If you know me, you know I love to talk about climate change, one of my favorite topics, and mostly I'm being critical of what passes for climate science. But the guy that I'm bringing on again is well, he's even more critical than I am, only he brings receipts and not just opinions. His name is doctor Matthew wie Leaky, and he writes a great substack blog. It's called Irrational Fear, and I link to it on my blog today.
If you want to go check it out.
It is paywalld, but it is worth every penny and it's not very expensive.
So welcome back to the show. First of all, Matthew, thanks Mandy, thanks for having me.
So you did something that I often wonder, and that is you went back and looked at predictions and about the climate and really just said were they right right now? What's fascinating me is I love it when I see in the newspapers we're fact checking no stradamis right, the very famous prognosticator from hundreds of years ago, and yet there's never that same intellectual curiosity about climate change predictions.
You have that intellectual curiosity. What did you find in this rather voluminous report.
Yeah, I think that. I mean, we have to have some accountability for past practices. I think, you know, we will hear a lot of rhetoric from the media, and you'll hear some of the normal characters. We'll say things like the oceans are boiling. We all know that's not true. I don't think anybody's going to make policy on that.
But the official documents that the government puts out, which primarily comes from the Global Change Research Act that started in nineteen ninety, we make what's called the National Climate Assessment every year, well every like five years or so, and that document is used to drive policy. It gets involved in every policy decision that we have as a country.
And so I wanted to go back and look at some of these.
So I went back and looked at the National Climate Assessments one and two. So the first one was published in two thousand and the second one was published in
two thousand and nine. They're not exactly always five years apart, and so when I started to dig into this, I kind of started to see a lot of the same rhetoric that they were talking about before, and increase in heat waves and increase in hurricanes, heavy precipitation, and you know, if you only have predictions that are relatively close, it's
hard to judge them. But we have now twenty five years since the first report came out, and that's a decent amount of time to start to look into these And with most of these things that I looked into, I realized why they're not going back and checking on themselves. It is because most of these predictions aren't happening. Sometimes they have the trend actually completely wrong in opposite other times it's just moving and oscillating and you know, natural
variability and there is no real clear trend. And so it's just this lack of accountability from all of these past predictions and how many times can you cry wolf before the public and hopefully the policymakers stopped listening.
Well, And that's really my point, and that's one of the reasons that I wanted to have you on because it's not just hey, look at these goofy climate scientists. They got all this stuff wrong. We are using these reports to make policy that is having, in my view, an incredibly detrimental effect on our economy. In oil in Colorado,
we've shut down oil and gas. We know that energy prices of skyrocket, and I've got a story on my blog today about now we're almost a ten percent delinquency for utility bills, and utility prices have gone up twelve percent in the last year. These are all choices that are being thrust upon the American people based on science.
You know, we're always supposed to trust the science.
But if we're not checking the science for accuracy, then we are making massive trillion and trillion dollar decisions based on garbage. Maybe not garbage, but certainly not good science.
Yeah, and the foundational pillar of all of this is the science, right, because we're making these sacrifices. We're going to be willing to pay a little bit more on energy because the weather was going to get really bad. That's what they were telling us in two thousand. This is why you have to make all these sacrifices. And
now we're seeing that that's not actually the case. These trends aren't trending in any of the way that they predicted, and so the foundational pillar, the reason for implementing all of this change and radically transforming our energy sector for the most part, is really not supported by the observational data.
Anymore.
It existed in their models in two thousand, I believe it did. I really think that they were convinced that this was what going to happen. But you know, the observational data is what we have to really go on, and it's just not there.
So let's talk about two things. Number One, hurricanes, because they're flashy, right, And when I was living in Florida in two thousand and four, in two thousand and five, when we had a lot of storms make landfall, and all of the climate alarmists, we're like.
Oh, there it is.
This is just the beginning of hurricane nightmares. And then after two thousand and four and two thousand and five, it was like crickets for a really long time. So let's start with hurricane data. What did they say was going to happen versus what has happened.
So you hear the common increase in frequency, intensity, and recent heavy precipitation associated with hurricanes, increased landfalls that you know, they kind of cover the gamut of all of it. And when we go back now and look at the last twenty five years, we see that hurricane landfalls are well within natural variability. In fact, this year Florida didn't get hit at all. That's not I mean, the US coastline didn't get a direct landfall at all, so that's pretty rare.
None of this looks like it's trending.
What you're seeing now is they play a lot of these mental gymnastics where they're transitioning from frequency and intensity to rapid intensification.
This is a new metric that we haven't really.
Been able to measure since we've had these fancy satellites, right and these crazy pilots willing to fly into these hurricanes where now we can actually measure them hour by hour. So you can see that as the story isn't working out in the obser observational data, that they're morphing into these new kind of more difficult to get metrics where we can't really look back one hundred years and they say, well, we might have not seen the intensity and frequency going up. Look,
they're rapidly intensifying. But overall, I mean, it's hurricane landfalls that we should be concerned with. There's absolutely no data that we're seeing a trend in that. Noah confirms that, the EPA confirms that, so you know, that's the real metric that we should be worried about, because that's where we lose lives and property.
I would go one step further in that now because and this is me speculating, it seems that the meteorologists who work in hurricane alley, who are going to be talking to the people who are in the line of the storm, they because they have bought into the narrative that is going to make storms, you know, more powerful
and more damaging. Now we have a greater sort of pre hurricane threat level coming from meteorologists, and that's damaging because people stop listening when you keep telling them that there's going to be a twenty foot storm surgeon, that there's going to be damaging winds and everything's going to be flattened, and then it doesn't happen.
And I know this.
From experience of living in a hurricane alley. People stop listening and then that gets dangerous. So I wonder how much of that sort of feeds into these prediction models that are saying to people, this is going to be the worst storm ever. And then when it kind of comes through and it's a category two, which isn't that bad, people just discount.
That In the future I do. I'm very concerned about that.
No, I think you're right.
I think there is a big psychological aspect to that, to whether the public is going to listen to experts and warning systems. I think they play a lot of games too. Now that everybody has a camera, you see all the images. Now, you know, constantly somebody's showing an image of a hurricane somewhere, because there's if there's not one landing year, there could be a typhoon in the Philippines, for example, And so you know this this this kind of if it bleeds, it leads, really does it drives
this whole climate thing. The more destruction, the more the narrative fits, and that drives everybody's fear up. And my whole argument is it's not in the data. That's why I name my substack irrational fear, because it's if you look at the data, it's not a rational fear to be afraid of hurricanes increasing and you know, damaging the US coastline. Obviously it's going to happen. It's going to
happen again. But it's no trend that this is some sort of runway train where where climate change is driving these more you know, they call them super charged hurricanes, right, that's just not in the observable data.
So here in Colorado, we don't have to worry about hurricanes, but we do have to worry about drought. And drought is the big thing that we have to worry about when it comes to food production and everything else.
Drought is what led us to the dust Bowl.
While that and bad farming practices back in the nineteen twenties and thirties. So what did they predict for drought back in twenty twenty.
Yeah, so they go back and forth.
The first NCA one, so that's the National Climate Assessment one, talks about heightened drought in the Southwest and regional droughts in the west. The second one increases that even into the south and the southeast. The NOAH and the EPA monitor this constantly. We have real time now remote sensors all over the place. So we have what's known as a Palmer Drought Index, and that's essentially just a scale that we use to try to identify for really getting much drier or much wetter regionally.
And as a whole nation. And if you look back at that, we have data that goes.
Back to eighteen ninety, and there's just no reason to think that this is trending in any direction. We recently did have a little bit of a drought area, but the late twenty tens were kind of wet, the nineties were very wet, and so you have this oscillation where you kind of move in and out, and that has a lot to do with ocean circulation patterns and these these large long term scales that we don't really fully understand yet because we haven't been monitoring the Earth's system
for that long. But nothing in the data would suggest that we're driving towards drought. I think that the infrastructure that we have for managing water has not been updated in a long time. California, for example, hasn't added any surface capacity since the late seventies, even though their.
Population had as doubled.
So we have a lot of mismanagement in water, but it's not coming from the fact that climate is increasing drought.
And you know, even.
Though there are areas that have seen increased drought and there's areas that have seen increased precipitation, there's just no overall.
Long term trend.
I think water mismanagement has a lot more to do with our issues than climate change.
Is there any area of the initial climate assessment where they nailed it right, like, dang, guys, great job, got it one hundred percent. Is there any specific area where you can say they got that right.
So the thing that's most on trend, where we're actually seeing something that's increasing, would be heavy precipitation events. So these are short term events where we have a very high increased amount of precipitation. We do start to see that. There's some arguments that that has to do with just having a little bit of warmer weather and warmer atmosphere holds more moisture. You know, people have probably seen no
experience that you go skiing, you get very dry. You go down to Florida, it's warm.
And very wet.
That's because that air capacity to hold water increases as you increase temperature, and so that.
Kind of makes sense to us.
Most people don't know that liquid fresh water is minuscule on the planet. It's only about two percent of all of the water budget. Most of that's locked up as ice. So I would argue that if we could increase our flood infrastructure and think about this a little bit, this a little bit of increase in heavy precipitation may be a really good thing for adding more fresh water to the surface where places like the southeast, that's the primary
use of waters surface water. So I would say that's the one place that they got it pretty close.
We're seeing it.
I wouldn't say it's abnormal increase, but we are seeing a trend that is continuously increasing in these heavy precipitation.
Events in terms of key.
So they got it exactly wrong. They got it exactly opposite. We're seeing less days above ninety five degrees and they predicted way more.
So you know, it's hit or miss. But overall, I would I would give them, you know, a D for their predictions.
So moving forward, and this is one of the things that I've had people say, well, you know, science is always getting better, the technology is always getting better.
We're always able to know more.
But to your point about the very brief amount of time that we even have significant rudimentary sort of weather you know analysis on a consistent basis, We've only been doing this for what like one hundred and thirty years with any real consistency, and that back then was with again almost you know, ancient style of barometric pressure measurement
and things of that nature. So how do you how would you argue or make the point that perhaps we're maybe out ahead of our skis with proclamations that we one hundred percent understand what we're seeing when we only have that limited amount of data.
Yeah, I think I think one hundred and thirty is a very generous number. I would probably say more like fifty years, because it's really satellites. Right, that the whole climate crisis was sold to us as a global problem and it was going to take this radical transformation because things were going to go haywire.
And in the early.
IPCC assessments in the late nineties and even in this first National Climate Assessment in two thousand, we just didn't really have enough data to make to say one way or the other. And so you know, it was fair game to make these predictions. But we're twenty five years later, and we have more and more satellites, we have more and more technology, remote sensing stations all over the planet.
We have the data.
So if it was so obvious, right, the science was settled, this was I was called a denier to question it.
If it's so.
Obvious, how come we have to do more and more gymnastical gymnastics to find the little things that are that are that are kind of getting a little bit wacky. If it was supposed to be so obvious and we were going to supposed to have this radical transformation, I mean, the way that it was sold to us was that this was just going to be right in our faces.
I mean, there's going to be fires burning everywhere, and there's no water and the last time you're ever going to see a ski area because snow is going to disappear. I mean I heard all of these things that no more snow was on the front of New York Times, and we're just seeing that all of this rhetoric was just for one reason, and it was for creating an emotional response and essentially taking money from the Western world.
That was the motive.
We now have the observational data none of it was coming true, and so why are we doing all this?
So I agree wellheartedly.
I mean the reality is is that this is why I find this so concerning, that we're not having genuine, robust discussions about the wrongness of these predictions as we're decapping our own economy.
I mean, especially here in Colorado, our governor.
Is all in on net zero and it is going to cost a small fortune to move Colorado to where he wants it to be. And if it's all based on bad intel, that is criminal. And yet because of the way the climate industry works, and Matthew, you probably know some of the scientists that I've spoken to since I got my first show in two thou and five. If you have a theory that you want to test that does not end with it's man made global global climate change, it's man's fault. It is emissions. If that's
not your theory, you can't get funding. No one will fund your study because the dogma is so entrenched that we can't even look at at other alternatives, like perhaps we should be spending this much time and energy on mitigation instead of trying to change the climate. It feels like a don keyxty like quest based solely an ego at this point.
Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you from a personal experience as a young academic trying to land some of my first grants and seeing the ideological stances that the funding agencies like NSF and NAH and NASA were taking. It's just I mean, you could you could see it all right? You know, this was had nothing to do with science, This has nothing to do with finding the truth or anything like that. It was just let's just push this mantra down the road that has to stay alive no
matter what. And we're just going to keep going down this road regardless of what the observational data says. And if there's no money to do it, none of these young academics are going to go try to prove this anyway, so we'll have this what I call manufactured consensus.
Right.
It's not a conspiracy where there's somebody up there like pulling the strings, but it is a conspiracy in the way that the system essentially is manufacturing a consensus, bying by having funding agencies, journals, essentially anyway to make your academic record. If you make that so ideological, then if you don't follow the you know, toe the line, you're out.
I experienced that personally, and.
So it creates this kind of false sense of consensus. But really what you're doing is just kicking out people that don't agree. And so I think we should start with getting rid of some of these funding agencies and their ideologies. They should be about the truth, regardless of where it takes you, especially now that we have all this observational data that proves that a lot of these predictions were incorrect.
A text sur just as this, Mandy oh As chat if climate change is real? And see what your answers. I will all do that chat is my personal assistant. Now, I'm Matthew, So I asked Chad everything. Does your guests have an opinion on the movie Climate. Somebody's trying to get me to watch this movie. I don't really care. I don't know what it's about.
Is it called Climate the movie?
Because I'm in that that's mad for a skeptical take.
I'm not sure. I haven't. I haven't. Is there a new one coming out? I can look.
I don't know if that's it or not.
I only get so much information regarding water mismanagement. Recently visited Hoover Dam. Does that play into the water mismanagement. I'm gonna go one step further, Matthew, and to partially answer this question in my view, because now we have the states trying to figure out how to divvy up the Colorado River, and they're supposed to have already done this,
and they can't come to an agreement. My question is is why is California getting any of the water because they are literally on the Pacific Ocean, build desalinization plants and leave our water alone.
I mean, but that's a whole different conversation.
Well, unfortunately, desalization takes a lot of energy, and they are very energy poor at the moment because they are also just gung ho on this you know, green energy thing. But that the main thing with the Colorado River Lake Meat Lake POW.
This was the Colorado River Compact. It was signed in the twenties.
The twenties were really an abnormally wet decade and so when they originally signed this, they made predictions.
This is one of the again a faulty.
You know, we have to be very careful about our predictions, and we have to understand that the planet's not just going to go along with this. There's a lot of natural variability. They estimated a significantly larger amount of water than what they got for the next decades, and that's what we think is now the average. We just think that there was this little heightened blip in the twenties
and so the allocations were wrong from the start. And you know, population has been growing dramatically and throughout the Southwest and the west, and so you add all those factors together, you make you have some water issues. But none of this is really related to climate or CO two.
Doctor Matthew will his substack is a rational fear. It is great worth the worth a small price of admission to keep up to date on this, I put a link on the blog today. Thanks so much for making time for us again, Matthew, really interesting stuff.
Thanks Mandy