None. Hello and welcome to the UK
column. Today I'm joined by Tom Nelson,
who is or has been the producer of Climate the Movie, and Tom,
welcome to the programme. You're a podcaster and of course
normally doing the interviewing. So I'm just going to say excuse
me if if the questions aren't quite what you're used to, but
anyway, welcome to the program. Tell us a little bit about
yourself first of all. And if I was to say I've rebuild
woodpecker, maybe that might be a place to start.
Yeah, thanks for having me on. Yeah, I was just kind of a
normal person, not involved in any scientific debates as of
2005. But then this I Rebuild
woodpecker thing happened where there was a peer reviewed paper
with 17 authors saying that Cornell had rediscovered this
extinct woodpecker. So I dug into it and right away
I found out that that was a total crock, that they didn't
actually rediscover it, but it got enormous amounts of
publicity. And on my blog I started tearing
apart the the data that supported it.
And a lot of other people had joined in too.
And we kind of ripped that one apart.
But within about a year after that, some guy wrote to me and
said, you know, this whole climate debate is very similar
to the Ivory Bill debate, that if you dig into it for yourself,
you'll find out that the evidence does not support what
they're saying. So that kind of kicked off my
whole interest in this. And since about 2006, I've been
reading up on the climate debates and participating in it
for hours most days I ever since then.
Yes. And so you've set up a, you've
got a sub stack and you've set up a YouTube channel and you've
been interviewing people for quite a long time on that.
I mean you've got lots of of interviews on there, including
of course the interview with David Siegel.
And we spoke to David Siegel a couple of weeks ago ourselves
and he's in fact running a climate science course for some
of our members at the moment. So, so that and you're still on
YouTube somehow? Yeah, I'm still on YouTube.
They've they haven't taken anything down.
They took one thing down because Steve Malloy said the wrong
thing about the 2020 election, but then they put it back up
because they changed their rules.
But I'm kind of impressed that I think the Google doesn't want
people to watch climate realist videos, but at least they're not
taking them down. So that's good.
Yes. So anyway, more recently then
you've got involved in the production of of this
documentary Climate the movie. And it is a fantastic piece of
work, I have to say, uh, so well done on that.
But how did that come about and how did you?
There were a couple of people on that I I was a little bit
surprised. We're we're prepared to engage
on this topic. Uh, well, maybe come on to why I
was surprised about that a little later, but but
nonetheless, how did that come about and how long did it take?
Yeah, I started doing the podcast in UH July of 22 and one
of my first guests was Martin Durkin.
I was a huge fan of him because I loved his great Global Warming
Swindle documentary he did back in 2007.
I think that held up really well.
So on my podcast in October of 22, Martin Durkin said, you
know, I'd really like to remake the great Global Warming Swindle
knowing what I know now. And that sort of kicked things
off. I started working with him and
in a few months we he actually started making the movie and it
took about one full year for the movie to come out.
But I give him all the credit in the world because he decided who
to interview and he did. He wrote the script, he did the
narration, and he's just the right person to make this movie
at the right time. I'm really happy with how it
turned out. And so that's available for
anybody to watch in various places including YouTube.
And so how did you fund that? We just had private funding and
it didn't really cost very much because there's a lot of
volunteers and working on it. We had to pay some cost to send
a team to Kenya to do some filming over there.
But overall it really didn't cost that much and Martin reused
a lot of old footage from like the Romans racing their Chariots
and all sorts of old dinosaur footage and stuff.
I think he did a really good job of keeping it interesting.
Yes, Now we're looking out the back window behind me here.
You can see how warm it is in Plymouth at the moment.
So clearly we're not experiencing much in the way of
global warming at this point in time.
But you know the, the, the film goes through many of the all of
the areas that are really of importance, CO2 and it's
influence on on temperature, the political aspects, the energy
aspects and so on. It's it's all packaged up in one
place and which I think is fantastic effort.
Now the question is what kind of response have you had then to
that so far, not just from people that are would be
normally expected to be supportive of the message?
Yeah, we're really happy, very happy with how the whole rollout
has gone. We're getting millions of views
and all sorts of people have downloaded full copies of the
movie and clips from the movie and then they've re uploaded
those to their YouTube channels and to rumble and to X and kind
of all over the place so that there are clips and full copies
of the movie everywhere already and more and more of that is
happening. One other thing on the side is
that they couldn't tell. People over in the Netherlands
have done a great job of doing translations or making subtitles
for the movie. They just hit the 20 language
mark already and now they've been putting up all these
different subtitles on their their YouTube channel and they
have 10 more languages in the in the hopper that they're working
on and Indonesian languages and Asian and it is really getting a
great worldwide roll out. So I I could not be more happy
with how it has gone. People like you say on our side
think it's a great reference as to what arguments you can use
against alarmists and then there have been a few small attempts
to debunk it but not very many from the other side.
And if you go to my sub stack you can see that there's been
attempted debunking and then people on our side have debunked
those debunking. And so it's it's a really
healthy thing, I think. And people are just arguing in
detail about each piece of this evidence.
I think that's what we need to do if we just believe the
experts and say, OK, there must be a climate crisis because the
experts say there is. That's not the way to go.
And if you look into it for yourself, you'll find a right
away that anything alarming they're telling you is a lie.
There's nothing at all alarming happening in the weather or
climate. It wasn't also happening 1000
years ago. Well, it precisely.
So it's it's going to be interesting to see how this, how
this goes because as you've said or as you've alluded to, there
is a whole army of debunkers out there that are that are
basically have set up YouTube channels and entire careers
based on debunking what they see as being conspiracy theory or
anything really which is kind of narrative.
And so far you haven't seen too much response from this group
yet, and just be interested to see how that develops.
Yeah, it's interesting. We expected to see some
attempted debunkings from like the New York Times or Washington
Post or the mainstream media, and they've been just strangely
silent on this whole thing. I'm surprised so far.
And maybe something's coming, or maybe it's not.
But we're getting more debunkings, attempted debunkings
from people you maybe you've never heard of before.
But a lot of the pushback is that, oh, the the people in the
movie are too old or they're we don't like the color of their
skin or something. It's just totally trivial stuff
that makes no sense. They're not really engaging at
all with the meat of the arguments because they really
can't. You really can't.
If you look at the data, you can't argue that hurricanes are
worse than they used to be or fires are, are are any of that
stuff Tony Heller does a really good job of pointing out in the
data everywhere. If you look, go down any rabbit
hole you want, you cannot find that the weather is getting
worse or the climate is getting worse because it just isn't.
There's this whole deal where like maybe in the US we're
supposed to think that heat waves are getting worse.
But if you look even here in Minnesota, where I'm from, the
temperature hit 100° Fahrenheit 38 times in the 30s and the 40s,
and then since 1988 it's done at maybe 10 times total.
So the whole idea that things the Earth is getting way hotter
and the temperatures are way more unbearable now it just is
not supported by the data. Right.
I know this is part of the problem of perhaps this is part
of the reason that it's so easy for governments and NGOs and
scientists that are involved in this industry to persuade people
that there is actually an issue is because of course we're
talking about climate here and so we're talking about hundreds,
thousands, 10s of thousands, millions of years.
We need to be looking at whereas most people are only looking in
terms of their own lifetimes and they won't remember what
happened in the 1930s, there aren't very many people left on
the planet that remember what happened in the 1930s.
And so, since most people have are born post war and have gone
through this cool period in the 1970s in particular, then it's
perhaps easy to sell the narrative that world is warming
up. Yeah, that's a great point.
I'm old enough to remember the 1970s myself, and it really was
cold in the 1970s. And my dad's old enough still to
remember the Dust Bowl here in the US in the 30s.
He he was a little kid when that happened and he, yeah, he said
it was really hot and it was very dusty, even in Minnesota.
But yeah, this whole perspective of if it's warmer since 1975,
then we have to panic. That's just not how it works.
People on my podcast. I've had over 200 people on my
podcast and they're constantly giving a perspective of long
cycles, and climate is so complicated that there's all
sorts of different cycles. There's like decadal cycles and
century long ones and much longer cycles, and it's very
complicated to try to figure out what's going to happen next.
But just that's the way it's been.
Even since humans have been on Earth, we've seen a lot of
really warm times and a lot of cold times, and the warm times
have always been better for life On Earth.
Warm times have been known as optimums for a reason, because
it's a lot better or humans and other life when it's warmer.
Do you say, I mean what what's your thoughts on what's coming
over the next few decades? Are we looking at things?
I mean, some people are saying that we're looking at things
actually cooling down even further in the next few decades.
Do you have any sort of insight into what you think is likely to
come next? I think that's a great question.
And I I've interviewed all these experts, I've listened to what
they've said, and my conclusion is that Earth's climate is so
complicated that nobody understands it well enough to
predict what's going to happen next.
So it could get warmer, it could get colder.
But I do think if you live long enough, any people who are
listening that live until 2100, it's extremely likely that at
some point you're going to see cooling and warming and that
that's just the way it's always gone in human history.
The whole idea that it's going to just keep warming
monotonically from here to 2100, I would bet huge money that that
doesn't happen. It's just colder, warmer,
colder. It just keeps happening and
unpredictable when it's going to happen.
Yes. So the next thing I'd like to
sort of touch on with you is the censorship side of things and
see get get some thoughts on you about this.
Because I'm not just talking about the censorship of of the
likes of your work on social media platforms and the Internet
and so on. But actually the silencing of
academics. Because one of the things that
that was clear over the over the COVID period and so on was that
the doctors that were coming out and talking against the
government's COVID narrative were finding themselves being de
platformed, yes, but also removed from post or or being
attacked by the medical or academic establishment in some
way. The same kind of thing happens
with climate scientists. They're they're silenced by
their institutions or they lose their jobs or they certainly
lose their research funding. I'd like to get some thoughts
from you on on that and what we might do about that.
Yeah, I mean that is a great point that you made there and
that is that's woken so many people up that they went through
COVID maybe four or five years ago.
They tended to believe what the mainstream media said, and if
the doctors didn't conform with the mainstream, they must be
wrong and maybe we should silence them.
But I think the elites went for the great reset here and what
they got was a great awakening. I'm just talking to all sorts of
people now who have figured out that they lied to us over and
over with COVID and they're saying what else are they lying
to us about? And now they're looking at
climate. I talked to a lot of people who
went through that very thing. They're looking at climate now.
They're finding out that of course they're just lying to us
every day over and over on climate.
So I think the whole COVID thing, it was just horrible, but
it did some good in the long run and that the people are asking
the right questions. And I I'm watching this whole
climate crisis narrative crumble right around us as we speak it.
It's definitely going down. And it it makes me very happy to
see that the lies are not standing up now like they were
five years ago. OK.
So you you are actually quite optimistic about that which is
which is very encouraging. Do you and and do you see that
as being something which is limited to a particular
generation, or is it right across the age range?
I think it is across the age range.
Yeah, I I do think it is. It is much harder to fool older
people with this whole climate crisis thing because they've
lived long enough to see so many other narratives be proven
wrong. So I think if you're 20 years
old and you've never seen bad weather in your neighbourhood,
it is easier for you to believe this stuff.
But I think even the young people are realizing that there
were so many lies told to us during COVID, etcetera.
And I should go back and mention that in the movie.
Ross Mckittrick does a good job of talking about how you kind of
you get cancelled in the academic world, in the
scientific world, if your views didn't match up with a narrative
that you could lose your job, your papers wouldn't get
published and they would kind of throw you off to the side.
And then they would say, hey, we've got a consensus cause we
threw out everybody who didn't agree.
And so that the people who are left agree and we must be right
because look, we have a consensus.
So I think Ross Mckittrick laid that out very well.
But I think that whole thing is starting to crumble and it has
to. Science is self correcting.
And there is no science at all that supports the whole idea
that CO2 is a climate control knob.
The weather is getting worse, there's a climate crisis.
There's no science at all that supports that.
So the the whole thing has to crumble and it is crumbling
right now. Well, science is self
correcting. But of course if we look
historically, science often hasn't self corrected until
after the scientists are dead. And in which case it becomes a
kind of a a travesty or a tragedy for for them as
individuals. But also because we're looking
at, you know, political policy driving this agenda and there is
a danger that if it takes 30-40, fifty years for the science to
to write itself, actually a lot of damage is going to be done in
the meantime. 100% agree with that.
And I do agree that the movie that we put out here, it we're
not trying to convince Michael Mann and Catherine Hayhoe and
these politicians who have gone all in on it.
I think they're going to cling to this thing forever because
it's way too painful to admit that they were wrong.
And I think a lot of these scientists because of group
think they're pushing this crisis narrative.
They actually believe it. They actually haven't.
Whatever. They haven't checked into it for
themselves and they're delusional enough to believe it
and I think they're going to continue to believe it.
But I think the general public who they're not haven't gone all
in on it. They're willing to listen.
And I I'd like to say even in the past I believed in the
narrative I I like 20 years ago I believed in this narrative.
I didn't ever climb at March but I thought that the CO2 was
causing the the climate to get too warm.
I I hate to admit that actually, but a lot of people are like me,
Anthony Watts, Tony Heller, who are strongly on the correct
side. Now they did believe in the
past. That makes me think that people
are persuadable. And if people just think for
themselves and look at do any sanity checking at all, they're
going to join us on the correct side and get on the right side
of the science. Right.
So the reason I asked about the age issue of whether this is
something that goes right across the age range of course is that
younger generations have been subject to propagandization
within schools. And it's a really sad situation
that schools are propagandizing children in that way, but they
they have been subject to that. So I was just interested in in
what your feedback is on on the the long term effect of that?
Yeah, by the way, I do think that parents, when they find out
that this is being pushed on their innocent kids at school, I
think you should take time out of your day and fight back hard.
And that I actually did that in my case a few years ago in our
local high school. I found out that there was a
warmest that was going to come in and and talk about all this
BS about climate. So I actually, I asked for equal
time and I I pushed that. I thought they can hear one side
and they can hear my side. And the eventual result of the
whole thing is that they didn't hear from either side which I
thought was fine. But I I don't think we should
just sit back and let people push this crazy propaganda on
kids. I think it's straight up evil
that they pushed us on kids, and kids can't sleep at night,
'cause they think that whatever, they're not going to have a
future. They're not going to study
because CO2 is going to do something bad to their future.
That's straight up evil. And we have to take time and
push back hard against it. But I do think that this just
can't last much longer. Like you say, there's a lot of
horrible stuff can happen in the meantime.
But I do think politicians in general are just going to stop
talking about it. I don't think they're going to
come out and say, hey, we were wrong.
Sorry, I think we're just going to suddenly notice, hey, they're
not talking about it anymore. I think that's how this is going
to play out mostly. OK, that's that's an interesting
take. I I hope, I hope that's correct
And and of course the reason I'm sort of asking these questions
is because one of the points that's made very clearly in the
film is just, you know, just gives an impression of the scale
of the industry. You know, we've got academics,
we've got scientists, we've got all the corporations that are
now producing product in form of wind farms and and panels and so
on. A whole host of the whole
industry based on this now. And of course at COP 28 we had
the whole G Fans Financial side of it starting to creep in as
well. We've had the statements from
the likes of Mark Carney about everybody being bankrupted if
they don't get on board with this agenda.
That seems like a very big juggernaut heading towards
everybody. It might be hard to get that
stopped, or at least diverted. Yeah, I think it's true.
I mean, I often say on Twitter that this is the most massive
scientific fraud in human history and people are
correcting me and saying maybe it's the most massive overall
fraud in human history. So the scale here is absolutely,
it's trillions of dollars. It's not even billions, it's
trillions of dollars. So yeah, the whole idea that
this is going to get stopped does sound like a big deal, but
the whole thing is so stupid with no scientific backing at
all. And then it's so destructive to
ordinary people like the farmers in the Netherlands.
They're not just going to sit there and let the people shut
them down because they're they're cows, fart too much or
whatever. So I think there's going to just
be enormous amounts of pushback amongst the real people because
this whole thing is an attack on real people with real jobs.
It absolutely the elites are attacking.
They want our money and they want our power and people are
not going to just sit and take it, which makes me happy the
whole the protests against the alleged elites are making me
very happy. I think we're going to see way
more of that as they try to shove this down our throats.
Yes, And and another part of it in the film, they're absolutely
making the point that we are effectively in.
And I say it's depending on your definition, of course.
But the definition they're suggesting is that, you know, an
Ice Age is any time where you're going to have ice at the poles.
It could be ice anywhere on the planet, I suppose.
Maybe that's, I haven't summarised that very well.
But of course the Arctic is increasingly become becoming a
key area geopolitically and it's amazing to me how the climate
change agenda is being wrapped into this geopolitical aspect as
well. So, for example, the British
government's just published a. Press release a few minutes ago,
which I'm going to talk about on our news programme tomorrow,
talking about the Arctic warming four times faster than the rest
of the planet and the number of wildfires in the region has more
than tripled since 2018. This is, this is their words.
I'm not, I'm not standing by these in any way.
These changes are felt most deeply by people in the region,
but they also affect the UK's weather, national environment
and resilience. But they say melting sea ice
will also make it possible for a wider range of actors to access
the region, which has the potential to increase tensions.
And of course this leads in very nicely, as far as they're
concerned, into the whole Russia, China narrative.
And so suddenly the Arctic becomes a a key area for
geopolitically. It's amazing how they try to
weave these these policy areas together.
Yeah, so they try on all these fronts to try to fool us, but
it's so easy to debunk this stuff.
Like the whole idea, and maybe there was a surge in fire since
2018, but the whole idea that trace CO2 caused a tripling of
fires over six years or something that just is so
stupid, It's amazing that people believe in that.
And of course they tried to sell this whole idea that CO2 is bad
for polar bears. But we can point out that for
sure we don't know how many polar bears are out there, but
for sure there's way more of them now than there was during
the 1970s global cooling scare. The whole idea that CO2 is the
polar bear control knob is completely crazy.
I I enjoy the Arctic sea ice thing because they they
desperately try to just cherry pick the correct start date.
And if you pick the other dates, that doesn't support what
they're saying. And I love the fact that they're
trying to tell us that Alaska is the fastest warming place on
Earth and there's this banana sea ice thing, or I'm sorry, the
Nenana River ice contest that's been going on for over 100
years. I don't know if you're familiar
with it. You can bet on exactly when the
ice goes out on that river. And just this year, the ice is
just comically thick right now as we speak.
Most recently it was over 4 feet thick, way thicker now than it
was back when they started showing us the data in in
nineteen 1980s. So whatever reason, the ice up
there is not conforming to the narrative.
And they they can, they can try to spin things any way they
want. But if you look at the actual
data, it is not, it's not doing what it's supposed to be doing.
So that's part of the reason why I enjoy doing this every day, is
that it it's so easy to tear this stuff apart.
If you look at the real data, yeah.
Well, let's just talk about wildfires for a second now,
going back many, many years, I mentioned this book several
times, and so our audience is familiar with it.
But Michael Crichton wrote the book State of Fear and of course
fictional book. He included a whole lot of data
that was available at that time in the book.
But the point is he was his story was based on a narrative
where many of these events were being created intentionally
through deliberate action by activists and so on, just to
light fires or create floods or whatever it happened to be in
order to to generate the news headlines that that created the
narrative. Do you think that kind of thing
is actually going on? I do it, yeah.
That's a great book, that that guy was super smart and now we
we miss him. But yeah, I think people have
been caught lighting fires. I think people who have been
activists have been caught trying to help out the narrative
by lighting fires. That's the thing that actually
happened. But in the case of the weather
data or the fire data in the US, it's so fun to take a look at
that because even high level of people, supposedly people that
we're going to trust on the other side, they say look, Oh
no, the fire since maybe 1982 or 1983 are up, that must mean that
CO2 is causing wildfires. But that is the worst cherry
pick I've ever seen, really, because that they picked the
single year out of all of the 20th century as their starting
point. They picked the lowest year.
And if you go back before 1982, you look at the first half of
the 20th century in the US, the fires consistently were just
comically large compared to whatever has happened since
then. So if you look at the whole data
that we have, there's no way you'd think that CO2 is the
wildfire control knob. The only way you can believe
them is if you just forget everything that happened before
1982. But that's the case with kind of
all of this stuff. You can pick any rabbit hole
again. You can go down that, and you
can find examples like this just everywhere.
They're totally assuming that you're stupid and that you won't
look at the data for yourself. And less and less people are
just accepting this stuff at face value.
So the whole thing is very fun for me, just the whole
debunking. I I really enjoy it.
It's it's. I enjoy it because it's so easy.
You mentioned the 70s cooling scare and of course the the
most, possibly the most famous person that was behind that was
was Leonard Leonard Nimoy who did his explanation that we were
heading into an Ice Age. What?
How did we get from that to the global warming narrative?
Because that seemed to turn on the dime.
It it did turn on a dime. And another famous guy, the late
Stephen Schneider, he was saying that during the 1970s that Oh
no, the earth is cooling and the cause is burning fossil fuels.
And just on a dime after it started warming, he turned and
said hey, Oh no, the earth is warming.
The cause is burning fossil fuels.
And in both cases the cooling was supposed to cause more
drought and flood and fires. Everything that was bad.
And then on a dime they said OK the warming is going to cause
droughts and fires. It's just amazing how they they
they just flipped as soon as the temperature flipped.
And I think again people are listening now may see this
again. I'm not sure.
Tim Ball the late great Tim Ball.
He said he lived through four different kind of scares of
cooling, warming, cooling, warming, and I don't know if
they'll try it again and hope we'll forget if it starts
cooling again. They may say, Oh no, a global
cooling is the thing we need to worry about and the solution is
to stop burning a hydrocarbon fuels.
I don't know if they're really going to try that, but it would
not surprise me if they try that again.
Yeah. And and of course our standard
of living as I was speaking to Steve Gorham some time ago and
and we were discussing this in a bit more detail, but but our
standard of living is based on the availability of inexpensive
energy. And one of the things that that
I thought was great in the in the film was was the trip to
Africa where of course they were making the point that Africa is
not being allowed to develop and they're not being given access
to an expensive energy. They're being basically being
told that, you know, because the Western world or the first world
has has sort of created this massive problem through its use
of of hydrocarbons, really Africa's going to have to skip
the hydrocarbon step and go straight to something else.
But in the meantime, we're happy to to pull out, continue pulling
out their natural resources in terms of cobalt and lithium and
all the other stuff that we need in order to to pursue these
these dumb power generation technologies that we're trying
to plant all over the place. And and so, you know, it's it's
totally unfair on the people in that part of the world who who
are coming later into this game. But in the meantime, you know we
are ourselves experiencing the removal of inexpensive energy
and naturally we're going to see a falling in our standards of
living. Yeah, that that's a great point.
And even when Martin Durkin went over there to Africa in 2007, I
think he made a great point about he visited an African
clinic back then that they were trying to run this clinic using
only solar panels. But the deal was is that that
that clinic could either run their fridge or they could run
their lights, but they couldn't run both because the solar
panels couldn't handle both. And I think that just so it was
a stark example of just how crazy it is to force that kind
of thing on Africans when there's no way that anybody
these do gooders in the West, they wouldn't go to a a clinic,
their own clinic that's powered in such a dumb way.
Everybody needs reliable power. And this whole idea that we're
doing the Africans a favor by blocking their use of
hydrocarbons because they're going to thank us when the
weather doesn't get worse. Of course, that's completely
crazy. And I know I've never met Jasper
Machogu from the movie in person, but I've talked to him a
lot on the phone, etcetera. And he says people in his
village, they don't care about climate change, they care about
having a clean water, and they care about cooking their food
without getting their house all smoky.
And they have, they understand the real world.
And I think Western do gooders and they don't know what's going
on and the whole road to hell is paved with good intentions.
It's just being laid out perfectly here that a lot of
these do. Gooders think that they are
doing the Africans a favor, but they're doing a terrible thing
for them. He also says that the the
Chinese are doing more to help Africans than maybe some other
Western countries because they're actually helping them
build roads and airports and they're not pushing the climate
scam on them. So I'm not at all pro China in
general, but at least they're not pushing this ridiculous
climate scam on them, so that's one plus.
That's absolutely right. And China of course not.
And you know China tends to use a lot of the language.
If you look, if you read what they publish and and so on, they
talk about sustainability and and so on.
But they seem to only talk about it, they don't do it and they
are quite happy to. I mean they're quite happy to
sell the West wind turbines and all this kind of stuff.
But in the meantime, they're building coal-fired power
stations. Yeah, yeah, there's so much
money to be made in this whole grift.
So a lot of people, I don't know how much even Elon Musk anymore,
if he believes in it, 'cause he's making so much money off
the EV grift. So a lot of people don't want to
speak out against it while they're making the money.
And I think the Chinese don't want to come out and say this
thing is a scam, 'cause they are cashing in on it big time too.
So I people talk about nuclear power, actually that I wanted to
bring that up at. Nobody advocates for that.
And I think maybe part of the reason they don't is because it
works and there's so. So there's not a lot of
opportunities for grift and nuclear power.
And if you try to get people to buy these crazy solutions, you
can make a lot of money. But if you try to get them to
buy a real solution like nuclear power, there's just less money
to be made. So that kind of makes me sad,
because I think in a real sane world, when we're choosing
reliable power based on cost benefit, we would go that way.
But instead, we're doing making all these stupid choices based
on grift, not reality. Indeed.
And you know, it would always seem to be more sensible to have
fewer power stations with higher density, higher energy density
in them, instead of spreading. I mean, it's not so bad in the
UK because because a significant proportion of our wind turbine
generation is offshore. But in California, some parts of
the United States, it's I don't understand how, from an
environmental point of view, the environmentalists haven't been
up in arms over what they're doing to the landscape.
Yeah, it was interesting that even Greta was protesting
against wind farms not that long ago.
That was interesting to see. I think she was protesting even
against the mining for EVs. As of recently, she's come out
against almost every form of energy really.
But I wanted to mention here in Minnesota there's a big push
that we should try to run our economy on wind turbines and
solar panels, that their solar facilities are heavily
subsidized here, and it's so crazy, 'cause we're above the
45th parallel and the sun angle is low and there are solar farms
here already that are just covered with snow.
They're they get covered with a foot of snow and it makes no
sense. Nobody's clearing them off,
'cause nobody actually cares if they create energy or not.
It's all about the subsidies. They're farming subsidies and
and not energy. So the the idea of covering
fertile farmland here in Minnesota with those solar
panels, that makes no sense. And as you may have seen as
there's a huge environmental problem if those solar panels
get hit by hail, I think there was a big case of a solar
facility that got just devastated by hail.
So now there's all these bits of solar panels laying everywhere.
It's an environmental disaster, so that that in general makes no
sense. And I do think people are
figuring out and they're fighting back against a lot of
those, a lot of those crazy facilities.
There's a guy named John Droves on my podcast who actually
specializes in fighting back against that.
So if people are worried about that in their local area, they
can either contact me or John Droves and he can help you fight
back against this this crazy stuff in your neighborhood.
So in Europe, here in the in particularly in continental
Europe and it and slowly but surely in the UK as well, we're
starting to see farmers push back heavily against the net
zero agenda and because they're seeing their livelihoods being
replaced by, you know, countryside management schemes
and power generation, solar panels and so on.
And they don't see a future in that for for the farm as it
were. It's is that kind of agenda
being pushed on farmers in the United States as well?
That's a good question. I mean just my dad in his farm
country, the agenda is being pushed as I mentioned because
they are actually trying to force this big solar facility to
cover a fertile farmland right there.
So that that is part of the whole net zero agenda.
And I'm hearing stories of farmers being offered huge
amounts of money, maybe 10 times their the price they would
expect to rent their land in order to put up either wind
turbines or a solar facility. So there's huge incentives right
now for this to happen. But even then the farmers are
pushing back because they know it doesn't make sense and
because they're wondering if maybe they sign a 20 year
contract with one of these shifty companies and the the
farmland gets covered with the some crazy with cement and metal
or whatever and then the company goes out of business, who's
going to clean it up? I think there's going to be a
lot of people asking that question and they're too smart
to just a sign on the dotted line because none, I guess none
of this stuff makes sense in reality.
And I think farmers in general might have a better sense of
real life than people who live in cities.
They're out there in the weather all the time.
They see what they do has to actually work in real life.
I think Martin Durkin talks about this new class of people
that are bureaucrats that just live in an academic world.
They don't actually know how things work in real life.
I think it's way easier to fool them with a computer model
rather than a farmer who's actually out in the weather
every day. People who are grounded in
reality are way harder to fool. Coming back on to this sort of
the the promotion of of this policy in the media and
censorship and so on in the UK, the BBC got a special mention on
your in your film and in the UK, the BBC when it's training
journalists actually doesn't just teach journalism.
It teaches climate as well, right.
And it's and that's the only policy area outside of
journalism that it obviously teaches things like when
teaching journalists it teaches things like you know media law
and stuff like this. But the the only sort of
political policy area that they teach is climate because they
they absolutely want to make sure that everybody that's
working for them is only pushing that particular point of view.
Do you see that kind of thing in media in the United States or
are they prepared to to contemplate speaking to somebody
who's skeptical, let's say? I think it is probably almost as
bad or close to it in the USI think there was just something
that came out about National Public Radio here in the US
where something like they looked at the political leanings or the
the registration politically of 87 people in NPR, it was 87 left
wingers, 0 right wingers. So I think there is an enormous
push in the media to go all left wing.
I think the BBC has a misinformation person called
Mariana Springs, I think, yeah. Yep.
So you can just about invert everything that she says, that
everything that she says is misinformation is actually
information, and vice versa. It's pretty amazing how she can
get everything wrong. And I think BBC may have had
some policy where they they wouldn't even talk official
policy, where they wouldn't talk to a climate skeptic for
stories. I forget a completely crazy.
Yeah, yeah. So I think the LA Times here in
the US had a policy where they, I don't know if they wouldn't
accept any sort of pushback against the narrative, but I am
seeing little cracks in the armor.
I I need to write up another blog post about this just in the
last, maybe the last month or so, there's more and more cracks
in the armor. There Was this a daily cause
over here? KOS, they had a climate denier
roundup. They did 2200 articles all
pushing back against people like me.
Suddenly they just went dark and their last thing was at the end
of 23. They said they're going to come
back, but they never did. There's also a Climate Nexus
newsletter type of thing. Just today they said, OK, I'm
sorry, it was fun while it lasted, but we're going out of
business or whatever. There's more and more stuff like
that. There's this Sabina
Hassenfelter, who's a YouTube, a big YouTube on the other side.
And right after our movie came out, within the next week, she
said, you know, she gave out, came out with this YouTube video
saying let's not get too alarmist about this.
It was kind of crazy, 'cause she has been totally alarmist and
all of a sudden she did this thing saying let, let's not,
let's not go too far with this. So I think there is going to be
some people who are going to produce content like this so
that they can point at it later and say, you know, I never
really did buy into this thing, look at this content I did in
2024. So I think there will be a
little bit of that. Like I said earlier, I think
most people will just forget. They'll just stop talking about
it and we'll go, hey, I haven't heard much about climate
anymore. I think they're going to move on
to something else. That's what happened actually,
with the ivory build woodpecker, that enormous amounts of people
who went all in on that, just stop talking about it.
They just, they didn't say I was wrong or anything.
They just, they haven't mentioned it for 15 years now.
I'm not certain people will get away with that in this case.
So, so look, you know if we think over the last lot of years
since say 2016 or so, we have seen in the UK at least a real
major splits in society. So the split in 2016 to 2018
kind of time was around Brexit and then we had very much
similar dividing line over lockdown policy and and
vaccination and this kind of stuff over the COVID period.
And we're starting to see perhaps the same types of
divides when it with respect to net zero policy and ultra low
emission zones in towns and cities and and restrictions on
travel and so on. And in the film they talk about
you talk about the the sort of the dividing line being between
conservatives and liberals. And I'd just like to be
interested to get some thoughts on you about how much, if any
overlap there is there or whether it is a hard division.
And and actually be interested in your thoughts on whether the
fact that Donald Trump has been vocal in this area has has hurt
the skeptic, the skeptic side. Yeah, that is a great question.
And I do think that more and more maybe it was red versus
blue, Democrat versus Republican over here.
But I do think there's been a shift where it's more sanity
versus insanity. I'm seeing a lot of that.
One example is Joe Rogan with his huge, huge audience.
He's been quite a left winger. I think he was a supporter of
Bernie Sanders and there was a time when Candace Owens was on
his podcast and she said she didn't believe in the climate
scam and he was he could not believe it.
He was a dumbfounded that nobody that this guest did not believe
it, but he is definitely shifted a little bit at a time.
So now when climate change comes up on his podcast, it does every
once in a while he scoffs at it. He he's not all in on it at all
like he just was recently. Let's see.
Yeah, I'm seeing this from a lot of other podcasters that are
coming at it from a COVID point of view.
They're talking all about the lockdowns were a mistake and all
this other stuff and they are starting more and more to
mention climate and they're starting to scoff at it.
I'm hearing so much of that coming from people who do come
from a left wing background. So as I said elsewhere, there's
a lot of well known left wingers who I thought I would disagree
with them on everything as of five years ago.
And now I'm kind of nodding my head and I'm starting to like
it. There's Brett Weinstein and
there's there's rusty rockets. I forget what his real name is,
Russell Brand, and there's RFK Junior who is talking about how
maybe skeptics should be jailed or something.
He's come around. He's definitely not all in on
our side, but he is softening his rhetoric quite a bit and
it's encouraging in general that I think this great awakening is
happening on all sides of the aisle.
I I do think that people want to just brand you as a crazy
Trumper. If you didn't believe in the in
the climate scam, that was definitely a thing.
But I think that is way less of a thing now than it was five
years ago. That makes me happy too.
Well, oh look, it must be warming up in Plymouth.
We can see the lighthouse again. So there we go.
Well, well, look, I'm going to say, I'm going to say thank you
very much for speaking me today, Tom.
Fascinating discussion. I'd like to talk to you again.
But in the meantime, we need to promote the film.
So how do people get to see the film?
Yeah, you can just go to climatethemovie.net and you can
see it there and but you can Google for climate the movie and
actually it has been coming up lately so you can look on your
favorite search engine. You can also Google for Tom
Nelson sub stack and get a lot more information about the
movie. You can find out how to download
a copy if you want to and upload it elsewhere.
And you can also search for Tom Nelson podcast if you want to
hear a lot more from people in the movie.
A lot of people in the movie. I've interviewed them at great
length on my podcast, so you can get way more way more audio
there if you want to. Yeah.
I'm going to say it's your channel is fantastic.
I really enjoy it and and you know a wide gamut of of comment
commentators on that. It is, it is a great resource.
So I'm going to say thank you very much for joining us today
Tom. All the best with the film.
We will do our best to to get it spread as widely as possible in
this country and thank you for joining me today.
All right. Thanks a lot for having me on.
I hope to talk to you again if you have time again some other
time. Thank you.
Absolutely. Thank you.