Point of View July 31, 2024 – Hour 2 : Current Environmental Issues

[00:00:00] Matthew is sitting in for Kirby Anderson today and we're going to shift gears to all things environmental. Joining me in studio, Dr. Sterling Burnett, long time friend. He is with the Heartland Institute, has been for 10 years now. He's been working in public policy for

[00:00:40] several decades now. He's also been a member of a commission and so forth. He's a member of the Environment and Natural Resources Task Force in the Texas Comptroller's E-Texas Commission. He was a former board member and past president of the Dallas Woods and Water Conservation

[00:00:57] Club. Just been involved in a number of things and he's our go-to person on issues of the environment and guns, but that's a different topic. Sterling, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me back on again. Okay, so I cannot turn on the radio today without

[00:01:12] hearing news reports saying, well it's warm today so we know that's global warming or there's a tornado out there so we know that's global warming or there's fires in California we know that's global warming and so we've got hot temperatures, everything's terrible.

[00:01:27] Actually here in Texas where we are, it's where the studio is, it's been pretty nice up until, I mean, I think it hits 100 today but we've been in the high 80s, low 90s so they may be sweltering California because the heat dome is over them but it's given

[00:01:41] us reprieve and I'm thinking, man, I like this kind of summer. But it's all relative, for myself I expect hot summers and I enjoy my pool. At night it's getting down a little

[00:01:55] cool and the water's not quite as comfortable as I'm used to it. I understand. So we're hearing all about the climate change is creating global warming. Talk to us a little bit about the heat because I keep hearing this year's looks like maybe the hottest year on record.

[00:02:11] Last year was the hottest year on record. The year before was the hottest year on record. Well you know, the record is a funny thing. We've only had surface station thermometers widespread. They've been in a few locations for several hundred years but widespread for

[00:02:27] 100, 150 years and then parts of Africa and Asia and South America even a shorter period than that. So the record ain't that long. And you have to look at, first off there's no such thing as global average temperature. The earth is not a human being. There's no

[00:02:48] temperature that you say, oh well that's normal. We make that up. Scientists decide what they believe the temperature ought to be. They play God. But when you're talking about surface temperatures, there are so many problems with the surface station temperature now.

[00:03:10] Take just a second to talk about that because the Heartland Institute did a study on that several years ago then I think you did a follow up. But there are things, little surface temperature things all over the country that are meant to sort of check the temperature

[00:03:23] all over the world. And the problem is so many of those places when they were established initially they were in fairly isolated locations. So they weren't affected by what's called the urban heat island. In a city you have built up buildings with concrete and

[00:03:40] brick and you've got a lot of sources of heat like cars and air conditioning units and all sorts of things. And at night all the surfaces that absorb that heat during the day slowly release it. Well that changes the average temperature. Well when they were built say

[00:03:58] if you were flying to Chicago, it's not Chicago, it's Ordway. If you look on your little flight ticket it's ORD. Well what was Ordway? It was an orchard. It was an orchard that they used to fly biplanes into. There ain't no orchards around there now. You know miles

[00:04:15] and miles of concrete, tarmac, jet engines. So those stations, what our research found it was originally done in 2009 they did the first surface station project. And it found that 80, more than 80 percent of the surface stations violated the National Oceanic and

[00:04:36] Atmospheric Administration's own rules, guidelines for what would count for a quality station. You had pictures of these things and they would be sitting right in front of an air conditioner. Hundreds of pictures. And after his report came out a lot of back in the day

[00:04:52] back and forth they ended up closing some of the most egregious stations. But then we decided it was time for an update to see if they'd really improved the system. It turns out they made the system worse. They added a lot of bad stations that weren't originally

[00:05:06] in their network. And now more than 90, I think it was 96 percent of the stations that we surveyed once again, people on the ground going to where the stations are taking pictures from all four sides to show whether it complies with NOAA's standards. 96 percent didn't.

[00:05:27] The best one I saw in this last report, this is the one I love more than any of them. I went out and looked at five of these stations myself. The only of the five stations I looked

[00:05:37] at, the one that was in the most urban area was the only one that was located according to NOAA's standards. It was more than 100 feet from a building, it was more than 100

[00:05:45] feet from any concrete, it was more than 100 feet from any heat source. It was out in the middle of a grassy field behind a high fence. Other ones, even in rural locations, a radio

[00:05:56] station right up next to the building on a concrete pad next to red bricks absorbs heat with metal things all around it. It's amazing. But the best one I saw in this last report, so Idaho is not a particularly well populated state. It's fairly...

[00:06:15] Has a lot of potatoes. Has a lot of potatoes, it's fairly rural. And it's got more than one station. But one station we found in Idaho was in a very, very rural location, almost a wilderness area.

[00:06:26] It has a hot springs there. They located the temperature station for that region on a built up brick wall, literally on the wall, adjacent to the parking lot overlooking the hot springs

[00:06:45] You can't make this stuff up. You can see in the pictures, you can see the steam rising behind the temperature station. It's fair to say that the earth has been on a gradual warming trend for centuries, millennia,

[00:07:00] right? But whether or not humans are doing it and to what extent is harder to determine. Well here's the deal. We came out of... We're actually in a very, very lengthy glaciation period, where it's been much cooler for hundreds of thousands of years than it was the periods

[00:07:21] previously. During the glaciation we have major ice ages, which have been lasting between 100 and 150 thousand years on average. And then interglacial, what we call interglacial periods, which last 10 to 15 thousand years on average. Actually closer to 10 to 12. We are currently in an interglacial period. Thank God for that.

[00:07:47] The last ice age when we came out of it was several degrees cooler than it is now. Most of the North American continent was either swamp or under ice itself. The glaciers receded. Sea levels have risen 400 feet since then because the glaciers melted. The water that

[00:08:11] was trapped in them is now in the oceans or the lakes. But even within those interglacial periods, there are short periods of colder periods, we call them little ice ages, and warmer periods. So we had a warm period in the Roman period, and that's when civilization

[00:08:29] expanded called the Roman warm period. Then they had the medieval warm period. Societies once again did well. In between those things we have things called dark ages. We'll hear more about the dark ages when we come back from the break.

[00:09:19] The Governor's office claimed that they were pushing a false narrative. Now reality has set in and the predictions have come true. Over the years I've written commentaries about progressive attempts in cities like Seattle and Portland to raise the minimum wage significantly.

[00:09:33] The results are always the same. Some benefit, but most others do not. Owners cut back the number of workers and the number of hours of those who remain. The prices go up. California is no different. An Associated Press dispatch last week reported that California fast food

[00:09:48] franchises have been cutting worker hours after the wage mandate took place. A Del Taco manager slashed the number of workers for each shift by half. A Jersey Mike's franchise owner reduced morning and evening shifts, reducing his staff by 20 workers and raising

[00:10:03] prices. The greatest harm is to those who lose their job. Research done by Beacon Economics recently found that California's minimum wage law does particular harm to teenagers. In the past two years, unemployment among 16 to 19 year olds nearly doubled. As the editors

[00:10:19] noted, instead of flipping burgers, more California teens will be flipping through TikTok videos. Think of your first few jobs. Like me, your only job skills were probably a strong back and a good work ethic. We probably weren't worth $20 an hour, but we did learn from skills

[00:10:34] that made us successful today. Many young people won't get that opportunity because of this law. I'm Kirby Anderson, and that's my point of view. A free booklet on a biblical view of Patriot preachers. Go to Viewpoints dot info slash Patriot preachers. Viewpoints dot

[00:10:55] info slash Patriot preachers. You're listening to Point of View, your listener supported source for truth. And we're back on Point of View. Joining me in studio, Dr. Sterling Burnett. He is an expert on environmental issues. He's with the Heartland Institute.

[00:11:12] If you have a question for him, give us a call. 1-800-351-1212. 1-800-351-1212. We're talking all things environmental. And Sterling, when we broke for the break there, you were talking about there was the medieval warm period. The Roman warm period. We went into

[00:11:33] a little ice age. And we started to come out of it in the late 1700s and we were basically out of it by the late 1800s. And when we came out of it, temperatures started to rise there

[00:11:44] and temperatures rose pretty steadily through the 1930s. This was long before CO2, human CO2 was an issue. We weren't you know, we didn't have all these electric power plants and automobiles and things. And then it took a little decline for about 30 years. And that's

[00:12:04] when the headlines were all reading, next ice age coming. Next ice age, you know, Time Magazine, New York Times, Columbia. Ice age was on its way. Ice age was on its way. And then it started warming again. And this warming, unlike past

[00:12:19] warmings, they attributed not to nature but to human activity. And now they're saying it's the warmest ever in history. In point of fact, look, in the United States, more than half the states, half the states set their highest temperature records in a single decade. 30s?

[00:12:41] The 1930s. Human emissions are not a factor. More than 70% of their states set their temperature records before the 1950s. And only I think six or seven percent of their states set their six to eight percent of the states have set records since the 2020s, supposedly the warmest

[00:13:04] two decades on record. So you have to take that stuff with a grain of salt. Let's talk about carbon because that's what we hear. And carbon emissions have been increasing. Carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide, right. Carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing. So when they do the

[00:13:20] count, they talk about the what is it like 440 parts per million? I think it's up to 422. 420, okay. 422. Is carbon something we should be concerned about? Well, not from my point of view. You know, I don't believe that's the driver of the present

[00:13:38] warming. I don't find the present warming dangerous. All the predictions they've made about hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts. No snow. No snow. Yeah, the end of snow. New York City was supposed to be underwater already. None

[00:13:53] of those predictions have come true. And CO2, what we know is it's essential to life. Look, over the long history of the earth, CO2 levels have been at points 7,000 parts per million. 7,000 parts per million. When life evolved around 5,000 parts per million.

[00:14:14] Over time, there's been a long, slow drawdown. Carbon captured by trees, captured by plants, goes into soil. A lot of it turned into carbonaceous rock, limestone, carbonaceous rock. And in the middle, late in the last ice age, so 19, 20,000 years ago, we had reached 180 parts

[00:14:39] per million of carbon dioxide. Lowest we've ever been in history based on the proxy data. Well, there's a problem. Plants need at least 150 parts per million of carbon dioxide to photosynthesize. If plants die, we all die. And it was 30 parts per million away. We come

[00:15:03] out of the ice age, they go up to 280 parts per million. Had nothing whatsoever to do with human activity. And plants start thriving. They were starving. They were basically starving. There's a reason why greenhouses routinely pump carbon dioxide into greenhouses. I think it was like 1,200, 1,500 parts per million.

[00:15:29] Up to 5,000 parts per million. The safety measure on submarines and the Apollo, they asked the space, 5,000 parts per million. That's when they consider it starting to get dangerous. We're talking about 420 parts per million here. Nobody's dying from 420 parts

[00:15:49] per million. It's only the impact on climate, but the problem is none of the predicted impacts on climate are coming true. The good things, however, are what's been happening because of increased CO2, a general greening of the earth, more plant life, deserts being reclaimed,

[00:16:07] and crop production and yields booming in part due to the use of modern fossil fuels, both for the implements but also for fertilizing the pesticides, but also in large part due to the increased CO2 in the atmosphere, making plants grow faster and bigger.

[00:16:25] Are the oceans warming? Oceans have warmed. Oceans have warmed. Are they warming dangerously? I don't think we can say that. Ocean seas are rising. They're rising about 12 inches a century. They have risen about 12 inches a century for the past 400 years, long before

[00:16:48] humans were doing anything. There's no evidence of a significant increase due to human global warming, and they'll rise until the next ice age comes and starts to grow the glaciers taking waters out of the ocean. We know how to deal with higher seas. The Dutch, Holland,

[00:17:08] the Netherlands has done this for centuries. The question is do we want to put the money into the infrastructure to protect our shores? Low-lying places, they face problems because seas are going to rise. The question is do we abandon them? Do we shore them up? Or do

[00:17:26] we throw up our hands and blame climate change and say the world's going to come in and end civilization because Barack Obama, who bought a beach house after he retired despite his fears of climate change, he's going to get his feet wet 150 years from now.

[00:17:42] One of the concerns we've heard going into the hurricane season is that the oceans are warmer and that's likely to increase the number of hurricanes. I think I remember a couple months ago thinking this was going to be a very, very active hurricane season.

[00:17:56] Yep, that's what they said. That was the prediction they made last year and that's the prediction they made this year and that's the prediction they made the year before. Last year and the year before didn't come true. This year started off with one major hurricane in July, not

[00:18:11] the first major hurricane ever in July, not even the first to make landfall in the U.S., but it was a biggie. If we get more hurricanes, we actually haven't reached peak hurricane

[00:18:24] season which is late August, early September. I have no doubt, I won't say no doubt, I won't be surprised if we have an above average hurricane season. But the theory is we should have been having above average hurricane seasons for the past 50 years and we're not. In fact,

[00:18:44] the trend line for hurricanes is flat lining or slightly down and the trend line for major hurricanes, that's class 3 or above, 3 to 5, is definitely down over the past 50 years despite all the CO2 and despite all the warming. It's just not borne out by the data.

[00:19:01] Tell us about tornadoes. What are they? Because of concerns we see here in Texas, we have some here, we see a lot of them hitting Oklahoma, Kansas and so forth. And there's even concerns that from the last hurricane that we have, Barrow, there were some tornadoes that were

[00:19:17] spawned by it in various places. As if that's never happened before. As if Texas isn't the southern end of something called Tornado Alley. I grew up with tornadoes. I was around in

[00:19:28] the 70s when they were talking about the ice age, that's when I saw my first two tornadoes. That's when I took food and clothing to Paris, Texas after it got hit by a tornado when

[00:19:41] they were warning of the ice age. In the end, even the IPCC doesn't try to make a connection between tornadoes and global warming because tornadoes are pretty chaotic events, very localized. But what we do see, what we don't see is an increase in tornadoes or an increase

[00:20:04] in the number of strong tornadoes. But what we do have now is better reporting on them. If a tornado struck the middle of Kansas in 1880, unless you were the farmer nearby, no one knew about it. Maybe your local Lawrenceville Journal or whatever the paper was there would

[00:20:23] cover Farmer Brown's cows killed by a tornado. But no one in adjoining Missouri or Illinois would ever have heard about it, certainly not in New York and certainly not people in Europe. We didn't have the press organizations there. We didn't have the ways of recognizing

[00:20:41] and tracking them, just like what we know about hurricanes. We only know, today we know about hurricanes and tropical storms when they form. We have radar systems, we have planes that fly, we can see them. We didn't have that 80 years

[00:20:57] ago, much less 150 years ago. Unless a hurricane made landfall, no one knew it existed. If a ship disappeared because of a hurricane, it was just a ship that didn't make a deport and no one knew why it disappeared.

[00:21:12] Okay, we'll hold it there. 1-800-351-1212 if you have a question for Dr. Sterling Burnett about the environment and some of the things we're hearing in global warming. Anyway, stay with us, we'll be back on Point of View in just a minute.

[00:21:31] It almost seems like we live in a different world from many people in positions of authority. They say men can be women and women men. People are prosecuted differently or not at all, depending on their politics. Criminals are more valued and rewarded than law-abiding

[00:21:49] citizens. It's so overwhelming, so demoralizing. You feel like giving up, but we can't. We shouldn't. We must not. As Winston Churchill said to Britain in the darkest days of World War II, never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never. Never yield to force. Never

[00:22:09] yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. And that's what we say to you today. This is not a time to give in, but to step up and join Point of View in providing

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[00:22:49] Point of View will continue after this. You are listening to Point of View. The opinions expressed on Point of View do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of this station. And now, here again, Dr. Merrill Matthews.

[00:23:13] 1-800-351-1212 if you'd like to ask Dr. Sterling Burnett a question about the environment. We're talking about all things environment today. And, you know, Sterling, you were talking about the warming that's occurred. Oceans are a little warmer. There is concern out

[00:23:31] there that the Arctic and the Antarctic have been melting and that the ice sheets are decreasing. Is it the case and is it a problem? So in the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s, the Arctic and the Antarctic were actually going in different directions. So...

[00:23:52] One was increasing, one was decreasing? Correct, which was not what predicted by the climate models. They said they should all be uniformly melting. Now, we've only been measuring ice there, you know, how long we've been in Antarctica with permanent stations. Even the Arctic, how long we've been there

[00:24:07] with permanent stations? Not that long. But what we knew is the ice grew considerably from the late 1800s through the early 2000s, late 1990s in the Arctic, probably reaching the highest levels it had been in a few thousand years. But they only started measuring at its

[00:24:33] peak and it really dropped off. I think by 2012, it had reached the lowest level that we've seen it in our lifetimes. And they were predicting, oh, it will be ice-free by 2020. You know, actually, I think Gore had said it would be ice-free by 2010. The IPCC said

[00:24:57] ice-free by 2050. But then when the 2012 happened, they said, oh, it's going faster than we thought. Well, since then it's grown. Not much. It's still below the average before the shrinking started beginning, but it stopped shrinking. Antarctica was setting records for sea ice

[00:25:19] extent through the mid-2010s. So through 2015, 2016, it was routinely setting new records for sea ice extent. But sea ice waxes and wanes. It waxes and wanes largely with ocean currents and ocean cycles. And it since then started to shrink. But the land-like ice

[00:25:47] on Antarctica is a different story. In West Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, which is the smallest portion of the continent, is shrinking. It's declining in fact pretty quickly. They talk about the doomsday glacier. If it melts, blah, blah, blah. But is that

[00:26:06] due to changing temperatures? No. They're still all below freezing there. No one goes to the sunny beaches of Antarctica. You know, just last year, five or six different measuring stations in different locations set new records for cold in Antarctica. But what you've got

[00:26:28] going on in West Antarctica, you've got subsurface seismic activity. Same thing that happens in Greenland. You know, everyone talking about Iceland. Seismic meaning volcanoes under the water. Volcanic, yeah, volcanic activity. Not just underwater. You know, there is a continent

[00:26:45] underneath it. So under the earth right there, you've got a lot of magma or heat near the surface that's melting the glaciers, that's melting the ice very rapidly there. It's happening in Greenland as well, right? But East Antarctica and Central Antarctica, which is the major

[00:27:06] portion of the continent, is actually adding ice. So there's more ice now than there was 50 years ago. Temperatures down there haven't changed at all. So it turns out that on net, they may be adding ice to Antarctica. We can't say for sure. It may be that West Antarctica

[00:27:26] is melting faster than the little bit of ice they're adding. You've got to remember, Antarctica and the Arctic are both considered deserts. They don't get a lot of... You might think,

[00:27:36] oh, it snows there all the time. No, it doesn't snow there all the time. They don't get a lot of ice there. It's very dry. It's just that the ice that's there stays frozen and sticks. But it has been adding some ice.

[00:27:51] So the other thing we want to touch base on is the wildfires. California's got a big wildfire. I think they call it the Park Fire. When the news talks about this, it often talks about,

[00:28:03] well, we're going to see more fires because of global warming. But it turns out a man apparently started this fire. A lot of the fires are arsonists. This guy was a... I honestly don't understand what

[00:28:18] sparked him to do this, but he pushed a burning car off a cliff into the brush and started the fire. And it's as bad as it is right now for two reasons. They've had a lot of rain

[00:28:32] the last two years. Rain and snow. Record-setting snow. Guess what that does for plant life in California? It becomes very lush until the summer comes every year when it dries out. And then it becomes what? Tender for fires. If you don't clear brush, if you don't

[00:28:50] cut trees, if you don't log, you get overgrowth. And when it dries out, all it takes is one arsonist with a car to spark a huge wildfire. They also have had problems with just their electricity. I mean, wires that broke, wind

[00:29:04] that tore down power lines and so forth, and that starts the fire. And that's not global warming. That's not global warming either. No. It turns out, if you look at the United States as

[00:29:13] a whole, wildfires were more common and bigger in the early part of the 20th century than they are today. California's history of wildfires, it's... You think about California, you say, oh, it's lush, it's green, it's got all these farms, it's got most people. That is an anomaly

[00:29:32] historically. California was one of the least populated areas in the continental United States when whites set foot, when Europeans set foot on the East Coast because it was arid and dry. It's a desert. And the government policies have diverted rivers from the West

[00:29:49] to make... This is the law, the Bureau of Reclamation's law, make the desert bloom like a rose. And they did it. A couple years ago, I take Archaeology Magazine and they had a story in there about the Indians,

[00:30:03] the indigenous population of California before the white man comes, doing controlled burns there to sort of manage the wildfires. They did that, but they also... They have very low population density. I mean, they

[00:30:20] were not the Northwest where you had huge villages and people living on fish, and they weren't even the Northeast where you had the so-called five civilized tribes or the Iroquois nation. They were small bands of people living across very desert land, and

[00:30:39] it took irrigation to make California as populated as it is. And the rivers are drying up because more and more people are taking water from the rivers upstream from California. They've let their dams go to heck, and so they're breaking. They don't have storage. And then

[00:30:58] the Endangered Species Act comes along and says, no, no, you've got to let more water out to save the minnow or the shore frog, and that means there's less water there for humans. So California has got a variety of problems.

[00:31:11] So President Biden, considering all these environmental issues that he sees, he's passed a lot of legislation, spending a lot of money to try to address these things. One of them is the push for electric vehicles, which I keep reading stories that they seem to be

[00:31:27] not having a lot of success selling electric vehicles. Yeah, every car company that's selling electric vehicles is losing money on them. Ford reported it lost $50,000 per vehicle sold. You can't stay in business for very long doing that unless

[00:31:41] the government's giving you money. The Mercedes has scaled back. Toyota said we're not going all electric. Right, and they got criticized for saying we like our hybrid idea. Yeah, exactly. Volkswagen, Porsche, they've all scaled back. Ford is cutting back its commitments.

[00:32:02] GM canceled the plant transition from regular to electric. Even Tesla, the benchmark for what an electric vehicle is or should be, is having problems now. And it's even worse if you're in the used car market for electric vehicles. Hertz invested heavily in electric

[00:32:30] vehicles, and just last year they sold off 30,000 of them in one fire sale because they said nobody wants to drop them because no one wants to get stranded anywhere. My guest for this hour, we have one more segment with Dr. Sterling Burnett with the

[00:32:45] Heartland Institute. You can find out more about Sterling on pointofview.net. We also have a link to him, and I'd encourage you to go to the Heartland Institute and see the number of topics they deal with there. We've got Pete on the line with a question. When

[00:32:58] we come back from the break, we're going to go to Pete and take his question about La Niña. That is an issue because we actually have, I think if I remember right, I looked

[00:33:08] at this one time, something like nine ocean oscillations out there. We talk about El Niño-La Niña, but there's the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, there's the Pacific decadal oscillation, there's one going around the Arctic, there's one going around the

[00:33:23] Antarctic. We've got a lot of those various oscillations around. La Niña-El Niño seem to get the most attention. So stay with us. We'll go to Pete when we get back from the break with our talk with Dr. Sterling Burnett of the Heartland Institute, and let's go

[00:34:06] to Pete in Texas. Pete, you're on the air. Yes, sir. For many years, you know, the weathermen, local weathermen have been telling us about La Niña-El Niño, and that these are the reasons why all these severe weather things

[00:34:23] are taking off. My question is, in your future forecast, do you see La Niña-El Niño growing up by any chance? Well, I don't think so-called global warming is going to affect La Niña-El Niño. Those

[00:34:39] are cycles that preexisted, that have been around historically. I don't think they're going to get worse or better. They don't really know what causes it. They don't really, yeah. So they don't understand what causes the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation

[00:34:55] or the Indian Ocean oscillation or any of these things. They've got these large-scale drivers of weather, seasonally and sometimes decadally, that the scientists don't understand, so they don't build them into their climate models, but they're convinced that CO2 drives everything.

[00:35:15] But just for the audience, La Niña-El Niño, if I remember right, is a warming and drying period for us in Texas. La Niña is the opposite, if I remember right. Well, they tend to last maybe six, eight, nine months. Sometimes it goes, and I think

[00:35:36] we had a La Niña for like three years almost. Yeah, that's it. They don't understand them. There's no set time period, and they don't cycle back and forth necessarily. There are periods where you have neither La Niña or El Niño. Right, neutral periods.

[00:35:50] And so lately they've been cycling, but if a neutral period comes, it won't be historically unique or unusual even. And when we have a La Niña here, if I remember right, I believe that's cooler and wetter

[00:36:03] for us, but on the opposite side of the La Niña, because it's in the Pacific, Australia gets hit with just the opposite. So it seems to reverse. So if we're having wetter and cooler, Australia's getting hotter and drier, and then when it reverses, we get the hot

[00:36:19] dry and they get the wet cool. Well, that's one of the things they've said is supposed to drive the hurricanes this year is the change cycle. And they say, oh, well, the oceans are warm. They are, and part of

[00:36:32] it is the ocean cycle. But that is not the only factor that drives hurricane formation. Dust from Saudi Arabia can disrupt hurricanes, which we're getting in Texas now, which can disrupt hurricanes. If hurricanes form and there is a lot of wind shear, it takes the

[00:36:55] tops off hurricanes and they become disorganized and break up. You've got to understand that hurricanes work sort of like heat pumps where they work from the clash and the gaps between surface temperatures and ocean temperatures. If ocean temperatures rise, but the temperatures

[00:37:14] near the center of the earth there, I mean, the core, no, no, no, the equator, the equator. That's it. Yeah, they're on the, around the, if temperatures around the equator aren't rising. So most of the warming that we're experiencing is in the north and the south. Temperatures around

[00:37:40] the equator aren't rising. Most hurricanes form around the equator. Well, temperatures there aren't rising ocean temperatures. So the gap between them is getting smaller, not larger. That also tends to buck the idea that more hurricanes will form.

[00:37:57] Let's talk another, about another issue where, which is the electric grid, because as we've been moving into summer, the, here in Texas, we're sometimes getting alerts from the, from the state saying, be cautious about how much energy you're using because we're putting a

[00:38:11] strain on the power grid. Are our power grids vulnerable? Have we got these working like we need to? Well, I like to say that for about 80 years, we had a power grid that was designed by engineers

[00:38:25] to provide power reliably and relatively affordably because they, we control the fuels. The fuels were relatively inexpensive and we had good supplies of them. Now, increasingly the last 20 years, the power grid has been redesigned by politicians who aren't engineers and they've

[00:38:41] been redesigned for purposes other than reliability and affordability. They've been redesigned to fight climate change. And so we get power sources that are dependent on the wind. And if the wind doesn't blow in West Texas, then we don't get a lot of power from wind turbines.

[00:38:55] And the wind doesn't typically blow when we have a high pressure, when we have the heat dome over us. In Texas, that's correct. So the time when we need it the most, they are absent without leave. Solar power, it works great within a certain range of temperatures. Actually,

[00:39:11] if he gets too high, which it does in Texas above about 90 degrees, the solar panels, despite all the sun, because of the way it moves the electrons, they lose efficiency. They're still providing power, but they're not providing as much power as they could.

[00:39:26] But we know they don't work at night and nights half the day. They don't work very well if it's cloudy or if it's stormy or if there's snow on top of them. So who thought it was

[00:39:40] a good idea to have a power system become reliant on the weather? We don't have virgins to sacrifice anymore to the weather gods to keep the power on with these systems. We shouldn't be designing a system that is inherently uncontrollable by us and unreliable.

[00:40:00] There's been discussions, at least from the environmental side, that we need to build batteries to store this energy so that we can use it when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining.

[00:40:10] Batteries are the most expensive form of power outside of offshore wind. They cost much more, and they can only store power for so long. A coal plant goes offline, natural gas can replace it. When wind and solar goes offline, battery can replace it for a few minutes to

[00:40:30] a couple of hours. But if it stays offline longer than that, you've discharged your batteries. And, of course, you have the little problem of these batteries are sort of dangerous. A beautiful example of that happened just this past weekend. I don't know if you or

[00:40:43] your audience heard about it. A truck carrying batteries, lithium-ion batteries, was leaving Los Angeles and going to Las Vegas on I-15. It overturned. It caught fire. The entire highway was closed for three days. First they just closed one lane, and then the fumes

[00:41:02] got too bad, and they closed the entire highway going both ways. They had traffic. People slept in their cars because there's no place to go. The fire department had trouble getting there, and when they did, they said, there's nothing we can do. They finally called a HAZMAT

[00:41:16] team in. It started Friday. It's Monday. It's still burning. The HAZMAT team in says, we can't put this thing out. So what they did is they got bulldozers. They pushed the truck with its burning lithium-ion batteries 100 yards into the desert, and then they built

[00:41:31] berms around it, and they said, we're just going to have to let this thing burn itself out. Do you want that next to your house? We're coming close to the end of the segment here. Tell us a bit about Heartland.

[00:41:44] Well, we've been around, it'll be 40 years this year. We're celebrating our 40th anniversary. We promote innovative private sector solutions to public policy problems. We cover a range of issues. We work with state legislators primarily, but we also work federal issues.

[00:42:03] I do the environment, but we also do healthcare, Social Security. Tax and budget, I think. Budget and tax, school reform. School reform is a big project for us. They can reach us

[00:42:15] at www.heartland.org. If you go there, I encourage you to go to all of our climate sites, www.climaterealism.com, www.climateataglance.com. Sign up for my weekly newsletter, Climate Change Weekly.

[00:42:29] It's actually not weekly. I want to be fair to you. Don't be surprised if one week a month you don't get it. It's three times a month. Dr. Sterling Burnett, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.

[00:42:41] And you can find out more about them. If you want to go to www.pointofview.net, we also have a link to those sites there, and so I'd encourage you to do that. I also encourage

[00:42:50] you to hit the donate button. I will be back tomorrow. We've got a couple more, we have three guests coming in tomorrow. The Land Commissioner of Texas, plus an economist, plus somebody to talk about presidential elections. Interesting topic right now.

[00:43:04] I'm Merrill Matthews, sitting in for Kirby Anderson. Thank you for joining us on Point of View. The Bible tells us not to worry, and yet there is a lot of worrying stuff in our world today.

[00:43:19] Thankfully, the Bible doesn't stop at telling us not to worry. God gives us a next step. He says we need to pray. But sometimes even knowing what to pray can be difficult. And that is why Point of View has relaunched our Pray for America movement, a series of

[00:43:39] weekly emails to guide you in prayer for our nation. Each week you'll receive a brief update about a current issue affecting Americans, along with a written prayer that you can easily share with others. We'll also include a short free resource for you in each email

[00:43:58] so you can learn more about the issue at hand. Will you commit to pray for America? Go to PointofView.net, click on the Pray for America banner at the top of the page to subscribe. Again, that's PointofView.net. Click on the Pray for America banner.

[00:44:21] Let's pray together for God to make a difference in America. Point of View is produced by Point of View Ministries.