Straight Talk: Climate Q&A Marathon with guest Chris Martz – The Climate Realism Show #160
Download MP3One of the most urgent tasks of our country is to decisively defeat the climate hysteria hoax.
Greta Thunberg:We are in the beginning of a mass mass extinction.
Jim Lakely:The ability of c o two to do the heavy work of creating a climate catastrophe is almost nil at this point.
Anthony Watts:The price of oil has been artificially elevated to the point of insanity.
Sterling Burnett:That's not how you power a modern industrial system.
Andy Singer:The ultimate goal of this renewable energy, you know, plan is to reach the exact same point that we're at now.
Sterling Burnett:You know who's tried that? Germany. Seven Straight Days of no wind for Germany. Their factories are shutting down.
Linnea Lueken:They really do act like weather didn't happen prior to, like, 1910. Today is Friday.
Jim Lakely:That's right, Greta. It is Friday, and this is the best day of the week, not just because the weekend is almost here, but because this is the day the Heartland Institute broadcasts the climate realism show. My name is Jim Lakeley. I'm vice president of the Heartland Institute. We are an organization that has been around for forty years and known as the leading global think tank pushing back on climate alarmism.
Jim Lakely:Heartland and this show bring you the data, the science, the truth, and when we're fortunate enough, excellent guests to counter the climate alarmist narrative you've been fed every single day of your life. There is nothing else quite like the Climate Realism show streaming anywhere, so I hope you will bring friends to view this livestream every Friday at 1PM Eastern Time, sometimes 01:12 or 01:08PM eastern time. Sorry for being late. And we also ask you to like, share, and subscribe, and leave your comments underneath this video. These all convince YouTube's algorithm to smile upon this program, and that gets the show in front of even more people.
Jim Lakely:And as a reminder, because big tech and the legacy media do not really approve of the way we cover climate and energy on this program, Heartland's YouTube channel has been demonetized. So if you wanna help the program, and I sure hope you do, please visit heartland.org/tcrs. That's heartland.org/tcrs, which stands for the Climate Realism Show, and you can help make sure that we bring this show to the world every single week. Any support you can give is warmly welcome and greatly appreciated. We also wanna thank today our streaming partners, JunkScience.com, CFACT, What's Up With That, the c o two c o two coalition, and Heartland UK Europe.
Jim Lakely:I hope you will find and follow all of these accounts on social media and also become a subscriber to this show on the Heartland Institute's YouTube and Rumble channels. So big show today, let's get to it. Today we have with us as usual, Anthony Watts, senior fellow at the Heartland Institute and publisher of the world's most viewed website on climate change. What's up with that? Sterling Burnett, director of the Arthur B.
Jim Lakely:Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy at the Heartland Institute. Lanea Lukin, she's research fellow for energy and environment policy at Heartland. And as always, we have Andy Singer, our producer and senior digital media manager at Heartland in the background making sure that this show looks great and flows professionally. And we are so happy to welcome back to the show Chris Martz. Chris Martz is a freshly minted meteorologist, getting his degree just last month and has been irritating climate alarmists and credentialed scientists with inconvenient data throughout his college career on social media, especially on X.
Jim Lakely:The New York Post just did a story on Chris Martz where you called yourself the anti Greta. That was an excellent piece on you, Chris. Congratulations, and welcome to the show. Oops. There is no audio coming out of Chris.
Jim Lakely:So this is why we were a little late coming on the show today to begin with.
Anthony Watts:His his audio is probably directed to the other stream you set up.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Maybe. Chris, you wanna try speaking, see if we can hear you? Nope. Cannot hear you.
Jim Lakely:Alright.
Sterling Burnett:Let's let's cut off the stream to his audience and just get it for our audience.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Alright. I do love his hat, though. I asked I asked Chris to to wear that Kat Diesel power hat, and he does have it on, so it's a shame we cannot hear him talk. Nope.
Jim Lakely:I think, Chris, you need to get out of the show. Maybe you have to dump back out or come back in if you can't figure it out. All right. All right. Well, hey guys.
Jim Lakely:We can definitely hear all of you, right? Anthony, Sterling and Lanea?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah, I think so.
Anthony Watts:Mike, check. We're all here.
Jim Lakely:We are all here. Well, we're working to get Chris Martz back on the show and get his audio working, of course, are doing this is a special show. We have such an active chat here on the livestream of the Climate Realism show, and we usually save part of the structure of the program to have questions, your questions and our answers at the end. There's so many good questions, we can't really sometimes get to all of them, so we probably next will do an entire show with just Q and A after we get through the crazy climate news of the week, which we're going to get to momentarily. Going to wait to see if Chris Martz has audio, if you can unmute him and see.
Jim Lakely:No? Okay.
Sterling Burnett:Live shows. Had him. Had He was working.
Jim Lakely:Yes. I think I jinxed it. Anyway, let's go let's go to our first segment, and it is the crazy climate news of the week. Hit it, Andy. Alright.
Jim Lakely:Thank you, Bill Nye. We have a lot of really crazy fun stories to get to today. I've titled the first one, Shut Up, They Say. This came from X. This is a short video from UN Secretary General Antonio Gutierrez, who says that we need more censorship of people who disagree with the climate cultists or on anything, really.
Jim Lakely:Anyone who disagrees with our supposed betters needs to shut up because they have big plans, you see, and just speaking your mind tends to get in the way. So let's play that video clip, please, Andy.
Antonio Gutierres:The platforms are being misused to subvert science and spread disinformation and hate to billions of people. This clear and present global threat demands clear and coordinated global action. Our policy brief, oops, information integrity on digital digital platforms puts forward the framework for a concerned international response.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. Yeah. Whatever.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Remember, that's the guy
Anthony Watts:that that the oceans are boiling, so he lost all of his credibility with that one statement.
Jim Lakely:Right. Speaking of this And by the
Sterling Burnett:way, he's not saying shut up, we say. He's saying, we will shut you up, by
Anthony Watts:the way.
Sterling Burnett:It's he's not asking us to nicely just withdraw and and keep our mouth shut. He wants a coordinated global action to suppress speech. Something that the little thing that we have in our constitution called the First Amendment specifically forbids.
Chris Martz:One a.
Anthony Watts:Well, he doesn't get that because he's in the EU, you know, and they think differently over there.
Sterling Burnett:I don't see Gutierrez. Is he from the EU or South America?
Jim Lakely:He's from South America, but he's the, secretary general of the United Nations.
Sterling Burnett:UN. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. So so so, Linea, I know, you know, we we see another call from for censorship every few months, it seems, from these globalist central planners, and they don't seem to realize it's not 2023 anymore. We're not gonna shut up, and God willing, at least America's government under Trump, unlike unlike under Biden, is not going to be looking to censor people who go against conventional wisdom or the dogma or the people in power.
Linnea Lueken:Well, I mean, if he stopped hitting this drumbeat, then he'd be doing nothing at all. Right? I mean, I'm fairly certain that the UN Secretary General's only job is to just cry about something on TV as much as they can. So, yeah, what exactly does he do when he's not talking about global destruction in some way or another, whether it's like capitalism or climate change, whatever it is. So, yeah, I think, Jim, that he would be out of a job if he was no longer doing this, if only.
Sterling Burnett:Well, I think two years ago, that would be a terrible thing.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. Terrible. I'd cry.
Jim Lakely:Mean, two years ago, this kind of hits differently because, you know, they were censoring people and they they did have the power to move governments to shut up their own citizens. I mean, it's happening still in The United Kingdom. I think you can be arrested for posting something on Facebook or X that offends the sensibilities of somebody in a certain way, then, you know, you can be arrested. It's happening in places, but it's not happening in The United States anymore.
Sterling Burnett:They just arrested a couple of people in Belgium for standing on the street with a placard. Two people standing on streets with placards, not blocking traffic as far as I could tell, not doing anything other than holding up placards about transgenderism. And they got arrested. You know? But they don't have free they they don't have a first amendment over there.
Sterling Burnett:You know, it seems to me that they don't get that they sort of missed the window. 1984 is forty one years in the past now, folks. Newspeak does not rule and hopefully never will.
Jim Lakely:Yep.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. You know, maybe since this guy is from South Africa, we should push back with him and say, what you're practicing is climate apartheid.
Jim Lakely:Well, he's from South America.
Sterling Burnett:He's from South America. South America is from saying EU.
Anthony Watts:Oh, they used to be together way back
Sterling Burnett:where he's from.
Linnea Lueken:He's from Portugal. Yeah.
Jim Lakely:Oh, he's a pro see see I see, look.
Sterling Burnett:Well, he was EU. Alright. My apologies. Anthony. We'll see you after all.
Jim Lakely:Alright. Well, let's move on then. We've we've properly bungled that whole thing. Let's move on to our second item, which is there is an EV ship adrift and a blade.
Anthony Watts:For platforms.
Jim Lakely:This this comes from Microsoft news. A cargo ship vanished in smoke with over 3,000 cars and EVs still trapped below deck. We'll read here from the story a little bit. EV sales might not have caught a light in the way automakers hoped, but news of another shipping fire reminds us that electric cars sure are combustible. The cargo ship was on its way from Asia to North America when a fire broke out, forcing the crew to abandon the vessel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, leaving thousands of brand new cars on board.
Jim Lakely:The morning Midas departed China from Mexico on May 26 carrying roughly 3,000 vehicles, including around 800 electric cars. But eight days into its nineteen day voyage, just after midnight on June 3, smoke was spotted billowing from one of the decks. UK based ship owner Zodiac Maritime, which manages the vessel, has since confirmed that the fire originated in the section of the ship carrying the electric vehicles. Now this happened, this ship got ablaze and was abandoned about 300 miles off of Adak, Alaska, which is very remote. My brother-in-law actually was stationed there in the Navy.
Jim Lakely:But Sterling, I'm gonna go to you as I know how much you love electric vehicles. So if electric vehicles are indeed our future and that future is mandated by government, then I guess ships randomly igniting and burning for days is also in our
Sterling Burnett:future. Ships, parking garages, outdoor parking areas, buses, you know, anywhere electric it's electric vehicle, you're liable to have, spontaneous combustion. You know, at one time, people debated whether humans spontaneous combust. There's no debate that electric vehicles and electric batter you know, the batteries that go into them do. I I don't understand how any shipping company any shipping company that ships electric vehicles at this stage can't get insurance at all.
Sterling Burnett:I would never insure a a shipping company that agreed to ship electric vehicles. You know, in England, they now have to in junkyards or or in repair yards, they have to separate them x number of feet taking up valuable space. If they did that inside the ships, you'd have, you know, whole or areas cordoned off. They needed completely new types of of fire suppression systems. They need, like, bulkheads between electric vehicles and everything else and then a special fire containment system, for the EVs.
Sterling Burnett:Maybe just a system that sucks all the oxygen out of the air in that container. I don't know if that would put an EV battery fire out, but we know spraying water won't do it. So, it it's a EVs are a disaster in every sense of the word.
Anthony Watts:Yeah. You know, I was looking at this thing drifting and burning, and I was thinking if Johnny Cash were alive today, he might write a song about it. It would go like this, and it burned, burned, burned the boat of fire.
Jim Lakely:Very good. Very good. Alright.
Linnea Lueken:And it's in the ring of fire there, isn't it too?
Sterling Burnett:Yep. Yep.
Jim Lakely:Very clever. It is in the ring. It is in the ring of fire out there. Right. Let's see.
Jim Lakely:We're still working just to give the audience an update. We're still working on getting Chris on the show. He'll be here soon. No worries there. Let's go on to our next item.
Jim Lakely:This is I've titled it the ultimate thirst trap. And so this is actually comes to us. Anthony Watts suggested that we cover this story today. This is from the New York Times. It's not just poor rains causing drought.
Jim Lakely:The atmosphere is thirstier. Higher temperatures caused by climate change are driving complex processes that make droughts bigger and more severe, new research shows. I'll read a little bit here from the story. Look down from a plain at farms in the Great Plains and the West, and you will see green circles dotting the countryside, a kind of agricultural pointillism. They are from center pivot irrigation systems, but some farmers are finding older versions, many built ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago, are not keeping up with today's hotter reality, said Meatpaul Kukal, that's the name, an agricultural hydrologist at the University of Idaho.
Jim Lakely:Quote, there's a gap between how much water you can apply and what the crop demands are, he said. By the time the sprinkler's arm swings back around to its starting point, the soil has nearly dried out. The main culprit? Atmospheric thirst. Quote, a hotter world is a thirstier one, said Solomon, I'm not even gonna try that word, a hydroclimologist at the University of Oxford.
Jim Lakely:He led a new study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, which found that atmospheric thirst, a factor that fills in some of the blanks in our understanding of drought over the last four decades, has made droughts more frequent, more intense, and has caused them to cover larger areas. Now, Anthony, you know, think that's enough for the gist to get where they're going with this study. As I mentioned, you brought it up and you're a little hot about it today. So have at it.
Anthony Watts:Yeah, it's the most ridiculous article I've seen out of NYT in the last couple of months. You know, this whole atmospheric thirst thing is nothing but anthropomorphamide. I can't even pronounce it. Anthro
Sterling Burnett:you know, when when they try to make take
Anthony Watts:something that is human and make it into something else, you know, that's what they're doing here. They're trying to make make it seem like the atmosphere is thirsty, like it's a living entity. And that's just ridiculous on the face of it. But scientifically, it just doesn't hold up either. You know, the when you look at global water vapor and you can see it in our climate realism post that we did today we saw record high global water vapor in 2024.
Anthony Watts:And this is data that comes from the EU on their Copernicus website. So if we've got record high global water vapor already in the atmosphere, how is the atmosphere thirstier? It isn't. The whole thing is just a bunch of made up hooey, and they're trying to basically scare people to say, oh, you know, this is one more thing that climate change is causing. You know?
Anthony Watts:It's it's causing the atmosphere to be thirsty when there's no such thing. You know? It's just absolutely ridiculous. If you'll scroll down here a little bit, Andy, you'll see a a graph that I was referring to. And that graph shows there
Jim Lakely:it is.
Anthony Watts:Look at that. We've got record high water vapor in 2024, yet somehow, the atmosphere is thirstier. Well, I'm calling BS on that.
Sterling Burnett:Anthony hammers the anthropomorphism and the, thirsty you know, the atmosphere needing more water. I'll hammer, two other things. First off, they claim that, droughts are worsening. The data refutes that. Droughts have not worsened.
Sterling Burnett:They haven't become longer than they have been historically. They have not become more frequent or more severe than they have been historically. That's just the data, folks. It does not show that. Secondly, I believe didn't you I didn't you read the title, Jim?
Sterling Burnett:It said something about less rainfall or or in the first paragraph, it said less rainfall. In fact, what the UN itself says, what the data show is we've got more rainfall in the regions that they're talk precisely they're talking about. We we have, improved precipitation. So the soils can't be drier if you've got more rainfall, and there can't be more drought if there's actually less drought or the same drought as before. This story, you know, the the claims that they make are based on computer models, not data.
Sterling Burnett:And when computer models make one projection and the data shows something completely different, you're supposed to follow the data if you're a scientist, not the made up models, which are just tools. And and in this case, bad tools.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. Yeah. We we I would suggest people can go to Climate@aGlance.com where you can see we have a section on everything you can think of about the climate. One of the sections under the extreme weather tab is drought, and that contains the latest data so we know so you can get the facts and it debunks a lot of what was in that New York Times story. Okay.
Jim Lakely:We're gonna try here again.
Anthony Watts:One one thing. This this atmosphere of being more thirsty, if that was true, it would probably represent that giant sucking sound that Ross Perot talked about in the presidential presidential election in 1992. Just ridiculous.
Sterling Burnett:Yep. Alright. I wonder if the atmosphere has a sippy straw. Hello, Chris
Jim Lakely:Can you hear us?
Sterling Burnett:Can you
Chris Martz:hear me now?
Jim Lakely:Yes, sir.
Chris Martz:Sorry about that.
Jim Lakely:That is totally fine. We are glad to have you here. So let's let's I think it deserves an applause and some cheers that Chris Martz is here with us today. Right. Enough of that.
Jim Lakely:So, Crit, before we go to our next item, actually, glad you're going be here for it in our Crazy Climate News of the I just wanted to revisit what I was gonna talk to you before we had those AV problems at the top of the show, and that is you had a fantastic feature on you in in the New York Post this week. Congratulations. And also congratulations on now being a credentialed meteorologist. So now you can, you know, now you can finally speak.
Chris Martz:Yeah. Now I can I can start I can start appealing to my own authority? It's kinda nice.
Anthony Watts:Right. But you know what?
Chris Martz:I hear you.
Anthony Watts:It doesn't matter if you got a triple PhD. They would say you're not qualified.
Chris Martz:Well, you know, it's funny because when I was in high school, when I started doing all this, they say, well, you need you need to go get a bachelor's of science degree to do this. It's to speak, you know, to get get a meteorology degree, then then you're qualified. And then, you know, I got that. And so now it's like, oh, you need to go to grad school. You need to get a master's.
Chris Martz:And so if I did that, then it's you need to get a PhD. And if got a PhD, it don't matter. I mean, look at William Heffer, Judith Curry, Roy Spencer. They don't care.
Jim Lakely:They don't
Chris Martz:care about any of that.
Anthony Watts:They only care about
Sterling Burnett:it when it's their side making a claim.
Chris Martz:Correct.
Sterling Burnett:When it's when it's it's our side making a claim, credentials don't matter.
Chris Martz:Yep. Absolutely.
Jim Lakely:Well, mean, was like that famous quote from Albert Einstein with his theory of relativity, you know, and all these scientists came out and said that, you you're wrong. You can't possibly be right. And he's like, why does it take so many of you to say that if only one of you? I only need one person to prove my theory wrong, not a hundred. And it's the same it's always been this way in climate science too.
Linnea Lueken:Well, and if that's if it's the case that they need you to be, you know, a professional in order to be allowed to speak on this stuff, what's Bill Nye doing?
Chris Martz:Yeah. They don't crush they don't question, Al Gore's credentials or Greta's or Or Bill McKibben. Greta. John Kerry.
Sterling Burnett:Worst of all, Greta, but or Bill McKibben or John Kerry.
Chris Martz:Oh, Bill McKibben has me blocked on twit on x.
Jim Lakely:Join the club, bro.
Chris Martz:I got under x.
Jim Lakely:That is all blocked.
Chris Martz:I like How
Linnea Lueken:dare you? I
Chris Martz:make it a favorite pastime when they get under people's skin, especially my haters. It just I love living rent free under I just start charging them rent.
Sterling Burnett:I wish, you know, I
Chris Martz:read a month.
Sterling Burnett:I actually reviewed Bill McKibbin's book, The End
Chris Martz:of
Sterling Burnett:Nature, you know, two two and a half, three decades ago, and he's a great writer. And and and he clearly is this, this suffering soul. He's been suffering about the Indonesia was in was written before he was talking about climate change. He was talking about how humans are, yeah, is no wild place left on Earth that's not unaffected by, human activities, which is, you know, because he talked about, you know, how pollutants fall even in wilderness areas, things like that. And he's and he's right, but he just he has come to conclusion that you need a lot less people, you know, that that they need to live like him.
Sterling Burnett:He he's one of the people that actually lives the lifestyle he espouses for others. He I don't think his house is hooked up to the electric grid. And I think he's gone I don't know if he's gone vegan. I think he went vegetarian. But he he's such a good writer.
Sterling Burnett:I wish he'd move off the climate topic and ride on something else.
Jim Lakely:Yep. So, so, Chris, how did it come about that the New York Post reached out to you? I mean, are you that famous can you be that famous on X that mainstream media wants to reach out and do features on you?
Chris Martz:Well, Chadwick Moore wrote the piece and so he writes for them and he did a profile on several other big, like, conservative commentators. Data republican, the lady behind that account, was the most recent one he did. And, I guess she actually had well, he follows me. He's followed me for a long time, and he had wanted to do something with me for quite a while. And he said, well, he basically wanted to it after I got my degree because, know, it helps to have that credential.
Chris Martz:You know, you gotta play that game a little bit. But Chad reached out to me after, I guess, state of republican, the the lady behind that told him that he should do your profile on me next because she's my go to climate person. So, that was pretty cool. So he came down from New York City, interviewed me in Charlestown, West Virginia because he came down to Harpers Ferry, which is between my house and Virginia, in Charlestown, West Virginia. So we had lunch and we talked for probably two, three hours.
Chris Martz:And as he recorded the audio and then, you know, he'll put the important bits of information in there. They sent out a professional photographer to get some pictures and there was there was only two that were in the article but it was probably, there were probably like, you know, two or three dozen pictures total that they chose from. So it was a really cool experience. It was cool to, you know, I was a little nervous at first because, well, I know it's the New York Post and I know that he did a profile on people that I, you know, I know, you know, sort of kinda, acquaintances with. You know, you don't want them to misquote you.
Chris Martz:They don't you don't want them to, I don't want them. You don't want them to do that. So it, it's really, I lost my train of thought. You don't want them to quote you because that because then that looks bad especially if it's like something like you're talking about like, you know, my college experience or something. You know, you don't want them to misquote something like that and their editorial standards, I asked them if they could read the article to me like if she could send like a preprint to me before they put it out.
Chris Martz:And he said, they can't do that. But he did run me through the article, the gist of it before they published it, but without going through every bit of it, which ended up being great. So it was really cool experience.
Jim Lakely:Well, I'm glad to hear it. Congratulations. As a former journalist myself, I can understand the trepidation with speaking to reporters. I don't even like speaking to reporters, I used to be one. Well done, and it's onward and upward for you.
Jim Lakely:Congratulations on your meteorology degree and being on the show today.
Chris Martz:Yeah, thank you.
Anthony Watts:By the way, Chris, I have a piece of advice for you about talking to journalists. If you're talking to them on the phone or video chat or whatever it might be, always record it Because then later, if they twist your words into something that you did not say, you can you can nail them with it.
Chris Martz:Yeah. That's a good idea. Yeah. I we he actually recorded the audio himself, and, I I, you know, could have done it myself if I had asked, but I figured since it's positive news coverage because that's what it was going to be, I figured I didn't really need to worry too much about it. But, it was really cool.
Chris Martz:It was really cool experience, and my follower count jumped up by, like, 20,000 in a day, which is which is pretty awesome and so, I like reaching new people. There's a lot of young people. I mean, I already had a pretty young audience. I mean, there's a lot of people in their 20s and 30s who follow me. That's about half of my audience.
Chris Martz:If you look at the age demographics which is cool because, you know, a lot of people say, well, it's it's the climate deniers, quote, unquote, are getting old. They're dying out. They're fossils. And, I'm not a fossil. Linea is not a fossil.
Chris Martz:Nobody here is a fossil, actually. But, they talk about people that are like 80 years old, they think, oh, they're gonna die out eventually. I think Michael Mann may have said that at one point. Don't quote me on that. But a lot of people were talking about how they're all dying out.
Chris Martz:So it's nice to have younger audience that's getting absorbed into the fold here. And so it's been a pleasure to educate young people and there's even more young people now who follow me that are I see people like 22, 20 three years old, like in my tweets and stuff, so it's really cool.
Jim Lakely:Yep. Again, congratulations. Great. Alright. Look.
Jim Lakely:We're gonna get on with our our fourth item in the crazy climate news of the week, and I've, called this category five whining. This comes from Mediaite. This is the headline Florida weatherman warns he won't be able to accurately predict hurricanes this summer because of federal budget cuts. John Morales, a meteorologist at NBC six South Florida, had a dire warning for viewers as the twenty twenty five hurricane season kicked off due to federal budget cuts at the National Weather Service and NOAA. And because of those cuts, he would no longer be able to accurately predict hurricanes.
Jim Lakely:You know, I I wasn't actually planning on sharing this entire video, but, you know, let's let John Morales have his full say, and and then we can react to it. So can you please play?
John Morales:Listen. I've been on this, you know, since since 08:00 this morning on social media, and there is a lot of anxiety out there because you don't see it turning. Right? When is it going to turn? John, it's not turning.
John Morales:It's coming straight to us. It's going to turn. Alright? The turn was never forecast to be on Sunday. The turn isn't even on Monday morning.
John Morales:The turn will come Monday afternoon, Monday evening, into Tuesday. Remember that? That was about six years ago. That was hurricane Dorian as it was absolutely devastating. The Northwest Bahamas as a category five sat over that region for two days.
John Morales:It was headed straight west. Lots of people in Florida were concerned the hurricane was heading here. And as you've grown accustomed to my presentations over my thirty four years in South Florida newscasts, confidently I went on TV and I told you it's going to turn. You don't need to worry. It is going to turn.
John Morales:And I am here to tell you that I'm not sure I can do that this year because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general, and I could talk about that for a long, long time, and how that is affecting The US, leadership in science over many years, and how we're losing that leadership, and this is a multigenerational impact on science in this country. Alright? But specifically, let's talk about the federal government cuts to the National Weather Service and to NOAA. Did you know that Central and South Florida National Weather Service offices are currently basically 20 to 40% under understaffed. From Tampa to Key West including the Miami office 20 to 40% understaffed.
John Morales:Now this type of staffing shortage is having impacts across the nation because there's been a nearly 20% reduction in weather balloon releases launches that carry those radiosondes, and what we're starting to see is that the quality of the forecast is becoming degraded. There's also a chance because of some of these cuts that NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft will not be able to fly this year, and with less reconnaissance missions, we may be flying blind, and we may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline, like happened a couple of years ago in Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, Mexico. So, I was asked to talk about this today. I'm glad I was. I just want you to know that what you need to do is call your representatives and make sure that these cuts are stopped.
Anthony Watts:Well, first of all, I wanna say weather balloons are not used to, analyze hurricanes. We have hurricane hunter aircraft for that. A weather balloon wouldn't stand a chance in a hurricane. So that complaint is completely irrelevant. Right, Chris?
Chris Martz:Oh, absolutely. And and a lot of these weather balloon a lot of the weather balloon data they launch, you know, that's over obviously land if they do it at the weather service. And a lot of that data, yes, it gets fed into models. It's gonna have an impact on you know, it could potentially the produced balloon launches could have an effect on the modeling situation. But to be fair, the GFS models complete garbage anyway.
Chris Martz:We should just use the European model, because it's just far superior, than the than the, I a nickname for the GFS, but we're not gonna say it here. That's more for the Twitter page. But weather balloon data is overland. These hurricanes are out of open water. So you're not gonna it's not gonna affect all that that much when you're getting that data sampling.
Chris Martz:Know, it's only when it's approaching shore that you're gonna be able to really launch a weather balloon and get any kind of data for that. And right by that point, it's already on as Anthony said, it's already on top of you. It's, you know, it's okay.
Sterling Burnett:It's not gonna it's
Chris Martz:gonna fart the wind. It's not gonna the chance it's at a chance.
Sterling Burnett:I would question whether he's he's right about the weather balloons, but even if he is, I doubt he's done a survey of all the weather balloon launches. But even if he is, what's what's what's inconvenient for them is they don't care about weather balloons when the weather balloons are telling you the temperatures are not rising as fast as the surface stations or the models said they should. Then they say, oh, well, you can't trust the weather balloon data. But suddenly, there are cuts being made to their favorite agency. Not no somewhat NOAA as a whole, but most of it to the Goddard Space, Institute, which has become the climate scold of the nation.
Chris Martz:That's NASA.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. That's right. I'm sorry. I apologize. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:That's NASA. But, they're they're cutting they are cutting some staff, but I would wager. I'm willing to I'm I'm willing to put I'm not a gambling man, but I'm willing to put real money on the line that they don't miss a single hurricane this year.
Linnea Lueken:That
Sterling Burnett:when tornadoes erupt, we'll know about
Chris Martz:them.
Sterling Burnett:I hear I hear about them all the time. You know, what we know right now is that, so far, there's been an unusual low in hurricanes. So for I think it's the fourth year in a row where we haven't had a single hurricane in May, which is outside of hurricane season, but what they usually have at least a tropical storm or hurricane form. They did not this year. You know, we're all thankful for that.
Sterling Burnett:But the point is our radar and our systems, didn't miss the fact that none formed, and I doubt that they'll miss any of them this year. Will we not be flying those those, hurricane flights? Of course, we will. There there's no evidence whatsoever that they are cutting the use of those airplanes, during storm. That's that's just that was just a falsehood.
Sterling Burnett:That's just a a red
John Morales:Right.
Sterling Burnett:So I also There's not a there's not an agency in The United States that cannot afford budget cuts.
Anthony Watts:I also have some additional I have some additional data here. I did some searching on this to see where in fact are the weather balloons being cut from weather service offices. And a summary produced by looking at different news stories says, North Central United States, particularly states like Nebraska and South Dakota, have experienced the most significant cuts in weather balloon launches. This is followed by parts of the Rocky Mountains, Great Lakes region, as well as much of Alaska. None of these places have hurricanes.
Anthony Watts:So once again
Chris Martz:Yeah.
Anthony Watts:Get complaining. Yep. Okay.
Chris Martz:Another thing I'd like to add is that, you know, when John Morales went on TV to talk about that, the the cuts and stuff. He's been on a whole Twitter rampage about this for for for weeks, months. And, somebody commented, they said, you know, keep politics out of your newscast. And and to be fair, I don't care who, you know, who's anybody's political views on, think people should be allowed to post what they want on social media. But if you're just giving the weather forecast on television, nobody cares.
Chris Martz:You know, to, you know, nobody wants to see your, your jab at Trump or a jab at Biden for that matter, if you're just presenting the weather. So it's, and somebody said to stop doing that. Said, he said, No, I don't think I will. So I thought that was kind of, in my opinion, arrogant on his part. And to more to add to Anthony's in a in in a related subject on that on this issue.
Chris Martz:You know, when when during the Biden Harris administration, there was a whole bunch of there were hundreds of millions of extra dollars that were funneled into the agency under their under their under their watch and a lot of that money went into fisheries contracts and climate, you know, justice programs and climate research and stuff. Almost none of that money went into the National Weather Service, which has been under understaffed and, you know, arguably underfunded for for many decades. And this goes back to the, you know, the break in years. This isn't this isn't something that's new. But all of a sudden, because Trump's in office, it's now it's now a problem.
Chris Martz:It's now his fault. That's all they do when they blame Trump for everything.
Anthony Watts:But now that's
Chris Martz:I can understand people don't like Trump, you know, whatever, but but blame him for everything that goes wrong. It's just it's just asinine.
Sterling Burnett:Well, that's similar what they've done with the, air traffic controllers. Right? There were hundreds of people short of air traffic controllers before Trump even came into office. They've had some problems since Trump came into the office early on before even if his staffing even if he did staffing cuts, they wouldn't have taken effect before these things happened. Same thing as the weather service.
Sterling Burnett:Right? But I still question whether they are understaffed. Look. I I I looked at the EPA yesterday for for another reason. They have 16,000 employees.
Sterling Burnett:16,000 employees. How many cuts have they made under Trump? Seven hundred and three.
Chris Martz:Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:0.4.
Chris Martz:I'm sorry. Under service.
Sterling Burnett:I don't think our environmental, my environmental health is suffering because 0.4% of the staff of the EPA is gone. Yeah.
Chris Martz:Well, you look at look at NOAA, they have 12,000 employees. And you look at the weather service, they have of of the NOAA employees, there's four four eighty eight hundred of them that work for the weather service. I mean, yeah, I mean, you could arguably arguably say that maybe some of some of the offices have been understaffed for decades. But do you really need that many meteorologists on most days to forecast the weather, especially if it's sunny and 75? No.
Chris Martz:You only read you only you only really need a fully staffed office if the weather is, high impact. But if you know? And that's and that's in, like, the Great Plains, you know, the Northeast during the wintertime, you know, Florida during hurricane season, the Gulf Coast states, but on a part time basis. So they don't need to be fully staffed all the time, especially if the weather is behind.
Sterling Burnett:Now nowadays, so much of it is automated. Right? We have radar and sonar systems that we never had before. We are finding we we we know about more hurt, tornadoes now than we ever did and hurricanes now than we ever did, not because of staffing at agencies, but because we have technologies that discover small tornadoes when they form that you coulda had a weather, you you could have fully staffed weather service and not seen those tornadoes because they didn't appear to you know, they didn't strike any place that anyone knew about. When tropical storms and hurricanes form in the oceans now, we know about them, But you wouldn't have known about them before unless a ship crossed their paths.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. You know, I I I wanted to bring up this story. There's actually a there's a secondary story we can bring up to kinda speak about this, but it's just this fear mongering, this idea that if you cut, $1 from federal funding, which is always going up anyway, that people's very lives are in peril. It's such BS. This is a story that was from CNN and we covered a little bit of this a couple of weeks ago on The Climate Realism Show.
Jim Lakely:Headline is NASA scientists describe, quote, absolute shitshow at agency as Trump budget seeks to dismantle top US climate lab. And it says here that NASA scientists are in a state of anxious limbo after the Trump administration proposed a budget that would eliminate one of The United States' top climate labs, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, or GISS, a standalone entity. In its place, it would transform the lab's functions into a broader environmental modeling effort across the agency. And it says here, career specialists are now working remotely awaiting details of even and even more unsure about their future at the lab after they were kicked out of their longtime home in New York City last week. Closing the lab for good could jeopardize its value and the country's leadership role in global climate scientists or global climate science sources say.
Jim Lakely:And it's an absolute shit show, one GIS scientist under a condition of anonymity said to the media. So, you know, it's this idea that that, you know, people are going to die, that you can't possibly cut anybody, that we need actually to keep growing all of these government agencies to study the climate or else we're all
Sterling Burnett:in peril. It's BS. But more importantly, it's NASA is a space agency, folks. The Goddard Institute was formed initially to study space, not for climate change. It shifted its mission entirely to get more funding under James Hansen.
Sterling Burnett:It was never intended to be the preeminent climate agency studying climate. It was a space agency. They're supposed to be able to get us in space, to find out what's coming at us from space, to, deliver satellites, things like that. Not monitoring global climate around the world and feeding people information. That's why we have a NOAA.
Sterling Burnett:We have a NOAA. It's it's duplication of effort. We don't need GIS, especially if it's not going to do space stuff, which is what it's supposed to do.
Chris Martz:Yeah. Sterling, took the words right out of my mouth. You know, NASA, as he said, that was signed into law by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1958 to study space. They're not they're that's what they did.
Chris Martz:They they space and aerospace engineering are not supposed to be studying climate. And so we have a lot of these duplicate duplicative efforts in the in the in the federal government where if we have a bunch of people doing the same thing at different agencies, we don't need that. There needs to be consolidation and that saves taxpayers money. You know, there's a reason we have no we don't need NASA doing the same same research and stuff. I can understand NASA, you know, having interest in monitoring weather and and climate a little bit with satellites, but, you know, have the satellites and let NOAA scientists use them.
Chris Martz:It's not it's not that hard.
Anthony Watts:You know, one other thing I'd like to point out is that NASA's gifts is redundant. Their climate work is absolutely redundant. They're getting data from NOAA. They're getting the GHCN data worldwide global data from NOAA. They're bringing that in, ingesting it, applying their own secret sauce to it, and then publishing it a different version of climate disaster with their Gistemp product.
Anthony Watts:We don't need it. It is redundant. And, you know, we could completely eliminate the agency and just simply preserve the data somewhere, and it would be fine. No one is going to suffer with the loss of NASA guests.
Sterling Burnett:Yeah. Well, as I said at the first, it was a duplicative. It grew its mission. In the end, if you read the charter for NASA, the word studying climate you know, the phrase studying climate change does not appear. That was mission creep.
Sterling Burnett:That was mission creep. Like so many of these agencies. If you if you read the Clean Air Act, carbon dioxide does not appear as a pollutant regulated.
Chris Martz:That's why they gotta get rid of the APA endangerment finding. Hopefully, that we can hopefully, they can succeed on that front.
Jim Lakely:And where the
Sterling Burnett:mission has creeped, you can safely cut and still keep the core mission.
Jim Lakely:%. Alright. Well, we promised this was a q and a show, and so maybe it's time we get
Chris Martz:to the q and a through which
Jim Lakely:it gives Linea, can you handle that for us again today?
Linnea Lueken:Of course. Okay, I'm waiting until the layout figures itself out.
Chris Martz:There we go.
Linnea Lueken:Alrighty. Hopefully everyone can hear me and everything is going well. Hello, audience. Thank you guys so much. Some of you guys were cheating before the show even started putting questions in, and I will bring up some of that.
Linnea Lueken:So welcome, everyone. Okay. So let's just launch right into Q and A. We'll probably go a little bit late, if that's okay with you, Chris, since we took some time getting here and we started a little bit late as well. All right.
Linnea Lueken:This is a quick little comment from Chris Shattuck, who said, Anthony, did you say grifting and burning?
Anthony Watts:You mean when I sang the Johnny Cash song?
Linnea Lueken:Yeah.
Anthony Watts:Well, you know what? If you go back to the split screen, what we had before, bring Chris back up. Bring Chris back up. There, look behind him. Totally coincidentally, there's a picture of Johnny Cash right behind him, and I did not get that idea from this picture.
Anthony Watts:It was totally coincidental.
Chris Martz:There's an Elvis one right here on the other side. I can't do this mixed up.
Linnea Lueken:We go. It's
Jim Lakely:fantastic. Have a
Linnea Lueken:we have a really good question that just popped up from our, longtime viewer, Chris Nesbett, who says, did Chris always have his doubts that we're suffering through a climate crisis and that the only way to end it would be to completely upend civilization?
Chris Martz:I don't I don't think we needed to, like, upend civilization. I used to be kind of back in the early days of high school, middle school. I was kind of on the mainstream narrative. Just kind of agreed that, okay, this is a problem. And, you know, this is all our fault.
Chris Martz:And we got to get rid of fossil fuels. And the weather is more extreme than it ever has been. So I thought we are maybe we had a climate problem, you know, maybe crisis. Don't know if I would use the crisis term, but I was definitely on the kind of the mainstream side of things before I began to question things that weren't adding up. So that was kind of my journey.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. Well, I think that's the kind of default position for everyone. Right? I mean, especially when you're younger, it's hard to, you know, be, like, aggressive in challenging the status quo or what all your teachers are telling you is the truth. And so, yeah, I absolutely believe that.
Sterling Burnett:Speak for yourself, Anaya.
Linnea Lueken:Is a good question from L. T. Oracle of Truth, who says, I have lived in Florida since 2006 and have not heard of Sahara dust until around five years ago. Is this a new phenomenon or was it just not reported? Lt, I will say that with many things like this, the my immediate response to this would be social media is the reason why you're only just hearing about it.
Linnea Lueken:It was almost certainly reported before now. It's been in the scientific, like, US scientific literature since at least the nineteen fifties or sixties, and it's been mentioned by explorers for a very long time before that. So it's not new. Anyone to add anything?
Chris Martz:Nope. You nailed it.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. Sweet. So anybody on Twitter right now or X right now saying that this is like some geo engineering thing that didn't exist before does not know what they're talking about. Be very skeptical of that.
Chris Martz:Don't get any of the ARI started on that.
Linnea Lueken:So here's from nothing as it seems. He said, where did Chris get his meteorology degree from?
Chris Martz:I just got it from, Millersville University of Pennsylvania. So, yes, school nobody's ever heard of, but if you are in the atmospheric sciences community, you're guaranteed to have heard of it because we do despite being a small school, we have one of the top meteorology programs in the world, and I'm sure Anthony has heard about it before I ever went there too. I'd be disappointed if Anthony never heard of it.
Jim Lakely:Well, as
Chris Martz:soon as he gets
Jim Lakely:his cup of coffee and comes back, we'll find out.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. And these I have a series of two questions here that have something to do with the defunding of certain parts of the weather service. Nuts and bolts said, well, for one, how many degrees does one need to get a job as a NOAA thermometer? And number two, Albert says, so how did Judith Curry do her accurate hurricane forecasting if it takes being, you know, the weather service to do it? Sausage
Chris Martz:slice and a egg and sausage. Well, for as far as the, Judith Curry question goes, I mean, she's a hurricane expert. Mean, she does she's done a lot of research on that. Think don't quote me on this. I have to double check.
Chris Martz:If she's if she's watching, I'm sorry if I get this wrong, but I think she did some of her, like, graduate school, whether it's masters or PhD work on hurricanes. I could be wrong on that. But I know she's done a lot with that and as well as ice sheet dynamics and stuff like that. But I don't know. But I know she's done a lot of research on hurricanes for sure.
Chris Martz:So she has, you know, all the knowledge and expertise to understand, you know, looking at past years, see what patterns were with the sea surface temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific and, the Atlantic sea surface temperatures, wind shear, all that kind of stuff, whether it's gonna be, you know, where the monsoon is gonna be, all that stuff affects where the African Eastern waves. And Anthony could probably add to all that. Yeah.
Sterling Burnett:Well, Bill Gray was the weather service, and he he and the people in Colorado almost as far away as you can get from any hurricanes. But he used to study them for years. And, look, they used the data produced by, NOAA and, the weather service, and they examined trends. You don't have to be with the weather service to be an expert on that.
Linnea Lueken:Alrighty. This question from Brandon Dudley says, do we really need weather balloons anymore? What's the function today?
Chris Martz:I would say, yeah, but I'll let Anthony elaborate on that. I wanna see if he would if it's good.
Anthony Watts:Well, the weather balloons have been around since, I believe, the twenties or thirties.
Chris Martz:Because he was from the state of the field funder and that person knocked double
Anthony Watts:There is some background there. I don't know where it's coming from.
Chris Martz:In the shade of maple swirl. It should be a lot of seconds.
Anthony Watts:I'm having difficulty talking over that, whatever it is. Can you hear me?
Jim Lakely:Yep. We can hear you, Anthony.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. We can hear you.
Anthony Watts:Okay. Yeah. I don't know where that background audio is coming from. But anyway, the weather balloons have been around since around the twenties or thirties, I believe. And, they have been a very important meteorological tool for a very long time.
Anthony Watts:But with the advent of radar satellites and so forth, we may or may not need them anymore. They have been upgraded through their lifetime, but they're still relatively crude. They're launched twice a day from different weather service offices and they drift for, dozens, sometimes hundreds of miles. And they do get a profile of the upper atmosphere and that upper atmosphere profile is important in weather forecasting. But now we have things like lidar, which can do vertical soundings as well.
Anthony Watts:And so the question is, do we really need weather balloons? Maybe not. We might be able to replace it with lidar, but unfortunately, the weather service and NOAA has been slow to adopt that.
Sterling Burnett:I'm I'm gonna respectfully disagree with Anthony. I think they still serve a purpose. You might map things with LiDAR, but they actually record, atmospheric data. And and they are an independent source of temperature data. They serve as a check on satellites, on ground based surface stations.
Sterling Burnett:They are good evidence. They were early good evidence before we did you know, before Anthony did his project and many others now have started looking at the UHI. They were good evidence of the UHI. So, as a as a check, you know, your sign your scientific the scientific method is you test things. This is one way of testing what other sources of data are telling you.
Sterling Burnett:So I I say keep them up.
Chris Martz:Yeah. I I agree with, Sterling generally on that. Although I think Anthony made some valid points, and on the on the contrary. So that's a healthy that's an interesting interesting debate to be had. But one thing I want to add to what Sterling mentioned, and I wanted to add that I wanted to say this as well, was the hope was it was a good temperature check, because, you know, the surface temperature data sets show all this, you know, warming that we've seen, you know, over the last seventy five years or so since 1950.
Chris Martz:Let's just go with that. And you look at the radiosonde data from, you know, the weather Berlin launches, and you look at, and that's an independent data set that they have from NOAA that you can look at. The reanalysis that they have, they all show less warming through the vertical depths of the troposphere than to the surface temperature data set. And to add to that, you have the satellite temperatures, which is, you know, you age and RSS. Now RSS, they adjusted their data to bring that into agreement with the surface temperature record.
Chris Martz:So now RSS from a sensing system shows all this warming, but UAH, John Christie Roy Spencer, and when I actually met them back in January, I was talking with them about this when I visited the campus just on the way to New Orleans. Basically were saying that they use the reason they don't calibrate their temperature data to do the RSS data, you know, to bring it to agreement with that is because they like being independent and using that to check the other data sets as a good quality control thing, along with the radiosondes and stuff. That balloon data is definitely very important.
Linnea Lueken:That's great. Thank you, guys. I didn't think we get such a good discussion out of a balloon question, but I really like that. Anyway, you learn something new every day on the Climate Realism Show. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:Ian McMillan says, is anyone here familiar with the work of farmer and ecologist Anim Savory regarding using grazing animals to reverse desertification and he claims climate change? Does transpiration come into it? I'm I don't I'm not familiar with the particular individual that you're referencing as anyone. I'm going take that as a no, I would say no. And I think that there's it depends on how the grazing animals are being used.
Linnea Lueken:I think I think it's kind of a mixed bag there because they can certainly tear up the ground pretty well as well as fertilize it. So I think it probably depends. I don't I don't know enough about the particular person's argument to to tell you either way.
Sterling Burnett:I'm not familiar with his work. There there is work on this decertification. I don't know about farm animals impacting climate change as far as except for refuting constantly the claim that farming is causing climate change.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. So this is a question from Polly who says the most important question in climate change is how much of global warming is caused by humans? Half, a third or even less? All right. Go ahead, Chris.
Chris Martz:All right. So this is a question I don't think we have a clue. I mean, I'm I'm some people here maybe might disagree. I'm sorry about that. So so I don't think we really have a clue.
Chris Martz:I think it could be, you know, as far as the c o two part of it goes, it could be most of it.
Jim Lakely:It could be almost none of it.
Chris Martz:We don't know because there's a greater uncertainty on the natural energy flows and then out of the system and energy imbalance. We don't know all of that compared to what the forcing is from co two and the uncertainty on that. So there's a so we we don't know. And as far as it could most of the man made part of it could be, urbanization, which is a lot of the work that Anthony's done, you know, those 96% of the surface temperature data is corrupted with bad station citing, it doesn't fit the WMO and NOAA standards. And in recent paper by John Christopher Spencer shows that maybe like 65 of The US temperature warming we've seen since the 1895 or so is is could be due to urbanization.
Chris Martz:And there's been work by Willie Soon that they did work on that with The US and Japan, has similar numbers if I recall correctly. Another test, another thing, this is what Sterling was talking about as well, was the balloon data and how it's independent to good measure. And he had a point in that temperature record shows all this warming, and it has warmed, But the satellite data, you know, from UAH and the radiosonde data analysis don't show it as a steep upward trend. And those are the bulk atmosphere temperatures. That's the whole troposphere.
Chris Martz:So the important part about that is that the climate models and Anthony knows about this, I'm sure Sterling knows about this is the tropical tropospheric hotspot. A lot of that warming we're supposed to be seeing is in the tropical troposphere mid upper troposphere. And and that's what all the climate models show. CMIP five, CMIP six suite, they all show that. And yet that's not materializing.
Chris Martz:So most of the warming should be occurring up in the upper atmosphere to the convective processes in the tropics, which was in response to radio forcing. We're not seeing that most of the warmings at the surface, which in my educated opinion is a urbanization signature. And I'll let the others add to that.
Anthony Watts:Well, I think you covered it pretty well.
Sterling Burnett:I I I'll just add one thing. I think studying climate change is important regardless of whether humans are, primate. You you know, I'm not sure that human activity I'm not sure that studying whether humans and the extent that humans are affecting the climate is as important as studying the climate change itself. Humans won't bring on the next ice age, And I wanna know, if there are any indicators that it's really coming, regardless of any human influence. So I wanna study climate change regardless of any human influence, because it it can change.
Sterling Burnett:It changes regionally all the time. And you wanna be able to, anticipate those changes and adapt to whatever changes come regardless of the cause of the change.
Chris Martz:That's a really good point. And before I we get to the next question, just wanted to add is that, you know, researching climate in general is important because, you know, it's also tied into the weather. And there remains a need in my opinion to have fundamental research that's, you know, understanding the climate dynamics. There's not much of that that's done these days. I mean, it's a smaller percentage of the peer reviewed literature.
Chris Martz:And then also I forgot what else.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. Alright. Awesome, guys. Thank you. And thank you, Polly, for the question.
Linnea Lueken:That was a good one. Let's go. I don't know the answer to this one, and I don't know that anybody else is gonna know it either here. People ask us all the time if we've seen this person or that person's work. Most of the time, the answer is probably going to be no because, well, I personally don't spend a whole lot of time watching various climate change videos.
Linnea Lueken:I tend to be like neck deep and I don't know, reading the wildfire reports from the National Interagency anyway. Fighting Zenithian says, what are your thoughts on Pothole fifty four's climate change videos? Have you considered responding to what he has said? I do not know who that is. Does anybody else?
Chris Martz:I know that he and Tony Heller would go back and forth on YouTube for a while with stuff, but I didn't I didn't really watch most of those videos. So I don't know if anybody else has.
Sterling Burnett:I've never seen one, and anyone who calls himself pothole fifty four would not be somebody that I would probably look at their videos anyway. But then I'm I'm admittedly an old codger. I don't get the names that everybody wants to call themselves.
Chris Martz:Yeah. I'm with I'm with Lynne. I I spend most of my time reading, not watching videos.
Sterling Burnett:Looking at data, not looking at blogs and things like that.
Linnea Lueken:Yeah. I mean, there are there are good blogs out there that
Chris Martz:are worth reading. What's up with that?
Linnea Lueken:Roy Spencer's blog. Yeah. For sure. But, yeah, no, I can't say I don't actually spend very much time at all looking at YouTube of other climate commentators and stuff like that. Okay.
Linnea Lueken:Let's go. I don't know this either. Above us only Sky said, I thought almost every commercial airliner had weather radar. Why not use that data? Anthony?
Anthony Watts:They do. But that mobile and it's very narrow. It's also not something that they collect. There is no collection feature for radar data in an airliner. This is on the spot.
Anthony Watts:You know, it's a sweep back and forth in front of the nose for them to see what's approaching them or what they are approaching rather. And so there's really no way to make any use of it.
Sterling Burnett:Well, also, it's it's fit for purpose. Right? You, Noah, a few years ago, started using ship intake valve next to their engines to, to water down the ocean temperature data, to, actually make it look hotter than it was. So they have the Argo Buoys that are fit for purpose to measure ocean temperatures, and they said, oh, it's not giving us the warming that we want. So let's start taking data from ship, traversing the seas even though that they're not fit for purpose.
Sterling Burnett:I would wager that the airline radar data is not fit for climate purpose. It's it's for the very specific purpose of getting them from point a to point b safely.
Linnea Lueken:Here's a here's a sly little comment by Chris Nesbitt who says, don't models give us better data than actual measurements nowadays? He doesn't mean that. He means to trigger everybody on the panel. But okay, now we have let's see. Oh, this is a comment that I wanted to bring up from Alex Pope.
Linnea Lueken:It's not a question, but I think it is a good point. He says, hopefully, staff cuts are the correct cuts and the quality of work and agency is improved. So you're getting more bang for the buck. That is something that's crossed my mind, especially as I see the way that climate alarmists talk about these issues is there almost seems to be like a wish on their end that the people who are currently staffing those agencies will like have a little bit of what do they call it? I can I've completely lost the phrase.
Linnea Lueken:There is a word for when people are kind of trying to, like, on purpose damage the results of their work or produce bad work in order to prove a point because they're protesting conditions or whatever.
Sterling Burnett:Anyway Sabotage.
Linnea Lueken:Sabotage is not the word I'm looking for, but it's close. There seems to be very bizarre wish for that. And I I hope that that does it does not end up being the case because weather forecasting is important for human life and health. So hopefully not. Kaywan says, whatever happened to climate audit?
Linnea Lueken:McIntyre's blog was my go to during Climate Gate. Anthony, do you know?
Anthony Watts:Yeah. He's gone over to Substack. There are challenges. Despite the fact that he's highly technical. He's not computer savvy.
Anthony Watts:And so he had some challenges with maintaining the WordPress version of climate audit and I had helped him for years with that. But, he decided to move over to Substack, which was easy for him to, manage. So I would invite you to search on Substack for him.
Linnea Lueken:I didn't know that. Charles Roder had Charles Rodger got my word, my phrase, right? Malicious compliance. That's what that's kind of what I was looking for. All right.
Linnea Lueken:Thank you.
Sterling Burnett:Okay.
Linnea Lueken:From DJ Bow, we have what is the likelihood that the administration would consider removing or suspending all temperature recording adjustments? What impact would that have on climate models?
Anthony Watts:Well, they're doing that now in a sense, and we do have the climate reference network, which requires no adjustments whatsoever, which is how it should have been from the get go. But the point is they co opted a, a network called the Cooperative Observer Network, which was all around the country, started in 1892. And it was not fit for purpose, as Sterling says. It was designed to aid in forecast verification. It was never designed to be a climate monitoring system, but it got co opted for that.
Anthony Watts:Now we have a perfectly good climate monitoring system with the climate reference network. And what are they doing with that instead of broadcasting that, instead of using that data in their monthly and yearly climate reports? They are using that data to adjust the crappy surface station data down to look something like it, which is just ridiculous.
Sterling Burnett:And I I would answer the question by saying if they cut out the adjustments, the homogenization work that they do, they get rid of all the stations that actually no longer exist, so they're no longer reporting from areas that actually don't have stations, just, averaging from different stations nearby. If if they did all that, the gap between what the, surface temperature stations say and what the climate models say would widen, but they wouldn't affect the climate models whatsoever because they're not based on data. They're based on assumptions, c o two forcing. They they don't reflect either homogenized data or raw data from the surface stations. That's not built into the models.
Linnea Lueken:Anybody else? Nope. Yes. All right. Thank you.
Linnea Lueken:Okay. Let's see. Oh, this is interesting from David Voigt who says, does anyone on here know what percentage of our local meteorologists are on the climate crazy train? Do they have to sign some kind of an agreement that they'll join?
Sterling Burnett:Honestly think local meteorologists were among the, slowest to be compromised by climate alarm. Most of them do their work. They go in. They look at the reports that come into them before they go on the air, whether radio or TV. They, report accurately.
Sterling Burnett:They don't stray into, long term. And by long term, I mean, more than a week, more than, a couple weeks forecasting. So they're not talking about climate change. They're talking about weather, which is what they're supposed to do. And, over time, the the field has become somewhat compromised, but I still think that there's more skeptics there than there are in other fields.
Sterling Burnett:Because they they live it every day. They know the weather changes every day. They know they know short term forecasts are still off a lot of the time, and so they they have to be skeptical of much longer term forecast. If you can't get the weather good ten days from now, how can you be expected to be forecasting it fifteen hundred years from now?
Linnea Lueken:See?
Chris Martz:I absolutely agree with, with Sterling's assessment. Most meteorologists that I know personally tend to be more critical of the climate alarmist mantra. And I'm actually with two other ones right now in this room who would agree with me on that. But it's and a lot of the TV people do. I mean, I know a lot of I get private messages from meteorologists, some pretty well known ones too.
Chris Martz:Some of the some of the bigger name ones that that I agree with me. Some of them have been vocal in the past. I mean, James Spann, for example, he's always been critical of it. He doesn't talk about it. I know that he's in the normal camp team.
Chris Martz:He's on team reality, but a lot of the big, a lot of people, a lot of surprising names that you wouldn't think are in on that list on the on the TV front. And there's people in academia who are also critical of that too but they can't speak out about it. And and there's people a lot of private sector meteorologists a lot of National Weather Service and NOAA people follow me. They can't necessarily say it publicly, but they would agree with their own team reality. What they got noticed is that meteorologists have to face forecast uncertainty and error and being wrong.
Chris Martz:A lot of these climate scientists, these basket weavers, as I call them, they don't have to face that because these predictions are out of the scope of necessarily even their careers. You know, these predictions are three thousand fifty years from now at a time that that time comes to pass, they're retired or dead. So it doesn't matter to them as much. And another thing about a lot of these climate scientists is that a lot of these government jobs and also university positions in order to be a climate scientist, they have a job opening. All you need is a math or physics degree.
Chris Martz:Now, that's no shade. I'm not throwing any shade on people with math or physics degrees. That stuff's tough. But just because you've got a degree or a Ph. D.
Chris Martz:In physics or a Ph. D. In math does not mean that you understand the weather. And so the weather is the foundation, the very foundation. I think somebody needs to have an understanding of in order to really understand the climate because you also get oceanography and geology.
Chris Martz:And yes, math and physics are important. But just because you have math and physics under your belt doesn't mean that you understand how the atmosphere works, how the ocean works, how the whole system works together.
Linnea Lueken:Absolutely. All right. This is kind of related to something that we already went over, over under above said when Judith Curry was on, she said that temperature data isn't used to create climate models. Is this true? If so, what are they modeling?
Sterling Burnett:Well, that that's what I said earlier. The climate models are based upon specifically assumptions about, temperatures vis a vis c o two and greenhouse gas forcing, not data. They you have a modeler. And he says, what do we think how much do we think a molecule of c o two warms the earth? What is the forcing of c o two on the earth?
Sterling Burnett:And so we model that as we as the rise in c o two goes up, they say, well, then it should have this much forcing. And then what they do is they also build in feedback mechanisms, feedback loops. So it's like, oh, well, will it affect water vapor? Okay. Will it affect this?
Sterling Burnett:Will it affect that? And how will they affect temperature? But they are not based on data. They produce an output that is based on physics, and assumptions about how the earth, how temperatures respond to various types of forcings. It has nothing to do with raw data or real data.
Linnea Lueken:It's it's interesting, too, because a lot of the, like recent models, it's starting to become clear that the more complicated, the more stuff, the more variables you add to the models, the worse they actually get at making any kind of temperature change predictions, which is pretty interesting. Anthony, if you could comment on that at all. I know. I mean, this is at this point pretty well your wheelhouse more than
Anthony Watts:mine. Well, the the models keep getting warmer. For example, the CMIP six models that have come out, and the RCP eight point fives, all of these seem to get warmer and warmer because there's a lot of what I see as confirmation bias in them. They're also solely focused on, you know, carbon dioxide for the most part. Yes.
Anthony Watts:They put in other variables. Yes. They put in water vapor. Yes. They put in solar and so forth.
Anthony Watts:But they have tunnel vision about carbon dioxide. And climate is not a linear function. It is a dynamic function. It's also not exactly real. Climate is a statistical construct.
Anthony Watts:It's a averaging of data over a period of thirty years. It's not like you can go and and and observe climate like you can weather. I mean, you you can look out the door and you can watch a thunderstorm going on. That's weather. You can't look out the door and observe climate.
Anthony Watts:So it's kind of a ficturous thing to start with. But the point is, is that they use the temperature data to sort of tune these and from a hindcast standpoint to see if they got it right. But when going forward, everything starts to get wonky because, you know, of the butterfly effect, because of chaos. The atmospheric is inherently chaotic on not only a local scale, but a global scale. And it's very, very difficult, if not impossible, to forecast a chaotic system far into the future.
Sterling Burnett:I think what studies have shown is that simple models perform better than more complex models because the more complex models build in things that we don't really understand very well. In addition, I think they found that predictions based on the null case, which is no change based on inputs, do better than predictions from climate models based on inputs. So, when the null case is better, that tells me your model is not really functioning the way it should.
Chris Martz:Another thing that you mentioned, was it Anthony that mentioned it? The simple models tend to work better, or was that you, Sterling?
Sterling Burnett:I just said that. Anthony?
Chris Martz:Yeah, you said Collin. Yeah. Roy Spencer, if you look at his blog, you go back to 02/2009 when he first started, he used to run a lot of different models himself and just excel. And he could sort of recreate a global warming trend with stuff with the PDO or ammo, internal variability and how that heat is redistributed. And it was just a simple model.
Chris Martz:It wasn't anything complex. So that was that goes to your point that they some of the sometimes the simpler stuff, is easier to understand than, you know, in a modeling in a modeling case.
Sterling Burnett:But what I meant was, not not understanding the model. What I meant was the simpler models better track measured changes. So they're closer to the temperature trend line of, the recorded temperatures than the complex climate models that the UN, uses.
Linnea Lueken:Yep. Okay. Shifting gears a little bit here. Stan Pickett asks, since endangerment finding was mentioned earlier, does anyone know how that battle is going within the administration? I think they're kind of busy right now.
Chris Martz:They're kind of busy with stuff, obviously, but I know because I work, you know, I do stuff with CFACT, and, we have a hard we're having a hard time on our I don't know how it is at Heartland or or wherever, but we're we're having a hard time trying to get in contact with them and them being, you know, forthcoming with information. It's I I was talking to Craig about that the other day. It's very, just not a lot of stuff coming out from them on that from our end.
Sterling Burnett:I think to some extent, they're wise in what they're doing. They they don't wanna do this, you know, in public. They wanna get their ducks
Jim Lakely:in a row.
Chris Martz:Not at all.
Sterling Burnett:You know, one of the successes of Trump's last administration was, all the countries they got to, to, recognize Israel. They had no no country after after Carter, did did Egypt. Not a single presidential administration was able to get, any other country in the region to recognize Israel. I believe four or five countries did in the last six months of Trump's term. How did he do that?
Sterling Burnett:What he didn't do, he he did what other presidents didn't do. They didn't hold public summits where they announced what they were gonna be doing so protesters could show up, where they had press conferences. What he did is negotiate behind the scenes, and then they come out and they have a press conference the day of the deal. Oh, we signed a deal today. This country is gonna recognize Israel.
Sterling Burnett:Well, that's what they're going to do with, the endangerment finding. They're gonna, I know that the energy department's working on it. The EPA is working on it. They're doing some dual track stuff. But what they're not going to do is publicly every day update you on what they're doing with the endangerment finding.
Sterling Burnett:They don't need the the flack from the mainstream media. They don't need the flack from the environmentalist. They all they already know what their feelings are. They want to present it as a fake and then have the public comment period.
Linnea Lueken:Alright. This is a good question from Kenneth Miller, who says per Lindsay and Hapr, is there a simple explanation of how carbon dioxide warming decreases with saturation at higher PPM levels? I think that would be an Anthony question. Well,
Anthony Watts:first of all, I'll give an analogy I like to use to help people understand this about saturation. Think of a bowl of soup. You go to a restaurant, you get a bowl of soup and you taste it. And it's like, yeah, it's bland. So you add a little salt to it.
Anthony Watts:And then you taste it again. Needs a little more salt. And then you add some more salt to it, and now you've overdone it. It tastes too salty. And you look at that and what have I done?
Anthony Watts:You know, you've got the salty mess. Well, here's the point. After that point where your taste buds are saturated to salt, sodium chloride, after that point, no matter how much more salt you add, it's still going to taste the same. And so that's kind of how it is with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Once you get to a certain point of saturation of molecules, adding more doesn't really change how it's perceived or how it reflects heat back, you know, infrared, long wave infrared, that sort of thing.
Anthony Watts:So it's really just a it's just like any other saturation thing. There's a res there's a maximum response you get to. And beyond that response or beyond that saturation level, there is no more additional response.
Sterling Burnett:Once once you cover this once you cover the spectrum, you can't it does you don't cover it anymore. It's covered. It's covered. When I sadly probably eventually go bald, I won't be balder any other day. I will be as bald as I can get.
Anthony Watts:You've you've reached maximum chrome saturation.
Chris Martz:Hey. You can get brainwashed in the shower when you get bald.
Sterling Burnett:That's it. You know? So
Chris Martz:Mister Clean.
Sterling Burnett:There you go. Well, if if now to be fair, if I sorta had mister Clean's bulky body, then then maybe I wouldn't mind it so
Jim Lakely:much. A little more like uncle Fester, I think.
Sterling Burnett:That's my fear.
Jim Lakely:That's my fear.
Chris Martz:Uncle Fester is John Fetterman.
Linnea Lueken:Right. On that note, question from William and Karen Fletcher is, are rural weather stations more likely to be the ones taken out of service than urban ones? If so, the virtual replacements would have more urban heat island effect.
Anthony Watts:Yes, that's true. I've actually observed this in my travels looking at over a thousand weather stations around The United States. The urban people, they are closer to where the weather service office is, and they get serviced better by the weather service office due to shorter travel times. But there are stations that are out in the boonies literally in the middle of nowhere that are hundreds of miles from the weather service office that service them to keep their equipment in operation. And some of them are very frustrated.
Anthony Watts:I've talked to people who said, you know, I haven't been visited by the co op manager of the weather service in years. And I've got, you know, the thermometer here that's acting wonky and I can't get them to do anything about it. And so since this is the volunteer program, some people just simply say, oh, why the heck with it? And they give up. And so, yes, the the rural are disappearing faster than the urban.
Chris Martz:Yep. That's a to add to Anthony's point on that, I know that because I I as you go off, I probably see it on my Twitter page. I like to create charts of like the number of extremely hot days or extremely cold days by year. Or and I can make create the heat wave days, frequencies, and stuff with that data by running it through Rust and then Python. But that data is really tough.
Chris Martz:It's increasingly hard to find stations that are open more than one hundred, one hundred and ten years. You know, there were one hundred and 20 or eight twenty eight as of 2023, but that number might be more like 700 something now. And so in order to kind of keep consistency, you have to and I was trying to figure out how to like do this and I cause I know John Christie at UAH does a lot with this data and so he's helped me. We've, and then he's been doing a lot of this work, on his own, but, he's been supplying me charts and some data because he has more time on his hands than I do, at least as a college student. But he's looked at the stations that have shut down, of these ghost stations, I guess.
Chris Martz:And so he looks for stations that are still operating that are within a few miles of it and tries and incorporates that data, does a little bit of guesswork adjustments to it to incorporate and extend the record length of that station. But then, as John mentioned to me, you you run into a whole host of problems with that because there are microclimates, there's changes in elevation, changes in other surroundings and stuff. So it's not quite an apples to apples comparison between if you're threading stations together. Absolutely right. It's the rural stations are disappearing fast, and that's not a good thing for long term climate monitoring.
Sterling Burnett:Well, you got you know, as Anthony mentioned, the station system, the original station system was all volunteer network. They wrote the things out by hand a few times a day. They mailed it in. That's still the case. They haven't computerized all this.
Sterling Burnett:And many of those stations shut down because the, the locations where they were, the people just simply aren't there anymore. If if they were next to a farmer's house and he ceases to be a farmer, and and and someone else comes in and and does something else with the land, that station goes away. No one's reporting that any longer, even if it functions, and usually it doesn't. I went when I looked for part of Anthony's project, one of the stations I found was right next to a small radio station in a town. And, it was biased.
Sterling Burnett:It was it was up next to the wall. It was you know, there were all sorts of problems with it. But, when that radio station goes out of business and a lot of rural radio station smaller radio stations are being co opted and taken over, by national chains that aren't then using that station anymore, you won't have anyone there reporting the data. It's just a simple fact that, where the locations were, sometimes the people, the company, the the the the whoever was actually recording, monitoring, and recording the data daily, they're no longer there. They're no longer doing it.
Linnea Lueken:All right. Well, unfortunately, you guys, that's about all the time that we have. We've run right up to when Chris has to leave. So we actually screenshotted the remaining questions that we have you guys so that we can try to address them next week. So don't worry if we didn't get to them.
Linnea Lueken:We'll try to get to them next time. But I'll hand it back to you then, Jim.
Jim Lakely:Yes. Oh, we'd be happy to get out of here real fast. I just wanna thank you again, Chris Marks, for being on the show. We can't wait to have you on again in the very near future, I hope.
Chris Martz:For having me on. It's always a pleasure to be here with you all.
Jim Lakely:Yeah. It's mutual for sure. Thanks, Lanea. Thanks, Anthony Watts. Thank you very much, Sterling Burnett.
Jim Lakely:And thank you, the audience, for making this show so much fun and successful. We're glad that you enjoyed yourself today. And again, we'll try to answer as many questions as we can in the chat each and every week. Thank you, Andy Singer, the producer extraordinaire in the background. I would remind you to always visit climaterealism.com.
Jim Lakely:Go to climateataglance.com. Go to energyataglance.com. Those are all websites produced by the Heartland Institute. And of course, always go to heartland.org where you can get all of our latest information, just on climate and energy, but on all the topics that we cover as a think tank. Again, you can support this program by going to heartland.org/tcrs, and I hope that you will do that.
Jim Lakely:You can also oh, I just forgot because Sterling will kill me if I don't say this. You should subscribe to the Climate Change weekly newsletter, which you can get by going to heartland.org and hitting the subscribe button up there at the top. Thank you all for being here. We will talk to you next week. Bye bye.
Linnea Lueken:How dare you?
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