Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Very pleased to welcome back to the show, doctor Matthew Wilicky.
Matt is a PhD scientist and former professor at University
of Alabama and the proprietor of the Irrational Fear substack
Irrational Fear dot substack dot com and Matt actually lives
in the Denver metro area and joins me in studio.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So, hi, Matt, thanks for being here. Great to see yours,
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So Irrational Fear is a must read for anybody who
really wants to understand what's going on in the world
of not just climate science, but a lot but policy
around it and the politicization of it.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
And so I appreciate your work.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And just one quick macro question and we're going to
jump into some articles.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Why did you leave University of Alabama?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Why are you a professor in exile instead of a
professor right now?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Well, I mean I started to speak out against a
few things in academia, and a climate being one of them,
but DEI being another. And those were two taboo subjects
that you just couldn't talk about in academia at the time.
And it was very clear as an assistant professor that
was going up for tenure that that wasn't going to happen.
I had rocked the boat a little too much, even
(01:11):
though I was just merely asking questions, trying to point
out some places where things could get a little bit better,
where the messaging was wrong. Those were two subjects you
just couldn't talk about, particularly around twenty twenty, and it
became really clear.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That I was unwelcomed, and so we ended up moving
to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So how are you paying the bills now? How are
you putting food on your family? As George W.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Bush would say, so thankfully, we had made some good investments,
so we had some rental properties, and so I managed those,
and then I.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Run a dumpster business.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Weely works dumpster rentals and write on substack.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And are you are you making at least a little
money off of your writing right now?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It's actually remarkable that you know, for a cup of
coffee a month, you can get ten to twenty you know,
individual articles, unique articles. I have no strings attached. I'm
not funded by the NSF. There's no government that's funding me.
There's no university chaining me down. I can tell it
like it is, speak the truth, talk about my experiences
(02:10):
and nobody can shut me up. So people appreciate that.
And within a year and a half or two years,
you know, we're close to half of what I was
making at the university. So this is a really new
avenue for faculty members that are pissed off and want
to keep writing and talking. And you know, this never
existed before, so hopefully keeps going that way, but.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
You know, you never know.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, folks go to Irrational Fear dot substack dot com
and become a subscriber.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I'm a subscriber as well.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
And it's interesting, you know, our mutual friend Roger Pilk
is also going to stop being a professor and is
also making something of a living on substack.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
And I'm so glad that's an avenue that's available to
you guys.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, he's got a great one, the honest broker. I
recommend that one highly as well.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
All Right, I want to talk.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I want to do kind of a rapid fire thing,
maybe three minutes each or so on some of your
reces and articles, and I'll probably just go in the
order that that.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
You wrote some of them.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
One of them, why CO two cannot explain current warming?
And of course we're I'm way out on one wing here, Okay.
When people start to talk to me about this stuff,
I just say, humans are adaptable, We're not all gonna die.
And CO two is plant food, so please shut.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Up about it. So that's kind of where I am.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Why But but you know, the usual suspect to talk
about CO two as if it's the driver of this
thing that's gonna kill us all.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Why is it not?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, So, I mean it's it's definitely a player in
the whole atmospheric system. But I would argue it's third
or fourth order. There's so many things in front of
that that are so much more dominant. Vapor, water vapor
being the most dominant one. I mean, that is the
ultimate greenhouse gas. That's because water vapor is kind of bent,
(03:53):
and so we can trap infrared. CO two isn't It
has to bounce into other things and then trap it.
And we're talking multiple percentages of water vapor in the
app in the atmosphere at all times, you know, deup
points it's one hundred percent, right, And then when we're
talking about CO two, we're talking about parts per million,
So the concentrations are orders of magnitude, and so you know,
(04:13):
it's hard to regulate water vapor.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
It's easy to regulate CO two.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
So they're picking the thing that they can make policy
that they can go after certain industries. They do it
particularly because CO two is something we produce. We don't
produce a ton of water vapor, and even if we did,
you couldn't really regulate. It all comes back to the money.
It all comes back to what kind of regulation they
can put on industries, and so they blame CO two
because it's one that they can regulate.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Did you see this.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Recent thing talking about how the hydroxyl radical oh. I
guess it would be OH minus because O is minus
two and H is plus one. But I guess this
hydroxyl radical is produced with some interaction with ozone and
it doesn't last very long, like less than a second.
But when it interacts with methane, it eats the methane.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Have you seen this, Yes, So methane has a really
short residence time in the atmosphere, methane or hydroxyl well
both actually, but methane gets knocked out because of that
that interaction.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That chemical reaction.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
And so this is something we talk a lot about
in the amosphere is residence time, How long is the
stuff that we're putting out there around When you talk
about methane, now you're talking about parts per billion, you've
dropped another or theoretically, theoretically yes, but it's not because
the absorption is dominated in those bands. So when when
when when you absorb the infrared, it's not just one wavelength,
(05:33):
it's a few different wavelengths where methane absorbs is totally
saturated by water vapor, So all of that is completely
So you can think about putting a giant blind on
your window and knocking out all the light. If you
put another thin sheet on that, it wouldn't do anything
because there's no light passing through in those bands. The
IR is completely saturated by water vapor. So methane is
(05:54):
doing nothing. Wow, in my argument, you're right. I mean,
theoretically it does have an infrared absorption band, it will
play a part, but because water vapor is so dominant
and it's so much more abundant in the atmosphere, it
just doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I mean, that's it. I've never heard anybody say that before.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
And of course you have all this left these leftists
or climate activists, especially in Europe.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
They're trying to shut down cattle farming in Europe.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
People always talk about cow farts, it's really the cow
burps that are the source of the methane. You're saying
that the methane produced by cattle is close to irrelevant
because it absorbs in the same wavelength that is already
dominated by.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Water vapor exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I'm saying it's even worse than that because the companies,
the bow vier is the product that is being fed
now to the cows so they don't burp. The methane
is being made by the same companies that invested hundreds
of million dollars into alternative meats. They have a pure
incentive to destroy natural meat and agriculture so they can
do these lab grown meats. And this bow beer has
(06:56):
already been shown, like all these other things, to reduce
sperm in males, to reduce testy size, in these medicals
in these medical tests. Now they say that's at doses
that are much higher than we'd ever produce, and you
wouldn't get it in the meat at anything close to that.
But why is it always that it's the companies that
stand to make the money that blow up all of
this stuff and hype it up. It all comes back
(07:19):
to the making the bubble wow. I had never heard
that either. You know, that reminds me of a couple
things that reminds me of.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Back in the day, there were some environmental groups that
were campaigning against fossil fuels, and it turned out they
were funded by Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Both were doing it, okay, both.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Of them because they didn't want American production of fossil fuels,
because that would depress the price of fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
That they're that they're selling.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
The other thing that it reminds me of is back
in the day, there's this famous study that concluded that
the most important meal of the day was breakfast, and
it was funded by Kellogg's right, right, and so it's
unbelievable high carb, high sugar breakfasts.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Hey, a listener.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
A listener wants to know if you have any thoughts
about ethanol E eighty five vehicle fuel.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
So I think that a lot of the subsidies for
for ethanol and vehicle fuels are are pointless. We produce
way too much corn. It's mainly for the corn lobby.
That's that that the reason that this stuff exists. We
don't have the infrastructure. I think that we could we
do just fine with with gasoline from oil or maybe
liquid natural gas at some point which you see a
(08:23):
lot of trust.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Is there any Is there any climate benefit to E
eighty five?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I think once you you take in all the accounts
for growing the corn and processing everything, the benefit is
very small.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
You wrote a very interesting piece just a few days ago.
And again we're talking with Matt Wylicky, uh PhD scientist, right,
so not just a piker who's just spouting some opinions.
This guy's the real deal.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
His substack is Irrational Fear dot substack dot com and
you should become a paid subscriber. You wrote a piece
called the Climate Housing Panic. This is a really fascinating subject.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Talk about a little bit.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, this one really hit close to home because on
the same day there was two articles that came out
that in the next decade or a couple decades, housing
prices in these what they call climate vulnerable areas are
going to drop. The number one place was Fresno, California,
where I grew up, so I know the housing market.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
They're very well.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
My parents still own properties rental properties plus their home.
So I just went simply looked up the Federal Housing
Index and what the prices have done, and.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
They've tripled or so are quadrupled in the last couple decades.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
There was that peak in two thousand and eight, it
dropped a little, and then they keep going up. So
everything comes back to this speculation. Nothing is showable in
the observable data. They also showed Miami. Miami's gone up
seven times in the last twenty years or something like that.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
The price is there, but they're claiming now that this
stuff is going to be climate vulnerable, so that insurance
companies are going to be charging all these prices. Well,
insurance companies read that stuff and they say, okay, we're
going to start raising the rates. There's no reason to
do it. This all speculation, but it's going to have
a real effect on people's property values, and so they
make they spout all this stuff out. They can't show
any supporting data, but it will have an effect on
(10:07):
people's property values because people buy this stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
People believe people who don't read your writing and Roger's writing,
and people people believe that climate change is responsible for
the destruction in western North Carolina of Hurricane Helene and
the other hurricane that came right after and Milton in
Milton that had.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Florida uh uh, and fires in California.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what do you tell people who are not constantly
reading the science and are just taking in what they
get on ABC News or CNN that's telling them your
home's going to burn down or get washed.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Away or get blown away.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah, so they have to just take a little bit
of a holistic view, take a step back, look at
more than just a few decades of data. I think
when you do that, you see that things change. Climate
is very cyclical. I showed that the f uds that
hit Ashville, North Carolina were similar to ones that happened
in eighteenth century seventeen nineties. But we don't really remember that.
We have weather in climate amnesia. We think a few
(11:09):
decades is enough of a trend. So if you take
a step back and you take a bigger picture, look,
you're going to see that a lot of this is
a cop out for politicians to blame a trace magical
gas for a lot of things that they could be
doing building flood infrastructure, but building better fire breaks having
water in the reservoir right next to the Pacific Palisades.
There's a lot of things that could be done, but
(11:30):
politicians love to blame the devil molecule right CO two,
because it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Washes their hands.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
It absolves them of all responsibility, and it basically puts
it all onto us for putting out CO two because
every time we exhale, forty thousand ppm of CO two
is coming out. So I just find it a huge
cop out for politicians. It's this ultimate kind of get
out of jail free card for not doing anything. These
things are not new events.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
All right, we got time for one more topic. We
got about three minutes here. I told you why I
had Mike on the show, and that guy's the real
deal as far as you know science goes. He's been
one of the top climate scientists for forty years. And
we were talking about a paper that he or a
note that he wrote recently. He didn't really sort of
backtrack on the science, but he said he completely missed
(12:18):
how it would be impossible to do some of the
things that he and others wanted to do because of politics.
And of course, in my mind, that's politicians taking care
of the local you know, our own feel like, why
should we impoverish ourselves to go anyway? So you wrote
a piece just a couple of days ago at Irrationalfear
dot substack dot com how science became a tool for
(12:41):
fear mongering, And of course this goes back I would
I would say the first major point in this was
al Gore, right, I think he really saw other people
were doing it on the lower level. Al Gore really
started off fear mongering as an industry.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's that's right. So I call it the climate industrial complet.
That's that sync.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
This this this kind of you know, sympathy. What sid
word sympathetic relationship, No symbiotic relationship between the media, the science,
the politicians. Everybody gets on board with the same narrative,
and everybody gets the funding going, and everybody ignores the
science that doesn't really fit and hypes the science that does.
(13:21):
In that particular article, the news was all about Greenland's
cracking up like crazy. But in the in the line
right in self, it says it's not even within the
uncertainty of their measurements.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's one line, but it completely destroys the paper use
round numbers. It's four plus or minus five or four
plus or minus six, so actually within their error bars,
it's possible that it's even improving.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
That's right, and that as a reviewer of science, I
would have rejected that paper in a second.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
How does that get through?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
And that's in Nature Geoscience, one of the most respected
journal journals.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Around, and it gets through.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
So everybody's kind of just patting each other on the back,
you know, letting the stuff go through, hyping it up.
The scientists don't say anything about the media. They should
come back and say, hey, those headlines are incorrect. Our
science did not say that. Let me correct the headline
and tell you what it says.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Let me just have we have just over a minute here,
and I want to do some listener questions with you,
but I need really fast answers. A listener asked, and
I already answered, but I want you to tell me
if I got the answer right, what percentage of the
atmosphere is CO two? I said, I think it's around
point zero four percent, that's right.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Or another way, say it as four hundred parts per
million four today I think it's four twenty four four.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Okay, So it's point if you're not doing it in percent,
it's point zero zero zero four to two. Okay, okay,
really fast answers. Are volcanic eruptions important from a climate perspective.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Absolutely, particularly the recent one in Tonga?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
And are they imported? This is my follow up. Are
they important because of particulates or because of CO two
or methane both?
Speaker 3 (14:52):
This one was really interesting because it increased the water
vapor in the stratosphere by ten percent because it was
a submarine volcano, so all that water got entrained in
the plume and went all the way to the stratosphere.
So that's something different that we've never experienced before.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Listen, that's gonna have a warming effect.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Listener question, Can your guest comment about carbon sequestering pipelines
that are being built.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
In the Dakotas and if they have any actual use?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
No?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
There, it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
What about variations in the sun, particularly in ultraviolet? How
big an effect do these have on climate?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I think we're still figuring that out.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I would argue much bigger than the IPCC likes to
give credit to. But you can't regulate the sun, so
they like to ignore.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
That Matt Wilicky's substack is called Irrational Fear. Irrationalfear dot
substack dot com. Get over there, become a paid subscriber.
Matt actually writes a lot. There are a lot of
places where you'll become a substacked subscriber and get you know,
one piece a week or something like that. Matt's writing
more like every other day, something like that, really good stuff,
(16:00):
science based that you just won't get elsewhere because other
people are reliant on the climate alarmism industry for their livelihoods,
and Matt's trying to do it the honest way. Irrational
Fear dot substack dot com. Thanks for joining me in studio.
Thanks forrestling
Very pleased to welcome back to the show, doctor Matthew Wilicky.
Matt is a PhD scientist and former professor at University
of Alabama and the proprietor of the Irrational Fear substack
Irrational Fear dot substack dot com and Matt actually lives
in the Denver metro area and joins me in studio.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
So, hi, Matt, thanks for being here. Great to see yours,
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
So Irrational Fear is a must read for anybody who
really wants to understand what's going on in the world
of not just climate science, but a lot but policy
around it and the politicization of it.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
And so I appreciate your work.
Speaker 1 (00:39):
And just one quick macro question and we're going to
jump into some articles.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
Why did you leave University of Alabama?
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Why are you a professor in exile instead of a
professor right now?
Speaker 3 (00:50):
Well, I mean I started to speak out against a
few things in academia, and a climate being one of them,
but DEI being another. And those were two taboo subjects
that you just couldn't talk about in academia at the time.
And it was very clear as an assistant professor that
was going up for tenure that that wasn't going to happen.
I had rocked the boat a little too much, even
(01:11):
though I was just merely asking questions, trying to point
out some places where things could get a little bit better,
where the messaging was wrong. Those were two subjects you
just couldn't talk about, particularly around twenty twenty, and it
became really clear.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
That I was unwelcomed, and so we ended up moving
to Colorado.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
So how are you paying the bills now? How are
you putting food on your family? As George W.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Bush would say, so thankfully, we had made some good investments,
so we had some rental properties, and so I managed those,
and then I.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Run a dumpster business.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
Weely works dumpster rentals and write on substack.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And are you are you making at least a little
money off of your writing right now?
Speaker 3 (01:48):
It's actually remarkable that you know, for a cup of
coffee a month, you can get ten to twenty you know,
individual articles, unique articles. I have no strings attached. I'm
not funded by the NSF. There's no government that's funding me.
There's no university chaining me down. I can tell it
like it is, speak the truth, talk about my experiences
(02:10):
and nobody can shut me up. So people appreciate that.
And within a year and a half or two years,
you know, we're close to half of what I was
making at the university. So this is a really new
avenue for faculty members that are pissed off and want
to keep writing and talking. And you know, this never
existed before, so hopefully keeps going that way, but.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
You know, you never know.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Yeah, folks go to Irrational Fear dot substack dot com
and become a subscriber.
Speaker 2 (02:33):
I'm a subscriber as well.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
And it's interesting, you know, our mutual friend Roger Pilk
is also going to stop being a professor and is
also making something of a living on substack.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
And I'm so glad that's an avenue that's available to
you guys.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Yeah, he's got a great one, the honest broker. I
recommend that one highly as well.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
All Right, I want to talk.
Speaker 1 (02:53):
I want to do kind of a rapid fire thing,
maybe three minutes each or so on some of your
reces and articles, and I'll probably just go in the
order that that.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
You wrote some of them.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
One of them, why CO two cannot explain current warming?
And of course we're I'm way out on one wing here, Okay.
When people start to talk to me about this stuff,
I just say, humans are adaptable, We're not all gonna die.
And CO two is plant food, so please shut.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
Up about it. So that's kind of where I am.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Why But but you know, the usual suspect to talk
about CO two as if it's the driver of this
thing that's gonna kill us all.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Why is it not?
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Yeah, So, I mean it's it's definitely a player in
the whole atmospheric system. But I would argue it's third
or fourth order. There's so many things in front of
that that are so much more dominant. Vapor, water vapor
being the most dominant one. I mean, that is the
ultimate greenhouse gas. That's because water vapor is kind of bent,
(03:53):
and so we can trap infrared. CO two isn't It
has to bounce into other things and then trap it.
And we're talking multiple percentages of water vapor in the
app in the atmosphere at all times, you know, deup
points it's one hundred percent, right, And then when we're
talking about CO two, we're talking about parts per million,
So the concentrations are orders of magnitude, and so you know,
(04:13):
it's hard to regulate water vapor.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
It's easy to regulate CO two.
Speaker 3 (04:17):
So they're picking the thing that they can make policy
that they can go after certain industries. They do it
particularly because CO two is something we produce. We don't
produce a ton of water vapor, and even if we did,
you couldn't really regulate. It all comes back to the money.
It all comes back to what kind of regulation they
can put on industries, and so they blame CO two
because it's one that they can regulate.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Did you see this.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Recent thing talking about how the hydroxyl radical oh. I
guess it would be OH minus because O is minus
two and H is plus one. But I guess this
hydroxyl radical is produced with some interaction with ozone and
it doesn't last very long, like less than a second.
But when it interacts with methane, it eats the methane.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Have you seen this, Yes, So methane has a really
short residence time in the atmosphere, methane or hydroxyl well
both actually, but methane gets knocked out because of that
that interaction.
Speaker 2 (05:10):
That chemical reaction.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
And so this is something we talk a lot about
in the amosphere is residence time, How long is the
stuff that we're putting out there around When you talk
about methane, now you're talking about parts per billion, you've
dropped another or theoretically, theoretically yes, but it's not because
the absorption is dominated in those bands. So when when
when when you absorb the infrared, it's not just one wavelength,
(05:33):
it's a few different wavelengths where methane absorbs is totally
saturated by water vapor, So all of that is completely
So you can think about putting a giant blind on
your window and knocking out all the light. If you
put another thin sheet on that, it wouldn't do anything
because there's no light passing through in those bands. The
IR is completely saturated by water vapor. So methane is
(05:54):
doing nothing. Wow, in my argument, you're right. I mean,
theoretically it does have an infrared absorption band, it will
play a part, but because water vapor is so dominant
and it's so much more abundant in the atmosphere, it
just doesn't do anything.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
I mean, that's it. I've never heard anybody say that before.
Speaker 1 (06:11):
And of course you have all this left these leftists
or climate activists, especially in Europe.
Speaker 2 (06:17):
They're trying to shut down cattle farming in Europe.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
People always talk about cow farts, it's really the cow
burps that are the source of the methane. You're saying
that the methane produced by cattle is close to irrelevant
because it absorbs in the same wavelength that is already
dominated by.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Water vapor exactly.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
I'm saying it's even worse than that because the companies,
the bow vier is the product that is being fed
now to the cows so they don't burp. The methane
is being made by the same companies that invested hundreds
of million dollars into alternative meats. They have a pure
incentive to destroy natural meat and agriculture so they can
do these lab grown meats. And this bow beer has
(06:56):
already been shown, like all these other things, to reduce
sperm in males, to reduce testy size, in these medicals
in these medical tests. Now they say that's at doses
that are much higher than we'd ever produce, and you
wouldn't get it in the meat at anything close to that.
But why is it always that it's the companies that
stand to make the money that blow up all of
this stuff and hype it up. It all comes back
(07:19):
to the making the bubble wow. I had never heard
that either. You know, that reminds me of a couple
things that reminds me of.
Speaker 1 (07:25):
Back in the day, there were some environmental groups that
were campaigning against fossil fuels, and it turned out they
were funded by Russia and Saudi Arabia.
Speaker 2 (07:32):
Both were doing it, okay, both.
Speaker 1 (07:34):
Of them because they didn't want American production of fossil fuels,
because that would depress the price of fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
That they're that they're selling.
Speaker 1 (07:40):
The other thing that it reminds me of is back
in the day, there's this famous study that concluded that
the most important meal of the day was breakfast, and
it was funded by Kellogg's right, right, and so it's
unbelievable high carb, high sugar breakfasts.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
Hey, a listener.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
A listener wants to know if you have any thoughts
about ethanol E eighty five vehicle fuel.
Speaker 3 (08:02):
So I think that a lot of the subsidies for
for ethanol and vehicle fuels are are pointless. We produce
way too much corn. It's mainly for the corn lobby.
That's that that the reason that this stuff exists. We
don't have the infrastructure. I think that we could we
do just fine with with gasoline from oil or maybe
liquid natural gas at some point which you see a
(08:23):
lot of trust.
Speaker 1 (08:23):
Is there any Is there any climate benefit to E
eighty five?
Speaker 3 (08:28):
I think once you you take in all the accounts
for growing the corn and processing everything, the benefit is
very small.
Speaker 1 (08:34):
You wrote a very interesting piece just a few days ago.
And again we're talking with Matt Wylicky, uh PhD scientist, right,
so not just a piker who's just spouting some opinions.
This guy's the real deal.
Speaker 2 (08:47):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (08:47):
His substack is Irrational Fear dot substack dot com and
you should become a paid subscriber. You wrote a piece
called the Climate Housing Panic. This is a really fascinating subject.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Talk about a little bit.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
Yeah, this one really hit close to home because on
the same day there was two articles that came out
that in the next decade or a couple decades, housing
prices in these what they call climate vulnerable areas are
going to drop. The number one place was Fresno, California,
where I grew up, so I know the housing market.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
They're very well.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
My parents still own properties rental properties plus their home.
So I just went simply looked up the Federal Housing
Index and what the prices have done, and.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
They've tripled or so are quadrupled in the last couple decades.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
There was that peak in two thousand and eight, it
dropped a little, and then they keep going up. So
everything comes back to this speculation. Nothing is showable in
the observable data. They also showed Miami. Miami's gone up
seven times in the last twenty years or something like that.
Speaker 2 (09:43):
I mean, it's ridiculous.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
The price is there, but they're claiming now that this
stuff is going to be climate vulnerable, so that insurance
companies are going to be charging all these prices. Well,
insurance companies read that stuff and they say, okay, we're
going to start raising the rates. There's no reason to
do it. This all speculation, but it's going to have
a real effect on people's property values, and so they
make they spout all this stuff out. They can't show
any supporting data, but it will have an effect on
(10:07):
people's property values because people buy this stuff.
Speaker 1 (10:09):
People believe people who don't read your writing and Roger's writing,
and people people believe that climate change is responsible for
the destruction in western North Carolina of Hurricane Helene and
the other hurricane that came right after and Milton in
Milton that had.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Florida uh uh, and fires in California.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
So what do you tell people who are not constantly
reading the science and are just taking in what they
get on ABC News or CNN that's telling them your
home's going to burn down or get washed.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Away or get blown away.
Speaker 3 (10:47):
Yeah, so they have to just take a little bit
of a holistic view, take a step back, look at
more than just a few decades of data. I think
when you do that, you see that things change. Climate
is very cyclical. I showed that the f uds that
hit Ashville, North Carolina were similar to ones that happened
in eighteenth century seventeen nineties. But we don't really remember that.
We have weather in climate amnesia. We think a few
(11:09):
decades is enough of a trend. So if you take
a step back and you take a bigger picture, look,
you're going to see that a lot of this is
a cop out for politicians to blame a trace magical
gas for a lot of things that they could be
doing building flood infrastructure, but building better fire breaks having
water in the reservoir right next to the Pacific Palisades.
There's a lot of things that could be done, but
(11:30):
politicians love to blame the devil molecule right CO two,
because it.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Washes their hands.
Speaker 3 (11:35):
It absolves them of all responsibility, and it basically puts
it all onto us for putting out CO two because
every time we exhale, forty thousand ppm of CO two
is coming out. So I just find it a huge
cop out for politicians. It's this ultimate kind of get
out of jail free card for not doing anything. These
things are not new events.
Speaker 1 (11:56):
All right, we got time for one more topic. We
got about three minutes here. I told you why I
had Mike on the show, and that guy's the real
deal as far as you know science goes. He's been
one of the top climate scientists for forty years. And
we were talking about a paper that he or a
note that he wrote recently. He didn't really sort of
backtrack on the science, but he said he completely missed
(12:18):
how it would be impossible to do some of the
things that he and others wanted to do because of politics.
And of course, in my mind, that's politicians taking care
of the local you know, our own feel like, why
should we impoverish ourselves to go anyway? So you wrote
a piece just a couple of days ago at Irrationalfear
dot substack dot com how science became a tool for
(12:41):
fear mongering, And of course this goes back I would
I would say the first major point in this was
al Gore, right, I think he really saw other people
were doing it on the lower level. Al Gore really
started off fear mongering as an industry.
Speaker 2 (12:57):
That's that's right. So I call it the climate industrial complet.
That's that sync.
Speaker 3 (13:01):
This this this kind of you know, sympathy. What sid
word sympathetic relationship, No symbiotic relationship between the media, the science,
the politicians. Everybody gets on board with the same narrative,
and everybody gets the funding going, and everybody ignores the
science that doesn't really fit and hypes the science that does.
(13:21):
In that particular article, the news was all about Greenland's
cracking up like crazy. But in the in the line
right in self, it says it's not even within the
uncertainty of their measurements.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
It's one line, but it completely destroys the paper use
round numbers. It's four plus or minus five or four
plus or minus six, so actually within their error bars,
it's possible that it's even improving.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
That's right, and that as a reviewer of science, I
would have rejected that paper in a second.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
How does that get through?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
And that's in Nature Geoscience, one of the most respected
journal journals.
Speaker 2 (13:52):
Around, and it gets through.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
So everybody's kind of just patting each other on the back,
you know, letting the stuff go through, hyping it up.
The scientists don't say anything about the media. They should
come back and say, hey, those headlines are incorrect. Our
science did not say that. Let me correct the headline
and tell you what it says.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Let me just have we have just over a minute here,
and I want to do some listener questions with you,
but I need really fast answers. A listener asked, and
I already answered, but I want you to tell me
if I got the answer right, what percentage of the
atmosphere is CO two? I said, I think it's around
point zero four percent, that's right.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Or another way, say it as four hundred parts per
million four today I think it's four twenty four four.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Okay, So it's point if you're not doing it in percent,
it's point zero zero zero four to two. Okay, okay,
really fast answers. Are volcanic eruptions important from a climate perspective.
Speaker 3 (14:42):
Absolutely, particularly the recent one in Tonga?
Speaker 2 (14:46):
And are they imported? This is my follow up. Are
they important because of particulates or because of CO two
or methane both?
Speaker 3 (14:52):
This one was really interesting because it increased the water
vapor in the stratosphere by ten percent because it was
a submarine volcano, so all that water got entrained in
the plume and went all the way to the stratosphere.
So that's something different that we've never experienced before.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
Listen, that's gonna have a warming effect.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
Listener question, Can your guest comment about carbon sequestering pipelines
that are being built.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
In the Dakotas and if they have any actual use?
Speaker 1 (15:15):
No?
Speaker 3 (15:16):
There, it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
What about variations in the sun, particularly in ultraviolet? How
big an effect do these have on climate?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
I think we're still figuring that out.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
I would argue much bigger than the IPCC likes to
give credit to. But you can't regulate the sun, so
they like to ignore.
Speaker 1 (15:38):
That Matt Wilicky's substack is called Irrational Fear. Irrationalfear dot
substack dot com. Get over there, become a paid subscriber.
Matt actually writes a lot. There are a lot of
places where you'll become a substacked subscriber and get you know,
one piece a week or something like that. Matt's writing
more like every other day, something like that, really good stuff,
(16:00):
science based that you just won't get elsewhere because other
people are reliant on the climate alarmism industry for their livelihoods,
and Matt's trying to do it the honest way. Irrational
Fear dot substack dot com. Thanks for joining me in studio.
Thanks forrestling
The Ross Kaminsky Show News
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