The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer

You said that climate science is the biggest cult in scientific history. Why do you say that? Because it's costing the planet trillions. There's a very large body of people out there who actually are using science to promote scams. It's absolutely crippling Western countries who are going down this path because you cannot run an industrial economy on sea breezes and um sunbeams. What you're saying is there've been times in the history of this planet when there's been

hundreds of times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today. Yes. We've had times in the past when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was at least ten percent and perhaps twenty percent compared with zero point zero four percent.

And what did we have then? We had the biggest ice ages this planet's ever enjoyed. On the one hand, you say it's not commensurate with the science. On the other hand, you're the only scientist who's been saying this for a long time. How do you explain that? Before we start, a very quick recommendation. We know our audience

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Ian, welcome to trigonometry. Thank you. Great to have you on. Tell us a little bit about you before we get into the conversation itself. I was born and bred in Sydney. I had a passionate interest in rocks as a child. I used to take them into the Australian Museum, and the curator was very kind with me. He spent a lot of time with these dreadful rocks. Explaining what they meant. Twenty years later I was publishing with him. So that really made his life, but he made my life also. And

I followed my passion at school and at university. I Had to repeat a year at school because I was far too young. Those were the post-war days where kids just pulled into school. and because I could read and write I got put into higher class and because I still could read and write better than anyone else up into a higher class. So I finished school at fifteen and that was far too young to go to university. So a repeated year. I went to university and followed my passion.

and when I finish Uh my undergraduate degree I I took an extra year to study things that I really liked. Um, I studied counterpoint in music. I did psychology'cause that's where all the girls were. Uh I I did botany because I was interested in uh the relationship between plants and soils and how you we do in geology look at vegetation and work out what the rock types are and what's going on.

Uh I did political science, which was a comparison of the British, uh, American and Australian systems, and they were all very interesting, and I did English literature. So I I felt then that my degree was complete. And then I went and worked underground at Broken Hill, which is a mining town that's been operating since eighteen eighty three. And that was fascinating and I did an honours degree working on the rocks underground.

And then I went off and did a PhD again working underground. This was in far north Queensland. At the same time I was um part-time tutoring in uni unity. part time tutoring in university, that's right. And then I I moved back to Broken Hill. Um and that was probably the most productive feud of my scientific life. I was publishing a lot of work. Um I was working in the field, I was working underground. And um then I went to the head office of the company in Melbourne.

And I left them on a day which I can never forget. We were passengers in their corporate jet. It ran out of fuel. It crashed. And not many people live from crashing in the forest. And I'd had an offer from a university because I had a lot of experience in in the mining industry. I'd had a lot of publications out there. And I thought I'd better take that off. I have three young kids. I don't particularly want to be travelling the world, flying in private planes and crashing in forests.

And that really changed my life. And that's when I started to combine what I knew from underground safety with general safety w and working in a university, there's really very little understanding of safety, very little understanding of responsibility and consequences for your action.

And I very quickly became a a chair at the University of Newcastle. That's Newcastle in Australia, not in uh the UK. And then after Newcastle I was the Leestuhl von Lagerstätten Kunde, the professor of mineral deposits at Munich. I thought that was Australian for a second. Well, we have a German population, but um in fact the Broken Hill Orb body was found by a German. That's a very different story.

And uh then I came back to Australia to be the professor and head of earth sciences at the University of Melbourne. and in my department I had geology, geophysics and meteorology, these same meteorologists who I saved from extinction when the university wanted to close them down, and our climate scientists and they're some of my biggest critics, so which is quite amusing. And then after the University of Melbourne,

Um, I was given the opportunity to build a new department of mining engineering at the University of Adelaide. I went from a tenured chair to an untenured chair. It was just a challenge and I had the minerals industry supporting me, the South Australian government supporting me, the university. And so I went there, it was a challenge. It was really quite an easy job because all I had to do was to raise a lot of money every year and with all my contacts in the minerals industry that was easy.

And um then when I finished off at the University of Adelaide I went back into the minerals industry. I now work as a director of uh Australia's biggest private company, that's Hancock Prospecting. They have operations all the way around the world and very big iron ore producer, producer of gas.

And during my university time, Uh I got interested in creationism and these were people who claim that the planet formed six thousand years ago, that there was a global flood four thousand years ago, and that all sedimentary rocks formed in this flood, and this was just scientific nonsense.

Yep, they were claiming it was science. And this was in the nineties. And this was my training for uh various other things in life. And so I wrote uh quite a few articles. I had various debates with creationists. Uh I put out a book called Telling Lies for God, which was gentle and non provocative as as the title suggests. And I realised that there's a very large body of people out there who actually are using science to promote scam.

And the creationists were one of these. Yes, they were deeply religious, but they were very misguided. And then I saw exactly the same thing arise in the late nineties with climate change. I could see exactly the same hallmarks. This this was a religion. Uh it had all the hallmarks of the religion with sin and with redemption, uh, with paying penance. And um basically you have to give up something in your life. Um, we won't as the as the leaders of the religion, but you have to.

And I started to look at the science and the science is absolutely totally incommensurate with my science and that is geology. I'd published by then hundreds of scientific papers. By then I'd had a few books out, I'd uh in edited an encyclopedia of geology. I I I was I'm a polymath with a specialist in one area, but I could realize uh see very quickly this w wasn't science. This was absolute nonsense.

Because if you're to promote an idea in science, it has to be commensurate with all the other validated work in science. And this wasn't commensurate with what we know in geology and what we've known for hundreds of years. Uh we've known about sea level changes for a long time. Um Charles Darwin wrote a book about coral reefs and sea level changes. That was in 1842. So what we've been told about sea level change was just nonsense.

We also had seen cycles of climate in the past where we've had very, very warm periods, we've had very cold periods, we've had six major ice ages. We're currently in one of those ice ages. It started thirty-four million years ago. And during that time carbon dioxide has changed enormously. Uh it was unrelated to temperature. It never has been in the past, so I can't see why it has to be in the present. And we see in the rocks that when you can back calculate

How much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere that we've had for the last 500 million years a decrease in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? It's dangerously low. if we halved it, we'd have no vegetation. So I could see that all these ideas coming out on climate change were total nonsense. And I could see there was a big business evolving behind it, as I saw with the creationists. So I thought, Well, it's about time I

compared them and I did a quite a bit of writing on this. I've written I think probably half a dozen books on it now.

uh I got on the lecture um tour, uh gave many lectures, many podcasts, broadcasts. I have a weekly segment on Sky T V. Sky T V in Australia is very different from Sky in the UK. uh which is a bit to the left. Uh so uh I got very active in this and I was really the only voice in science that was talking like this. A few other geologists We're doing it, but not as active. And because

the climate story we've been told is incommensure with validated science elsewhere, then it's not science. So to a normal person listening, there may seem like there's a contradiction there. On the one hand You say it's not commensurate with the science. On the other hand, you're the only scientist who's been saying this for a long time. How do you explain that? Well, right across the board in geology, uh people object to um this. New religion of climate change.

You can count on a sawmiller's hand the number of geologists who would uh agree with the with popular paradigm, simply because we look at the past, we see sea levels go up and down all the time, we see uh massive ice ages, we see very rapid temperature changes, it's all written in the rock. We happen to be a minor science. And many scientists, once they retire from universities and institutions, will then stand up and say, Well look, uh, I don't think we're right. I don't think this is right.

So geology is a very different science in that we use a lot of observation and we link it with experiments in physics and experiments in chemistry. And very few people know geology. So right across the board in geology you'll find people just say, Oh, that's just rubbish. Mm-hmm. J but but you so you mean in other fields people are not saying this stuff? Uh people in astronomy uh are criticizing climate science, people in um some areas of solar physics uh criticizing

um climate science, it's not universal. And the one thing you see when you look at the IPCC reports is there's no geology. There's no paleontology. And they're the clues to what seawater temperature might have been. They're the clues to what sea sea levels are doing. And I and Ian, you said uh that climate science is the biggest cult in scientific history.

And when I heard that I was like wow, that's a pretty bold statement. Why do you s why do you say that? Why do you stand behind that particular statement? Because it's costing the planet trillions. as a result of the climate science hysteria to completely change energy systems which are constantly being revised and constantly made more efficient. And we've abandoned efficient, cheap, reliable energy and putting in unreliable energy, we're completely recapitalizing.

uh grids, we're completely recapitalizing generation of electricity. Uh there isn't enough electricity, we have to have backup, which is enormously expensive, which lasts for a very short period of time. The costs are absolutely horrendous. Now scientists we'll publish work. But if there's an economic consequence from that work, there'd be no responsibility.

they will get on and publish the next paper and then they publish the next paper. So it's absolutely crippling Western countries who are going down this path because you cannot run an industrial economy on sea breezes and um sunbeams. There's just not enough ground. So what we're effectively talking about is net zero. And and what do you think about the UK's approach to net zero?

Well, I think you should uh tell your Prime Minister that you breathe in zero point zero four percent carbon dioxide, and because he's metabolizing food He breathes out four percent carbon dioxide. So if he wants to go to net zero, drop dead. That's the solution. It's totally ridiculous. Our bodies are carbon based. Carbon dioxide is a major planetary gas. Um, it's been around for billions of years. The first atmosphere had methane and um

hydrogen and helium and some carbon dioxide in it. The second atmosphere, which was dominant for a very long period of time, was rich in carbon dioxide, and it had hundreds of times more carbon dioxide than now. And what do we see? A thriving of life.

And the third atmosphere is an oxygen bearing atmosphere which we currently live in. So we've had an evolution of the atmosphere, we've demonized something which you can't see, you can't taste it, you can't smell it, and so you can demonize it. The same as you can demonize viruses or bacteria or radiation. Uh it's a wonderful, wonderful thing to scare people with. We don't get told that carbon dioxide is plant food. And without carbon dioxide you have no life on Earth.

And what's the rationale for doing this? Uh because it's look, on the net zero side of it, uh I I I I there are some people who still haven't caught up, but I regard what you're saying about net zero as completely uncontroversial. I think it's exceedingly clear at this point that net zero is economic suicide.

And I think that's what we're seeing in our country in other countries. There's and I don't I don't think that's controversial. I don't think that's questionable. I think that's just a matter of fact for anyone who's looked at it with an open mind and with anything like a rational approach. But on the science aspect, this is where I really wanted to explore the things that you're saying, because I think this is incredibly valuable. Why do you think?

the scientific community, or at least this is what we've been told. The scientific community has arrived at a point where the vast m we we keep being told the vast majority of scientists agree that. human activity is causing climate change and it will cause it to uh to to get to a point where it's runaway climate change, which means we basically can't go back and the planet just overheats, quote unquote. How do we get to that being the consensus for you? And is it the

Well, you never have consensus in science. Once you've got consensus it isn't science. The second thing is we've had times in the past when the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere was at least ten percent and perhaps twenty percent compared with zero point zero four percent. And what did we have then? We had the biggest ice ages this planet's ever enjoyed.

And this is when we had kilometers of ice at the equator at sea level. And the evidence for this is incontrovertible. It's worldwide. And this is um written in the rocks. We geologists see this and we understand it.

Um immediately I just want to flesh that out, just sorry to interrupt. So what you're saying is there've been times in the history of this planet when there's been hundreds of times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there is today. Yes. And that at those points it was incredibly cold. You know how at the beginning of every year people say this is a year things change. Then by February, everything looks the same. If you've been sitting on a business idea for months or even years,

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America thrives. Protect what you've built. Visit next insurance.com slash LPS slash trig or click the link in the description of this episode. Yes. On average. Yes. And then it warmed up quickly in the interglacials, then it cooled down again. That's not driven by carbon dioxide. That's driven by something else, like that great ball of heat in the sky we call the sun. It's driven by the Earth's orbit. It's driven by many, many other factors. It's driven by where the continents might be.

So we've had very high carbon dioxide in the atmosphere before. And what has happened is we've sequestered that into carbonate rate. And this has been happening for a long period of time. Now with those older glaciations, the carbonate rock was dolomite, which has got forty eight percent of the gas carbon dioxide in it. That's by weight. And so we pulled that carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And um in younger times in the last twenty percent of time we've

pulled carbon dioxide out of the limestone. We pulled it into carbon rich sediments, black shales, into coals, into the shells, into the uh of uh which are now fossils, into carbon rich rocks. So that's been sequestered out of the atmosphere. And that process has been going on for at least a billion years, but we certainly have got very good evidence that.

About 500 million years ago when we had an explosion of life, we had 0.7% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It's gone down to 0.04%. Where's it gone? It's gone into into the rocks, into sediment. Now, during that 500 million years, we've had a couple, three major ice ages. Yet carbon dioxide has been going down over time. So there's no relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide. So why do so many people in the scientific world, in government

Politics, why do so many people believe that there is this strong case? Well you have you we use the word believe, and that's a word of religion and politics. It's not a word of science. And they believe it because uh that's the way of putting bread on the table. Now, I've had these people in in various departments uh that I've run.

And these people are mainly mathematical modellers. They're eminently unemployable. Uh they are able to get grants from governments by scaring people witless and the government throws them a few shackles to keep them uh alive. And they base their life on a model, looking at what might happen in the future and if it something goes wrong, they'll redo the model. Now we've had forty years of models now and of the hundred and two major models we have, not one of them

has told us what we've measured over the last forty years. So they don't work. Uh because they make one assumption which is invalid, and that is that carbon dioxide drives temperature. Now there's not one scientific paper out there and this is a big call, but you can check it out, there's not one scientific paper there that demonstrates that human emissions drive global warmth.

If there were, you'd never hear the end of it. Now, this is a question I always ask people who call themselves climate scientists, and I question that. Um Show me the evidence, because that's what you do in science. Show me the evidence. Show me. that the human emissions drive global warming. And if you can show me, then you've got to show me that the other emissions, which are natural, which are ninety seven percent of the emissions, don't drive global warming. It's never been done.

Right from the start. And it's keeping a lot of people employed in universities and in institutions and in government. Uh it's driven by bureaucrats who are green. We've had a forty year dumbing down or fifty year dumbing down of our education system and these people now give us the benefit of their knowledge as bureaucrats and as politicians. It's don't you find it remarkable that so many people have bought into this?

including very, very intelligent people. We interviewed Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson really believes in what you've been saying and how, you know, this is this global warming has been influenced and driven by man-made courses. You've used that word believe again, and belief is a religious phenomenon. And I think this is a new religion. We have in the West almost completely abandoned Christianity. But we have to have faith in something and this is the new religion.

And so an intelligent person like Boris Johnson might understand the classics, but he needs to go back a few more thousand years. But even if he did read the classics, he would know that in the time of Jesus it was warmer than now. Uh then in the Viking times it was cooler than now. Then in the medieval times it was warmer than now. And then uh in the Middle Ages we had

uh uh the Little Ice Age. It was considerably colder than now and we've warmed up since the Little Ice Age. Well, no, what a surprise. So I I think this is this is the new religion and this has turned out to be blind, unreasoning faith. Because there was at one point I think it was in the nineteen seventies where the great W how shall we say you know, the great worry was it was global cooling. Yes, of course. Um science operates on frightening people if you want a research grant.

So uh I once served on the Australian Research Council, I also served on the German Research Council and the Swedish Research Council, but in Australia We were instructed by the minister to give money, grant monies to people who were fighting the war on on camp. And if you could demonstrate that there was a relationship between ingrown toenails and cancer, um, you would get funded. Now, uh, you will get funded if you can put climate change into your research grant application.

So it is the new religion. It's been embraced with fervor. And it's gonna cost us very, very dearly. The and the thing that I always found weird, because look, I'm not a scientist. I I follow this stuff, but nowhere in the detail that obviously you do as a scientist or other people. But one of the things that I found strange was embracing of Greta Thunberg. and she was seen as the front person for this particular movement and at the time she was 15 years old.

And at that time I was a school teacher and I was thinking to myself, why are we letting a school kid be the forefront of a global movement? It's it's weird. Well, she wasn't a school kid, she didn't go to school. Um And this again we we see uh in religion, in Christianity, young women. often appear a as a uh something on the horizon. We don't question it. We just admire it and view it from distance. She couldn't answer a single question you put to her.

She's absolutely pig ignorant because she didn't go to school. And our education system now has dumbed down people where they've lost the ability to think critically. We don't ask questions. And if you ask questions, you get banned, you get thrown out. So I think this this is a perfect. scam to run with an ill educated society that's given up the basis of Western civilization and that's Christianity. And it's also believing as well that it's...

It's very anti human. That's the thing the other thing about it. I remember talking to a neighbour of mine and uh he's a he's an old boy and he's got a few kids. Careful. He wasn't in his prime like you are in. And uh He he was talking about one of his sons and he said that he didn't want to have children. I was Oh, okay, is it a lifestyle choice?

And he just went, no, no, um, he's really worried about the climate. And so they don't want to bring children into a world where they feel that the world is going to end. And I just thought that's unbelievably tragic.

Well, think of previous generations. If you were in nineteen sixteen living in this country, you would ask the same question. I mean, should I have children? If you were nineteen forty two in this country, if y you would ask the same question. I can remember as a young man, um we were worried about having children because of the impending nuclear holocaust that we're going to have. So I think every generation goes through this and every generation survives it.

And I think people are a little bit too sensitive and they're not really thinking. Other generations have had this in the past. Can you think of being in Ireland in eighteen forty four with the potato famine? People had children.

So uh I I think it's an irrational uh way of thinking. Well, c let let's come back to the science a little bit. Can you give us I I I think one of the interesting things whenever we talk to someone like you is you operate on a timescale that the overwhelming majority of people have no way of even conceptualizing in their head, which is millions of years, hundreds of millions.

And I do you think that's part of the reason we're here? In the sense that I I often think like if people saw the entire history of global temperatures. And saw where we are on it, they would ask a lot more questions than anyone's been asking. But if you only look at the last fifty years,

then a story can be told that's much more persuasive about how it's all doom and gloom. Well I think that's exactly right. People don't understand the past. They don't want to know about the past. They don't learn about the past, so they can't ask the right questions. And that's why we geologists are never regarded seriously uh when it comes to climate change, because uh the same processes that operated a hundred years ago or a billion years ago, they're still here.

Um, you have to change the laws of physics and chemistry. Uh, if you're going to say, Well, the geology's wrong, it doesn't work. So when we look in the past, we look at the six great ice ages, we look at the five great extinctions of of complex life. Um, but we c we also integrate that with history. We integrate it with um what has been lived. So I used the example before, um, when someone might say, Oh, you know, this is the hottest time we've had ever

You say, well, no. Um we've cooled down since the time of Jesus. It was much hotter then. It was much hotter um in the medieval times. It was much hotter in the nineteen thirties. So how far do you want to go back? You don't have to go back very far to show that we're not living in our usual times. We are actually living in an ice age because we've got polar ice. Uh ice is a rare rock.

uh for less than twenty percent of time we've had ice on earth. So we're living in an unusual time, but when you look at the temperature over time, and you don't need to go back very far. Uh the temperature doesn't change

uh very much at all in our lifetime compared p compared with the past. So we had a period after um the last uh glaciation which ended fourteen thousand four hundred years ago, where the ice sheets broke up and dropped dropped huge amounts of ice into the Atlantic Ocean, we suddenly became cool, and this is a period called the Younger Dry. And we had temperature drops that were very, very large, like ten and fifteen degrees Celsius drops. And it took about 10 years.

to have a fifteen degree Celsius rise after the younger dryers. Now that's global warming. What happened in the younger dryer? We actually huddled into villages, we fortified those villages, we invented animal husbandry, we invented for survival, we invented agriculture. uh, where we collected grass seeds and actually uh m uh grew them. We've got extremely good evidence of that. So in these times of hardship, we humans thrive.

And once it became warm and history shows us this, then we get uh the populations expanding, we have less war, uh the economy thrives. For example, in the medieval warming, Europe had two harvests a year. That gave an enormous amount of wealth. That wealth was spent on the universities, the cathedrals, the monasteries. Uh we see evidence. You've only got to travel through Europe and see this. So over time we can see that temperature has changed a lot. Now, we also have cycles of climate.

The geological cycles are every four hundred million years and that's when we pull apart or stitch back together the continent. It's the position of the continents that really does drive your climate. Really? Can you explain the mechanics of that? Well, it's it's plate tectonics. It's pulling apart and you have fractures going deep into the earth. These fractures leak out molten rock, which has to cool down.

And the leak out carbon dioxide. We've got that process happening right now in the mid ocean ridges. We have about seventy thousand kilometers of mid ocean ridges. We're leaking out carbon dioxide out of the basalts there. We have about three point four million old volcanoes on the ocean floor that we've been able to measure.

Uh, we know that there's a volcanologist will give us a very strong correlation between a swarm of earthquakes, which means molten rock is rising and degassing and putting carbon dioxide into seawater. It doesn't bubble up because it dissolves. And when that carbon dioxide is a basalt. lava or volcano erupts on the sea floor.

Then you have to cool it down. You'd cool it down with seawater. And one cubic kilometer of molten basalt is at um at twelve hundred degrees Celsius. If you cool that, that's enough energy for 30 hurricanes. So there's this. thought in the volcanological area that maybe El Nino's are related to the movement of molten rock beneath the ocean. and that that's got to be cooled down and that gives you warm water above.

So we've got this four hundred million year cycle. It's currently in process and we can see it happening right now in Antarctica. The ice sheets in West Antarctica have a hundred and fifty geothermal areas and volcanoes underneath the ice. That's because we're pulling apart Antarctica. Once we pulled it apart, we'll completely change the ocean current.

Uh Antarctica is currently isolated. Warm tropical water can't get to it. We have a circumpolar current and it freezes. Once we break up Antarctica currents will be able to move and we will go back to the normal situation that planet Earth has been in, where it's been warmer and it's been wetter and sea level's been about two hundred meters higher.

We've got extremely good evidence of that, um, time and time again over the past. So these four hundred million year cycles, um it's it's not quite four hundred million years, it varies a little bit, but these are tectonic cycles. We've got galactic cycles where every hundred and forty-three million years we've got a bad address in the galaxy and we get cold.

Uh we've got orbital cycles, these Milankovic cycles, which um gets spoken about a lot and that uh their cycles on about a hundred thousand years, forty thousand years and twenty thousand years and that changes the distance we are from the sun. And then we've got uh solar cycles and there we've got some long ones around ten thousand years and we've just come out of a grand solar maximum. Uh we've got cycles about two hundred and um seventeen years.

uh sorry, fifteen hundred years uh and the twenty-two year cycle, which has been known for hundreds of years.

Uh we've got um lunar tidal cycles where we push warm water up into the Arctic. From the moon, and that's if you're 18.6 years. And so uh that combined with the ocean cycles, which are every 600 years. uh sorry, every sixty years you can then plot uh the exploration of the North West Passage and it's every sixty years. You can see that it's warmer and people can get through. They got through in wooden baits. So we've got these oceanic cycles and just recently there's been a cycle which

I I want to see more evidence, but there's a suggestion there might be a Martian cycle every two point four million years. So we've got solar cycles, orbital cycles, galactic cycles, tectonic cycles. And all of that is being reduced to saying traces of trace gas in the atmosphere drive a major planetary system. Pull the other one. It's got bells on it. How much of this is about hubris in? Because the way I see it is a thousand years ago, fourteen thousand years ago.

It gets colder. We look around, we go, it's getting colder. We need to adjust. We need to huddle in the villages. We need to do this. We need to do that. We need because we know we can't change what's happening. But now... We've become so technologically sophisticated, we're so advanced, we're so competent at solving problems. that we almost I think are pre-wired to think that every problem that exists as A has been caused by us. and B must be solved as opposed to a adjusted to.

How much of it is simply about the fact that human beings in line with increasing technological advancement have become very, very arrogant about that. Well, I think you're absolutely right. Uh we if we had another uh inevitable glaciation We could solve it technologically. Uh already in parts of the world where it's triple glazing, uh we could solve it, uh as long as we've got energy uh that can can keep us warm and as long as we've got international trade to bring food uh from warmer climate.

Um but we saw that in the past, in the the peak of the Little Ice Age. we had the mourn the minimum. And that very cold period was obviously due to sinful humans. And it was deemed that the witches were making the harvests fail. And so witches were rounded up and witches were drowned.

And after they stopped drowning the witches, we came out of the Mauna Minimum and it warmed up. Problem solved. Problem solved. Ev evidence was. It was it was the witches doing it. So we've been doing this for a long while. And uh we we seem to think we're top of the pile. We're not. Ninety percent of our cells by number are bacteria.

Fifteen percent of our weight is bacteria. If you want to die, a good bacterial infection will do it. The dominant life form on Earth are not whales, they're not trees, they're bacteria. And most of them are beneath your feet for the top four kilometers in the crust. So we we tend to think we're pretty important. We're not.

And it's also the thing that I resent is I don't mind I don't mind having conversations about climate science, climate change, but but talking to different people who've got different views. Fine. What I hate is this culture of fear that I now see in the media where if it's a bit cold, they say extreme weather. You're like, mate, it's a bit of sleep. What's going on?

Or what you get on the other side of it is this phrase that always is used now since records began. This is the hottest weather since records began. And just going by what you say, you go, well, the records haven't been around that long, have they? Well, two things. Um the records haven't been around that long, and the temperature record is a contaminated record. Uh these uh have a cluster of measurements in the UK, Europe and the US.

Uh these uh were many of them were in rural areas, which are now in cities and suburbs, and so you have the urban heat eff island effect, and these figures are changed. So the primary data has changed. And often you see that in a rural area when it's been changed it gives a warming trend. So I think the data's contaminated and a number of people have commented on that, including people at type climate institutes like your Phil Jones. You've got to be very careful of the record.

Um there are other records you can get from tree rings, from the ice cores, and they tell us a different story. Uh a geological record tells an even um more exciting story. So for ice cores, the original ice cores that were drilled used volcanic eruptions and dated the the ash and the acid in those cores. Then you could work out the rate of ice deposition.

And then with that, as snow falls and is compressed into ice, it traps little bits of air and you can extract that air and measure the amount of carbon dioxide. You can also from chemical fingerprints in the ice, you can work out at what temperature it formed. So then you get a correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature and time.

And that showed a perfect relationship. You could see these Milankovic cycles, you can see the three cycles and you could see that carbon dioxide followed exactly uh the temperature. But with more detailed sampling, a totally different story came out. And the story was that you will get a period of natural warming and some six hundred to sixteen hundred years later

you get an increase in carbon dioxide. Now we've known that from chemistry for two hundred years. Uh you know it if you want to sit down with a a carbonated drink, like a champagne or a beer or a soft drink. Uh commit a sin. Don't drink it. Just watch it. And as it warms up it keeps bubbling out carbon dioxide.

That's what happens to the oceans. So you warm the the atmosphere and later the oceans will release carbon dioxide. So we know that from chemistry, we know it from looking at our soft drinks, we know it from the ice cores. That's an absolutely totally different story to what we're told, simply because it doesn't follow the popular paradigm.

And what's really interesting now actually is that you're seeing a number of big name people who pushed this narrative who are now starting to roll back on it. Case in point, Bill Gates. Well, that science works like that. Uh I Um, I mentioned Broken Hill earlier. I had published probably sixty or eighty papers on Broken Hill. There was a new mineral found some fifteen years ago b by some scientists at Broken Hill. They named it after me because of my work on Broken Hill.

And I am the authority on Broken Hill and I published a sequence of papers and then when I went back and looked at the data and looked at new data I thought, Wait a minute, I don't think I'm right here. And so I went back and um it spent me years to g it spent years to go back and look at this data and get new data and I published a paper criticising all of my earlier work, saying I was wrong.

that this is a better interpretation. Now that's the way science works. Um you might come to a conclusion, but it's only tentative.

And with more data, more thinking, more calculation, you'll come to a different answer. Now, Bill Gates is clearly thinking that economically that this is nonsense, uh, with the amount of energy that he needs for AI. But many scientists are doing this in their life when they get a little bit on in life, they they will change their views on many things. It's based on thinking and it's based on new data. Or it might be based on the fact that they're no longer employed by an institute.

Um and many people have left these climate institutes. You'll hear their real view. Well here's where I'll permit myself to disagree with you though, Ian, because I think what Francis' point is when Tony Blair and and Bill Gates and others row back on their previous advocacy for dealing with climate change through net zero. That's not a scientist changing his mind having looked at different view. It's partly an economic view. I also think partly it's a political and cultural view.

because you are A seeing results in the real world, which is increased populism, because energy m being expensive ruins economies and when economies are ruined, people get upset and that has political ramifications. But I think it's also about I the conversation around net zero has shifted dramatically in the Western world in the last two or three years. And a lot of people are now coming out and being critical of it for political reasons. They essentially sense which way the wind is blowing.

I think there's a lot of that going on as well, wouldn't you agree? Yeah, I do too, especially uh in Germany. I think there's been a very significant change there. And that's that's very much political, but it's also driven by the cost of energy. And the cost of energy now is crippling. In this country people have to make a decision whether they have a hot bath

Whether they have a hot meal or whether they put on the heating. Now, for a a first world country, that's just impossible. That shouldn't happen. So and people are starting to wake up, these people also vote. And they're and and this is why someone who might be uh pushing a different agenda um gets attracted.

And the thing that I find particularly worrying is what you're talking about is how there is an institutional capture in these scientific institutes. And you're thinking to yourself, well, that is really dangerous because if we can't trust what's coming out of the scientific institutions, then that ultimately is not just going to undermine people's faith in climate science.

They're gonna go, well if I can't trust this, how can I trust this? How can I trust that? How can I trust medicine? Vaccines, whatever else it is, because they're lying about this, so why wouldn't they lie be lying about that? I think it was wo because it was politicized. And the politicians jumped on the bandwagon, uh, and the so called climate scientists um could see that there was a pot of money here.

to keep their institute going, to have research grants, to to run and go to conferences. And so once science is politicized, that's the end result. It's very dangerous. Uh other sciences are not as politicized and certainly my science i it it is not politicized at all. And I I think that's the end result. Once you politicize it, once uh politicians are talking about climate change.

Uh you've only got to ask them a simple question, you know they they don't know what they're talking about. So polilos politicizing science is dangerous. Politicizing um uh um various Aspects of science which may or may not be important for, say, defense or medicine, terribly dangerous. And we're talking about the politicization of science, and look. I I never thought of science as being something that was inherently political until relatively recently until

what we're talking about now, the climate uh the climate science. Has it always been political or is that something new that's come in? No, it's quite new. It's um Uh and I've been uh working as a scientist since nineteen sixty eight. Uh I think it's it's come in from the nineties. And there's a pot of money out there. And scientists are got the same weaknesses as everyone else. If there's a pot of money they'll they'll try to grab it.

and virtually every university has a climate institute. Uh and I think they they they don't ask the simple question, well, whatever we do can't change the global climate. Why are we doing it? And it's also as well, you have to be fair to scientists and go look. If their research isn't going to get public

Or if it's going to negatively affect their career, then why would they publish research? People only respond to incentives. Cli scientists, however smart or brilliant they might be, are still human beings. That's exactly right. Um so it it's all about the money. And so many universities now have climate institutes because that's where the money is. Uh so many people are getting whacking big research grants because governments um don't want to be accused of ignoring climate.

Well, uh that being the case, I think it'd be interesting to talk about you mentioned that we are likely to revert to the mean, which is warmer wetter, as I think you said, and you said a third thing as well, warmer, wetter and something else. higher sea warmer, wet and higher sea levels, which I would argue, based on my very rudimentary understanding of just human society as it is today, given the number of people living on the planet, those things will be disruptive.

And if they are inevitable, all that money that we've been spending trying to stop the inevitable change in climate and sea levels ought to be being spent on making adjustments to the way we live and creating all sorts of you know, the sorts of things they do in Holland to manage sea levels to protect towns and cities.

One of the things that's really the tragedy here is there's been a huge misallocation of resources that has impoverished Western countries at the same time as leaving them vulnerable to the very thing that they are trying to prevent but can't. Yes, very much so. Uh natural processes are fairly slow. In the case of Holland they've been doing it for a thousand years.

Uh that is because of the land sinking. Uh South Eastern England is sinking. Uh Scotland is rising, both politically and physically. Um this is a normal process. Uh in Scandinavia it was once covered by five kilometers of ice. That pushed down the rock. Uh that ice is gone. Scandinavia is rising. We've got old survey records going back centuries.

Uh we've got old beaches in uh Norway that are three hundred and forty meters above sea level. So we know the land goes up and down. It'd go to the biblical town of Ephesus. Uh that was a port. It's inland and above sea level. Uh a little bit further south go to Lydia. That's where gold coins were first made and first minted. I've been to Lydia, down the main street, in a yacht.

So the land level's going up and down all the time and we humans have adjusted to that. Well uh I w I took my mum uh the other day to Pavansey Castle, which is just down the road from London, uh on the south coast. You and they d you go to one of the towers and they say this was you know, this is where they would defend themselves from the sea.

You can't see the sea'cause it's now seven miles inland or two I can't remember how many miles, but you can't even remotely even imagine the sea being there because it's so far away. So these processes are natural. But what I'm asking you in is I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realizing we can't stop climate change'cause we're not causing it.

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Ving firar 70 år av resor som är svåra att släppa taget om. Och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Boka redan nu på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först. I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realizing we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it. So what is it that we need to do to ensure humans are thriving on the planet?

Adapt. We've always done it. And there's never been a problem. We do know that when it's colder, you have more wars, you have more disease, and you had more people die. Um we have people um have a decreased longevity in cold periods of time. So we've always known this. And when we look at death, There's been a survey done, a medical survey of thirty four million deaths uh um related to climate.

And more than ninety percent of people, um, if they have a climate related death, is due to the cold, not the warm. So we are already adapting and that's the one thing we humans can do. We can adapt and adapt very, very quickly. Um a rising sea level, it it's it's not overnight. Uh the one geological process that would be difficult to adapt to very quickly would be an asteroid impact. And the chances of that decrease all the time a as the solar system settles down even more.

Um, but we can adapt. These things don't happen overnight. They take time. Climate change doesn't occur uh between Thursday and Saturday. It it takes a very long period of time. And uh humans have adapted before. We'll do it again and probably be much better because we're a technological uh species now.

One of the things that I found concerning about the whole climate change debate is we know that humans have a very real impact on the world. And they have a very detrimental impact when we think about ecology, when we think about sea life, when we think about animal life. But we don't tend to talk about that anymore, Ian, because the moment we talk about humans' impact on the world, we talk about climate change.

When actually there's so many more import important or just as important things that we need to talk about and address, like pollution, microplastics, etc. Well we've got the eight major rivers that are putting plastics into the ocean. We've got the oceans with a large amount of micro plastics.

We have changed climate, it's say Mount Kilimanjaro. By forest clearing, we've had less precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro. Um that that's fairly well established. But Uh we are probably in the Western world polluting less than we did two hundred years ago.

Um, and that's because we're wealthy. But you go to parts of the third world, it's just disgusting how dirty it is and how dangerous it is. They are the real problems. And what I find difficult to understand is that to solve the world's climate crisis, whatever that is, is we are knocking down forests to put in wind turbine. These wind turbine blades have poisonous chemicals in them, they've got asbestos in them, uh, and we are cutting swathes of forest.

Killing off wildlife, doing the same with offshore wind turbines, to save the planet. It's a bit like in in Vietnam. You know, we had to destroy the village to save it. Yeah, i it just doesn't make sense because when I hear scientists talking about this, we should be talking about other things like Species extinction. And also, as well, you go, the whole thing doesn't make sense because we're so interested in essentially de-industrializing.

Yeah, it seems every w I think it's every week uh China opens two new coal power stations. You go none of this actually seems to make any type of logical sense. No, well it doesn't. Um but the these are the cold hard facts and China's using Australian coal in these power stations. Yet i in my country we we've got thousands of use of coal there. We're trying to ban the use of coal to generate electricity for ourselves.

uh which is cheap and reliable, uh yet we're very happy to sell it to China and buy back their value added products. So uh we're killing off very large areas of prime agricultural land putting in solar panels. And these are contaminating the ground, these are destroying good farmland. And again, we buy these from China that have been made with our coal. And we buy them at at an elevated price. So I think the world's going through one of its periods of going mad. But

I think and we we've touched on it before, we are starting to see common sense start to come to the fore. Is that true in the scientific community or is it still very much captured, do you think? Follow the money. Um the money hasn't dried up in the scientific community. If uh a government decided that we would like to spend a lot of money on research on the next inevitable glaciation.

And cycles of climate and what can we expect, uh, you'd immediately find a stampede in the other direction for people to get funded for their research. looking at the a potential glaciation. So um I don't think science is changing it because the money's still there, but I think the community's changing because it's burning their pockets.

I I'm sure you've had this question before, but i in very much in that spirit. You're obviously someone who's worked in the mining industry. Some people will say your belief. are driven by you said yourself, follow the money. This is a convenient belief for you to have given that this is the industry you've worked in all your life. Uh uh what what do you say to that?

Well, there are a number of CEOs of major mining companies who are very green. and who are going down the path of um having electric vehicles, uh having uh a greenwashed uh operation. Uh, in my case, my views uh arose well before I was in the mining industry and um they will change depending upon the data. uh the mining industry, especially the petroleum industry, uh understands climate change very well because uh they constructed

probably fifty years ago, a sequence of sea level curves based on climate, based on sediments, and uh um this is a guide as to where to find oil, it's where to find coal, where to find gas. So we practically apply uh everything I've been saying about sea levels and about carbon dioxide to look for oil. I'm I'm not a petroleum geologist, but to look for oil and gas.

So uh I'm fortunate uh in the position I have now where I have more freedom than I ever had when I was in uh the academic world. Far more freedom. I can basically say what I think. Hm. Yeah, and it's interesting. I remember uh I've always had questions about this because there were there's just things about the whole climate narrative never made entire sense to me. So I remember would have been

Probably twenty five, thirty years ago. Uh my my my grandfather was a scientist, and he had many friends who were scientists. I remember talking to somebody.

one of his friends and I asked him, Well, w what what about this climate thing? You know, is it is it really the consensus? And he said, there are a lot of scientists who who who think this is happening for this reason. But he said the people that are dissenters make me question because they are usually the most brilliant and uh talented ones who are but they have to take a risk to speak out.

And it it it does sound to me based on what you're saying and other people we've spoken to that the things that you're saying are just quite hard to say in the social context. And if people have watched this interview or listened to this interview and gone, well, you know, this is a bit out there, climate denier, or of all this other stuff.

I just go back to the point Francis made earlier. Well, you know, they've they've s scientists or some scientists have been running around for years now saying if you say that your name is Stacy, you become a woman. Right. That that's been the thing that we've all been told to believe. And and there's lots of other examples I could give. So this idea of groups of people, you know, our friend Douglas Murray, the madness of crowds, groups of people going crazy.

I mean it's a pretty common thing actually in the district. I think it is. Well, my first book on climate change, Heaven and Earth, came out while I was a chair at the University of Adelaide. uh created a storm because no one had dared to do that. And I integrated history, archaeology, and geology. I looked at previous agriculture that was might have been done in the north of England. I looked at um Stone Age societies and um how they adapted to climate.

I tried to to cover the whole spectrum. I had about three and a half thousand scientific references in that book. I published that while I was in a university and uh it wasn't like I I guess it's if you're crazy or if you're skeptical about everything, which you should be as a scientist, you should be skeptical about everything, then uh I'm being quite consistent. But I also had in the same building where I was in Adelaide a climate institute. And they were very generously funded.

Uh compared with my department where people actually went in and became a productive member of society. Uh all of their uh graduates ended up working in another climate institute. I don't see that's being productive for society. And Ian, when we talk about climate, we also talk about green technology.

And the people will say, you know, these are you know, they're doing very well, you know, they're gonna be able to replace certain technologies that we have. Where do you stand on green technologies? Are there some that are actually good and you think will make a positive impact?

Are there some that are just not there or are there and are there others that you go, look, this is a busted flush. We need to stop funding this? Well, I I think with all new technologies, you've got to actually fund it to a point where you can say, I don't think this is gonna work. And I think it's it's been wonderful. Um to stimulate green technologies. I'm yet to see any green technology

that makes processes more efficient and more cost effective, but that doesn't mean you stop trying them. And I think this green transition is going down in i the inevitable path where Western countries will have no more nuclear power.

Uh that that's that's the transition. It's not a transition away from coal because the annual consumption of coal keeps increasing. Uh and it has been doing that uh for about a hundred and twenty years. So uh what it's pushing us towards is looking at nuclear fusion even more, looking at other nuclear processes. There are some nuclear processes floating around where

Um the cooling systems are very different, um using, say, liquid sodium are very different from water cooled systems. I I think it's uh edging towards a technology boom where we will be changing uh the use of energy because Every time you turn on a switch, you're using energy. The amount of energy we humans are using individually is increasing enormously. Uh it has to be cheap. Unless it's cheap, you cannot run an industrial society. To de industrialize a society

uh with expensive energy is not very sensible. So I th I think to have a green revolution is wonderful because ultimately the market says, no, th this is a busted flush. It's not gonna work. And why is it that we don't talk about nuclear energy more? Why is it that when I read in the newspapers we're talking about nuclear power plants being actually shut down? Is it because we see if of uh uh Fukuyama And we get worried about

like a disaster like that. Fukushima. Francis Fukuyama has made a lot of mistakes. But but having a nuclear meltdown isn't one of them. Well, y you could say the end of history was a nuclear meltdown. But yeah, I agree. So Fukushima Or is it just a hangover from, you know, the Cold War where we a h entire generation thought we were gonna die in a nuclear war?

Well, I I think it's very complicated. It's easy to frighten people with nuclear because you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it. And if you've got a reactor near your house, uh you think, Oh, uh I'm I'm it's gonna blow up. Well

Some reactors, it's impossible for them to blow up. The second thing is I think there's been an enormous amount of disinformation as part of Cold War tactics. Uh and that continues. The third thing is um that nuclear power countries like France. went to nuclear power because there was a crisis and that was the oil crisis and now they they are flush with cheap energy, which is nuclear.

So I think it's very easy to scare people with nuclear. I think there's been quite a a a process uh that has been going on since Cold War times using Cold War tactics. Uh it's clearly um not the only thing what the sh we should be having for energy. We should have an energy mix uh for all the right reasons.

Uh and I think nuclear obviously will come when there's an energy crisis. That's how France got uh into b being a nuclear country. And there's tiny countries like Slovenia, three mil three million people. It's nuclear power. So why can't big countries do the same? Yeah, it's been great having you on. We're gonna head over to uh Substack where our audience will get to ask you their questions. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

I think we're not talking about enough about the unstitching of Western society, uh, the attacks on our culture. and the breakdown of a s um society and processes that took thousands of years to build. And that is underpinned by in many ways Christianity is underpinned by some of the things we've been talking about, the scientific method. Now I just don't think we're talking about how to think, how to think critically, uh, how to use our history to enrich the future.

Well, we do that on the show as much as we possibly can. Thanks for coming on and and talking to us. Head on over to triggerpod dot co dot uk where you get to ask Ian your questions. What role do you see advanced technologies like AI driven modelling playing in reshaping the climate debate? Especially when geological data spans millions of years. Här hör vi hjärtslagen. Vi finns här när du vill räkna på bolån. För allt.