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My expertise is in deception.
The thing that sets magicians apart from con men...
...and other kinds of thieves and liars...
...is that we're honest liars.
It's the moral contract.
Please give it up for Jamy Ian Swiss. Give it up!
Good evening. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
We'll begin at the beginning with incontrovertible evidence...
...of a misspent youth.
I'm saying, "I'm gonna fool you, but it's okay." Right?
"That's my job, and I'm gonna bring you back in a not severely altered condition."
You ever seen anybody take cards, wave their hands...
-...and have it change into another card? -No.
You wave your hands over it, and it changes just like that.
You don't always have to wave your hands over it.
Sometimes you just give it a little snap. It changes just like that.
-Watch again, just a little snap. -No.
It changes just like that.
I make an honest living, right?
Therefore, it offends me...
...when someone takes the skills of my honest living, if you will...
...and uses it to twist and distort and manipulate people...
...and their sense of reality and how the world works.
I know how to fool people...
...and I know how to recognize when people are being fooled.
Dioxins, pesticides, chemicals in general.
There's no evidence that these are harming us.
Asbestos, designed to last a lifetime...
...a trouble-free lifetime.
Catastrophic global warming is a hoax.
There's no scientific consensus.
There is no consensus. This is a myth.
Cigarette smoking does not cause cancer, yes or no?
It is not known whether cigarettes cause cancer.
There really isn't a scientific consensus.
Do you accept the basic premise that smoking kills?
No, I think that the scientists who make statements like that...
...are making political statements, not scientific statements.
-How do you spell your name? -G-L-A-N-T-Z.
-I got it. -I can give you a card.
-No, it's all right. Stan, right? -No?
-Or Stanton. Stan. -Are you a...?
I got involved in the tobacco issue in 1978...
...over clean indoor air. Then, the radical thing was to have a nonsmoking section.
Good evening, the captain has turned off the no-smoking sign.
Smoking was everywhere.
It was on airplanes.
It was in restaurants.
I work in a hospital.
People were smoking in the hospital.
What in the world is so wrong about smoking in the workplace?
I mean, I smoke on my job every night. I'm not hurting anyone.
-Well, that's bullshit. -Is it?
One thing you've gotta be willing to do when you're doing science...
...that is not in the interest of these giant corporations...
...when people come after you for baloney reasons...
...you've gotta be willing to stand up to them.
I don't know of any evidence, conclusive evidence.
-Here. You could read this. -Let me ask you something.
-Read this.
Let me ask you one simple damn question. Hold on.
We spent a long time banging our heads up against the wall...
...because these guys are rich, they're politically powerful...
...and they're mean.
-How old are you? -I'm 42.
Forty-two. Now, I smoke four packs of cigarettes a day.
I am 55.
Wait a sec, wait a sec, wait a sec.
Tell me if I don't look 20 years younger than this asshole.
Come on.
But when you went to policy makers or the media...
...and talk about just how dishonest and manipulative they were...
...people would kind of think you were a little paranoid delusional.
And then the whole situation changed.
I'm sitting in my office on the 11th floor of the hospital...
...and a box arrives.
And in there was thousands of pages...
...of internal tobacco industry documents.
The documents in the box came from somebody on the inside...
...working for the companies...
...copying a bunch of documents and sneaking them out...
...and making them available to people on the outside.
We now have over 80 million pages...
...and the great bulk of those have become available...
...because of lawsuits against the tobacco companies.
The thing that is so important about the documents...
...is it gets you behind the veil, it gets you inside the companies...
...where you don't have to speculate about what they're doing.
You could read about it.
That the tobacco companies knew smoking caused cancer in the '50s.
It is not known whether cigarettes cause cancer.
That they knew smoking caused heart disease in the '60s.
No causal relationship between cigarette smoking and heart disease?
No, as a matter of fact there are--
That they knew nicotine was an addictive drug in the '60s.
Yet 30 years later, the CEOs of all the big tobacco companies...
...stood up under oath and told Congress that nicotine wasn't addictive.
-You believe nicotine is not addictive? -I believe nicotine is not addictive, yes.
I don't believe our products are addictive.
-Not addictive. -Not addictive.
-It's not addictive. -Not addictive.
The science that they did internally was very good, often decades ahead...
...of what people on the outside were doing.
It's just that you don't want the people on the outside...
...to know what that evidence is saying.
The tobacco issue broke into the public consciousness in 1953.
Faced with undeniable evidence that smoking was killing people...
...they did what any self-respecting big corporation would do.
They hired a public relations firm.
And Hill and Knowlton said to the heads of all the big tobacco companies:
"You can't deny the evidence.
You can't say smoking doesn't cause cancer.
But what you can do is cast doubt."
I think there's a great deal of doubt as to whether or not cigarettes are harmful.
Smoking may be hazardous, it may not be.
It may be or it may not be. We don't know.
None of the things which have been found in tobacco smoke...
...are at concentrations which can be considered harmful.
But the components themselves can be considered harmful, can they not?
Anything can be considered harmful.
Applesauce is harmful if you get too much of it.
I don't think many people are dying from applesauce.
They're not eating that much.
The playbook that big tobacco developed to attack science...
...worked for them for 50 years.
Because every day that they can delay effective policy action...
...is one more day that they can make more money.
They can be out there selling a product...
...that's killing a half-a-million Americans a year and get away with it.
And so other businesses that were faced with regulatory challenges...
...had to look at this and say, "Boy, if this works for tobacco...
...we ought to be able to use that playbook too."
What's happened is that people working on a whole range of other issues...
...that you wouldn't think had much to do with tobacco...
...have gone into the documents and found things...
...that we never would have thought to have looked for.
My partner and I, we were both ready...
...to take on a new project, something we could sink our teeth into.
And almost everybody said:
"You should be looking at flame retardants."
I had no idea that there were flame retardants in my couches, my chairs.
These are chemicals measured by ounces and pounds.
In the average couch, there could be up to 2 pounds of flame retardants.
We all wind up with the chemicals in our bodies because of it.
Because those chemicals come out of the foam, they migrate in the dust.
American babies are born with the highest levels...
...of flame retardant chemicals of any place in the world.
They're linked to health problems.
And kids are the most vulnerable.
So then the big question was, "Do they really protect us from fires?"
One of the early breakthroughs was...
...when we talked to the leading fire scientist.
It was his study that the chemical industry was holding up as proof...
...that flame retardants work.
And yet when we talked to him, he said, "They're grossly distorting my work."
That flame retardants in your house...
...they don't protect you from anything.
And then I thought, "Wow, okay.
We have them in our bodies, they're rising exponentially...
...and they don't work?
How can that be?"
In the '70s, thousands of people were dying in fires started by cigarettes.
When you smoked a cigarette and put it down...
...it could burn for up to 30 minutes after you'd put it down.
The tobacco industry was under pressure...
...to create a self-extinguishing cigarette.
Tobacco kept insisting, "We can't do it."
You start tampering with a cigarette...
...it is a very highly technical and complex undertaking.
They didn't want to alter a product...
...that was making them billions of dollars a year.
So what they needed was a scapegoat.
And they had this perfect scapegoat, and it was furniture.
The furniture was to blame here.
You need to fireproof the world around the cigarette.
The cigarette industry at that time was having credibility problems...
...so they needed a credible third party to go out there and deliver their message.
There was this document in the tobacco archives...
...that laid bare their strategy in pretty callous language.
"You have to try to understand who is a potential threat to you...
...so you can neutralize them.
Example, the self-extinguishing cigarette.
Who would be involved in the self-extinguishing cigarette...
...on the other side of the fence? The firefighting community."
This is an international group of executives.
He's saying, "This is what you need to do.
Find your enemies. In this case the fire service.
Those folks are a real threat to us. Neutralize them."
"We had turned them around and made allies.
Third-party defenders for ourselves."
So there was a guy at the Tobacco Institute named Peter Sparber.
The Tobacco Institute planted Peter Sparber...
...inside the National Association of State Fire Marshals.
And the fire marshals named him their legislative representative.
What the fire marshals didn't know was that big tobacco...
...was paying him $200 an hour for work they thought was volunteer work.
So in some ways he's almost like a spy.
He would go in, he would talk to the fire marshals.
And he convinced them that they should deliver the message of big tobacco.
That it's not cigarettes causing all these fatal fires, it's the furniture.
Manufacturers had to put pounds of toxic chemicals...
...into the cushions of your couch.
You have to hand it to Peter Sparber.
I don't think there's too many guys that could pull that off.
He said, "If you can do tobacco...
...you can do just about anything in public relations."
Peter Sparber went on to work for the pesticide industry, the oil industry.
There are other Peter Sparbers out there.
You see the same small group of people that the tobacco industry used...
...working on all kinds of other issues.
This is not what the drunk driving debate is about.
This is political sound bites instead of good science.
They had developed a certain set of skills...
...that a lot of industries are gonna want.
Dioxins, pesticides, chemicals in general.
There's no evidence that these are harming us.
The only way these guys are actually effective...
...is if the public thinks they're an independent voice.
Steve, first of all, are you in bed with big oil...
...and if so, how good in bed are they?
Not in bed with anyone, just trying to do the right thing on climate change.
Red. Watch it. You win. You lose.
You lose. See.
How did you miss that one?
Nobody ever won at Three-Card Monte in history.
They've been playing it for 150 years, and nobody's won.
That one's your red. That one's your black.
People want to think that the Three-Card Monte...
...is all about the sleight-of-hand maneuver the Monte operator uses...
...to switch one card for another.
That's the least of it.
The Monte operator, he wants to instill that confidence in you.
That's where "con" comes in con game.
And so he enlists the assistance of confederates...
...shills, people who stand there and bet with money and watch the game.
The shill wins so that you have the confidence...
...that the Monte operator will pay.
Pay me. Thank you. Thank you.
They're gonna look like they're independent.
The idea of how to mask the shill...
...how to make the shill look legitimate to the audience...
...so that they're not suspect when they're playing the game...
...is all part of the psychology.
The game does not work without that concealment.
The evidence does not support the notion...
...that humans are causing global warming.
There is no scientific basis for alarm.
We do not know enough about what affects climate.
We don't know if there's a problem.
Climate scientists have a political agenda...
...and they are using science to drive that political agenda.
First of all, Dr. Hansen, say your name, spell your last name, give your title.
Well, I'm James Hansen.
I'm the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. And it's H-A-N-S-E-N.
Okay.
You've created quite a stir.
Are you glad that the stir is happening?
Well, I think that it's important to have the attention...
...on the possible climate changes.
-Let's try that again. -Sure.
-You want to ask the question? -No.
No, you just go ahead and answer them.
Well, I think that-- What I'd like to say is that, frankly...
...I would rather do my research than be interviewed for TV.
What made you fall in love with science?
Well, that's what I could do.
I could do physics and mathematics. That was easy for me.
I got into science with NASA...
...as the space program was just getting started.
I had proposed an experiment to go to Venus on the Pioneer Venus mission.
The question was, "Well, why was Venus so hot?"
As it turned out, the greenhouse effect was the reason...
...why Venus had a temperature of about 600 degrees.
We started realizing that our own atmosphere was changing.
So I then began to work full-time...
...on understanding our planet instead of Venus.
The CO2 that we put in the air by burning fossil fuels...
...will stay in the climate system for millennia.
It's like putting a blanket around the planet.
It holds in the heat.
Civilization has developed in the last several thousand years...
...in a climate that has been very stable...
...varying by no more than about one degree.
So if you warm up a few degrees...
...you're putting the planet outside that which has existed...
...for hundreds of thousands of years.
We'd just assumed that humanity would take sensible actions...
...to avoid undesirable consequences.
Thank you for being here.
Dr. Hansen, if you'd start us off, we'd appreciate it.
Mr. Chairman and members--
You have to talk right into the microphone.
These are not high-tech microphones.
You have to pull it right over close and talk right into it or people can't hear.
-Okay. -There you go.
Most scientists are not good communicators.
We're not trained to do that.
Science itself is hard enough...
...without trying to communicate with the public.
The global warming is now large enough...
...that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence...
...a cause-and-effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.
So in 1988, Jim Hansen testifies, and the news media reports it.
It could mean devastating changes to life on Earth.
John Passacantando, executive director of Greenpeace.
I just trundled into this fight...
...as really just another earnest environmentalist.
I've worked on this for 20 years.
Environmentalists, we thought this was a fight about science.
Get the science out there, into the media...
...politicians will listen, we can solve this.
The question is, what will the White House do about it?
Politicians, even President Bush, say, "We're gonna tackle this."
Those who think we're powerless with this greenhouse effect...
...are forgetting about the White House effect.
So the fossil fuel industry realizes it has an enormous problem.
Bill O'Keefe is executive vice president of the American Petroleum Institute.
He's also a board member of the Global Climate Coalition...
...made up of oil and electric companies, automakers and others.
We believed it was a war on oil, they had an off-oil agenda.
Climate change was part of that.
I think that it's unfortunate that the science...
...is so distorted and misstated....
The science is complicated, and there are lots of factors.
You have to understand the whole picture.
There is a natural variability that has nothing to do with man.
Climate is changing naturally.
It has to do with sunspots, the wobble of the Earth.
And so it's not too difficult...
...to persuade some of the public that we really don't know for sure.
So let's wait awhile. We need to have more proof.
We need more data.
The science isn't there to make a determination.
There is no need for us to rush to this kind of judgment....
Others put out ads saying more pollution is gonna be good for us.
A doubling of the CO2 in the atmosphere...
...will produce a tremendous greening of Planet Earth.
CO2 benefits plant life.
It's increasing the bounty of the planet...
...our ability to feed populations.
What you see from the coal industry...
...is analogous to what the tobacco industry used to do.
They refuse to change. They're trying to convince us that it's good for us.
The way they used to say, "Luckys make you healthy."
So there's this hope that, as the science continues to emerge...
...the public will become aware...
...and our political leaders will solve this problem.
But that's not what happened.
I was always interested in broader questions about scientific knowledge.
Why we believe some things and not others.
How do scientists come to consensus?
What does it take for scientists to say, "Yes, we know this is true"?
The problem is, there's no consensus on what's causing it.
Consensus has not been met among scientists....
A decade after Hansen had testified in Congress...
...that climate change was happening...
...the media are still presenting this as a big scientific debate.
Gentlemen, I'm sure that this debate is gonna continue for a long, long time.
I had the idea that we could test this question...
...of whether or not there was a consensus among scientists.
Active scientists, people who are doing research...
...and publishing in journals.
Not the public at large, not politicians, but scientists.
And so we got a list of all of the papers...
...that had been published from 1992 to 2002...
...that had used that key word phrase "global climate change."
And then we read them.
The question was...
...how many of these papers disagree that most of the observed warming...
...is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations?
So I certainly thought we would get some that disagreed.
And when we found nothing...
...then I thought, "Oh, this is a result that needs to be published."
When my article on the scientific consensus came out...
...I started getting threatening e-mails, saying that I was a communist...
...that I should be fired from my job.
A few people began to say to me:
"Other people have also been attacked in a way that seems similar."
People who worked on acid rain, who worked on the ozone hole.
I started doing research on the people who were attacking me.
And that's when I discovered a startling fact.
They were the same people...
...who had attacked the scientists on all these issues.
Then I began to realize, "This is a debate, but this is not a scientific debate."
And if it's not scientific, then the question becomes:
"Well, what sort of a debate is it?"
Dr. Fred Singer was greeted like a rock star...
...at a recent meeting of global warming skeptics.
This 84-year-old, Princeton-trained physicist...
...is the grandfather of a movement...
...that rails against the broad scientific understanding...
...that global warming is real, man-made and potentially catastrophic.
It's all bunk. It's all bunk.
There are so many scientists who disagree with you.
The IPCC, NASA, NOAA, the National Academy of Sciences...
...American Association for the Advancement of Science...
...The American Geophysical Union, The American Meteorological Society.
We're talking about scientists all over the globe.
What can I say? They're wrong.
When we talk about scientists, there are really two camps.
Those of us who wish to have decisions that are evidence-based...
...are called, not just skeptics, which is a good word...
...but they're called deniers.
And some of us are called criminals.
What would you call yourself?
Well, I consider myself, primarily, a scientist.
A major part of the mystery of this story...
...was to understand the scientists in the story.
This whole thing doesn't work unless there are credible voices.
Eminent scientists, Drs. Singer and Seitz...
...promote the skeptic view on climate change.
Singer and Seitz rose to high positions of influence and power...
...within the American scientific establishment.
Fred Seitz was one of the most important American physicists of the 20th century.
He was the president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
But now we see him starting to attack science and scientists...
...in areas in which he has no expertise.
So why would a man like that question the work of his own scientific colleagues?
One of the other things that emerged was that Seitz...
...had worked for the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.
The blame for smoking should be placed upon smokers.
If they buy them, it's their responsibility.
Yeah, but you know that in the '80s...
...the tobacco company very clearly said that there wasn't a direct linkage.
If people wanted to believe that, it was their own doing.
But was that also political on the part of the tobacco companies?
-Well, they wanted to keep up sales. -Yeah.
Was it irresponsible on the part of the tobacco companies?
It was irresponsible on the part of the smokers.
Fred Singer, like Fred Seitz, also worked with the tobacco industry.
You can find many documents that attest to his relationship with Philip Morris.
I still think that the EPA has cooked the data on secondhand smoke.
I am annoyed by the fact that this tobacco business...
...comes up every time when I speak about global warming...
...which has nothing to do with tobacco.
So why did Seitz and Singer do this?
Why would they make common cause with the tobacco industry?
Most people assume the answer's money.
But it was clear to me early on that that wasn't the whole story.
Lift off.
Lift off at 34 minutes....
Both Seitz and Singer are Cold War scientists.
They both worked on Cold War weapons and rocketry programs.
I was primarily concerned with building instrumentation...
...to be put into captured V2 rockets.
We felt the threat of the Soviet Union quite strongly.
They also shared a kind of political ideology, deeply, deeply anti-communist.
When the Cold War ends...
...they begin systematically attacking all these other issues.
There's a bit of a mystery. What do these things all have in common?
All of these issues are issues that involve...
...the need for government action.
That's when the penny dropped.
I began to realize, none of this is about the science.
This is a political debate about the role of government.
So in a number of places, we found these people saying...
...they see environmentalists as creeping communists.
They're Reds under the bed, they call them watermelons...
...Green on the outside, Red inside...
...and they worry that environmental regulation...
...is a slippery slope to socialism.
Socialism will not be buried under the ruins of the Berlin Wall.
We're not seeing the end of communism.
But the beginning of a new threat to free enterprise and to liberal democracies.
By any other name...
...government control of the economy is still government control of the economy.
I call them watermelons.
They're Green on the outside, but Red on the inside.
You know, at the end of the Cold War...
...we threw these people out the window Red...
...and now they've walked back in the front door Green.
I'll tell you what the environmental movement is in this country.
It is the modern home...
...of the socialist-slash-communist movement in America.
This bill is Green on the outside and inside it's deep communist Red.
The further down the road somebody gets in terms of their commitment...
...behaviorally and ideologically with a social group, a tribe--
"Our tribe doubts climate change. That's what we do."
Whether you care or not, your tribe believes a bunch...
...of other things that you also believe, so you buy the package.
I am Michael Shermer, director of The Skeptic Society.
We investigate the paranormal, pseudoscience...
...and cults and claims of all kinds between.
Some people call us debunkers...
...but there's a lot of bunk that needs debunking and that's part of our job.
When I say, "Where's the spacecraft?" You say, "They hid it."
Your whole case is based on anecdotes.
You gotta have a piece of the spacecraft, as I've always said.
Bring back one of those probes.
We did one on Holocaust deniers.
Vaccinations, "Do Vaccines Cause Autism?"
We've done many issues on climate change.
I became skeptical of the environmental movement...
...when a lot of the predictions they made in the '70s--
When I was in college and taking classes in these subjects.
--it was clear they weren't coming true. They exaggerated.
Sometime in the next 15 years, the end will come.
An utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.
And when civilization collapses on this earth...
...as it will within this decade, it's going to hit the U.S. first.
Rain forests would disappear and we'd run out of oil, and all that.
Overpopulation will destroy the Earth.
And billions of people would be starving to death...
...because we don't have food to feed them.
None of that happened, It didn't even remotely happen.
By the late '90s, the global warming thing...
...it became kind of a secular apocalypse...
...sort of a millenarianism for liberals.
It's not just a prediction, it was like, "Oh, boy.
Disaster is coming, and we, the chosen ones, well, we were right.
We'll come out the other side and say, 'See, we were right."'
So I was a climate skeptic for several decades, actually.
But data trumps politics.
In the end, you have to follow the data.
I read, you know, all the leading books and scientific papers.
I'm trained enough to realize what the data actually show.
I thought, "Oh, my God, this stuff is real."
Take all the politics out...
...the Earth is getting warmer...
...and we're the cause, no question about it.
So this isn't the greatest hoax ever sold to the American people?
No, climate change is not the greatest hoax ever sold to us.
But people on the right, they really think it is, even Libertarians.
I go to this Libertarian conference every summer, Freedom Fest in Las Vegas.
The Cato Institute is a Libertarian think tank.
We're dedicated to free markets and individual liberty.
Freedom from government, limited government.
The Heartland Institute believes warming is not man-made.
This is our event today. James Taylor is with The Heartland Institute.
-Okay. -Who is he debating?
He is debating Mr. Shermer...
...who is-- He writes for Skeptic Magazine...
...but James Taylor is doing the skeptic side today.
We'll see what happens at the debate. Yeah, we'll go to that.
They think of me as some liberal crazy, conspiracy-- Putting together this con--
This made-up story about climate change.
I'm like, "I used to be on your side. All I did was look at the data."
I've been Libertarian my whole adult life.
Since I read Atlas Shrugged in college, like everybody else here.
I prefer to read The Wall Street Journal...
...and ignore The NY Times...
...because The Journal tells me what I like to know is true.
So what flipped me was just sort of looking at the data...
...and all the new data that had come in the early 2000s.
Ninety-nine percent of the world's glaciers are retreating.
Why don't people change their minds when new data comes in about climate?
Because it isn't about the data.
It's about me being a consistent tribal member...
...and showing to my fellow tribe members that you can count on me.
The whole global warming debate is based upon your team...
-...starting out-- -"My team."
Yeah, your team. Starting out by making the declaration...
...that carbon dioxide causes temperature change.
First, it's not fifty-fifty.
It's not like half of scientists say this and the other half say that.
Almost none of them say what my opponent says.
-That's a lie. -No, none. I showed you the chart. No.
-Ninety-nine percent of scientists-- -That's a lie!
You can repeat it, but it won't make it true.
Ninety-nine percent have said that it's real.
-That is a bold-faced lie. -No, it is not.
When I go into these debates, it feels like I'm going...
...into a Twilight Zone episode.
You know, where black is white, up is down...
...and everything is just the opposite of what you think it is.
Two parallel worlds that exist side by side.
And each of us has a counterpart in this world.
Carbon dioxide increases have followed--
Whenever I deal with climate deniers, it's almost like a mirrored reality.
I put up the slide showing the Earth getting warmer...
...and the other guys put up the same slide:
"The Earth is getting cooler."
Temperatures now are not abnormally warm.
They're abnormally cool.
Another dimension? Another world parallel to ours?
You call that rational?
When you look at climate scientists...
...we know who they are, they work in science labs.
On the other side, people are not scientists.
Global warming....
Or if they are scientists, they're not climate scientists.
They're a political, ideological group...
...that just mines the data that somebody else gets...
...and cherry-picks data that fits what they already want to be true.
An international group of scientific experts said in no uncertain terms...
...global warming is real...
...and it's almost certainly caused by what we humans do to this planet.
The IPCC is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...
...and it literally consists of thousands of professional climate scientists...
...from all over the world.
And then we have the NIPCC.
You can say "Not IPCC." We call it "nip-ick."
We reached the opposite conclusion.
I want to-- I want to stress that we didn't add any new scientific work.
They present themselves as scientific.
They use graphics to make them look like the scientific reports...
...they're trying to discredit.
This is a report produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
And here is the mirror of that produced by the Cato Institute.
They've adopted the exact same page layout and design.
If you're a congressman, how do you tell the difference between this and this one?
And that's the point of this deception.
This is kind of an extended summary.
-It's called a synthesis report. -Yeah.
The actual IPCC report is about so thick.
And how thick is your NIPCC report?
Same.
-It's same. -You're as thick as they are?
We strictly use the same thickness.
So it's 97 percent of them and one of you.
There's hundreds of us, hundreds, thousands of us.
Look, 31,000 scientists and engineers...
...signed a statement to the contrary to what you just read.
-The Oregon Petition? -Yes.
The Oregon Petition claims to be signed by climate scientists...
...who disagree with the mainstream view of the scientific community.
If you actually look at it, what you find is in many cases...
...they aren't scientists at all.
Somebody put on there the Spice Girls.
Somebody else put on there Michael J. Fox.
Even Charles Darwin made the list.
And in fact the claim was so obviously false...
...the National Academy took the unprecedented step...
...of publicly disavowing this petition.
More than 31,000 scientists signed a petition....
And yet, it gets cited and it gets repeated.
More than 31,000 scientists....
More than 31,000 American scientists rejecting global warming alarmism.
They give the impression that it's a very big network with lots of scientists.
But if you look closely...
...you see it's a small number of people, really just a handful.
Hey, Fred.
It's kind of an amazing accomplishment when you think of it...
...that such a small group of people have an enormous impact on public opinion.
So that more than half the American people think that the science isn't settled.
Reach out and touch another one. This one here? Okay.
Jason's card. Take a look at that. Try and remember it.
Don't tell me what it is. I just want you to tell me when you see it.
As a magician I work hard to prevent my audience from seeing through the trick.
A lot of people think the hand is quicker than the eye.
It's not really true. It's just the eye sees a lot of things the mind never notices.
Having trouble, I can tell.
What card are you looking for, maybe I can help. What?
The four of--? Really? Was it really the four of hearts?
-It's under my cocktail. Show it to them. -No, it's not.
Yeah.
And now maybe if you watch it enough times with the benefit of a recording...
...maybe you figure out the trick.
I don't want you to tell me what it is, I want you to tell me when you see it.
But if you actually see the method, once you see that, you won't un-see it.
Then you can see me put it there time and time again.
Once revealed, never concealed.
It sort of comes back to that idea of a playbook, right?
What shape is it gonna take next?
But look at this, see? See, there's this.
As science started catching up to the flame-retardant chemical makers...
...their tactics got even bolder.
Senate Bill 1-4-7.
In 2011, a bill was up that would have changed the rule...
...so companies didn't have to add pounds of flame retardants to furniture.
Firefighters get cancer at alarming rates.
There were firefighters arguing that the rule didn't work.
There were breast-feeding mothers arguing they don't want it in babies' milk.
Public health officials saying this isn't good for us. I wanted to see...
...what does the other side say?
Hi, I'm Dr. David Heimbach.
The real star-witness was the burn surgeon.
And I've actually gotten a Compassion Award...
...from the Dalai Lama last year.
He told this sad and dramatic story.
A 7-week-old baby was in a crib...
...laying on a fire-retardant mattress...
...on a non-fire retardant pillow.
Mom put a candle in the crib...
...candle fell over, the baby sustained a 50-percent burn.
The entire upper half of her body was burned.
Now, this is a tiny, little person, no bigger than my Italian greyhound at home.
She ultimately died...
...after about three weeks of pain and misery in the hospital.
I literally heard a gasp when he told the story about this baby.
He had the room in his hand.
-Price? -No.
Price, no. Emerson?
When David Heimbach finished speaking, you knew the bill would fail.
Okay, can I tuck you in?
I remember flying back to Chicago and seeing my boys sleeping in their cribs...
...and I'm thinking, "Why would any mother...
...put a candle in her baby's crib?"
I got back to the newsroom, what I talked to Sam about:
"So, what have they argued in the past?
When have these bills come up before? Did Dr. Heimbach show up?"
Last month I won a...
...Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award from the Dalai Lama.
Sure enough, Heimbach had testified...
...and he told different stories about babies...
...who burned to death in candle fires.
Tell you about a child I took care of in April...
...about a 9-week-old baby, about the size of a teddy bear....
And that's when Sam and I sat down, we're like:
"We got three babies who died in candle fires...
...all treated at Dr. Heimbach's hospital. We gotta find those babies."
So I called the medical examiner's office.
Asked them to run a computer program of 18 years of deaths of babies or toddlers...
...where Dr. Heimbach had his hospital and practice.
There was not any death of any child...
...that matched Dr. Heimbach's description.
I thought the best thing to do was just to call him at home.
I said, "Those kids you talked about, did they all die in your hospital?"
And he said, "It wasn't factual, it was anecdotal."
And he said, "Listen, the details don't matter. The principle matters."
I go, "What's the principle?" He says, "The principle...
...is flame retardants work." I said, "That's not what you testified."
And he said, "Well, I wasn't under oath."
Were either one of you paid for your time here in opposition to the bill?
Citizens for Fire Safety.
Okay, thank you.
Citizens for Fire Safety are paying for my trip here, yes.
Records showed that they paid Dr. Heimbach $2 40,000.
So who is Citizens for Fire Safety, right?
What they were claiming was, they were a broad coalition.
Their website had this picture of five smiling kids holding...
...a hand-drawn banner with the words "Fire Safety" on it...
...and there was a heart dotting the I.
Turns out, that in California, that if you have fewer than 50 members...
...in your trade group, you have to disclose who your members are.
Who were the members? The members were the three largest makers...
...of flame retardants in the world. All that was in that group.
So there was no question...
...Citizens for Fire Safety was a front group.
The story came out, and Citizens for Fire Safety folded.
And the law changed. So now companies can make furniture...
...without flame retardants.
But that took two years of investigating.
Citizens for Fire Safety was pretending to be looking out for consumers...
...when in reality it was looking out for the interests of its funders.
How many other groups are out there doing the same thing?
In the 1980s, after I had testified, I decided to...
...bail out of the public aspect of this problem...
...because I was very uncomfortable in that role.
And I thought, as the story becomes clearer...
...we will then take the actions that are needed.
By the year 2000, it had become so clear that we were not doing anything.
The science has become so clear.
The things that we predicted are actually happening...
...and some of them are even happening faster than we thought.
The ice cap has shrunk 23 percent.
The ice is already 50 percent smaller.
-Every state in the U.S. set a heat record. -Driest year in half a century.
Massive Arizona wildfire....
This storm may be the strongest tropical cyclone on Earth...
-...to make landfall. -A category five...
...and that is only because there are no categories above five.
We know as much about how the climate works...
...as doctors know about how your body works.
The scientific method is, you have to continually reassess your conclusions.
As soon as there's new data, you ask, "How does that affect my interpretation?"
And you're open-minded.
What we're up against is people who have a preferred answer...
...and so then they take the position of a lawyer.
They're going to defend their client, and they will only present you...
...with the data that favors their client.
As the scientific community coalesces around believing...
...climate change is underway, it's at that moment that we see the think tanks...
...moving into the media environment and trying to argue the opposite.
In the missile age, it is vital to try to picture in advance...
...how crises might develop.
So the idea behind a think tank is to think.
One early example of a think tank is the RAND Corporation...
...which was set up to give advice...
...about how to solve problems that the military faced.
I find it difficult to see how we could say it was an air-dropped weapon.
What is of use is if you have an independent group who can...
...look at data, work through the issue of...
...what would solutions to that problem look like.
Is there a capability of tracking them? I don't know.
It devolves into something that's highly partisan...
...and has made up its mind in advance what the answer is.
So what we begin to see is think tanks taking up climate change as an issue...
...but not from the point of view of science but from the point of view of the politics.
And one of the first groups to do that is the George C. Marshall Institute.
I work on motorcycles.
Either the bike starts and runs right, or it doesn't.
And if it doesn't, there's no weaseling your way out of the fact.
And I like that about it. You might say the BS quotient is low.
Unless you're working on Harleys, in which case it can actually be pretty high.
I got myself into a PhD program at Chicago.
So when I finished, I got a phone call from a former teacher...
...who informed me about this job...
...at the Marshall Institute.
And, you know, the salary was huge.
At Marshall Institute, coming into it knowing that they were sort of...
...on the skeptical side of the global warming stuff...
...you know, I was more or less down with that.
At the same time that I started, there was a new president.
O'Keefe was a different kind of animal.
He had come from sort of the business world...
...so he had a different mentality.
He liked to mention that he knew Karl Rove.
So in other words, he's plugged-in and he's an operator.
It's an incredibly complex subject, and it's really about politics...
...and political control...
...and control of economic means of production.
Climate is just a mechanism.
I'm pleased to be part of your program...
...and you're in the offices of the George C. Marshall Institute.
A small science-policy think tank.
Is Marshall actually doing science?
No, we're not doing science.
What I try to do is make sure our work reaches decision makers...
...reaches people in the media...
...so that we are part of shaping the public policy debate.
I think a lot of people who get into that think tank world start out as intellectuals...
...but, you know, in the mixing pot of Washington...
...arguments become weapons.
Part of this was gathering arguments that were already out there...
...they weren't always compatible with one another.
Sometimes the argument was that, "The Earth is not warming."
We don't see a warming of the atmosphere in the last 50 years.
At another time the argument would be, "Well, yes, the Earth is warming...
...but it's not due to human activities."
The fact that glaciers are melting does not mean that the cause is human.
It only means that it's getting warmer.
At another time the argument would be, "Yes, it is warming...
...and it's due to human activities, but the cost of doing something about it...
...would be ruinous for society."
Of course there is a human influence on climate.
We've known it for a decade or more.
If they go ahead and regulate CO2 as a pollutant...
...it will basically stop economic growth in the United States.
And this is what many of the enviros want.
The occasion for me finally quitting...
...was that I got a call from somebody...
...who was updating a directory of lobbyists...
...and they wanted to know if Bill O'Keefe...
...was indeed the president of the George C. Marshall Institute.
I said, "Yeah, but why are you asking?
Why--? Is he part of this directory?" And they said, "Yes."
I confronted O'Keefe and said, "Are you a registered lobbyist?"
And he got extremely angry.
I tried to get him to tell me, if he was, who his clients were. He wouldn't tell me.
And when you went to Marshall...
...were you still connected in any way to the petroleum business?
I think I had-- Yes, I had an oil company as a client.
So were you a lobbyist when you went to work for Marshall?
I was still registered as a lobbyist.
That seemed utterly preposterous to me...
...that you would have...
...as the president of a think tank a guy who's a registered lobbyist.
It's just the whole pretense of the place goes out the window at that point.
And so we had sort of a blowup and I quit.
So for me, at least, there's more real thinking going on in a bike shop...
...than there was in the think tank.
If you were hired by a Greenpeace organization to figure out...
...how to present climate as a problem, what would you--?
-What would you suggest to them? -They couldn't afford me.
At the same time O'Keefe is a lobbyist for ExxonMobil....
When I was at Greenpeace, we looked into who was funding these think tanks.
And you started to find ExxonMobil...
...and the Koch brothers and the Southern Company.
ExxonMobil has been a major funder of climate change disinformation.
They funded over 30 different organizations...
...that promoted disinformation...
...or misleading information about climate change.
Nobody's gonna believe ExxonMobil.
But if they can say it through somebody else who seems independent...
...there's power in that for them.
Myron Ebell is Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy...
...for Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Senior fellow and science director of Heartland Institute.
-The idea that cooling.... -It creates a new cast of characters.
These people who become well-known for casting doubt on global warming.
-Dr. Marlo Lewis, a senior fellow.... -What these institutes do...
...is they promote their own "experts" as contrary experts...
...who give you the "other side" of the issue, and journalists fall for it.
-Fall for it lock, stock, and barrel. -Let's talk to a couple of experts.
-Joining us.... -Scientists will be invited...
...to explain the science and then against the scientist...
...they will have a so-called expert from a think tank.
And so the public is presented with dueling experts.
Steven Zebiak is General Director of International Research Institute...
...and Climate and Society at Columbia.
James Taylor is a senior fellow at the Heartland Institute.
If you actually ask what are their credentials...
...the answer's often very little, sometimes none.
In college, I majored in government. I also took atmospheric science courses.
That makes me well-positioned to bring together...
...all the aspects of this debate because it's scientific, it's economic, it's political.
There are think tanks that do nothing but crank out op-ed pieces every day.
If you start tracking them, you'll see it's the same handful of people...
...that just keep pumping out this material.
Some of these so-called experts, they become go-to people.
A handful of them turn out to be very, very good at it.
The global warming alarm spread by Al Gore and the United Nations...
...is in utter scientific collapse.
We've gone 18 years without global warming according to data.
Akin to medieval witchcraft where we blame witches for controlling weather.
You were described as the godfather of climate change denying.
-The mastermind of the whole-- Yes. -Yeah. Yeah.
What do you call yourself? Are you...?
What do I call myself?
I guess I'm an environmental journalist on some level.
After the Greens out there finish puking after hearing me say that...
...I will say, that's how I started.
And will, to the best of my ability--
I was a volunteer for Ronald Reagan in 1980, at age 12.
When you were growing up...
-...you were a door-to-door salesman? -Yeah.
I learned so much from door-to-door sales.
I did gutter cleaning.
You learn then what communication tactics worked...
...and what didn't.
How did you meet Rush Limbaugh?
Rush Limbaugh I met in 1991.
Our man in Washington...
...an ever more and more popular part of this show.
There he is sneaking in.
I used to hang out at the men's room at these events...
...so I'd guarantee I'd get just about every big name.
As the night went on, they'd be drinking more...
...so you'd always get much better interviews.
Women should deny sex...
...until we clean up this planet. Not all women.
You decided to go to work for Senator James Inhofe.
-Wow, you're jumping. Okay. -Your energy--
I thought this was Marc Morano, my life. No. Oh, okay.
-Catastrophic global warming is a hoax. -I got a call from Inhofe's office...
...to be the new communications director. It was the lowest point...
...when I started, in June 2008, for global warming skeptics.
If you look at the 10 hottest years ever measured...
...they've all occurred in the last 14 years...
...and the hottest of all was 2005.
Al Gore's film-- I'd just watched the movie.
I watched it the week before I started the job.
It was poised to win awards. Later, he won the Nobel Prize for it.
So we decided for Inhofe to go on the offensive.
NASA scientist and alarmist James Hansen--
He's NASA's vocal man-made- global-warming-fear soothsayer--
He'd say almost anything you asked him to say.
On some levels, it was not so much directly talking about science...
...but it was going after the scientists themselves?
I mean, that was a change that you brought to Inhofe.
Yes, in fact we went after...
...James Hansen and Michael Oppenheimer...
...and had a lot of fun with it.
We mocked and ridiculed Hansen.
I couldn't believe they let me do this.
I did a two-part, 10,000-word, scathing critique on Hansen.
I'm not gonna question his scientific work, but in terms of his influencing the public.
And actually his scientific work isn't really in question...
...it's more of his public claims and publicity and interviews.
I still felt restrained, so I started doing what I call...
... "the underground newsletters"...
...which went much further than anything else, had more fun...
...more humor, wit, sarcasm, and sometimes nastiness.
That went out and became the basis for Climate Depot.
This is the new media's new world.
This is an office where you rent it as you need it, but we all know...
...most of the work happens on the road or in your home office.
They find no evidence of a human fingerprint in that drought.
A lot of it's done in a taxicab heading to, you know...
...Fox News or CNN studio, or even on the runway in an airplane.
James Hansen, I call him NASA's resident ex-con...
...is inspiring these people to potential acts of eco-terrorism.
Communication is about sales. Keep it simple.
People will fill in the blank with their own, I hate to say biases...
...but with their own perspective.
A global environmental organization that'll police the world.
Think of the-- Our own EPA, that speaks French.
I'm not a scientist, although I do play one on TV occasionally.
Okay, hell, more than occasionally.
Joining me, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Marc Morano.
You go up against a scientist, most of them...
...are gonna be in their own little, policy-wonk world or area of expertise.
So you look in the ice and you find bubbles of trapped gas--
Very arcane, very hard to understand, hard to explain...
...and very boring.
Bottom line, new study in Nature, peer-reviewed...
...no change in U.S. drought in the last 80 years.
Bottom line, a new study out shows--
You can't be afraid of the absolute hand-to-hand combat, metaphorically.
You've gotta name names, you gotta go after individuals.
You can't just go after a system. I think that's what I enjoy the most...
...is going after the individuals, where something lives or dies.
As a scientist, you're trained to defend the science that you do.
What you don't expect is to have people...
...threaten you with all kinds of dire consequences...
...for continuing to do the research that you do.
I was contacted by the IPCC to act as convening lead author...
...for one chapter of the second assessment report.
That final sentence, "The balance of evidence suggests...
...a discernible human influence on global climate"...
...was finalized at the end of November, 1995.
I had no idea that my life would be so dramatically changed...
...by that one sentence.
These are a few e-mails...
...from a large number of e-mails that I received.
"Yeah, you-- You arrogant, fucking piece-of-crap con man.
I hope you are hung by your pathetic, little neck.
I'd love nothing more than to beat you with a large stick...
...you shit-eating Yank. Go die."
It's possible I posted Santer's e-mail in the early days of Climate Depot.
He's far from the only one I've done that to.
"You're an effing terrorist, you and your colleagues...
...ought to be fed to the pigs, along with your whole families."
"How come no one has beat the living piss out of you yet?
I was hoping I would see the news and you committed suicide."
"You stupid bitch. I would like to see you convicted and beheaded.
If you have a child, then women in the future will be even more leery...
...of lying to get ahead when they see your baby crying next to the guillotine."
Sometimes it's one a week. When your e-mail address...
...gets posted online at Morano's website, it's 200 or more in a day.
Well, I think the most disturbing e-mails and letters were ones that...
...suggest there will be harm to you...
...direct physical harm to you and your family.
I don't know what his complaint is--
-I'll give you the philosophy behind it. -Yeah, that's more important.
Is he ready? This is one of my favorite topics.
In fact, I got on ABC Nightly News just because I posted e-mails.
I did a whole segment.
The public is appropriately angry at these scientists.
No one's advocating violence, but it is refreshing to see...
...these scientists hear from the public.
I think people should be thanking me. I was doing a service.
People go, "Oh, your death threats." I get death threats. I enjoy them.
It was one of the healthiest things that could have happened...
...in the climate debate.
I make no apologies. I still do it. I enjoy doing it.
Every time we see the world beginning to act on the science...
...we see some kind of attack designed to undermine it.
1995, the IPCC comes out with its second assessment report that says...
...yes, there's climate change. What do we get?
Massive attack on Ben Santer, who's the lead author of the key chapter.
In the second case, before the run-up to the Kyoto negotiations...
...when it looked like the world was going to agree...
...we had the Oregon Petition.
It's a completely discredited document...
...nevertheless, it did a lot of damage.
Third time, Copenhagen. Finally, we're gonna get an agreement.
The U.S. is on board. Obama has gone to Copenhagen.
What do we get? Climategate.
A new scandal that's burning up the Net these days...
...that began with e-mails that were stolen--
Suddenly, we see this release of stolen e-mails.
Lines taken out of context to make it seem as if...
...scientists were involved in nefarious activities.
People started saying, "What's going on in Copenhagen?"
This is the upper echelon of the U.N. It's been exposed...
...as the best science that politics and activists can manufacture.
My initial reaction with the Climategate, I thought, "Okay...
...gosh, I hope I didn't flip at the wrong point there.
Maybe this is all baloney."
When you actually read the e-mails in context, you go, "Okay...
...he's not actually saying what Rush Limbaugh said he was saying."
There's been three investigations into Climategate, where they had...
...independent committees go through every e-mail. There was nothing.
They were trying to find yet new ways to weaken...
...this growing international accord.
All they have to do is slow down action.
Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has.
That's all you really want. There's no legislation we're championing.
We're the negative force, just trying to stop stuff.
It's all about distraction, it's all about confusion.
It's about preventing you from looking where the action really is...
...which is in the science.
Misdirection is the use of the little lie to sell the big lie.
The big lie and the floating lady, the classic levitation illusion...
...is the mechanism that's used to make the woman rise.
The little lie is the passing of the hoop.
The floating raises your skepticism.
There must be a wire. There must be threads.
There must be something.
And then the hoop is used to specifically undo that. Cancel that.
So, really, misdirection is about focus.
It's not so much about directing away or misdirecting...
...it's about direction.
It's about bringing your attention to something that engages you.
And then, you don't see anything else in the frame.
The tobacco companies knew they have to appeal to something more...
...basic than this intellectual pursuit of science.
How do you do it? Do it with freedom.
That's the way freedom dies. Today it's smoking.
But what will they try to regulate next?
What will they try to regulate next? What we can say? What we can read?
I don't want Big Brother breathing down my neck telling me what to do.
Not just for smokers but for nonsmokers...
...and all others who want to live their lives...
...making their own decisions, not having them made for them...
...by the benevolent bureaucracy of Washington wisdom or these other--
By turning it into an abstract issue of freedom...
...and moving it away from their corporate interests...
...they can get people behind it. Who can possibly be against freedom?
What happened was, these other companies...
...and other industries realized, like: "Hey, this is a pretty good idea."
Everywhere you turn, somebody is telling us what we can't eat.
Do you ever feel like you're always being told what not to do?
These people tell us where to work...
...how many children to have, how much energy to use...
...how much water we can--
On global warming, you see the same thing happening.
For literally decades, David Koch has been just a tireless defender...
...of our economic and individual freedoms.
I'd like to introduce to you David Koch...
...our chairman at the Americans for Prosperity.
Koch Industries is heavily invested in coal, oil, tar sands.
They are some of the biggest polluters in the country...
...received the largest fines.
They needed an army of people to fight against regulation...
...in the name of freedom.
Good afternoon, fellow freedom fighters!
The group, Americans for Prosperity, is holding a nationwide...
...hot-air balloon tour.
They're spreading a message of global warming alarmism...
...lost jobs, higher taxes, and less freedom.
Over eight years ago, we launched Americans for Prosperity...
...and the goal behind it was to provide grassroots support...
...at the local and state level...
...to push free-market policies.
And we have just over two million people who've taken action.
We now have an army too.
Do you try to figure out if the science is real or not?
-Or you don't even think of that? -No. We're on the economic side.
Howdy.
We study what they'll do to American people in the name of global warming.
They won't drill for oil. Guys, let's get moving here.
Come on, it's not a really hard-- Not a really hard decision. Let's--
For a long time it was just, hey, An Inconvenient Truth...
...and all these polar bears that seemed to be drowning and horrible things...
...that seemed to be happening. A lot of Americans said:
"Gosh. That seems like a bad thing."
But then, through the education efforts of a lot of groups...
...like Americans for Prosperity and others...
...Americans began going, "Wait, I'll pay more for everything.
It means a little bit less freedom."
I think the American public has moved our way.
The polls confirm that.
We want to make sure that both parties know...
...we'll hold them accountable. Republicans, too, absolutely.
Should I think of you as a liberal, a conservative, or...?
Pretty conservative is how you should think of me.
Ninety-three American Conservative Union Rating...
...100 percent Christian Coalition, National Right to Life.
With your help, we can reclaim the Congress.
I represented the 4th District of South Carolina...
...which is probably the reddest district in the reddest state in the nation.
When I was first in Congress, I was a complete denier.
I said, "That's hooey, absolute nonsense. Al Gore's imagination."
I just that knew if it was coming from the other team, it had to be wrong.
I got on the science committee...
...and had the opportunity to go to Antarctica twice, actually.
I saw the evidence in the ice core.
You can pull it up and examine the CO2 levels.
They were really stable.
And then coinciding with the industrial revolution, there's an uptick.
The chemistry is real clear, that you're changing the chemistry of the air.
So I decided, really right then and there...
...I'm gonna go back and I'm gonna do something.
Madam Speaker, what I'd like to say tonight...
...is that there is a need to act--
And to come together to find a solution...
...that breaks our addiction to oil, that creates new energy jobs...
...and that cleans up the air.
That was to my great peril...
...with the Tea Party coming and the Great Recession happening.
Tim Phillips is helping to organize some protest parties.
It's a genuine grassroots uprising.
Groups like Americans For Prosperity, we're organizing.
There's a tide of doubt that comes out of the Great Recession...
...where we started to doubt every institution, you know.
Along comes some people that see the opportunity.
Coming up next is a global warming tax.
It's a pretty cold night in April here, right?
Americans For Prosperity has been amazingly effective.
They're able to organize that discontent.
In the name of Al Gore-ism.
And by the way, can we just talk about Al Gore for a moment?
If you see Republicans becoming sympathetic...
...to carbon tax, do you view it as your job to knock those guys out?
Well, we hold both parties accountable.
We don't always see eye to eye, do we, Newt?
No, but we do agree our country must take action to address climate change.
The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention.
We have had climate change.
Clearly, humans have something to do with it.
I remember in the mid-2000s, so many Republicans...
...they had a lot of the same tenets of faith that Democrats still many have today.
Well, I think the risks of climate change are real.
I think human activity is contributing to it.
Those days are over. Few Republicans play that game.
A lot of Democrats bailed too.
You have Newt Gingrich at the beginning of '08...
...on the couch with Nancy Pelosi.
And by the end of 2008....
Do you believe in man-made global warming?
I don't think we know.
My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet.
George, the idea that carbon dioxide is harmful to our environment...
...is almost comical.
We've run TV ads in Republican states...
...with Republican senators, like South Carolina.
Sit down!
What happened in your election?
Well, it wasn't even close.
Bob Inglis ran into a buzz saw of voter frustration with incumbents.
Inglis lost every county in the district.
He is a seasoned congressman going down to a huge defeat tonight.
Are we--? Is there not cell phone reception? Where are we?
Can you hear me now?
Did Price brief you on the climate views of this radio show?
No.
All right, well, we better find that out, huh?
We can turn on the radio, see what he's saying.
We're after-- The target audience is red-state Republicans.
And so I think we found some...
-...in Mississippi. -From SuperTalk Mississippi....
Eight-o-two. We go on at 8:08.
Paul Gallo, a shining example of the Fairness Doctrine as it should be.
You think polar bears are in trouble? No, they're not in trouble.
In some cases, we've got more polar bears than we've ever had.
We got polar-bear problems out there in some cases.
Former South Carolina GOP Representative Bob Inglis...
...is urging conservatives to stop denying...
...humans are contributing to global warming.
I don't understand. How do you come up with this?
Because to me, every fiber in my body is saying you're a conservative.
You can't believe this, that conservatives--
You're asking me, as a dyed-in-the-wool native-born Mississippian...
...will die here and blessed to do so...
...to believe that humans are responsible for global warming...
...and we must admit that.
Mic's yours, sir.
The challenge here is it's a conversation started by liberals.
What we're used to, as conservatives, is they gin up hysteria...
...and then they drive through regulations and tax increases...
...and grow government.
And so it's natural that we respond with, "No, we don't wanna do that."
But what if we had a different conversation?
It's all about economics.
You're taxing something you want more of, which is income...
...and you're not taxing something you maybe want less of, which is CO2.
Why do we need to be talking about the global-warming tax again?
Because if you believe in taking care of this part of Eden that's left...
-...and if you believe in creation care-- -Now you're confusing me.
Now you're saying you do believe that we are, as humans...
...creating global warming.
-We are part-and-parcel responsible. -Yes.
I don't believe that humans are creating this, because--
And neither do, apparently, a vast majority of climatologists out there.
-I was tracking-- -That humans--
I was tracking with you until that last part. You're wrong on that last part.
Good luck to you. It was good meeting you.
-Good to talk with you. -Lots to do...
...in the final two segments coming up next.
Okay, lots to do in the final two segments....
-We'll put you down as undecided. -Sorry?
-We'll put you down as undecided. -I don't think so.
Okay, Perez, we are ready to roll.
And as for climate change, we're in the middle of it right now.
It's called winter into spring.
For him to say that we need to change the conversation...
...is to cave in to these liberals and their way of thinking.
When they're wrong, they're wrong.
I can't take this. Can we get out of here?
It's so easy to fall back into the: "The weather always changes."
Yeah.
It's a battleship, Bob. It takes a while to turn around.
That's right.
I mean, it's not just a head thing. This is very much a heart issue.
It's not the science that's affecting us.
I mean, the science is pretty clear.
It's something else that's causing this rejection.
Many conservatives, I think, see action on climate change...
...as really an attack on a way of life.
The reason that we need the science to be wrong...
...is otherwise, we realize that we need to change.
That's really a hard pill to swallow...
...that the whole way I've created my life is wrong, you're saying?
That I shouldn't have this house in the suburb?
I shouldn't be driving this car that I take my kids to soccer?
And you're not gonna tell me to live the way that you want me to live.
And along comes some people sowing some doubt...
...and it's pretty effective because I'm looking for that answer.
I want it to be that the science is not real.
Top U.S. oil company ExxonMobil...
...and Russia's Rosneft have signed a deal...
...to develop oil and gas reserves in the Russian Arctic.
One of the reasons this deal is now possible...
...is the human-induced global warming that has rolled the ice back.
It's warmer in the Arctic than it's been in at least 40,000 years.
And yet there's ExxonMobil looking at that...
...thinking they can drill more.
The very thing they paid groups to tell us wouldn't happen...
...has now benefited them.
We could be into the hundreds of billions of dollars...
...over the life of developing all of the potential prospects up there.
We now know they were using climate change...
...as a source of insight into exploration.
There's a point at which you realize you are part of the losing end of a hustle.
And it can make you feel very sad.
And I know many environmentalists who feel very sad.
Each of you solemnly swear that....
But at some point, the public catches up with you.
The legal system catches up with you.
An extraordinary punishment for the country's big cigarette companies.
A federal judge said they lied...
...and they have to take out ads and admit it publicly.
Specifically, they have to say...
...they "deliberately deceived the American public...
...about the dangers of cigarettes" and they designed them to be addictive.
We know the truth about the harms of tobacco.
And the tobacco industry has been prosecuted for its illegal activities.
So that's the good news, right? The truth has come out...
...and people who deserve to be punished have been punished.
The bad news is that it took 50 years.
If we look at the case of climate change...
...we can imagine that eventually...
...people will come to understand the scientific evidence.
But the problem is, we don't have 50 years.
Climate change is happening, it's underway, and it's not reversible.
As sea level rises and hurricanes become more intense, people get killed.
Their houses and communities get destroyed.
Think about heat waves and droughts that ruin agricultural communities.
These are problems that it will require government intervention to address.
The great irony of the story to me...
...is that people who don't like big government are going to get more of it.
And we're gonna see more money being spent...
...on dealing with the aftermath of these disasters.
There will be billions of dollars in real-estate losses.
But more than that, people will die.
That's why it matters.
That's why this is meaningful for us...
...not just for polar bears or people in Bangladesh.
That's why so many people in the scientific community...
...are really starting to talk in very worried tones.
There's a growing sense in the scientific community...
...that we're running out of time to prevent a train wreck.
Our parents did not know the things they were doing...
...were going to have major consequences for young people...
...and future generations.
But we cannot say that. We can only pretend that we don't know.
If we warm up the planet a few degrees...
...we're talking about eventual sea-level rise of tens of meters...
...which would wipe out all the coastal cities.
If the ice sheets begin to disintegrate...
...then by that time, you've passed a tipping point...
...so that it's....
You're going to get consequences that are out of our control.
I've been arrested, I think, four times.
We should be going and beating on the president's desk...
...telling him, "We have a problem."
You don't have to accept things the way they are.
There are things we can do to change.
The lie is that we can't do it, that we can't innovate.
We gotta keep relying on petroleum, coal....
We gotta have just those things.
Why?
To be in this situation...
...where those fossil fuels are imperiling our future...
...and future generations...
...and we're not accountable for that...
...that really becomes a moral problem.
We're leaving our children and grandchildren a legacy...
...of people who failed to lead.
People who, when it came their time to be awakened...
...they slept.
We didn't have enough faith in the future that could be brought about...
...so we just gave up.
We couldn't rise to higher things.
I don't wanna be a part of that. I wanna be a part of saying:
"No, we did rise to it. You bet we did."
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