Heartland Daily Podcast

That's right, Greta. It is Friday, the best day of the week because it's the Heartland Institute broadcast the Climate Realism Show on Fridays. I'm Anthony Watts, senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. I am the show host today. Jim Lakeley is off, and, you know, we're gonna have a lot of fun today.

The Climate Realism Show is like nothing streaming anywhere, so I hope that you, I would like to share, subscribe, and leave your comments. And we have a comment section that you can interact with, and we're looking for your comments as well as your questions at the end of the show. And, of course, the powers that be don't really like us all that much. And so, if you do more comments and things like that, these all can convince YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this program and to get the show in front of more people. And a reminder, because big tech and the legacy media did not approve of the way we cover climate and energy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized.

So if you wanna support the program, please visit heartland.org/tcrs for the climate realism show. Heartland.org/tcrs, and help us keep making this show happen any week every week. Any support you got, we'd appreciate. Next, we wanna thank our streaming partners, junk science.com, CFAAC, Climate Depot, and, of course, my website, what's up with that dot com, the most influential climate website in the world. Today, we have with us, h Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur b Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute, and Linnea Lukin, research fellow for Energy and Environment Policy at Heartland.

Welcome, guys.

Good to be here again. Another week. Another exciting show.

Yep. I've got one more week of me having some this is the last Friday where I'll have my Halloween decorations, and then they will be gone. So enjoy them.

That's cool. So were any of your Halloween decorations, Trump related and then destroyed by angry people?

No. See, I I have a I have a thing about political Halloween decorations. I actually don't like them. I like Oh. How it's fun.

Politics is fun, but I don't want I I don't want my yard decorations to polarize anyone except for people who

Makes sense.

Don't like scary yard decorations. They can go someplace else.

But,

And my my Halloween decorations are a 100% like hers, apolitical. Halloween, to me, is about one very specific thing, monsters. And, though I may I may consider some politicians monsters. I may consider some politicians monsters. They're not the kind of monsters that, we we, should be talking about on Halloween.

Yeah. Well, you know, we can't have a climate crisis without some monsters. So I'm I I I will say I

I'm not I'm not quite as ambitious as, Linnea there. My Halloween decorations, they will come down, but I I can't promise they'll all be down by next Friday.

Yeah. Well It

took me dead. It this weekend.

They'll be gone.

Mine went mine went up over the course of, a week and a half, and they'll probably come down over the course of the same week and a half.

Alright. Well, be safe taking those down. Stay off the ladders.

Yeah. No.

Alright. So we're gonna start our favorite feature, at least my favorite feature, the crazy climate news of the week. Hit it, Andy. I get such a kick out of watching that thing. Hilarious.

Bill Nye, he he's personifies climate crazy. Alright. So first, an article from Newsbreak in the UK. You don't wanna waste time on climate change, TV weather's big problem with the environmental crisis. Well, you know, as a former television meteorologist myself spending over 25 years on air on television and another 10 or so on radio, I can tell you that we have a limited amount of time to present these things, and this article is actually hitting home to something that's factually correct because people that are watching a television weather program, they really do not want to have climate change shoved in their face.

They wanna know what the weather's gonna be tomorrow and for the weekend so that they can plan. They don't give a, insert your own expletive here, about climate change. They wanna know the here and now of weather. You know? It's a classic case of weather should not be climate.

So, you know, the problem that we've got here in the United States is that there is an organization, that's called climate central.com, operated, by a former, weather channel meteorologist, Heidi Cullen, and they are out pushing climate stuff to the television meteorologist and weather casters on a regular basis. And so, there has been some of this happening in the United States, but there's also been some blowback. Last year, you may recall, there was a television meteorologist. I believe he was in Iowa who basically said, I'm done. People are too mean to me because I've been talking about climate.

Well, there you go. What do you think, guys?

Can't take the heat. Get out of the kitchen, I guess.

Good point.

Sounds about right.

My, you know, my my take on it is is just what yours is. Anthony, look, I when I go on my, phone to check the weather, I don't wanna hear about climate. I wanna know what's the temperature, what are the wind speeds, is rain or some other inclement weather likely, are there tornado warnings, you know, what's going on today? That's who I that's what I go to the weather person for. What's going on now, what's likely go on this week so I can make plans, so I can warn my relatives who don't live near me if if inclement weather's coming their way.

But what I don't want a weatherman, or meteorologist, weather woman, to to talk about or to tell me about is what might happen 50 a 100 years from now, because guess what? Even as good as weather forecast have gotten, as far as I can tell, they're wrong for, say, 2 days ahead, about 50 period of the time, and the farther out you go, they're wrong an even greater than amount. Right. So for them to pretend, because they've been fed some information from Heidi or other climate central, meteorologists who are climate focused, they're not weather focused anymore, that they can't get your weather right in the near term, but we can get it right 50 years from now, we can tell you what it's gonna be like a 100 years from now. Stupid.

And so I don't wanna hear it. Tell me what I essentially need to know to live my life today, and, when my grand nephews are old enough to worry about the weather, then tell them what weather is going to be coming for them that week and that day.

Yep. Yeah. The way I approached it when I was on the air, and I actually did some climate programs when I was on the air, is I made it separate from the weather cast. I would actually go out and shoot a video segment just like a regular news segment and talk about things. I did one on Urban Heat Island early on.

And so, you know, I remember the ending of that. I said it was it's not the atmosphere. It's the asphalt. And, people actually really liked that because it was separated from whether they needed to know. So this guy in the UK, writing about this, he's spot on.

Don't mix weather and climate in your local news. Alright. Let's go on to the next one. Biden's climate splurge. Oh my goodness.

This is just, wowsers. So, basically, what's happened is is that they've thrown out, to paraphrase Carl Sagan, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000 of dollars, to these private climate advocacy groups. You know? Meanwhile, we're having to beg for scraps here on the TCRS for a donation because, you know, our big oil checks have not arrived yet. But it it's just the usual projection of part of the left.

They are accusing us of exactly what they're getting, 1,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000. And so these advocacy groups, they're out pushing all kinds of policy stuff. Sterling, you've had a lot of experience with these advocacy groups. What's the what's the deal with them? What are

they Well, do? I was actually interviewed for a story on this. May have been this story, though I don't think I was quoted in one story. But I was interviewed at length for about 30 minutes about, this big push. So many of these groups actually, I don't have experience with many of these groups because they're new.

They were formed specifically to get 1,000,000,000 of federal dollars. There's no evidence that they have any kind of transparency or tracking for how these billions will be spent. There are no requirements from the federal government that they track it or because, you know, Biden, Kamala might not be here in a short time. And, basically, you've given 1,000,000,000 of dollars to newbies who have no track record, for spending 100 of 1,000 of dollars, much less 1,000,000,000 of dollars. A couple of these groups had, you know, you look at their their past because some of them have been around for a little bit longer, but you look at their past and it's like, what was their, you know, how many staff did they have last year?

2. What was their income? About 10, $12,000. Suddenly, they have 1,000,000,000? And to pretend, if you if you look at, how climate spending goes, that much of this money won't be spent aggrandizing themselves, by which I mean.

So are you going to just ship money to poor you you previously served poor communities trying to, help them find housing, help them, pay their electric and water bills, things like that. Right? Some of these groups are like that. So now you've got a few $1,000,000,000. Are you going to, once again, pass through most of that money to the people with housing, or are you going to have new offices?

How many staff are you going to hire and what are you going to pay them? You know, the point is, a lot of this money will be drained away just simply to, you know, how many conferences will you attend now, on housing and things like that? A lot of this money is not going to help the people that supposedly it's intended to help. It's not going to make communities more resilient to climate change. It was a big gift to buy votes, and these groups are probably out there right now saying, hey.

You gotta vote for Kamala because, you know, we're getting all this money to help you. She's the one that's taking care of you on the climate. It's just crazy. No accounting standard no accounting standards. No no, requirement that they,

Yeah. Yeah.

Report. I wanna read some of the part of the article from RealClear Investigations about, Biden's climate spurge. They say here, although there isn't much public information available about the Justice Climate Fund, whatever that is, it seems to have been an overnight excess success. After gaining nonprofit status in August 2023, the organization was awarded 940,000,000 by the Biden administration just 8 months later in connection with the White House's, $27,000,000,000 greenhouse gas reduction fund, which aims to provide financial assistance to reduce carbon emission and reduce pollution. The Justice Climate Fund is not the only nonprofit newcomer.

Suddenly, they get written. Within a month of gaining nonprofit status by the IRS, an outfit called PowerForward Communities, which reported 2023 revenues of $100, was suddenly awarded $2,000,000,000. Can you imagine?

Anyway Look. They are staffed by people who are friends of Biden and Kamala. They are staffed by insiders on climate. They are operate do you think it was do you think does anyone really think that it was coincidence they were founded when they did when this money was coming up?

Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm in the wrong business. I repent. Everything's true.

No.

Yeah. There's like I mean, jeez. These guys are the only guys that get to have government cheese. We never get any government cheese. You know what?

I'll even take I'll even take the, the government cheese that's literal cheese in the, like, secret government cheese caves that they have hidden away. This is I mean, talk about bias, though. Right? There. I don't think, you know, even if they don't want to support something like the Heartland Institute, I highly doubt that anyone's getting grants from the government who work anywhere near a even climate neutral or even lukewarmer position on this stuff, you know, and that would be halfway reasonable.

That's what I liked about the the previous Trump administration when they were talking about trying to get together that red team, blue team stuff so that they can actually fund both sides of the argument and see, you know, whose arguments and whose data comes out on top. But, of course, that's not the point. This is just a propaganda outlet. Our government right now is and probably for a long time, is not interested in getting to the truth. They are only interested in promoting, their policies.

You know, it's really if like we saw with COVID and stuff, it's not about the climate. You know, they're they're they're using climate as, like, a tool or as, like, a Trojan horse to bring in their, you know

Absolutely right.

You know, socialist and, you know, worse than socialist government policies. And they're they're like globalism and stuff, to use a fun buzzword. That's that's the real end goal. It really doesn't matter what vehicle they use to get there. So, yeah, that's

more me more immediately. You're right about the long term goals. But more immediately, this this money was granted when it was for a reason. It's a get out the vote. It's a get out the vote, for Democrats.

That's what this money is for. Why did it go to these or newly formed organizations, newly formed just before the election? They've had the money for 3 years now. Why were they newly formed just before the election? Why did they get 1,000,000,000 of dollars just before the election?

It's to get out the vote.

Yeah. You know, basically, the message is vote for us, and we will solve the climate crisis. That's it. That's it in a nutshell. As if you can actually, you know, legislate the climate to change.

The climate doesn't give a insert your own this expletive here about, you know, legislation. It just doesn't. Anyway It's

it's it's it's like, the big man or the, the the authoritarians in other countries, chicken in every pot. Well, 2 carbon credits in every pot. Get your get your new windows here. All you you know, vote for the right team, and you'll get new windows and insulation. Vote for the right team, and we'll get electric chargers in your neighborhood.

You can't afford the cars, but you'll have the chargers.

Right. Right. Okay. So let's move on. The next one, this one is from the the stupid it burns category.

This one is about climate change and sleep loss, believe it or not. You know, they'll blame climate change on anything or anything on climate change, I mean. So this this one here is just browsers. Okay. So I'm gonna read some parts of the article.

Climate change is driving sleep loss as nights get warmer. Rising temperatures, drought, heavy rainfall are increasingly impacting people's health according to a Lancet study. High nighttime temperatures led to 5% more hours of sleep loss worldwide over the past 5 years compared to the period between 1986,000 5, according to the latest edition of The Lancet study of climate and health. It marks the first time the prestigious medical journal has examined this metric. The 8th annual Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change report authored by, count them, 122 global experts found that high temperatures, drought, and heavy rainfall are increasingly impacting people's health and blah blah blah blah blah.

100 and 22 experts, and I suppose they've never heard of the urban heat island making cities warmer at night. I mean, the majority of population lives in cities. Right? And so the urban heat island effect, it's been known for decades, very clearly affects night more than anything. It is just amazing that they simply glazed over this and said, oh, it's climate change without paying any attention to the urban heat island.

Well I wanna

know what

other go ahead. Sorry.

Sure. I was I was kinda gonna make a joke again. Anthony, you know, the way to fix this is to ban air conditioning because it's a climate polluter. So that's how we're gonna fix this, by making it too expensive to run air conditioning.

Oh, well, let's, let's hope that doesn't come true.

My you you know, my question is this. When you do these studies, you generally have to rule out confounding factors like the urban heat on effect, but some other confounding factors that might, be impacting people's sleep cycles and how much sleep they get.

Well, I can think of 1.

That's what that that's what I was gonna say is how many people are sitting on their phone, either TikTok ing or checking data or, you know, doing whatever they do on their phone, communicating, watching video.

Or get woken up by the phone by some you know, forgetting to turn the notifications off.

Yeah. Or, you know, I I constantly hear these people talking about how climate change is making, you know, is disturbing psychology of people. Well, it's we've we've argued that it's climate fear. It's the alarmism. Well, maybe people are so frightened that they're not getting as much sleep.

They're taught they go to bed and they toss and turn and they think, oh my god. The world's coming to an end. Climate change is killing us all. There's nothing I can do about it, and they can't sleep. I I don't know, but my suspicion is there's a lot of factors that may go into, you know, if it's really the case that people are losing, you know, more sleep.

But, and I I I glanced over the study. I don't see how they ruled out the high variety of confounding factors that might have been doing that.

Yeah. I lose sleep over climate change, not the way they want they want you to, though.

Yeah.

I lose sleep thinking about, you know cover

a lot. But I gotta do tomorrow at work. Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah. It it's funny because, UHI is not just the United States phenomena. It is a global phenomena. I mean, you know, you could look at any city anywhere and find UHI in it leading to warmer temperatures overnight. I mean, it's all the way from Rajavik to New Delhi.

I mean, it's everywhere, and it is something that you can easily discern yourself if you have a thermometer in your automobile that measures the incoming air temperature, the outdoor air temperature. Go to the outskirts of the city, on a on a windless night, maybe in the summer, and drive, you know, a a transect north, south, or east, west along some road that tends to be fairly straight through the city. I did that several years ago in Reno, Nevada and found a tremendous UHI signature, so much so that one of the local TV stations picked up my report on what's up with that and ran it on their nightly news showing how the urban heat island is so huge. And and that's the problem that we've got with a lot of our climate change the urban heat island is so large so predominant so common that it is biasing up the, the climate signature. You know, the climate signature the climate change signature mainly is in the lower temperatures overnight.

And then the reason it goes up is because the asphalt, the concrete, all that stuff retains solar radiation and has the heat during the day and then releases it at night, keeping the low temperature overnight higher than what it normally would be without this stuff being present. And it's a real simple thing, and yet Noah just says, oh, well, we can algorithmically adjust for that, you know, blah blah blah. Well, they don't, and I've proven it. I've proven it through my surface station project where if you go examine the stations that have not been corrupted by UHI or local micro UHI effects, you know, like a piece of concrete being right next to the weather station. And look at those over the past 30 years.

The amount of warming is about half of what you normally get, from the whole climate signature, you know, the whole temperature signature of climate change. And so it it's once again, it goes back to the simplistic things that these folks refuse to acknowledge, and it goes back to the money. If Well if the money wasn't there, they'd look at this stuff and solve it.

I I asked them to put Ed's comment back up because that's something I didn't even mention. Look, we know something that people have been worried about. It's the top issue. It's the top issue in our election. But you know what?

Inflation's not just limited to the US. People are worried about being able to pay their bills. They're worried about whether their jobs will still be around. And, you know, that's a real worry. That's something that people have been known.

And it's become more and more of a concern during the Biden Harris administration with high inflation, with traditional jobs being shut down, with less, you know, people having to to work 2 3 jobs to pay the same bills they paid before, except they're not the same bills because the prices are going up and up and up. That's something that can keep you up at night.

Right. Right. So, we have a a website called climate ataglancedot com, and we have all kinds of facts on this where we talk about, you know, different aspects of climate change and the issues and the reality behind them. One of the things that we've been doing lately is having Linnea record these fantastic YouTube videos, and, they have been getting a lot of exposure. So I'd like to run one that Linnea has produced for UHI, if we can.

Andy?

This is Linnea Lukin from the Heartland Institute here with another Climate Fact Check. Today, we're going to look at something called the urban heat island effect, which often gets left out of the discussion when people are claiming temperatures are breaking records. The urban heat island effect has a big non climate related influence on official temperature measurements. Urban heat island is a term used to describe the influence that population centers like cities and suburbs have on local temperature. The temperature in cities is higher, sometimes much higher than in surrounding rural areas because of all that concrete, asphalt, and even air conditioner exhausts and the heat produced by machinery.

This is especially true for nighttime temperatures. During the day, concrete and asphalt are heated by the sun and they gradually release that heat well into the night, warming up the surrounding air and rising nighttime temperature well above the temperatures in grassy fields and other less developed areas. You can test this out for yourself simply by walking on asphalt barefoot on a summer evening and then stepping into sand or dirt. The pavement is hotter. This effect becomes a problem when the temperature stations used to record long term temperature trends are influenced by it.

Research has found that nearly 90% of US temperature stations are poorly sited, located in places where the urban heat island effect is a problem. For instance, many temperature stations are located in what used to be a grassy field, but over time, buildings and parking lots popped up around it, inflating or biasing the rate of warming recorded by the station. Some researchers have found urban heat islands are responsible for almost half of reported US warming. This isn't to say that there is no natural warming, but data show stations that are not corrupted by the urban heat island effect report much less warming than the biased or compromised stations. This isn't just a problem in America either.

Other parts of the world have similar sighting problems for their weather stations with devices located on airport tarmacs and other terrible spots for accurate readings. My challenge to you is next time the Local Weather channel reports a record breaking high temperature reading, check to see how many temperature stations in your area actually back that measurement up and where they're sited. Often, you'll find the official temperature for an entire area is recorded at an airport subject to a significant urban heat island effect. That's all I have for this fact check. For the sources used as reference for this video, you can check out climate at a glance.com where you can also download a free copy of the book Climate at a Glance for Teachers and Students.

If you prefer paper, you can purchase a hard copy on Amazon. We also have an app available called Climate at a Glance for Android and iPhone. Thanks for watching.

Well done, Monaia.

Yeah. And I have a quick comment I wanna make about, upcoming videos too because we're not done with these. We're not gonna we're probably not gonna get the same, like, professional studio, group together again for the next set of videos that we're going to do, but they're not stopping. We have more topics to cover. I'm just right now, we're in a, like, experimenting phase to try and produce the best product that we can for you guys.

So we will have more of these climate shorts coming up. We're just trying to figure out the best way to make them look as good as possible, so that you guys can have, some more nice clean videos to send around to friends and family. There you go.

Yeah. You know, and the left hates these things mainly because you make so much sense, and you do it in such a relaxed, factual way. You know? It causes their heads to catch fire.

Yeah. It's like that that one video I did a couple of years ago about Earth Day where I said, you know, to young people, like, you don't have to be worried that the world is coming to an end. It's not. It's gonna be okay. Here's the facts.

I got I still get comments popping up in my x feed of people going, like, apoplectic over that one. So that's that's that was very fun.

Embrace the doom. What's wrong with you? Alright. So here's our meme of the week. Things I'm concerned about.

Totalitarianism, or climate change. Well, that's kind of our viewpoint here. As, you know, Linnea pointed out earlier, climate change is a tool to initiate socialism and government control, and that's what we're really worried about. Right?

Polls reflect that. They're more concerned about politics and and the issues. Climate change comes in last or near last in every poll I've seen, and no one wants to spend no one wants to spend money on it. Even the people who are concerned about it said, how much will you how much are you willing to spend? Will you take $10 on your electric bill a month?

No. Will you pay 50¢ more for gas? No. It's it's it's it's a, you know, it's it's an existential threat, but I'm not gonna pay to prevent it. So that tells me they're not really that concerned about it.

Yep. It's, and so because we're not, you know, living correctly, the government decides to start pushing this stuff on us, and that's where the real friction starts. And, that leads us into our main topic, climate change policy, killing the American dream. Yeah. Rethinking homeownership.

This is, it's something that it's just a mind boggling thing to me. This is in the New York Times, and they're basically saying, well, because you own a home, that's bad for the planet. You know? You should just be a renter. And I wanna read some parts of the article for you, and some commentary ahead of it.

It seems that virtually every policy that is proposed about climate has some kind of catch to it, such as you have to reduce the amount of driving you're doing, or you have to buy an electric car, or you can't meet eat eat meat anymore because it's bad for the planet. Eat bugs instead. Or you can't fly out on vacation because that's bad for the planet. Now, of course, piling on to all this stuff, The New York Times says homeownership is not good for the planet, and therefore, you should just be a renter. And they're talking about things like insurance premium and property taxes as being driven partially by climate change.

And so, you know, it's the same kind of nonsense that we see time and again where climate change causes everything. No. They will attach climate change to anything they wanna push to make you believe. It's simply that simple. And so, for example, in one place, taxes have increased by 18% for single family homes since 2019.

Climate change doesn't act that fast, folks. Just absurd. What do you think about this, guys?

Well, can I ask you a question, Anthony? Because I'm I'm gonna admit, I didn't read this article. So I've got a question. You talk about taxes and insurance premiums, and I understand why insurance premiums are going up. Insurance companies wanna make a lot of money, and they wanna blame it on climate change, not themselves.

And, cities haven't been keeping up with infrastructure for decades, and so they wanna blame it all on climate change and then taxing pretty hard. But my question is, does it because, look, they also claim that having babies, you know, having children is bad for the climate, so you shouldn't have children. Now they're saying you shouldn't buy houses. My question is, are they also saying in this article, I don't know if they do, that single family homes put out more c you know, are responsible more c o two than, you know, the the brownstone.

Sterling, we've lost you. He he's stuck on the

oh, there we go. You're back. Music bleed through the walls, the sounds you know, basically, everyone living in dense urban environments and not having single family homes in the suburbs, do they do they attack that as well or not? Because that was my first thought when I saw the headline.

Yeah. Well, that's not that whole 15 minute cities concept that they're pushing. Everybody should be packed in close by, walk to everything, don't own a car, don't drive, you know, bicycle or walk or whatever, and don't take vacations.

They do they do mention that rent is also becoming more expensive, they claim, because of climate change and with the, like, rental insurance and, you know, the cost of rent from, landlords needing to cover, you know, that damage and stuff that could potentially happen. But, again, it's it's it's the whole, you know, you'll own nothing and be happy thing. Right? They they want to scare you out of homeownership in general. At the same time as it actually is getting harder to own a home, not because of climate change, but because of, Democrat policies?

Exactly. The Democratic policies that we've seen from the Biden administration over the last 4 years have caused huge amounts of increase in inflation, which translates to higher rents, higher insurance premiums, higher fuel prices, you know, for your electricity or gas. It just and yet, you know, they would just assume blame climate change because it lets them off the hook. We're not responsible for this. Climate change is responsible.

Don't you understand? Get with the program. Right?

Oh, of course. I mean,

look, climate change is responsible for everything. And the all the all the, steps needed to fight climate change involve restricting your freedom. Every one of them.

Every one of them. And we can talk too about the insurance thing because we've covered this quite a few times in, at Climate Realism. They you know, the the big insurance companies are very, very happy to have the climate change scapegoat, right? Because they can say, you know, well, we're raising rates because climate change, we're doing this because climate change, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, the the there's kind of like like a parasitic relationship between the insurance companies being able to make these claims and then the news and the alarmists being able to take those claims and use them as evidence that climate change is getting worse.

Right. So it's like a circular relationship. It is. It's,

And you're right about the parasitic part because the climate change policies are essentially parasitic policies. Yeah. They are all aimed to extract more from the public and give them less freedom.

Yep.

So along those lines, we've got another story about authoritarianism. This is one that Sterling found. It says that authoritarianism is on the rise. Is climate change to blame? So, basically, this story follows this guy, in the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.

I think that's the way you pronounce it. He was the long time mayor of Davao City. He made headlines for when there was a super typhoon Yolanda back in 2013, he made headlines for traveling some 400 miles, one of the worst ravaged areas of the country along with a convoy of medical and relief workers and a $150,000 in cash he was gonna hand out. He announced that he told security forces to shoot any looters who might try to intercept the convoy, and then he went on to clarify, shoot them in the feet. That's what I really meant.

And then as a presidential candidate in 2016, but, you know, following up on that big tour of giving away cash and, you know, going to these ravaged areas, he slammed as a component, the former interior secretary, for allegedly misspending Yolanda hurricane recovery funds or typhoon recovery funds. And then he won in a landslide, and then he turned into a dictator. Where have we seen this before?

He turned into a dictator. You mean a dictator that the next election came along and he stepped down peacefully after he lost? I I don't know many dictators that do that. He wasn't a dictator neither, you know, they also try and link Jair Bolsonaro in in in Brazil and Trump himself and, I forget who else was featured in the story as strong men who Not every one of them elected through democratic means. Every one of them left office when they lost.

Now we know Trump complained. He he disputes, the election, but what he didn't do is turn the military and keep himself in power. That's what dictators do. That's what authoritarianism is. They're they're confused about this.

I'm gonna stop talking now because I happen to know that Linnea wrote eloquently about this story.

Why, thank you. I did write about this story. I this one did crack me up though because of all of the, like, desk spots that they could use as examples for this story. I mean, it it was it was written by Grist. So they have a they have a, political angle.

Obviously, they're they're gonna look for all the, like, what they interpret as, like, right wing, desk spots to use. The second I saw Donald Trump was among the listed, like, strong men, I thought, give me a break. I mean, this is this is going a little I mean, I guess it's not going far because they've been calling him Hitler for, like, 10 years. So it's not it's not that unusual. But anyway, both sides of this comment are absurd.

The climate change is leading to authoritarians. Authoritarianism is wrong on both points. 1, we do not have a rise in authoritarianism. If you scroll down in the article, I there is a neat little chart that was put together by Our World and Data showing the further further. Bit more.

It's a big chart down. There we go.

That's the one.

Sure. No, no, no. Right there. Showing democracies versus autocracies and the. The the prevalence of at least electoral.

Governments is so much higher than it was in 17/89 at the start of this dataset. It's not even funny. There's a recent dip in recent decades, but something tells me that some of that might have to do with certain left wing policies that have slowly been increasing in certain countries. I would say unless they did not include this information, I would say that, you know, the the, like, COVID policies and stuff would certainly make it questionable as to whether or not our supposedly liberal democracies are really quite as liberal as we like to claim. It's so that's obviously absurd.

The idea that, you know, authoritarianism is on the rise. Second, all of the examples that they use, it's hurricanes, it's drought, it's wildfire. All of those things are also either on the decline or staying the same as they've always been. So both sides of this argument are stupid. The idea that, like, the despots that they or the the alleged despots that they listed are worse than people that we saw even, I don't know, a 100 years ago.

I can think of a few rising dictators from that era. The idea that these guys are worse than that and that it's becoming more of a problem than before is so laughable. I almost didn't write about this because it was so absurd. I thought there's no reason to even debate this question. It's just stupid.

Uh-uh. Yeah. But it was kind of fun to write about anyway.

Yeah. Well, you know, you're right. It is just stupid, and that that's the stuff that we tackle every day on climate realism.com. You know, if you were reading something in the newspaper or on a website or whatever and you say to yourself, that's stupid. Go to climate realism.com, and chances are within the next day or 2, we will have a rebuttal to that sort of stupid stuff.

Anytime there's something stupid about climate, we're on it. Right?

Yeah. Now, when I I saw the headline of that story, I just thought, we had monarchies rule a vast bulk of the world for 100 of years. We had communism rule, a vast swath of the globe for, 75 years or so. I mean, there's still a few out there and you don't have to be communist to be a dictator, you can be right wing, but does anyone think that these things wouldn't have happened or didn't happen before the recent period of modest warming? If so, then then you're just let me put it best.

You're stupid, and there's no evidence that they are on the rise because of climate change. I mean, my wife look, my wife's from Venezuela, and I've seen what happened to Venezuela, during our marriage, during and just before our marriage. They had elections, and there, they had a kleptocracy. So, they were these people that, you know, we protect the landowners in every election. We go to the people, and we say, oh, chicken in every pot.

We'll we'll put your kids in school. We'll we'll pay for their lunches, things like that. And then they did nothing after the election. And, a guy who, by force, tried to overthrow the government. And, you know, rather than having him executed as treason, they put him up, put him in jail for a couple of years, a general or a colonel.

I think he was, that was Chavez. He ended up coming to power through an election, and almost, you know, routinely, every election since then has been corrupt. Nobody accepts the results of these elections, And they've gone down a very, very bad road. The people are no more taken care of them than they were before, but the economy has collapsed. And, you know, suddenly they're having to get aid.

They were getting doctors from Cuba. That's how bad it is there. They're they're shipping in doctors from Cuba. So that had nothing to do with climate change. It had to do with political corruption before and strong man tactics now.

And and Venezuela is not unique.

Right. And I I do have 2 more probably little comments about this story. One, they are correct. They're they're the the only, like, central point of their hypothesis on this that is not bonkers is the idea that, instability paves the way for some kind of a dictator to to rise up. Right.

So in the case of, you know, violence in certain African nations, different places in South America and stuff, we've seen in unstable conditions, not necessarily just from weather, but economics, all sorts of stuff. If there is instability in a country that can lead to people being frightened and either giving up to a strongman type authoritarian leadership or reaching for 1 because they don't feel like they have anywhere else to turn. I'm sorry. My dog is barking. The, the other point is, if I can remember it, what was happen to say?

That's okay.

I completely lost it. I I got excited about the the the one But

you're right.

And I

forgot what happened.

Change is causing more forgetfulness than young people.

And dogs and dogs to bark.

And dogs barking. Yeah.

The, the fact is she's right. You know, they warned about this, at the founding of this country. People often trade security for freedom. Desperation makes people do desperate things. Yeah, I mean, look, the rise of Hitler, for example, was not driven by climate change.

It was driven by the desperate situation there. The huge inflation created the aftermath of the policies from World War 1, and he promised to answer that. And he and he found scapegoats. Right? But what he didn't blame is climate change.

People often seek messiah type figures when we face problems. But, the instability in so many of these countries, civil strife, religious strife, corruption, corrupt governments, they get a lot of aid, but somehow it never trickles down to the people. That is not climate change, And there's no evidence because, you know, Linnea went through the litany of them in her article that the weather's getting worse anywhere. So if it's not causing more floods, so that's disruption, it's not causing more heat. That's disruption.

It's not causing more storms. That's disruption that would call for the the strong men. Then what is the result of in those instances where strong men are coming to power where they weren't before? What is it? It's not climate change.

Right. And and I wanted to say one more. I just remembered my other point because it's something that some of our viewers have brought up as well. If anything, you know, if anything related to climate change is leading towards authoritarianism, It's coming from the climate alarmists.

Yeah. You

know, they wanna take everything away from you and have control over where you travel, when you take vacation, what kind of vehicle you drive, whether or not you are able to, you know, access electricity all the time. They want to regulate, usage like that. If there's authoritarianism, it's coming from them, not from, like, reactions to climate change.

They wanna regulate farm production. They wanna regulate what appliances you use. They want you to live in smaller places. And, you know, the old the the the thing that Anthony said earlier, you will own nothing and be happy about it. That's what they want, and, that is authoritarianism.

Right. So it's it's it's it's them. Why this is our game of the week. Things I'm concerned about. Totalitarianism, all in red, or climate change.

The solutions are worse than climate change itself. That's the problem that we've got here, folks. Yeah. Alright. We've had a lot of folks, giving us questions.

Linea, take it away.

Thank you very much. Okay. We've got a question about hurricane season here from Bob Johnson who says, isn't hurricane season about over? So what's the data look like? How did hurricane season compare to previous years?

I think it came out

on the first is the end of hurricane season. Yeah. And I haven't looked at all the data, but it doesn't look abnormal to me. It's certainly nothing like the 33 named storms that doctor Michael Mann said were gonna happen.

Yeah. I think we've hit the low range of, the prediction from the hurricane center this year. Yeah. Because they give our range.

The low range being not above average, by the way. Yeah. We haven't had a

a hurricane. I'm not sure. Baby Stan's in the audience, and he can tell us.

We haven't had a hurricane in, I think, 2 weeks. I think Anthony just said it was November 1st. I thought it was November 30th was the end of, of

her December 1st. November 30th. December 1st.

December 1st is what you said. I think it's November 1st. I said that didn't sound right to me. So, it's not over yet. We could have, some more storms, but, we've had another lull for a bit, thankfully.

Gosh. Thankfully. But right now, where we stand, I think, is at the low end of the predictions and the low end of the majors landfalls make predictions.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure we'll have a a show where we do a a postmortem on the hurricane season, particularly targeting doctor Michael Mann and his 33 named storm because climate change is terrible and it gonna cause the whole world to go crazy with hurricanes. That's never gonna happen. We'll talk about that.

I'm putting this on the screen even though it could get us in trouble out there. It's funny. Thank you, Jerry Palmer. I love this comment.

He'll bottle them too.

Oh, yuck. Okay.

We're gonna see a South Park episode on that.

Yeah. Chris knows but has quite a few questions for us. Good questions too. This one is how many or how much have the trillions we've spent on fixing climate change the climate?

No good answer to that. No one can measure it.

Yeah. And that's that's part of the genius of the whole scheme. Right? Is there's no way to prove it one way or another. They can just, like, claim victory, and everyone will go along with it.

But as long as they don't claim victory, the problem still exists forever.

Well, also, I mean, that's that answer that's part of the answer to his question. Right? Because they haven't claimed victory. We spent 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars, and they say it's getting worse and worse all the time. So it hasn't had the intended effect.

You know, when they're asked to testify, how much will this spending and and administration officials this one under Obama, they've been asked to testify. How much, will this prevent? What temperature rise will it prevent? What how much sea level rise will this spending prevent? And they say, oh, that's not how we measure success.

How do you measure success? Those are the metrics. You're trying to prevent temperature rise in sea level and things like that. In the end, they can show no evidence that the 1,000,000,000,000 and 1,000,000,000,000 of dollars spent have done any, anything to prevent climate change?

This is a good question. Kind of a, from, sorry, from Peter Land here who says, c o two increases at the same speed even with all the spending. Right? And I would say, yeah. It would be very interesting to plot them next to each other and then watch that.

I mean, it's not it wouldn't be, you know, super useful, but it would be kind of funny to make that plot. I might do that.

Oh, I suspect the I I suspect the spending is going up even faster than

Oh, talk about exponential. Okay.

Yeah.

Do any other fields of science do this homogenization thing where measurements are polluted by other measurements? I'm sure there's bad statistical science being done in other areas. I couldn't tell you because, well, I don't know about on the measurement end, but scientists do kind of get a little bit carried away by their own hypotheses in a lot of areas where they'll, for example, like the dinosaur feather thing. They find a a dinosaur feathers on a particular part of a dinosaur, in the fossil record, and then they extrapolate that to say that there's feathers on the entire animal when there's actually no evidence that that actually happens. That's a little bit similar where it's like runaway.

You know, they're expanding, well outside of what the data actually shows. That's my my silly little nerd example. But, Anthony

Go ahead, Anthony.

Yeah. I've been thinking about it. I can't think of a single field where homogenization is used other than in climate change. I think it's something invented specific to climate change studies. And I think about other metrics of, you know, measuring things on the surface, you know, like crops, for example.

We don't homogenize the world. We average it. You know? But let's say you're looking at to create a metric for wheat production for the globe. Well, some areas are gonna be lower, and some areas are gonna be higher.

But we don't go in and try to homogenize to make the higher areas lower or the lower areas higher through some kind of a statistical homogenization thing. That's just crazy. But it seems that we do that in climate change studies.

I will say this. I don't know that they do homogenization. What I do know is that there have been studies recently that look at, peer reviewed journals, and they find that ever increasing portion of the studies published in peer reviewed journals, those studies that have actually passed peer review are false, that they'd have to retract them. This is especially prevalent in the medical field, but not just the medical field. And, the point is, bad science happens, and it's more common than you think.

Much of climate science isn't science at all. It's science y, because science is driven by data.

Right. It's supposed to be anyway, but it seems lately, climate science is driven by policy, and fear more than anything.

Yeah. That's fair. Alright. This is for m 4 GW who says, can you talk about the USCRN research stations?

This is Minnesotans for Global Warming, and these guys produced one of the best videos ever of doctor Michael Mann called hide the decline. It was brilliant, and he absolutely went bonkers over it and and, you know, sent out a cease and desist and lawsuit and all this stuff. So hi. Thanks for being on the show. We're looking forward to another one of your videos if you ever get around to making one.

But, USCRN stations, well, this is the US Climate Reference Network. And, the US Climate Reference Network was put into effect, around 2,002. They started building it up, and it's they realized back then, that the the existing station network, you know, the cooperative observer network was not that great. They didn't wanna admit that. So what they ended up doing was creating about a 114 stations around the United States, including Alaska, and Hawaii that are situated properly.

They're away from the airports, away from the asphalt concrete buildings, air conditioners, all that stuff, well away from it. And they started logging data, and the network became active in 2,005. And you can look at it. If you go to whatsapp with that.com, I have the results of it on the right sidebar, and you can go in and look at the data there, and there's a link to the actual raw data. And so you can look at it yourself.

And the thing is is that the the instead of just simply, okay. We're gonna use this going forward to talk about the warmest month ever or whatever. They use this in a completely bass, accurate way. The u r s USCRN data is used to adjust down the crappy CO OP data. That's right.

We're going to instead of just simply throwing out all the bad data, we're going to, address it further to make them more compliant. This and I believe this is a direct response to my surface station project and all of the criticism that rightly came from it towards NOAA. They basically said, well, we're adjusting the old crappy network to match the new super duper state of the art network, and therefore, you know, your criticism is unwarranted.

I've said it before.

I'll say it again. I'm climate science.

I've said it before. I'll say it again. It's like taking up bottled water or sterile water and mixing it with stream water and saying you come up with something you can drink.

Yep. Michael Johansen

I'm not fear protection.

I think I'm pronouncing it right, points out that, like, 50% of the studies in psychology can't be reproduced. And that's not that's not just true for the, for psych or for, psychology. It's also true across the social sciences, especially. There. It is a bit of a mess.

And actually, who was it? I think it was Hayek who wrote a whole book about how we are inappropriately applying trying to apply like hard science type methods for study to sociological sciences, in places where they do not belong and that they do not actually show or demonstrate what they claim that they are demonstrating with them. It's pretty amazing that we've been talking about this for, you know, a very long time, and and it's starting to become kind of common knowledge that there's a replication crisis in the sciences. Here's another question from Chris who says, I suspect that climate alarmists aren't that fond of this pesky democracy business. How can they save the world if people can just vote them out?

It's kind of a time to speak. It's not a real question, but it's a good jumping off point.

That's a point that I, discussed with, with Lenea when she was writing her article. It was like, it's no coincidence that so many of these climate alarm groups praise authoritarians. They praise dictators. They they look to China despite its growing ever larger emissions, and they opine what a wonderful place it is because there, the government can get things done. They do not like you're right.

Democracy is pesky. People have to vote, and you have to consider other people's opinions. And when it comes to climate, we can't afford to do that. It's an emergency. They want the strong men.

They want big government. That's why every one of their policies is ever bigger government. But then they claim people who want smaller government are fascist. The very opt you know, you can't you can't be a fascist and and be for smaller government. I've never seen that in history.

Yeah. So Chris Nisbett's question speaks right to the heart of something that we've observed in the climate change issue for a long time, and that is noble cause corruption. And if I haven't, explained it before, let me explain it again. Noble cause corruption actually came from police departments where they've got some perp that they've arrested, and they know he did this. They've got all this circumstantial evidence, but it's not enough to convict, they believe.

And so the cops plant something on him. They plant a gun on him, plant drugs on him, whatever it might be, to basically make the conviction stick because they know he's a scumbag, and they don't wanna get him off the streets. So this has morphed into the same kind of thing in climate change. We are saving the planet, and, therefore, we are more important than you, and, therefore, we have to adjust this data, make these wild claims that aren't substantiated, goose the models, whatever it takes to get you to pay attention and get the climate change agenda, you know, out there to basically make you change your lifestyle, to live it as we see fit. That's what's going on.

To be fair, I think this kind of thing goes back much farther than modern policing. Socrates through Plato wrote about this more than 2000 years ago, where you have the, philosopher kings and the noble lie in the cave. Basically, rulers have to lie to the people for their own good, and, they've been doing this for as long as we've had

governments, probably even before governments. Yep. Well, there we go. That's it in a nutshell. Climate realism is a place you should be visiting on a regular basis.

Our streaming partners, of course, are providing all of this content through Twitter and so forth, so be sure to visit them. Junkscience.com, run by Steve Malloy, all the junk that's fit to debunk, cfact.org and climate depot, and, of course, my website, what's up with that dot com. I wanna thank everybody for all their questions and comments today. I wanna thank you, Sterling and you, Linnea, for your expert commentary, and our producer, Andy, in the background pushing all the buttons to make stuff happen. There he is.

Thanks for saying hi. Alright. Way to go. Okay. That's it for this episode number 133 of the Climate Realism Show.

I want you all to have a great weekend and a great upcoming week. Bye bye.

We did it. We did it, Joe. You're gonna be the next president of the United States.