The Climate Crisis is a Scam - Professor Ian Plimer

23:11Francis Foster:in government, in politics, why do so many people believe that there is this strong connection? Well, you've used the word believe, and that's a word of religion and politics. It's not a word of science. and they believe it because that's the way of putting bread on the table. I've had these people in various departments that I've run and these people are mainly mathematical modellers. They're eminently unemployable. They are able to get grants from governments by scaring people witless and the government throws them a few shackles to keep them alive and they base their life on a model looking at what might happen in the future and if something goes wrong, they'll redo the model.

23:54Now, we've had 40 years of models now and of the 102 major models we have, not one of them has told us what we've measured over the last 40 years. So they don't work because they make one assumption which is invalid and that is that carbon dioxide drives temperature. Now, there's not one scientific paper out there and this is a big call but you can check it out. There's not one scientific paper there that demonstrates that human emissions drive global warming. If there were, you'd never hear the end of it. Now, this is a question I always ask people who call themselves climate scientists, and I question that.

24:34I say, show me. Show me the evidence, because that's what you do in science. Show me the evidence. Show me that the human emissions drive global warming, and if you can show me, then you've got to show me that the other emissions, which are natural, which are 97 % of the emissions, don't drive global warming. It's never been done. So the whole thing is a fallacy right from the start. And it's keeping a lot of people employed in universities and in institutions and in government. It's driven by bureaucrats who are green. We've had a 40-year dumbing down or 50-year dumbing down of our education system.

25:07And these people now give us the benefit of their knowledge as bureaucrats and as politicians. Don't you find it remarkable that so many people have bought into this, including very, very intelligent people. We interviewed Boris Johnson. Boris Johnson really believes in what you've been saying and how this global warming has been influenced and driven by man-made courses. You've used that word believe again and belief is a religious phenomenon and I think this is a new religion. We have in the West almost completely abandoned Christianity but we have to have faith in something and this is the new religion.

25:47And so an intelligent person like Boris Johnson might understand the classics, but he needs to go back a few more thousand years. But even if he did read the classics, he would know that in the time of Jesus, it was warmer than now. Then in the Viking times, it was cooler than now. Then in the medieval times, it was warmer than now. And then in the Middle Ages, we had the Little Ice Age. It was considerably colder than now, and we've warmed up since the Little Ice Age. well, what a surprise. So I think this is the new religion and this has turned out to be blind, unreasoning faith. Because there was at one point, I think it was in the 1970s, where the great, how shall we say, you know, the great worry was it was global cooling.

26:36Yes, of course. Science operates on frightening people if you want a research grant. So I once served on the Australian Research Council, I also served on the German Research Council and the Swedish Research Council, but in Australia, we were instructed by the minister to give money, grant monies to people who were fighting the war on cancer. And if you could demonstrate that there was a relationship between ingrown toenails and cancer, you would get funded. Now, you will get funded if you can put climate change into your research grant application. So it is the new religion. It's been embraced with fervour.

27:18And it's going to cost us very, very dearly. And the thing that I always found weird, because look, I'm not a scientist. I follow this stuff, but nowhere in the detail that obviously you do as a scientist or other people. But one of the things that I found strange was embracing of Greta Thunberg. And she was seen as the front person for this particular movement. And at the time, she was 15 years old. And at that time, I was a schoolteacher, and I was thinking to myself, why are we letting a school kid be the forefront of a global movement? It's weird. Well, she wasn't a school kid. She didn't go to school.

27:56And this, again, we see in religion, in Christianity, young women often appear as something on the horizon. We don't question it. We just admire it and view it from distance. She couldn't answer a single question you put to her. She's absolutely pig ignorant because she didn't go to school and our education system now has dumbed down people where they've lost the ability to think critically. We don't ask questions and if you ask questions, you get banned, you get thrown out. So I think this is a perfect scam to run with an ill-educated society that's given up the basis of Western civilisation, and that's Christianity.

28:41And it's also believing as well that it's very anti-human. That's the other thing about it. I remember talking to a neighbour of mine, and he's an old boy and he's got a few kids. Careful.

28:55Francis Foster:He wasn't in his prime like you are. And he was talking about one of his sons, and he said that he didn't want to have children. I was like, oh, OK, is it a lifestyle choice? and he just went, no, no, he's really worried about the climate and so they don't want to bring children into a world where they feel that the world is going to end. And I just thought that's unbelievably tragic. Well, think of previous generations. If you were in 1916 living in this country, you would ask the same question, should I have children? If you were 1942 in this country, you would ask the same question. I can remember as a young man, we were worried about having children because of the impending nuclear holocaust that we were going to have.

29:42So I think every generation goes through this and every generation survives it. And I think people are a little bit too sensitive and they're not really thinking. Other generations have had this in the past. Can you think of being in Ireland in 1844 with the potato famine? People had children. So I think it's an irrational way of thinking.

30:05Francis Foster:Well, let's come back to the science a little bit. Can you give us, I think one of the interesting things whenever we talk to someone like you is you operate on a timescale that the overwhelming majority of people have no way of even conceptualizing in their head, which is millions of years, hundreds of millions of years. And do you think that's part of the reason we're here? In the sense that I often think like If people saw the entire history of global temperatures and saw where we are on it, they would ask a lot more questions than anyone's been asking. But if you only look at the last 50 years, then a story can be told that's much more persuasive about how it's all doom and gloom.

30:45Well, I think that's exactly right. People don't understand the past. They don't want to know about the past. They don't learn about the past, so they can't ask the right questions. And that's why we geologists are never regarded seriously when it comes to climate change. because the same processes that operated 100 years ago or a billion years ago, they're still here. You have to change the laws of physics and chemistry if you're going to say, well, the geology's wrong. It doesn't work. So when we look in the past, we look at the Six Great Ice Ages, we look at the Five Great Extinctions of complex life, but we also integrate that with history.

31:21We integrate it with what has been lived. So I used the example before. when someone might say, oh, you know, this is the hottest time we've had ever. You say, well, no, we've cooled down since the time of Jesus. It was much hotter then. It was much hotter in the medieval times. It was much hotter in the 1930s. So how far do you want to go back? You don't have to go back very far to show that we're not living in unusual times. We are actually living in an ice age because we've got polar ice. Ice is a rare rock. for less than 20 % of time we've had ice on Earth. So we're living in an unusual time, but when you look at the temperature over time, and you don't need to go back very far, the temperature doesn't change very much at all in our lifetime compared with the past.

32:10So we had a period after the last glaciation, which ended 14 ,400 years ago, where the ice sheets broke up and dropped huge amounts of ice into the Atlantic Ocean. we suddenly became cool. And this is a period called the Younger Dryas. And we had temperature drops that were very, very large, like 10 and 15 degrees Celsius drops. And it took about 10 years to have a 15 degrees Celsius rise after the Younger Dryas. Now, that's global warming. What happened in the Younger Dryas? We actually huddled into villages. We fortified those villages. We invented animal husbandry. We invented for survival.

32:49We invented agriculture where we collected grass seeds and actually grew them. We've got extremely good evidence of that. So in these times of hardship, we humans thrived. And once it became warm, and history shows us this, then we get the populations expanding, have less war, the economy thrives. For example, in the medieval warming, Europe had two harvests a year. That gave an enormous amount of wealth. That wealth was spent on the universities, the cathedrals, the monasteries. We see evidence. You've only got to travel through Europe and see this. So over time, we can see that temperature has changed a lot.

33:29Now, we also have cycles of climate. The geological cycles are over 400 million years, and that's when we pull apart or stitch back together the continents. And it's the position of the continents that really does drive your climate. Really?

33:43Francis Foster:Can you explain the mechanics of that? Well, it's plate tectonics. It's pulling apart and you have fractures going deeper to the earth. These fractures leak out molten rock, which has to cool down, and they leak out carbon dioxide. We've got that process happening right now in the mid-ocean ridges. We have about 70 ,000 kilometres of mid-ocean ridges. We're leaking out carbon dioxide out of the basalts there. We have about 3.4 million old volcanoes on the ocean floor that we've been able to measure. We know that there's a volcanologist will give us a very strong correlation between a swarm of earthquakes, which means molten rock is rising and degassing and putting carbon dioxide into seawater.

34:24It doesn't bubble up because it dissolves. And when that carbon dioxide is a basalt, lava or volcano erupts on the seafloor, then you have to cool it down. You cool it down with seawater. And one cubic kilometre of molten basalt is at 1 ,200 degrees Celsius if you cool that, that's enough energy for 30 hurricanes. So there's this thought in the volcanological area that maybe El Niños are related to the movement of molten rock beneath the oceans and that that's got to be cooled down and that gives you warm water above. So we've got this 400 million year cycle. It's currently in process and we can see it happening right now in Antarctica.

35:06The ice sheets in West Antarctica have 150 geothermal areas and volcanoes underneath the ice. That's because we're pulling apart Antarctica. Once we've pulled it apart, we'll completely change the ocean currents. Antarctica is currently isolated. Warm tropical water can't get to it. We have a circumpolar current and it freezes. Once we break up Antarctica, currents will be able to move and we will go back to the normal situation that planet Earth has been in where it's been warmer and it's been wetter and sea level's been about 200 metres higher. We've got extremely good evidence of that time and time again over the past.

35:43So these 400 million year cycles, it's not quite 400 million years, it varies a little bit, but these are tectonic cycles. We've got galactic cycles where every 143 million years we've got a bad address in the galaxy and we get cold. We've got orbital cycles, these Milankovitch cycles, which gets spoken about a lot and their cycle is on about 100 ,000 years, 40 ,000 years and 20 ,000 years and that changes the distance we are from the sun. And then we've got solar cycles and there we've got some long ones around 10 ,000 years and we've just come out of a grand solar maximum. We've got cycles about 217 years, sorry 1500 years and the 22 year cycle which has been known for hundreds of years.

36:32We've got lunar tidal cycles where we push warm water up into the Arctic. That's from the moon and that's at the 18.6 years. And so that combined with the ocean cycles, which are every 600 years, sorry, every 60 years, you can then plot the exploration of the Northwest Passage and it's every 60 years. You can see that it's warmer and people can get through. They got through in wooden boats. So we've got these oceanic cycles and just recently there's been a cycle which I want to see more evidence but there's a suggestion there might be a Martian cycle every 2.4 million years. So we've got solar cycles, orbital cycles, galactic cycles, tectonic cycles, and all of that is being reduced to saying traces of a trace gas in the atmosphere drive a major planetary system.

37:25Pull the other one, it's got bells on it.

37:27Francis Foster:How much of this is about hubris, Ian? Because the way I see it is, 1 ,000 years ago, 14 ,000 years ago, it gets colder. We look around, we go, it's getting colder. We need to adjust. We need to huddle in the villages. We need to do this. We need to do that. Because we know we can't change what's happening. But now we've become so technologically sophisticated. We're so advanced. We're so competent at solving problems that we almost, I think, are pre-wired to think that every problem that exists, A, has been caused by us, and B, must be solved as opposed to adjusted to. How much of it is simply about the fact that human beings, in line with increasing technological advancement, have become very, very arrogant about that?

38:16Francis Foster:Oh, I think you're absolutely right. If we had another inevitable glaciation, we could solve it technologically. Already in parts of the world with triple glazing, we could solve it as long as we've got energy that can keep us warm and as long as we've got international trade to bring food from warmer climates. But we saw that in the past. In the peak of the Little Ice Age, we had the Mounder minimum. And that very cold period was obviously due to sinful humans. And it was deemed that the witches were making the harvests fail. And so witches were rounded up and witches were drowned. And after they stopped drowning the witches, we came out of the Mourn Amendment and it warmed up.

39:04Problem solved. Problem solved. Evidence was it was witches doing it. So we've been doing this for a long while. And we seem to think we're top of the pile. We're not. 90 % of our cells by number are bacteria. 15 % of our weight is bacteria. If you want to die, a good bacterial infection will do it. The dominant life form on Earth are not whales, they're not trees, they're bacteria. And most of them are beneath your feet for the top four kilometres in the crust. So we tend to think we're pretty important. We're not. And it's also, the thing that I resent is I don't mind having conversations about climate science, climate change, talking to different people who've got different views.

39:49Fine. What I hate is this culture of fear that I now see in the media where if it's a bit cold, they say extreme weather. You're like, mate, it's a bit of sleep. What's going on? Or what you get on the other side of it is this phrase that always is used now since records began. This is the hottest weather since records began. And just going by what you say, you go, well, the records haven't been around that long, have they? Well, two things. The records haven't been around that long and the temperature record is a contaminated record. These have a cluster of measurements in the UK, Europe and the US.

40:26These were, many of them were in rural areas, which are now in cities and suburbs, and so you have the urban heat island effect, and these figures are changed. So the primary data has changed, and often you see that in a rural area, when it's been changed, it gives a warming trend. So I think the data is contaminated, and a number of people have commented on that, including people at climate institutes like your Phil Jones. You've got to be very careful of the records. There are other records you can get from tree rings, from ice cores, and they tell us a different story. A geological record tells an even more exciting story.

41:03So for ice cores, the original ice cores that were drilled used volcanic eruptions and dated the ash and the acid in those cores. Then you could work out the rate of ice deposition. and then with that, as snow falls and is compressed into ice, it traps little bits of air and you can extract that air and measure the amount of carbon dioxide in it. You can also, from chemical fingerprints in the ice, you can work out at what temperature it formed. So then you get a correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature and time and that showed a perfect relationship. You can see these Milankovitch cycles, you can see the three cycles and you could see that carbon dioxide followed exactly the temperature.

41:47But with more detailed sampling, a totally different story came out. And the story was that you will get a period of natural warming and some 600 to 1600 years later, you get an increase in carbon dioxide. Now, we've known that from chemistry for 200 years. You know, if you want to sit down with a carbonated drink, like a champagne or a beer or a soft drink, commit a sin, don't drink it, just watch it. And as it warms up, it keeps bubbling out carbon dioxide. That's what happens to the oceans. So you warm the atmosphere and later the oceans will release carbon dioxide. So we know that from chemistry, we know it from looking at our soft drinks, we know it from the ice cores.

42:29That's an absolutely, totally different story to what we're told, simply because it doesn't follow the popular paradigm. And what's really interesting now, actually, is that you're seeing a number of big-name people who pushed this narrative who are now starting to roll back on it. Case in point, Bill Gates. Well, science works like that. I mentioned Broken Hill earlier. I had published probably 60 or 80 papers on Broken Hill. There was a new mineral found some 15 years ago by some scientists at Broken Hill. They named it after me because of my work on Broken Hill. and I am the authority on Broken Hill and I've published a sequence of papers and then when I went back and looked at the data and looked at new data, I thought, wait a minute, I don't think I'm right here.

43:17And so I went back and spent years to go back and look at this data and get new data and I published a paper criticising all of my earlier work saying I was wrong, that this is a better interpretation. Now that's the way science works. You might come to a conclusion but it's only tentative. And with more data, more thinking, more calculation, you'll come to a different answer. Now, Bill Gates is clearly thinking economically that this is nonsense with the amount of energy that he needs for AI. But many scientists are doing this in their life. When they get a little bit on in life, they will change their views on many things.

43:56It's based on thinking and it's based on new data or it might be based on the fact that they're no longer employed by an institute. and many people have left these climate institutes, you will hear their real view.

44:09Francis Foster:Well, here's where I'll permit myself to disagree with you, though, Ian, because I think what Francis's point is, when Tony Blair and Bill Gates and others wrote back on their previous advocacy for dealing with climate change through net zero, that's not a scientist changing his mind having looked at different data. No, that's an economic view. It's partly an economic view. I also think partly it's a political and cultural view because you are a seeing results in the real world, which is increased populism because energy being expensive ruins economies. And when economies are ruined, people get upset.

44:45Francis Foster:And that has political ramifications. But I think it's also about the conversation around net zero has shifted dramatically in the Western world in the last two or three years. and a lot of people are now coming out and being critical of it for political reasons. They essentially sense which way the wind is blowing. I think there's a lot of that going on as well. I do too, especially in Germany. I think there's been a very significant change there and that's very much political but it's also driven by the cost of energy and the cost of energy now is crippling. In this country, people have to make a decision whether they have a hot bath, whether they have a hot meal or whether they put on the heating.

45:26Now, for a first world country, that's just impossible. That shouldn't happen. And people are starting to wake up. These people also vote. And this is why someone who might be pushing a different agenda gets attracted. And the thing that I find particularly worrying is what you're talking about is how there is an institutional capture in these scientific institutes. And you're thinking to yourself, well, that is really dangerous because if we can't trust what's coming out of the scientific institutions, then that ultimately is not just going to undermine people's faith in climate science. They're going to go, well, if I can't trust this, how can I trust this?

46:06How can I trust that? How can I trust medicine, vaccines, whatever else it is? Because they're lying about this. So why wouldn't they be lying about that? I think it was because it was politicised and the politicians jumped on the bandwagon and the so-called climate scientists could see that there was a pot of money here to keep their institute going, to have research grants, to run and go to conferences. And so once science is politicised, that's the end result. It's very dangerous. Other sciences are not as politicised, and certainly in my science it is not politicised at all. And I think that's the end result.

46:43Once you politicise it, once politicians are talking about climate change, you've only got to ask them a simple question. You know they don't know what they're talking about. So politicising science is dangerous. Politicising various aspects of science, which may or may not be important for, say, defence or medicine, terribly dangerous. And we're talking about the politicisation of science. And look, I never thought of science as being something that was inherently political until relatively recently, until what we're talking about now, the climate science. Has it always been political or is that something new that's come in?

47:20No, it's quite new. And I've been working as a scientist since 1968. I think it's come in from the 90s and there's a pot of money out there and scientists have got the same weaknesses as everyone else. If they're a pot of money, they'll try to grab it. and virtually every university has a climate institute, and I think they don't ask the simple question, well, whatever we do can't change the global climate. Why are we doing it? And it's also as well, you have to be fair to scientists and go, look, if their research isn't going to get published or if it's going to negatively affect their career, then why would they publish research?

48:04People only respond to incentives. Scientists, however smart or brilliant they might be, are still human beings. That's exactly right. So it's all about the money. And so many universities now have climate institutes because that's where the money is. So many people are getting whacking big research grants because governments don't want to be accused of ignoring climate.

48:29Francis Foster:Well, that being the case, I think it'd be interesting to talk about, you mentioned that we are likely to revert to the mean, which is warmer, wetter, as I think you said, and you said a third thing as well, warmer, wetter and something else. Higher sea levels. Warmer, wetter and higher sea levels, which I would argue, based on my very rudimentary understanding of just human society as it is today, given the number of people living on the planet, those things will be disruptive. and if they are inevitable, all that money that we've been spending trying to stop the inevitable change in climate and sea levels ought to be being spent on making adjustments to the way we live and creating all sorts of, you know, the sorts of things they do in Holland to manage sea levels, to protect towns and cities.

49:16Francis Foster:Isn't one of the things that's really the tragedy here is there's been a huge misallocation of resources that has impoverished Western countries at the same time as leaving them vulnerable to the very thing that they are trying to prevent but can't. Yes, very much so. Natural processes are fairly slow. In the case of Holland, they've been doing it for a thousand years. That is because of the land sinking. Southeastern England is sinking. Scotland is rising, both politically and physically. This is a normal process. In Scandinavia, It was once covered by five kilometres of ice. That pushed down the rock.

49:53That ice is gone. Scandinavia is rising. We've got old survey records going back centuries. We've got old beaches in Norway that are 340 metres above sea level. So we know the land goes up and down. Go to the biblical town of Ephesus. That was a port. It's inland and above sea level. A little bit further south, go to Lydia. That's where gold coins were first made and first minted. I've been to Lydia down the main street in a yacht. So the land level is going up and down all the time, and we humans have adjusted to that.

50:23Francis Foster:Well, I took my mum the other day to Pevensey Castle, which is just down the road from London on the south coast. And you go to one of the towers and they say this was, you know, this is where they would defend themselves from the sea. You can't see the sea because it's now seven miles inland. I can't remember how many miles, but you can't even remotely even imagine the sea being there because it's so far away. So this process is natural. But what I'm asking you, Ian, is I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realizing we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it.

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54:59Francis Foster:I think one of the big challenges is we've got to redirect our attention from, oh, we've got to stop runaway climate change to realising we can't stop climate change because we're not causing it. So what is it that we need to do to ensure humans are thriving on the planet? Adapt. We've always done it. And there's never been a problem. We do know that when it's colder, you have more wars, you have more disease and you had more people die. we have people have a decreased longevity in cold periods of time. So we've always known this. And when we look at deaths, there's been a survey done, a medical survey of 34 million deaths related to climate.

55:43And more than 90 % of people, if they have a climate-related death, is due to the cold, not the warm. So we are already adapting, and that's the one thing we humans can do. We can adapt and adapt very, very quickly. A rising sea level, it's not overnight. The one geological process that would be difficult to adapt to very quickly would be an asteroid impact. And the chances of that decrease all the time as the solar system settles down even more. But we can adapt. These things don't happen overnight. They take time. Climate change doesn't occur between Thursday and Saturday. It takes a very long period of time.

56:25and humans have adapted before. We'll do it again and probably be much better because we're a technological species now. One of the things that I found concerning about the whole climate change debate is we know that humans have a very real impact on the world, and they have a very detrimental impact when we think about ecology, when we think about sea life, when we think about animal life. But we don't tend to talk about that anymore, Ian, because the moment we talk about humans' impact on the world, we talk about climate change, when actually there's so many more important or just as important things that we need to talk about and address, like pollution, microplastics, etc.

57:06Well, we've got the eight major rivers that are putting plastics into the ocean. We've got the oceans with a large amount of microplastics. We have changed climate at, say, Mount Kilimanjaro. By forest clearing, we've had less precipitation on Mount Kilimanjaro. That's fairly well established. but we are probably in the Western world polluting less than we did 200 years ago and that's because we're wealthy. But you go to parts of the third world, it's just disgusting how dirty it is and how dangerous it is. They are the real problems and what I find difficult to understand is that to solve the world's climate crisis, whatever that is, is we are knocking down forests to put in wind turbines.

57:51These wind turbine blades have poisonous chemicals in them. They've got asbestos in them. And we are cutting swathes of forest, killing off wildlife, doing the same with offshore wind turbines to save the planet. It's a bit like in Vietnam. You know, we had to destroy the village to save it. Yeah, it just doesn't make sense because when I hear scientists talking about this, we should be talking about other things like species extinction. and also as well you go the whole thing doesn't make sense because we're so interested in essentially de-industrialising yet it seems every week i think it's every week china opens two new coal power stations yes you go none of this actually seems to make any type of logical sense no well it doesn't um but these are the cold hard facts and china's using australian coal in these power stations yet in my country we've got thousands of years of coal there we're trying to ban the use of coal to generate electricity for ourselves, which is cheap and reliable, yet we're very happy to sell it to China and buy back their value-added products.

58:58So we are killing off very large areas of prime agricultural land putting in solar panels, and these are contaminating the ground, these are destroying good farmland. And again, we buy these from China that have been made without coal and we buy them at an elevated price. So I think the world's going through one of its periods of going mad. But I think, and we've touched on it before, we are starting to see common sense start to come to the fore. Is that true in the scientific community or is it still very much captured, do you think? Follow the money. The money hasn't dried up in the scientific community.

59:35If a government decided that we would like to spend a lot of money on research on the next inevitable glaciation and cycles of climate and what can we expect, you'd immediately find a stampede in the other direction for people to get funded for their research, looking at a potential glaciation. So I don't think science is changing it because the money's still there, but I think the community's changing because it's burning their pocket.

1:00:02Francis Foster:I'm sure you've had this question before, but very much in that spirit, you're obviously someone who's worked in the mining industry. Some people will say your beliefs are driven by, you said yourself follow the money. This is a convenient belief for you to have given that this is the industry you've worked in all your life. What do you say to that? Well, there are a number of CEOs of major mining companies who are very green and who are going down the path of having electric vehicles, having greenwashed operations. In my case, my views arose well before I was in the mining industry and they will change depending upon the data.

1:00:43The mining industry, especially the petroleum industry, understands climate change very well because they constructed probably 50 years ago a sequence of sea level curves based on climate, based on sediments, and this is a guide as to where to find oil, where to find coal, where to find gas. So we practically apply everything I've been saying about sea levels and about carbon dioxide to look for oil. I'm not a petroleum geologist, but to look for oil and gas. So I'm fortunate in the position I have now where I have more freedom than I ever had when I was in the academic world, far more freedom.

1:01:26I can basically say what I think.

1:01:28Francis Foster:And it's interesting. I remember I've always had questions about this because there were just things about the whole climate narrative never made entire sense to me. So I remember, it would have been probably 25, 30 years ago, my grandfather was a scientist, and he had many friends who were scientists. I remember talking to somebody, one of his friends, and I asked him, well, what about this climate thing? You know, is it really the consensus? And he said, there are a lot of scientists who think this is happening for this reason. But he said, the people that are dissenters make me question because they are usually the most brilliant and talented ones who are but they have to take a risk to speak out.

1:02:12Francis Foster:And it does sound to me based on what you're saying and other people we've spoken to that the things that you're saying are just quite hard to say in the social context. And if people have watched this interview or listened to this interview and gone, well, you know, this is a bit out there, climate denier of all this other stuff. I just go back to the point Francis made earlier. Well, you know, scientists or some scientists have been running around for years now saying, if you say that your name is Stacey, you become a woman. Right. That's been the thing that we've all been told to believe. And there's lots of other examples I could give.

1:02:48Francis Foster:So this idea of groups of people, you know, our friend Douglas Murray, the madness of crowds, groups of people going crazy, I mean, it's a pretty common thing, actually, in history. I think it is. Well, my first book on climate change, Heaven and Earth, came out while I was a chair at the University of Adelaide. Created a storm because no one had dared to do that, and I integrated history, archaeology, and geology. I looked at previous agriculture that might have been done in the north of England. I looked at Stone Age societies and how they adapted to climate. I tried to cover the whole spectrum.

1:03:26I had about 3 ,500 scientific references in that book. I published that while I was in a university and it wasn't liked. So I guess it's if you're crazy or if you're sceptical about everything, which you should be as a scientist, you should be sceptical about everything, then I'm being quite consistent. But I also had in the same building where I was in Adelaide a climate institute. And they were very generously funded compared with my department where people actually went and became a productive member of society. All of their graduates ended up working in another climate institute. I don't see that as being productive for society.

1:04:09And Ian, when we talk about climate, we also talk about green technologies. And people will say, you know, they're doing very well. They're going to be able to replace certain technologies that we have. Where do you stand on green technologies? Are there some that are actually good and you think will make a positive impact? Are there some that are just not there? And are there others that you go, look, this is a busted flush. We need to stop funding this. Well, I think with all new technologies, you've got to actually fund it to a point where you can say, I don't think this is going to work. and I think it's been wonderful to stimulate green technologies.

1:04:49I'm yet to see any green technology that makes processes more efficient and more cost effective but that doesn't mean you stop trying them and I think this green transition is going down the inevitable path where Western countries will have more nuclear power. That's the transition. It's not a transition away from coal because the annual consumption of coal keeps increasing and it has been doing that for about 120 years. So what it's pushing us towards is looking at nuclear fusion even more, looking at other nuclear processes. There are some nuclear processes floating around where the cooling systems are very different using, say, liquid sodium, are very different from water-cooled systems.

1:05:36I think it's edging towards a technology boom where we will be changing the use of energy because every time you turn on a switch, you're using energy. The amount of energy we humans are using individually is increasing enormously. It has to be cheap. Unless it's cheap, you cannot run an industrial society. To de-industrialise a society with expensive energy is not very sensible. So I think to have a green revolution is wonderful because ultimately the market says, no, this is a busted flush. It's not going to work. And why is it that we don't talk about nuclear energy more? Why is it that when I read in the newspapers, we're talking about nuclear power plants being actually shut down?

1:06:20Is it because we see Fukuyama and we get worried about a disaster like that? Fukushima. Fukushima.

1:06:29Francis Foster:Francis Fukuyama has made a lot of mistakes. Yeah, yeah. But having a nuclear meltdown isn't one of them. Well, you could say the end of history was a nuclear meltdown. But yeah, I agree. So Fukushima, or is it just a hangover from, you know, the Cold War, where our entire generation thought we were going to die in a nuclear war? Well, I think it's very complicated. It's easy to frighten people with nuclear because you can't see it, you can't taste it, you can't smell it. And if you've got a reactor near your house, you think, oh, it's going to blow up. Well, some reactors, it's impossible for them to blow up.

1:07:04The second thing is I think there's been an enormous amount of disinformation as part of Cold War tactics, and that continues. The third thing is that nuclear power countries like France went to nuclear power because there was a crisis, and that was the oil crisis, and now they are flush with cheap energy, which is nuclear. So I think it's very easy to scare people with nuclear. I think there's been quite a process that has been going on since Cold War times using Cold War tactics. It's clearly not the only thing we should be having for energy. We should have an energy mix for all the right reasons.

1:07:48And I think nuclear obviously will come when there's an energy crisis. That's how France got into being a nuclear country. And there's tiny countries like Slovenia, 3 million people. It's nuclear power. So why can't big countries do the same?

1:08:04Francis Foster:Ian, it's been great having you on. We're going to head over to Substack where our audience will get to ask you their questions. But before we do, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? I think we're not talking enough about the unstitching of Western society, the attacks on our culture, and the breakdown of society and processes that took thousands of years to build. And that is underpinned by, in many ways, Christianity. It's underpinned by some of the things we've been talking about, the scientific method. I just don't think we're talking about how to think, how to think critically, how to use our history to enrich the future.

1:08:50Francis Foster:Well, we do that on the show as much as we possibly can. Thanks for coming on and talking to us. Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk where you get to ask Ian your questions. What role do you see advanced technologies like AI-driven modelling playing in reshaping the climate debate, especially when geological data spans millions of years?

1:09:22We'll be right back.