#2397 - Richard Lindzen & William Happer

Joe Rogan (0:03)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Trained by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Gentlemen, first of all, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it.

Richard Lindzen (0:15)

My pleasure.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

My pleasure. And if you don't mind, would you please just tell everybody who you are and state your resume, like what you do? I mean, just a brief version of your credentials.

Richard Lindzen (0:29)

I'm Dick Lindzen. And my whole life has been in academia. Basically, I finished my doctorate at Harvard. And I did spend a couple of years at the University of Washington and Norway and in Boulder, Colorado. Then part of that was because at Harvard, I was working in atmospheric sciences, but they had no one who dealt with observations. So I went to Seattle for someone who did. And then I got my first academic position at Chicago and stayed there about three, four years, moved on to Harvard, spent about ten years there, and then to MIT for about the last 35 years until I retired in 2013

I've always enjoyed it. I mean, the field of atmospheric sciences, when I entered it, I mean, the joy of it was a lot of problems that were solvable. So you could look at phenomena. One of them that I worked on was the so-called quasi-biennial cycle. Turns out the wind above the equator, about 16 kilometers, 20 kilometers, goes from east to west for a year, turns around, goes the other way for the next year, and so on. We worked out why that happened, and there were other things like that. So it was a very enjoyable period until global warming.

Joe Rogan (2:12)

And sir, would you tell everybody what your credentials are, what you do, where you're from?

William Happer (2:17)

I'm Will Happer, and I'm a retired professor of physics at Princeton.

And like Dick, I'm a science nerd. But I was actually born in India under the British Raj. My father was an army officer in the Indian Army, Scottish, and my mother was American, and that was before World War II. So when I came to America as a small child, my mother was working in Oak Ridge for the Manhattan Project. So I remember the war days at Oak Ridge, and that's probably why I went into physics. I thought this looks like an interesting way to make a living. And if I can do it, I'll do it, and I have. And I've done a number of things. I spent a lot of time at universities at Columbia, at Princeton. I also served for a couple of years in Washington as Director of Energy Research under President Bush, Sr. And I've learned a lot about climate from Dick, my colleague here. I first became suspicious when I was Director of Energy Research. I would invite people in to explain how they were spending the taxpayers' money, and most people were delighted to come to Washington and have some bureaucrat be interested in what they were doing. And there was one exception. That was the people working on climate, and they would always be very resentful. You know, we work for Senator Gore. We don't work for you. And so I would tell them, well, okay, let him pay for your next year's research. I can find other people who will come and talk to me who would be glad to take my money.

Joe Rogan (3:58)

That's interesting. So Senator Gore has been involved in this whole climate thing for quite a long time then.

William Happer (4:03)

Oh, yes, very long.

Joe Rogan (4:04)

When he was a senator, before he was vice president.

William Happer (4:06)

That's right.

Joe Rogan (4:07)

And when he made that movie, An Inconvenient Truth, what year was that again? Jamie was like, 98 or something?

Richard Lindzen (4:15)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (4:15)

Something like that? 99? That, what is it? Oh, really? Were that off? Wow. Okay, so 2006

So when he made that film, there was always, when I was a child, I do remember Leonard Nimoy had a television show called In Search Of. Remember that show?

William Happer (4:32)

Sure.

Joe Rogan (4:33)

And on that show, he warned of an oncoming ice age.

William Happer (4:37)

Right.

Joe Rogan (4:37)

Do you remember that? And I remember being a kid and freaking out like, oh my God, Spock is telling us the world's going to freeze. This is terrifying. And then somewhere along the line, it became global warming. And initially in the 80s, it was kind of funny. People were saying, well, hairspray, the more you use it, you could play golf deep into November.