Transcription
That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs. All of that's completely false. There's actually a very specific document that that drives all of this, this entire story for the past 16 years. None of the media has covered this story at all.
Hey there friends, fans and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pollola here and I thought I would take this Friday well to talk about two stories that are really one story about our kids, about their future and about the climate. But let's start with the kids because there is this post on Twitter that went super viral and here it is. 47 million views as I sit here by Interior Porn. I don't know what that means.
So the text on this says it's a little hard to see. So, "When are you two having kids?" And you got this young couple, like got to be in their early 20s, wide-eyed, looking at their travel. And of course, they've gone all these places. These are all these travel books of the photos of their travels. And there it is. India, Africa, Spain, 24, 25, Asia, the world, Norway, 2023. I've been to a lot of these places.
This thing's gone super viral because it's it's sort of been seen as yet another sort of selfish childless celebration of being against kids, against family, against the future, against basically the basic biological drive that most healthy animals have, which is to procreate and to continue to survive as opposed to go to Bali more than once. I was curious if this is like really what these two meant to say. Were they bashing having kids? This is how it's been treated by like right of center media.
So I look I it took me a little while to find the actual original post. I took a frame grab. I used a Google visual match because like how what are you going to even search for here? And I found a bunch of examples and and of course a ton of commentary. And then I actually found the original Instagram account. And it turns out this video that they recorded, they've actually put different type on it a couple of times. One says, "Our type of rich is travel." But the one in question that got reposted and went super viral, apparently nobody really went to look for the original because one of the comments on the actual original says 47 million views on Twitter, just two comments here on Instagram. And I just found that's kind of interesting. It's a little little bit of a window into how quickly we all get angry, especially on Twitter and don't even stop to say like, is this what these two people actually meant? And it's not clear at all to me that it's what they meant. They seem kind of cute. They're they're just I mean, before you have kids, you need to actually have relationship formation. You need to get married. You need to fall in love. You need to go on dates. And so for me, for this dad, I'm just happy to see two heterosexuals actually in love with each other and maybe getting married. I think they are married. I I assume they're married. Maybe they're not. But you know, this is how far we've gone. That just seeing a man and a woman enjoying being together is a win.
The concern though, the triggering that has happened as the result of this Twitter post is not without warrant, even if these two maybe don't quite deserve this much negative attention, because there are plenty of other people who have truly gotten deranged about the future. And and um this is actually one of the least creepy of this particular style of personal monologue. It's worth watching because trust me, it feeds into the other story about our future.
>> When people ask me why I got snipped, I generally kind of gesture vaguely to fascism and climate change and people go, "Oh, yeah, totally understandable."
So, just in case you missed that, it's got snipped, you know, got a vasectomy. So, fascism and climate change equals no kids for me. But before we get even more hot and bothered about this issue, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. More than half of you watching aren't subscribed. It really makes a difference. It helps us reach more people. And now, uh, let's get right back to it.
But the truth is that whenever my friends and family members get pregnant, and I'm in my early 30s, so that's happening a lot these days, I get a horrible weight in the pit of my stomach. Often times I'm genuinely happy for them. You know, sometimes I can even look them in the eye and say, "You'll be a really great father and mean it." But there's another part of me that can't shake the idea that in 9 months another American will come into the world. Uh, another ravening cannibal who will spend the next better part of a century burning fossil fuels, housing cheeseburgers, and ignoring homeless people at traffic lights.
>> I didn't do much vetting on what else this guy may have posted. It is a little weird that it looks like maybe he's a vet. He's got the folded flag. He's got the founding fathers behind him. He's not talking about Americans in a particularly patriotic way, but let's uh let's keep going. It's it's sort of a ethnography into uh climate catastrophism.
>> Billionaires are by far the worst climate criminals, but according to Oxfam, the richest 10% of humans globally also share a considerable amount of blame for CO2 emissions.
>> Billionaires are worse. climate criminals. Of course, the top 10%, which means the entirety of the United States, by the way, the entirety of the United States fits into the top 10%. Uh, in fact, if you're median income in this country, you're in the global 1% of income on planet Earth. But yeah, okay. So, we're all climate criminals now because of the output of our breathing CO2.
>> And that richest 10% includes just about everybody who lives in the global north above the poverty line. Everybody in the north, a lot of people, okay, a lot of climate criminals.
The role of population growth on climate catastrophe has historically been way overstated. But there's no question that this is a crisis inflicted by the halves onto the knots. And every single person born in the global north exacerbates the problem by virtue of the huge amount of resources that they are almost certainly bound to consume. And you can say, you know, oh well, well, I'll I'll bring up my kid to share my values and they won't do those things. Um, and I can respect that, but that's a hell of a gamble. It's worth noting, and I've covered this in in in other videos, and I will put a link to some of them, that um the notion of resource consumption itself is kind of weird because as we sit here, we've got around 8 8 billion with a B people on planet Earth. If you go back to 1800, you've got like 1 billion. We've managed to continually have more resources as we've grown the population because as economist Julian Simon said, the human mind is the ultimate resource. So there's a sort of fixed zero sum thing at the heart of this argument, but I find his calm scary but also interesting. Let's keep going. You know, you could take your kid to school every day on your bike, but if every other parent has an SUV, eventually your kids's going to get curious and want to drive a car, right? And then and then what are you going to do?
>> The catastrophe. I'm pretty sure it's already a catastrophe that not enough of our kids today want to get their driver's license. I was quite happy that my son actually was quick to get his driver's license, and I I certainly pushed it. It's about as close to a sign that you want to have real freedom for yourself as any, especially in America. But I guess it's part of the climate crimes.
>> I just don't think there's any realistic way that anybody in the global north could have a child that won't eventually cause massive harm to the planet.
I don't think the planet cares. Like Mars is sitting there. It doesn't have a mind. It can't actually be harmed. It's just rock. The planets don't care because they don't have feelings because they don't have minds because they're inanimate objects. So this this language of the planet being a being, this Gaia worship is is permeates this ideology. But he what's so great about this video is he really is encapsulating basically the totality of this worldview. A worldview that, as you're going to find out very soon, should be getting turned upside down. and probably like most people not even realize that they're doing it. To me, the creation of human life is very obviously an incredibly selfish thing to do under most circumstances. And I'm not saying that we should like make it illegal to have children or whatever, but I am saying that this is a deeply consequential thing to do. And maybe we should give it a little bit more thought than just, oh well, that's just what people do at this age, or I want someone to take care of me when I'm old, or I just want the family name to live on as though that were anything other than vanity. On the cover page of the first edition of Frankenstein, there's a quote from John Milton, Paradise Lost. It's Adam talking to God, and he says, "Did I request thee maker from my clay to mold me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?" Well, with all due respect to John Milton, I think enraged children all over the world put it much more succinctly when they snap at their parents that righteous and unanswerable declaration. I didn't ask to be born. Maybe the FBI should be keeping track of this guy. Might be a little bit in the Ted Kazinski space.
>> Uh, no peeking.
Ted Kazinski. Just saying got a little Kazinski there towards the end. So you know the the problem why did I show this other than you know it's fun to mock people. He is an exemplar of huge movement of people a lot of people you know in fact there's so many people like him that there's entire psychiatric practices dedicated to addressing it. The climate psychiatry alliance was formed to raise awareness about the impacts of climate change on mental health. Now these are people obsessed with climate change possessed by it as an ideology. Because if this was properly formulated, it would say psychiatrists raising awareness about the impacts of climate crisis hysteria on mental health. cuz there is no reason why changing climate should have an impact on your mental health other than of course the the good old when it's sunny we feel happy and when it's rainy and miserable we feel miserable and that's one of the reasons why sort of the Nordic countries have high suicide rates because they don't get enough sun but that's not what they're talking about here they're talking about the global sort of Marx inspired movement that has driven people crazy and I found out about this because of course this is all over the news and it has been for over a decade. This came from uh Time magazine just recently. Climate anxiety is taking its toll on young people. Indeed, it is. I have seen it for myself. I've seen it mostly not with my son but with his peers throughout his schooling. I do think it's slightly on the Wayne, but not as much as it should be among our youngest people.
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A few years back, Lancet published this gigantic study surveying the world, uh, young people, basically between 16 and 25. And what they found, it was over 10,000 respondents, was pretty crazy. So, of course, as I like to do, I threw the document into robot and said, "Make it pretty for me with nice big fonts so we can read it on a video. Here it is. A generation doesn't want to live here." And by here we mean at all. By here, we mean Earth, the universe, material world, the material reality.
So, what what what was found? 10,000 16 to 25 year olds, the single biggest like worldwide cross-sectional study of young people's beliefs about the catastrophic future that isn't really coming. Actually, 84% are at least moderately worried about climate change. Almost 60% are very or extremely worried about climate change. 45% say their feelings of climate change negatively affect their daily lives. Hence the psychiatry practices springing up to apparently pander to this fear instead of recognizing that the fear itself is a problem. Um but I'm sort of loading us up here with my commentary. Maybe they're on to something. We'll get to that. The the future they say is frightening. 83% of people have failed to take care of the planet. This is the beliefs of our kids. 75% say the future is frightening, which of course would make it harder to want to have a future for yourself or have kids that would have a future if the future itself is frightening. 55% say the things I most value will be destroyed. My family's security will be threatened. Again, more than half of the 10,000 young people around the world were saying this. The emotions that the climate story has been evoking in our kids have been debilitating. 67% said they're afraid, they're sad, they're anxious, they're angry, they're powerless, they're helpless. You don't do anything when you feel this way. This is one of the things that is um sort of self-defeating about this whole thing is these are the emotions of stasis and shrinking and collapse. They aren't actually the emotions of action, but that is certainly why they get pushed.
Nearly four in 10 say they are hesitant to have children of their own. 4 in 10. And you know, the United States was just a little below the median here at 36%. Still more than 3 and 10, almost 4 in 10. Um, it's interesting that you do see that this the highest in these areas with, you know, more radical climates like Brazil and the Philippines and Australia, Finland, of course, because they face Russia. I don't know. I thought these places were the happiest. I thought they were the happiest countries. Apparently not. Apparently, they don't want to reproduce. and and this stuff is just anxiety is the highest where climate disasters are most visible. Now the right way to understand this is where weather disasters are most visible but again all countries 59%. And our kids fundamentally believe they have been betrayed. Up to basically twothirds of our kids feel that we have betrayed them because of climate. So what's going on here? Why do they believe this? I think we all know in one sense, but it's worth just revisiting how we got here because the underlying source of it has been exposed. It starts with this guy, of course. I mean, it doesn't really start with this guy. goes back to failing in the human heart through Mouthys and then Paul Erlick.
>> Too many people, too much consumption and growth mania. Humanity is not sustainable.
So, you know, Mr. Population Bomb's been singing this song for a long time. He is now gone. So, he's not polluting the planet. I assume he's happy about that. I don't think he believed he was going anywhere. God rest his soul. But this is going on all over the planet. It's going all over the world. The the climate protests continue.
>> today. Around the world, people are marching. It's a global protest against climate change.
>> This is video from Washington DC this morning. Millions around the world are making their voices heard ahead of the United Nations climate action summit on Monday.
>> Here, take a look at this. More than 100 demonstrators marched from the again the southwest side of the city and stopped outside of Senator Gary Peter's office in Carter Plaza. It is mostly girls. Our girls are really under assault. Their psychology is under assault by by the adults. I'm not happy about that. As a father, that is that sucks. Our daughters are under attack and this is just one of the vectors of attack. But let's keep going.
>> Organizers are asking him to fully back the Green New Deal, which is federal legislation aimed at addressing climate change and economic inequality. Now, this is a slightly older video, but it's still the same stuff. Nothing's changed.
>> Our demonstrators are also calling for an end to fossil fuels. A group of high school students organized this march. Several of them are affiliated with a local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, which is a national organization that fights climate change. And they have other fights, too, because they're a national communist movement, the Sunrise Movement. So, right there, again, all you have to do is dig a little bit and you'll find that this is all got other stuff going on. So, just put a little note, the Sunrise Movement. Beware. Beware if you see that on a flyer at your kid's school, the Sunrise Movement. One student tells me she skipped high school and marched with her dad in hopes of taking the first steps to a change for everyone.
>> This is a movement for all people. Um, able-bodied, uh, disabled, gay, straight, black, white, it doesn't matter. Um, we're fighting for all of our lives.
We're fighting for all of our lives. This is what a majority of our kids believe still today. Our kids here are not alone in the wealthiest country on planet Earth. Uh the other wealthy kids are also believing it and the not so wealthy.
>> I'm here on the corner of Elizabeth and Park Street where busy lunchtime traffic has been brought to a complete standstill as protesters stage a sitin in the middle of the road.
>> Police keeping a watchful eye over the peaceful protest. Children also making their voices heard in Bondi. Our politicians are ignoring the unignorable facts.
>> The koalas are dying and I want to save the koalas.
That message hard to argue with. Analise Bolt, 9 News. Think about the children and the koalas. Think about the koalas. Striking students call on the government to do more to fight climate change. This was just a couple days ago. Students striking. I I don't students always want to strike. They don't want to go to school. This is all just a a reason to not go to school. That's what a lot of this frankly is if you're being honest. Especially the younger kids are like, "Oh, we can go on a protest. That's great. Not we don't have to go to math class. Awesome."
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It's not hard to understand where our kids got all this from. They have been hearing about it from other mentally disturbed children for a long time.
>> This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you?
They hear all the uh complicit adults cheering for this for this poor autistic child who's been made into a tool of a political movement. uh this political movement,
>> millennials and people and you know Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we're like
>> the world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change. And your biggest issue
>> is your your biggest issue is how are we going to pay for it? And like this is the war. This is our World War II
>> and it I think for younger people, we're looking at this and we're like, how how are we saying let's take it easy?
These are the times that I feel like we need to raise the voting age, perhaps past 30. Uh yeah, so that's 2019. It's now 2026. So we're 7 years towards the end of the world. Uh and it's getting harder to find clips like that. But at that time, uh, this was the stuff that was all around. It wasn't just the radical fringe types like AOC. This was the New Yorker, the uninhabitable Earth with a skull fossil, or is our planet headed toward a hot house, Washington Post, good old Al Gore talking about rainbombs. We're still putting 162 million tons into it every single day. And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima class atomic bombs exploding every single day on the earth. That's what's boiling the oceans, creating these atmospheric rivers and the rain bombs. Atmospheric rivers. So I'm not sure what that means that there have you seen Have you Have you seen any rivers flying through the air? What does that even mean? An atmospheric river. I imagine it means something. It sounds ridiculous. Rain bombs. Again, it's just uh the bomb bast. It's actually almost an art form to watch Al Gore deliver these uh deliver these sermons. It's it's it's quite incredible. and sucking the moisture out of the land and creating the droughts and melting the ice and raising the sea level and causing these waves of climate refugees predicted to reach 1 billion in this century. Look at the xenophobia and political authoritarian trends that have come from just a few million refugees. What about a billion? Being angrier makes it makes it more true, doesn't it?
Here's a slightly less angry voice that's just as important, more important because Al Gore hasn't been in technically in political power since like 2000. Uh John Kerry on the other hand believed all this stuff while wind surfing and off of yachts as Secretary of State. It's really hard for me to fathom that the United States Senate that I served in for 28 years when we used to be able to deal with each other on a bipartisan basis and get things done that now there are a group of people who don't even accept the science that's now settled.
>> There's no such thing as settled science, sir. There's no such thing as settled.
That's one of the things that should trigger your ear to say when I'm hearing people talk about science, the word settled should never be be uttered because science is a process and the process involves a continual openness to being proven wrong by new facts. That's the most essential element of science. And so this settled science thing which is about to get unsettled has been part of the reason why discourse on this has been broken.
Every single economic analysis that had that is a serious economic analysis that has been peer-reviewed and put out over the last 15 20 years documents that it is far far more expensive to not respond to climate than it is to respond. If we respond to this crisis, we can win this battle. And in the doing of that, we can create millions of jobs around the planet. We can have cleaner air. What we're talking about is reducing pollution.
>> And this is one of the other things that has changed recently, I think, for the better from the Trump administration, which is the coupling together of things that are actually pollutants like methane, with the not pollutant, which is CO2, which we release every time we breathe out. Now listen to what he does here.
>> Methane is pollution. CO2 is pollution. 10 million people a year die from this pollution. No, no human being has died from the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's that's that statement is a lie.
But by grouping them, you get to say other particullet that are not CO2 that do cause like smog and acid rain and you know horrible this might be from Beijing. This this image that's what he's talking about. This is but this is the stuff that's been pushed on our kids for the past 15 20 years.
>> And yet we're not reducing it. We're increasing it. If you ever want a definition of insanity, it's some of the behavior that the world is falling into.
And just just real quick, one more thing, the B-roll here. CO2 doesn't cause smoggy air. Like this image is not CO2 in the air. Just just a little bit of like it's easy to have these things wash over you, but just pay attention to the way you get manipulated by the mixture of sound and imagery and words being coupled. This is what has been done to our kids, to all of us, but especially to our kids. It has been targeted at our kids.
>> We can have a healthier planet, a cleaner planet, a more secure planet if we do the things that are on the table to have clean energy.
And of course, the uh the good old simplification of highly complex problems into just being math. It's just math.
>> You know, this is not some madeup political thing. This has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with ideology or shouldn't. This is about mathematics and physics. That's what's happening.
I can't get past that one. Mathematics. I don't know what does that mean. What does that mean? Obama used to talk about this with with his economic policy. It's just math. It's just math. No actually like anything involving human choice, human behavior, how we conduct ourselves in the society, our preferences, the jobs we pursue, the the places we want to live, all of which contribute to everything in the climate. Cuz when we talk about the global climate, we're literally talking about the entirety of planet Earth. like the attempts to model the future of the climate are an attempt to model and predict the future of everything on planet Earth. So the notion that that's just math is a game being played to try to act like again it's settled science. It's it's 2 + 2 equals 4.
But there's actually a very specific document that that drives all of this this entire story for the past 16 years. And that document is this the RCP8.5 a scenario of comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions. Global climate science is uh orchestrated coordinated by a UN body called the intergovernmental panel for climate change and they have these models these predictions these simulations and the RCP8.5 was the most extreme one. It was the one that predicted the most catastrophe. four degrees of warming on average, which again at the planetary scale, the notion that there's an average temperature for planet Earth, like you can put a thermometer in the mouth of Earth who's sick to take its temperature. This is not a thing. You can't do that. There's different climates. There's not one temperature. Averaging them might technically be math because you can measure all of the different sites and then divide them by the number of measurements you took and get an average. But that doesn't really mean almost anything at all. Actually, it doesn't have anything to do with whether my area is hotter or not. I'm sitting here in Austin, Texas in miday. We have been getting non-stop rain for the past 8 weeks. And when I first moved here in 2011, we went through a 100 days over 100 degrees. And I was told by the news that we were going to be in permanent drought for the next decade. I guess technically that was more than a decade ago. Uh so maybe but that but that wasn't even true that that didn't survive like two years. So that's the problem with complex systems.
But again in the most hubrisfilled version of trying to model the world. These scenarios attempt to model what the entire society will look like in 2100. And RCP8.5 was the doomsday scenario. But the way it was positioned turned out to be very very consequential. This is the most consequential boring stuff you will ever see. So bear with me cuz some of it's boring but it is super important. One of the things in this paper was a statement. Compared to the scenario literature, RCP 8.5 depicts thus a relatively conservative business as usual with low income, high population, and high energy demand due to only modest improvements in energy intensity. So, what did this thing assume about the future? Because what you'll find is that good old RCP8.5 was adopted by everyone to underpin their stories. All of those headlines were about RCP 8.5 and its predictions of catastrophe. Well, here's Roger Pelky, one of the people who has been pillaried for simply doing basic science. The science and by basic science, here's what I mean. Asking questions, forming hypotheses, trying to seek out if they work, trying to see if they don't work, which is to say falsify them, and continually being open to new information. That's science. That's just doing science. There's no the science. The science is also nonsense. There's not one science, but there is a process, the scientific process, the scientific method. He's better at it than most of these people. And here's what he had to say about the impact of this seemingly innocuous 2010 published in 2011 simulation of the future.
Scenarios were 8.5, 6.0, 4.5, and 2.6. 2.6 was selected to align roughly with a 2° temperature target for 2100. Um 8.5 was associated with something like a 4.7 to 5.2° 2° C temperature change in 2100. A massive amount of change. What's interesting is that scenario became identified as where we are heading and so that was used as the baseline to project if we don't take action this is what the world will look like. Um it was also the baseline against which uh policy was evaluated. So it had a very important role. It was the baseline. It it was the if we do nothing, we and by we do nothing, if there isn't very substantial draconian government top-down mandates, bans, multi- trillion dollar subsidies, complete upheaval of the order of the world. If we don't do those things, if we just let the free marketish because no one has a perfectly free market, but we just have like mostly freeish market stuff happen where people are just trying to get better all the time at the margin. Um, we'll be in hell. We'll be in 5° temperature average changes by 2100 and it'll be a catastrophe. And that's the baseline. That's the way it was positioned. Um, it was also the baseline against which uh policy was evaluated. So it had a very important role. Um tens of thousands of scientific papers uh were published over the last 15 years or so using that scenario. Not exclusively but uh often I tell people if you see a headline about how climate change is going to affect society, the planet in years ahead, odds are it's going to be based on RCP 8.5. So even if you haven't heard of it, you've certainly heard of its result. Your kids have certainly been told some derivative version of it in their classroom this year, in their environmental sciences class this year. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. It's inescapable.
So, what became of RCP 8.5? If you've made it this far, you might already know the answer. The answer is it's been abandoned. A report's just come out this last week saying that the IPCC, the UN body that puts out the annual climate reports, they've decided the next climate report needs to tone down the rhetoric a little bit because quote unquote, the worst case scenarios they've been publishing are implausible. Now, all of those scenarios are based on computer modeling, right? So, the the scenarios are as good or as bad as whatever they feed into their computer model. And of course, none of the scenarios have come true despite uh the UN Secretary General. Remember recently he talked about we're on a a highway to climate hell. Now, I usually try to find a slightly more neutral video pop for these moments. I couldn't find one because none of the media has covered this story at all. There's no video from mainstream news about the fact that the IPCC has essentially reversed itself on this. Uh, President Trump weighed in with his usual bombast good riddance over 15 years of Democrats promising that climate change is going to destroy the planet. The United Nations top climate committee just admitted that its own projections RCP 8.5 were wrong, wrong, wrong. For far too long, climate activism has been used by Democrats to scare Americans, push horrible energy policies, and fund billions into the bogus research programs. And that last part is true. Unlike the the Democrats who use climate alarmism nonsense to push their green news scam. I you know you are the president sir. I know it just it doesn't it doesn't really it always feels a little like what are you doing? My administration will always be based on truth science and fact. President Donald J. Trump all caps. So that got fact checked of course with usual and things.
But here's the deal. What is he talking about? What what did they actually do? Well, they released this new, you know, again, maximum boring report saying there they've got new estimates and buried in there is this claim here for the 21st century. This range will be smaller than assessed before. On the high end of the range, the CMIP6 high emissions levels quantified by SSP58.5 have become implausible. based on trends in the cost of renewables, the emergence of climate policy and recent emissions trends. Now, this is our first stop in the how all of this is totally intellectually bankrupt for real, legit, cuz I spent all day looking at these different papers. I'm I'm not suddenly more expert, but I just wanted to make sure that I got the language right from those from the original sources. I went to the original papers and looked at what they say. this statement here, this is what he's saying in this summary. Saying that, well, our total destruction of society that everybody ran with, it turns out that because we actually scared people into making change happen and instituting policies that have been put into effect. Well, in a way, we kind of fixed it. That's what this is saying. We kind of fixed it. The worst case scenario is now off the table because of solar panels being cheaper because they're made by slaves in China and because I don't know other policy stuff like the inflation reduction act which was going to pump something like $5 trillion into green companies borrowed again from China. So we're going to borrow 5 trillion from China to give to Chinese companies to enslave weaguers to make more solar panels. that was the scheme that was going to take place with that with all this policy. The problem with this is all of that's completely false. Uh no aspect of what has actually happened since 2011 comports with the idea that like we we as a planet took their advice substantially because it would need to be planetary. And the fact is is that just the Chinese alone are creating more coal fired plants than you can possibly imagine.
But that actually speaks to the underlying reason why this was bankrupt from the start. You see this scenario which was called a business asusual scenario and a baseline made assumptions that were so manifestly crazy that if you promoted this while claiming to be legitimate, you are discredited. What do I mean by that? the the the the RCP 8.5 assumed that by 2100 the population of planet Earth would exceed 12 billion that there would be essentially no new technology created that improved energy efficiency in our society which has already been instantly invalidated that was invalidated instantly but you didn't need to be an expert or a scientist to know to know that that was a crazy assumption and that coal use per person on planet Earth would go up by five times. Now coal use has declined throughout the first world and even as China increases its use of coal overall coal is on the decline planetwide because it is actually not as energy dense as other stuff like oil and natural gas. In fact, our emissions in the US have been flat because of fracking. So that's why our emissions have actually not continued to go up. They've actually been going down as a share of G GDP. None of that's got to do with massive taxes or capp trade or or an energy transition, which hasn't happened. There's been no energy transition. We're all consuming more fossil fuels today than we were projected to except in this scenario, this wild scenario where it was only going to be burning coal power plants like it's 1,800 in the year 2100.
So, why why should you know that? Why does that matter? Why is that so important? Because in 2011, it was already understood by anyone thinking or paying attention, people like Roger Pelky then, that this was crazy, that this shouldn't have been taken seriously. And anyone saying they were on the climate beat in media or journalism that wrote stories like we like you saw about the the the world being on fire on the basis of this this like crazy civilization ending simulation were lying to you. They were they were lying to you. They were liars. They should have known by looking at it that this is all implausible. We can't really look at this one. We have to look at the other ones because this one was sort of pushed to the limit just to seem crazy. And instead, literally everybody adopted Crazy Town and now it's dead. As Roger notes, it's officially dead. It's officially gone. Um, so let's hear what Roger, who studies this stuff full-time, has to say about sort of the the claim the the back padding that uh thanks to the IPCC scaring our kids for over a decade, we're now in the clear of total catastrophe.
As you say, there's one popular view out there and I, you know, it's a very face saving and comfortable view that we were on that trajectory until we had the Paris agreement and we implemented all sorts of policies and that brought us back down. The good news is that questions like that don't have to be opinions. We can actually evaluate how the energy system has changed. Um we can look at at rates of decarbonization in the technical terms and the evidence indicates that actually no um the world has not all of a sudden bent the curve either in emissions or rates of decarbonization of the economy, energy intensity, carbon intensity. Um and so there's not good evidence that the reason was policy. Add on to that that there's really good research again led by my colleague Justin Richie that explains that the scenarios were never on target. They were based on a flawed theoretical conception of how the future energy system would develop. And basically the assumption was we're going to we're going to burn all the coal we can find and coal is the most carbonintensive fossil fuel. Uh we're going to eliminate natural gas, we're going to eliminate nuclear, eliminate wind, solar. Eventually we're going to eliminate petroleum and get liquids from coal. And that theory underlies not just RCP 8.5, but really all of the scenario set of the past 20 years. I think one of the things that was actually baked into the uh the crackpot cake of of RCP 8.5 was this notion of peak oil. You don't hear that term around that much anymore, but this was the thing. Oh, we're running out of oil. We've got peak oil. That that that is false. There's no peak oil. There hasn't been peak oil. There might not be there. We will actually never extract all the oil out of the ground. That's actually that actually is a fact because as economist Julian Simon pointed out um we never use up everything because of prices. As prices go up, as we're seeing right now with oil and gas prices right now because of military action and intervention with Iran, um people make substitutes. So if we do start to, you know, draw down the total supply of oil in a meaningful sense and we and it's just too expensive to extract the other stuff because of the the distance and the thickness and all the stuff that goes into making it difficult or it's at the bottom of the ocean and there's probably aliens down there and we're scared to go whatever that is. um the price will go up as that happens and we will switch to other stuff and maybe at that point like these unreliable sources of intermittent energy suddenly become more affordable than the alternative. That's unlikely. We'll probably just have fusion power. It's going to be it's all going to be fine.
The scope of the abuse of this 8.5 is truly incredible. So back in 2020, Roger actually wrote this piece, the systemic misuse of scenarios in climate research. And in it, he lays out just how vast the abuse of this is, not to mention the sheer volume of research being pumped out. The misuse of this particular scenario has been consequential as it has been emphasized by the IPCC, the US National Climate Assessment, and is pervasive in the underlying literature that these assessments rely on. A Google Scholar search indicates that almost 4500 articles referring to RCP 8.5 as business as usual. It pervaded all of climate science. When you look at the various scenarios and how frequently they were cited by actual research, over 16,000 16,800 articles between 2010 and 2020 were published focused on this outlandish crazy talk scenario. It was actually the most frequently cited one which is just it just proves the entire stud the entire field is corrupt. You know this has been this is being ignored or swept under the rug. But this there has been so many scandals in this field that I I guess this is why recent polling shows that people won't even spend one additional dollar to try to address climate change. As soon as you put a price that is hits your pocket for this issue, the the public is has frankly already moved on and that is that is the silver lining in all this. But this massive parasitic world of governmentf funded taxpayer extracted research continues to go crazy. If you do a search in Google Scholar for RCP 8.5 between 2022 and 2025, you get another new additional 17,000 articles written. There aren't enough people with PhDs in even adjacent fields to do this. I wonder how much of these are produced by chat GPT in the post2022 period. It's completely crazy. And and so I think the thing is when you look deeper, you see other indications that there's something frankly more diabolical going on with all of this. Because if the actual science, the scientists, the researchers aren't are making use of this like bunk report, this this completely whacked out crazy simulation as their default. they need to be disregarded. The politics behind it is something else. It's something weirder and and it feels like nobody's talking about this anymore. But underneath the surface, there are forces forces making billions of dollars that care more about this issue than all of the other in the vast left-wing omni cause. And nobody has sort of encountered this quite as
Much as The Liberal Patriot, which was a publication that ultimately met its death because of climate change. This was a publication, nonprofit organization and publication by Mark Halpran and Ruie Texeria trying to essentially reorient the Democratic Party towards non-crazy. And there are three issues that they tackled. They tackled many in their work, but they were going back to actually being against illegal immigration and doing something about it. Not sterilizing and manipulating children under the guise of gender-affirming care and transgenderism. It's recognizing that 80% of the public recognizes that that's like child mutilation and evil and crazy and that shouldn't be like in the centerpiece of one of our two major political parties. That should be relegated back to the fringe and banned, and climate change.
So, one might think that immigration and trans would elicit far more passionate pushback than climate change because these are even more personal. They impact people that might have family and friends that are affected by them. Turns out that's not true. Turns out you could throw the trans kids and the Mexicans under the bus, but how dare you touch climate change. Don't you dare touch our climate change. You know, as they note in this article from the Breakthrough Institute, Ruie Halpin's co-founder and TLP's most prolific and influential author told us that across six years, 1,500 posts, and a range of controversial subjects, TLP's funding and editorial independence has been threatened exactly four times, which is to say, very, you know, powerful donors calling up and saying, "You better knock it off. Stop publishing that or I'm pulling my funding." Every one of those instances was in response to an article about climate change, and it ultimately killed this organization. They ultimately lost their funding.
Who is this guy, Ruie? Well, he's actually like a really serious political player on the left. He wrote this very famous book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, 20 years ago, suggesting that the Democrats had it on lock. That essentially the rise of brown America was going to guarantee a permanent Democrat majority. He's not a raging right-winger. And yet he ran into the buzzsaw of the ultimate money grab that is the climate movement. And, you know, you can say what you want. John Kerry.
"This is not some made-up political thing. This has nothing to do with politics. It has nothing to do with ideology or shouldn't. This is about mathematics and physics. That's what's happening."
It's not about mathematics or physics. It's entirely 100% about politics and frankly, just rent-seeking. Rent-seeking to the tune of trillions of government dollars to flood into unproductive products, basically. In fact, it's anti-physics because, as you've heard from my other guests on this matter, hydrocarbons actually have the physics on their side. They're energy-dense. They're dispatchable. They're available. They create the ability to have affordable, reliable energy. That's why I like them. That's why I'm in favor of them. And their output, CO2, is plant food, which is why the planet has greened to the tune of two continental United States in the past 30 years alone because there is no climate crisis and CO2 is not pollution, it's plant food.
But the omnicause, the politics, the ideology, you see it on display with the people who've been the most vocal about this issue, like Bill Nye, who also says this same stuff. You can see the transformations that have taken place here.
"The Earth is getting warmer faster than it's ever gotten before. And that's the problem. It's not that the world hasn't had more carbon dioxide. It's not the world hasn't been warmer. The problem is the speed at which things are changing. We are inducing a sixth mass extinction event."
"We are not. There is no mass extinction event."
Kind of by accident. And we don't want to be the extinct eee, if I may coin this noun. It looks like the U.S.'s strength is its weakness. So people came here from all over the world.
And you get a hint of just how diabolical this ideology is once it infects your mind. You know, some of us grew up liking Bill Nye when he was just the science guy and didn't become a political hack.
It looks like the U.S.'s strength is its weakness. So people came here from all over the world for freedom to think and act the way they want, the way they wanted, especially freedom of religion. So we ended up with both the people who framed the Constitution, which is a fabulous thing, and people who asserted that the Garden of Eden was in Missouri, and there's nobody, there's no police for that sort of thing. You're allowed to believe whatever you want. It's great. But with that, it's great, but it's great. But freedom of speech, freedom of religion, it's great, but that butt hangs heavy. Was this for them? And I emphasize them, the other side. Consequences of that was you could also ignore facts of science for a while, and now it's coming to a head. But man, it's really divisive, isn't it? It's really something.
Tectonic plates move, and that's a fact. And the world's getting warmer because of human activity. That's a fact. If you had somebody who really strongly believed the Earth was flat, you wouldn't have to have that person on a television show with the people who believe the Earth is round. So the BBC, as I understand, just got enough. We, I mean, we got work to do. We can't. It's not. It's not one person versus the other person. It's 97 people versus three people. So you see that that's the hey, yeah, we got this First Amendment, we got all this freedom stuff, and yeah, but we should be like Britain, who doesn't have that and who arrests 12,000 people a year for Facebook posts and who just says, "No, we don't have debates anymore about things that like the most important organizations get fundamentally wrong. We won't be allowed to do that." And people like Roger Pielke get lambasted and destroyed and called Nazis. You just, after a while, let's move on. There may have been, there may have been such debates at some time in her, in early human history, but you wouldn't have such a debate now.
The science guy, you know what this science guy also decided was the science? The other omnicause issue that's the most anti-science thing in the world.
"One thing's clear about sexuality. There's a lot more going on than meets the eye. Female or male, gay or straight, pink or blue. We were taught to see these as binary. Now we're realizing it's more like a kid's school. And this stuff isn't just for adults. Parents know this already. Kids explore gender, expression, attraction before they've ever heard of a spectral. Sure, this might make things confusing for those who insist everyone pick an M or an F, but people, we have to listen to the science. And the science says we're all on a spectrum."
It does not. It's literally the most binary thing in the world. You are a crackpot. He's become a complete hack crackpot. This is what happens. This is what has happened to too many Americans, people who should be sane. And then it's also happened to people who aren't really particularly sane and not American, like Greta, who, of course, you know, gallivants around whatever the cause du jour is, like the now it's the flotilla in Gaza or whatever. It's not about politics. Only it's only ever about politics. It's only ever about politics. That's what's happened.
And I think as we come to an end, I want to focus on the most abusive and frankly should be illegal thing that has been driving this into our kids' minds. We saw all those student protests, right? All the upset students, the students that have been driven to wanting to sterilize themselves, like that poor, sad, perhaps deeply angry and disturbed man at the start of this video. Um, yeah, right. This is all organic, right?
"Students across the world blew off school to fight for their future. Climate resolution. The student-led climate strike brought out thousands of teens in their own cities to get lawmakers to act on this urgent issue. Some cities like New York gave students permission to skip class to take part in the strike. Today's climate strike in New York City has three main demands. The first one is no fossil fuels in democracy and governments, business or media. The second one is a just transition to 100% renewable energy. And the third demand is hold polluters accountable."
And don't install screen time on my phone. That's the fourth demand. Striking students call on government to do more to fight climate change. So, you know, we've seen this over and over. This is what we've seen over and over. Well, that's all been an action of, of basically the most politically partisan creature in American political life, the teachers unions, whose contributions to a single party are such that you can't even see the contributions to anyone else in any bar graph. My editor will put up a bar graph over here, and they will, she will, you will see like it's all blue, it's all D. This is a partisan hack enterprise. It shouldn't be legal. And you watch these people. They are the ones in control of our kids' schools. This is what they're saying.
"Our planet is boiling. But Donald Trump offered oil company execs a deal. He'd scrap climate laws if they donated a billion dollars to his campaign. The Biden-Harris administration has taken more action to combat climate change than any in history."
And so what do they do in practice besides take from their members to give to the Democratic Party, whether their members or Democrats or not? Well, they mobilize our kids to go to these protests at taxpayer expense. That's what they do. And they only do it in one direction. And this isn't just the public schools. It's the private schools, too. I've had to have my son not attend rallies that were just completely against our family's values because that's what they do. That's what the education system does. It sends our kids to be activated, to be activists.
We got this CPS, which is the Chicago Public Schools. CPS has signed a joint agreement with CTU to transform May 1st into a day of civic engagement, student voice, and standing up to the White House attacks on our school communities. So, are we going to see the park is now? I mean, we're getting more and more people. Are we going to see kids being bussed to this protest?
Yeah. So, what we know is that CPS agreed to provide buses and lunches for at least or up to 100 schools. Now, there was a lot of, there was a lot of red tape that they had to go through in order to get there, but we know that there are many school, at least 35 that are confirmed, bussing kids to Union Park. This is what's going on. This is what's going on. The student protests are basically being financed and then coerced into action by a politically partisan teachers union machine that also has control of the classroom and therefore can scare our kids to death on the basis of bunk science and then mobilize them for politically partisan reasons. That's what's going on with this entire thing. I, it, you don't have to look that deep to see it, but it's important to bring the receipts and to say like, "No, this is actually what's happening."
Are kids being brought to the protest here today?
There are students who will be attending.
Okay. And how does that work? Like, do they have to get like a permission slip or something like that? Can you walk me through the little process because I know the country is very interested.
I can't right now, sorry. Because we're keeping track of where they're coming and how many there are and when they're.
Can you tell me roughly how many kids are going to be coming here today?
We are not exactly. We have around 2,000. A little over 2,000.
2,000 kids. How many different schools?
Oh my gosh, there's a lot of them.
A lot of them. Okay. And yeah, look, this safety operation. So, well, how long have you been briefed about here today? Has it been like weeks of preparation? Months?
We've been preparing.
Preparing?
Sorry. We got to run to this now.
Okay.
Okay. We got to run to get the kids off the bus. This is wow.
Yeah. So, this is what's happening. It's junk science that just basic logic without anything else will be revealed as junk science, subjectively filtered through a media that I guess can get away with it for a decade, at least with a large amount of the population, fed by a single-party teachers union apparatus that mobilizes kids into the streets so that those same reporters can then go to that fake protest orchestrated by our taxpayer-funded teachers to then point out that the children are calling on all of us as adults to destroy the wealth engines of our societies in the name of Mother Gaia, even though we aren't going to do that because the underlying basis is false. And if you say anything like that, if you say this is all BS, you're a denier, which is to say you're like a Holocaust denier. So therefore, you're a Nazi. That's what has become of this.
That is why people like Michael Shellenberger, who's a friend, been on the show many times, been really at the forefront of this issue along with Alex Epstein and Bjorn Lomborg and Matt Ridley, all of whom I know now at this point. So these, these are the people I talk to about this issue. His book Apocalypse Never, as well as Alex's book Fossil Future, lay it all out. So, if you don't believe me, if you somehow got to this point and you still think maybe I'm wrong about this, those two books bring all the receipts, as does Roger's work over at AEI.
You don't need to stray from the basic facts. And the basic facts aren't that we can predict the future. We can't do that. It's not possible. It's not possible to write mathematical models that can predict the climate system, which is to say the entire ecology and economy of planet Earth in 75 years from now. That's impossible. If that were possible, let's just think about this for a minute. Just consider this. This entire debate is predicated on the modeling of the complex system of the entire planet. If you could model the climate of the planet out 75 years, it is the equivalent of having Gray's Sports Almanac from Back to the Future 2. This book tells the future. The information in here is worth millions. And I'm giving it to you. Your ability to bet on the future would be perfect. You would have a literal crystal ball. Not even Palantir, named after the ball in Lord of the Rings, has that kind of predictive power. So of course it's impossible. You don't need to be a climate scientist or an environmental scientist or a physicist to know this. It is easily falsifiable that we can't predict complex systems. We can't predict stock markets. We can't actually accurately reliably predict the most simple complicated games, like who's going to win any given sports battle. Who's going to win the Super Bowl? Nobody can predict that reliably. The rules are fixed. There's only so many players. We can't predict it. That's how complex. Just think about that. We can't even predict the outcome of a game with only 22 players on the field in a very strict set of rules on a very limited artificial piece of grass. We can't do that. So there's no chance we can actually model the whole society.
This demands humility. Recognizing that makes you humble about the future, about the nature of the world, about the nature of your own understanding of the world. And that is the first step towards actually doing and thinking like a scientist. And if your kids are racked with anxiety, like more than half of planet Earth's kids are about this, that's the point of this whole video is to arm you with ways to talk to them and sources you can draw on to have a serious conversation with them. And my best advice on this front would be this. I'm being lecture-y because I'm a lecture-y dad, and that's what I do here. You should be more Socratic. So, take the facts from this video and the links and the materials we'll have over at dadsavesamerica.com and use them to frame a set of questions to ask your anxious daughter about the future. Why does she think this? Where does she get it from? What about this? Have you seen this? What do you think about this? Let her read it. Let her read the material. If this is true, why do you think they said it anyway? Why did these journalists write this if they should have known that the predictions were crazy and impossible? How does the fact that we are currently experiencing population decline and have known about this for a long time, including UN reports, how does that line up with this claim that we're going to have 12 billion people on the planet? Why do you think they did that? And just ask, just ask questions because being forced to sit there in your own silence and try to answer these questions will change your mind more than simply being barked at. And that's what I'm here to help you with. I will bark at you so you can ask your kids some questions. But you can bark at me down in the comments. Let me know what you think about this video.
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