that's the biggest one.
If it's something that we aren't producing in terms of an industry or as a society, we can't tax it. We can't go after it and regulate it. So water vapor is the biggest one. Everybody ignores water vapor, the IPCC ignores water vapor. That's by far the number one greenhouse gas on the planet. Right, the sun, like you mentioned solar variation, we don't really understand it. We've got a couple decades, maybe five or six with satellites a couple extra centuries of measurements before that.
The planet's four and a half billion years old.
We have a very tiny little subset to go on to try to understand these one hundred thousand year or maybe million year.
Cycles that we're going through.
And so it all comes back to how much can policy get involved. And they realize they can't tax the sun, like you said, so what can we kind of nitpick at?
Right, Let's go after CO two.
That's an easy one now, methane hitrosoxxide, right, And so they just kind of pick down the line on things that they can regulate. But we're really talking about third maybe fourth order effects. So if you really think that taxing CO two is going to change the weather, I've got bad news for you because I really don't think it will.
Let me ask you a question.
You may or may not know the answer to this, but it's something that has been bugging me for so long about the entire study of the arc of history when it comes to climate, and we're told, and I think the whole ice core thing is super cool, Like they go and they drill these ice coores that are a mile long, and then they pull them up and they examine all the layers in the ice, and they extrapolate out all this data from those ice ice samples.
But the thing that always gets me about that is that they keep telling us we are in an unprecedented period of warming. It's never warm this fast. Ever, We've never had this kind of warming. Okay, so let's just say we have before and all of the ice melted. So we're looking at ice cores. How can we get a true idea of what those ice cores may say if we've had prior periods of rapid and intense warming that destroyed the ice layers.
Do you see what I'm saying.
Absolutely So in places like Greenland, that's definitely a big consideration because if you're not creating new ice, then you're destroying.
The core basically.
So we talk about this in sediment and geology. If you're not depositing layers, then you're eroding them. Well, now we have missing timeframes, we call them unconformities, and so that's a definite consideration. So one of the things in Antarctica, we're a little safer because we think that even the warming there couldn't ever get it above freezing. But it's a desert, so you don't have a lot of new snow being deposited on top. So there's a lot of trickiness.
This is one of the reasons why I argue that we don't really know the variations of climate in the past on the century scale, right, that's just impossible because everything gets blurred because of the things you're talking about. What if you have a decade where there's no ice forming in Greenland because it was super warm that decade because of an ocean current or something like that, And so the resolution for our past climate is really bad.
You know, we have really good update date information now, but the claims that you hear about, oh, it's the hottest year and one hundred and twenty thousand years, that is absolutely absurd. I've never seen a climate scientist that has any real worth in the field or is respected ever make that claim.
And so this is it's like, how do you I think that what's happening with the Trump administration and I and this report, by the way, is congressionally required. So what would you speculate, Matthew, would be the next steps here? What would you think if they fired all the climate scientists who are invested in making sure that it's crazy who they hire now.
I mean, did they get Judith Curry? Who do they?
I think she would be great. Doctor John Christy would be great. There's a lot of great scientists. But I think you just have to change the mission of the report such that it is about the observable data, what have we seen has occurred, and then a big reflection chapter. What are the predictions we made in the past that haven't come to fruition and how confident are we in our future predictions. That's something that is just not done
in these reports. My whole argument in most of this is that we have to focus on the observable data. That's what's telling us how things are changing. Anybody can tweak a model, anybody can tweak the knobs on the computer on the keyboard and make a model basically give you whatever you want.
We call it garbage in, garbage out.
But the observable data is the observable data, and we have a lot of it, and so we should just be focusing on that. And the narrative on that is very different than the narrative and the projections and the
models that they're doing. So I'm more than happy to keep a National Climate assessment if it focuses back on observable data and also reflects back on the last four, will I'll be five because it'd be National Climate Assessment six that looks back at the last five and really highlights how terrible the predictions and the models have been. So we can have an honest conversation.
Noill, Matthew, let me ask you this because I just got this text, and I think there's probably a lot of people out here who feel this way. Hi, Andy, I'm a fan of the show and consider myself a moderate, but I feel that today's conversation with this climate denier is quite dangerous. I may not be an expert on this situation, but I can tell you anecdotally that since I've been in Colorado since two thousand, we've had much
hotter temperatures, longer heat waves, and less rain. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that climate change is real. So I always respond to this in the same way, and that is, of course, the climate is changing. It has been changing since the beginning of time. We have the Rocky Mountains because the climate has changed. We have iceberg grooves on the bottom of the Black Sea, that
were just discovered because the climate is always changing. What we're discussing here is the level of certainty about it are being our fault and the accuracy of the data and the projections that are being used to spend literally trillions of dollars that are being inflated by scientists who have an invested interest. I mean that's my take on that.
Yeah, and I agree with you one hundred percent. I would love to know where the listener lives. If they're in a metropolis area. Since two thousand that has grown quite a bit. I don't deny that the temperatures in their area are warmer. When you replace a lot of trees and grasses and prairie land with asphalt and buildings and glass, you're going to warm the climate up in that region, so that regional area will get hotter on certain hot days. We call that the urban heat island effect.
The issue is is can you tax your way out of that? Or can you regulate your way out of that. You can dismantle the city, I guess you can start taking down the skyscrapers or taking down the buildings and getting rid of the roads, going back to dirt. I don't think anybody's going to be for that. So there's no denying that humans have an effect on their environment.
The question is is whether this has to do with CO two and our greenhouse gases, or this has to do with the natural urban environment that we've built around ourselves. And I would argue that it's the urban heat island effect. Definitely does make cities warmer than the surrounding regions. We've seen that for a long time. But I just don't see a way of getting around that unless we just take apart the cities.
And nobody seems to be for that.
And so you know, we're conflating to problems or the problem exists, but you're conflating the reason for that problem.
And I think that's an important distinction, right, I mean, where I want to know exactly what it impact we're having on the climate. But what we've done is take the question of what impact are we having on the climate, or what other external circumstances could be happening to be creating a climate situation, and we've turned it into your car is the problem? Oh those cows there next, and we're going to take away everything we need to have
a functioning modern society. Chasing renewable energy that is inherently unreliable. So there's huge policy decisions that are being made. And the point that Matthew makes, and he makes it brilliantly on a substack irrational fear, is that we should be looking at the hard data instead of speculating and guessing without giving any you know, we never go back to
look and see how those old predictions turned out. You would think that would be the first thing they would do in order to hone future predictions, but it never
seems to happen. So that's what we're talking about. We're not sitting here saying the Earth is not changing, and we're not like knuckle draggers over I mean, we recognize the changes, but we're discussing what's actually going on, because in my mind, I would rather be investing trillions into mitigating for communities that need it, you know what I'm saying, Like, I'd rather assume when you look at the ancient civilizations of the Aztecs and the Mayans, why did they disappear?
My guess is it got too hot there for them to live and they moved on. But we don't talk about things like that. We need to mitigate it instead of trying to stop it, because it may be a natural process that we have no way of controlling.
But we really are kind of repeating history because we're sacrificing. You know, they used to make sacrifices of people and young young women and things to the gods to change the weather. We're essentially sacrificing industry. We're sacrificing our energy industry to the hope or maybe the you know, the god of energy such that it will change the weather in the future. So history really does repeat itself. But you're I agree with you on hundred percent. Be practical.
There are solutions out there. This idea that I think it's ignorant to think that stasis is the goal that's never been a part of the planet. There If we just go back in history at any time, the planet is not in stasis.
It's meaning the same meaning's yah.
It's always changing, and the ancient civilizations realized that and they made sacrifices to the gods to hope it didn't change. It's sad to think that we're just basically doing the same thing, but with trillions of dollars and the one industry that has given us the life that we afford today.
And to be clear, abundant energy is why our standard of living has raised as rapidly and as completely, not just in the United States, but we are in a period of prosperity in the world right now. Even poor nations are better off than they were one hundred years ago. And then the number of people living in extreme poverty has dramatically just dropped like a stone, all because of cheap and abundant energy, and we are trying to undo that now.
So that's why talking about it.
Yep.
I used to teach a course at at University Alabama called sustainability, and you can tie energy to education, to fertility rates, going down to equality, to equality of women.
I mean, there's so many things.
That tie back to the infrastructure that energy provides for you, and that's what they're attacking. So it's really the fundamental fabric that has provided, you know, the living standards that we appreciate today.
Doctor Matthew Willicky is am I saying your last name right, is it Whylicky? Yeah? I am I.
Okay, We'll just go with it.
He has a fantastic substack called irrational fear. He doesn't just talk about climate science. He talks about all kinds of science.
So if you ever just.
Want to kind of go and get a reality check, I would highly recommend a subscription. You can find it on the blog today at mandy'sblog dot com.
Great conversation.
I find this stuff fascinating and I am interested to see who ends up writing this report because I don't know if you saw this, but the NIH just put out their own report about gender or firm and care for kids that is.
Sure to cause a star.
Let me just say that I didn't have it on the blog today because I haven't read it.
It's four hundred Actually I did put it on the blog. It's four hundred pages.
But this is an administration that's not afraid to say the standard dogma is not where we're gonna stay because it's not right.
And we'll see what happens next.
Yeah, all right, thanks so much, Matthew. It's good to see you again, and I'm sure we'll talk again soon.
All right.
That is doctor Matthew Willicky from the Irrational Fear substack