#1777 - Andrew Dessler

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

All right, we're up. Well, thank you very much for being here, Andrew. Appreciate it. Why don't you tell everybody, if you would, what you do and what your credentials are.

Andrew Dessler (0:20)

So I'm a professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University. I'm the director of the Texas Center for Climate Studies.

I've been studying climate and the atmosphere for about 30 years.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Thank you for being here. I brought you on here to counter this book.

Steve Coonan, who was my last guest, and I'm trying to do this and balance things out. He has a very different take on what the science says about climate change than you do. So I guess we should start. I know you've read the book. What do you think about his book?

Andrew Dessler (1:01)

Yeah. Well, let me start with a little context, some historical context. So for decades on a number of problems, there have been scientists who show up and say the consensus is all wrong. So it started in the 60s with tobacco. So the evidence was very clear that smoking is bad for you. And then the scientists started showing up and saying, no, we don't really understand.

There's all these problems with the science. And what the tobacco companies figured out very early is that having a scientist advance that message was much better than having a PR person.

So they would go out and hire scientists to say, hey, we need you to push this message. And they went out. It was very effective. They delayed the recognition that smoking is bad for you for decades.

Joe Rogan (1:43)

Have you seen the documentary, Ministers of Doubt?

Andrew Dessler (1:46)

Merchants of Doubt, yeah. In fact, I was going to say, that's a fantastic book by Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway that really goes over this, all the way into climate change, about how science is used to try to undermine policy action.

And so then, you know, fast forward to the 80s, and you have fluorocarbons and ozone depletion. And in fact, the exact same thing happens. The science was really well established, but the scientists started showing up saying, the scientists have it all wrong. And in fact, the arguments they're advancing are almost exactly the same as the arguments that Dr. Kuhn is advancing. If you take a word document, you just do a global word replace, ozone depletion for climate change, you have exactly the same argument. In fact, I have a slide with a quote that I normally don't make people read a paragraph, but I think this is actually really useful. If you go to slide 52, this is from 1989, and I think it's going to show up there. Yes. It's worth, so this is a quote from something that was said about fluorocarbons. It says, the current situation can be fairly summarized as following. The CFC ozone theory is quite incomplete and cannot yet be relied on to make predictions.

The natural sources of stratospheric ozone layer have not yet been delineated, theoretically or experimentally. The Antarctic ozone hole is ephemeral. It comes and goes. It seems to be controlled by climatic factors outside human control rather than CFCs. That's exactly the same argument. We don't understand it. It's natural variability.

It's identical argument. And keep it back up.

In the next paragraph, New York Times reports talks about the disadvantages of CFC substitutes. They may be toxic, flammable, corrosive. They certainly won't work as well. They'll reduce the energy efficiency of appliances. They'll deteriorate. $135 billion of equipment used CFCs in the United States alone, and much of this equipment will have to be replaced or modified to work well. Eventually, that will involve 100 million home refrigerators, air conditioners in 90 million cars, central air conditioning plants in 100,000 large buildings. Good luck. Total costs haven't even been added up yet. And again, windmills don't work.

The costs are going to be extraordinary. And, you know, you were around the 90s. Do you remember the economic apocalypse that happened when we replaced CFCs?

Joe Rogan (3:49)

It didn't happen.

Andrew Dessler (3:50)

The economic apocalypse didn't happen. We replaced them. And none of that happened.

Joe Rogan (3:54)

What did they replace them with?

Andrew Dessler (3:55)

With other CFCs. So the original F11, F12 got replaced with these things we call HCFCs that are less damaging. Those aren't there. And none of that happened. And that, those people are the true alarmists in the debate. The people that say we can't do it because we can do it. And all, and they're just trying to scare people into not taking action.