. . robertson founder of the christian broadcasting network.ñ cnbc commentator barry ritholtz on who's to blame for the recession. we'll also feature martin and annelise anderson on why presidentx reagan believed destroying nuclear weapons would bring an end to the soviet union. on "after words" nicholas schmidle talks about his%w two years in t&zpakistan.

he sits downqb7;ç with ralph p. online withez great new feature including streaming video and easy to search archives. booktv.org. >> without disputing the existence of manmade climate change, university of virginia research professor patrick michaels and arizona state university climatology polling robert balling demonstrate why they believe the alarmist approach to global warming is unnecessary. the cato institute in washington, d.c. hosted this event. it's a little over an hour.ovx >> in the issue of global warming it seemsk6ñ either you on the talk show line in the afternoon and you say there is no such thing as climate change or you say it's the end of the world. and thisv÷ applies to both side of the issue. i'd like to talk about howo#w w- the facts appear to not appear.

things go unchallenged in the climate of extremes. people accept the strangest things without really fact-checking. and i'd like to begin on may rj one exchange that lasted only a mere few minutes. if we could. there we gíç "larry king live." on 2007. one change that lasted only a mere few minutes contained an incredible number of unfactual statements. it's between the vice president÷ an unidentified woman calls says, vice president gore what issues caused by climate change globally are likely to affect the united states in the next 10 years? the vice president responds the direct impacts on the u.s. have already÷(í ñrkbegun. today 49% of america is in conditions of drought or near-drought.

the implication that the global warming is increasing drought in the united states. fine. tip &hc% how hard is it to check? it turns out it's six mouse on the upper graph here is the percent of the united states experiencing drought)h9 conditi. this is something called the palmer drought severity index. it's a very, very common metric of climate that's been used for literally a half a 90ñcentury. and on the bottom are the northern hemisphere temperature departures from average from the united nations intergovernmentañ panel on climate change of which by the way i am a member and a rather active one.jat what you see here if you look on the y axis, here's the 49% that gore was talking about.n gore was talking about.n now, is therea between this and global warming? you don't have to waste your time running excel on this because the correlation is obviously zero. simple fact, not checked. or we could look at longer term

climate history of the pacific southwest which is one of the i places we really care about drought. the energy secretary who has a nobel prize in particle physics which is somewhat not related to climatology said recently that global warming will destroy agriculture in california and cause the loss of the major cities in california. this is absurd. but the reason he said that is because of stories about major drought in the pacific southwest and the colorado water system. and, of course, if we take a river stream flow as measured by tree rings and other kinds of fossils this is by dave in qñj here's the more recent drought and you can see that it is nothing compared to whatf0ñ we e seen -- that's lowest in the current drought -- nothing compared to what we saw here in

the 12th century. this thing lasted 60 years so to say there's any signal of warming in this record, which would begin somewhere aroundg÷w 1900:%9 absurd.gv i-again, you conditions in the early part of the 20th century which by the way resulted in the migration of people to california as a green paradise. i'll show you that in a second and then it dried and then it got wetter. let's segue to california. we have fires in california, mr. gore said in his response. senator reid chimed in a little bit later, by the way, not in the show. one reason we have the fires in california is global warming. let me tell you about forest fires and range fires in california. they occur because it rains a lot in a previous winter. you've all been to california. by the time april 1st rolls around in southern california, there's not a cloud in the sky. the marine layer is thick. and it does not rain until next october or next december if

you're lucky. to the point that normally you can support decent fires but the fires become enhanced if the previous winter or the winter before that was very wet. thl9m=9 they become wet is because of el nino that causes excessive rain in southern california. so one could have checked with

to warming. this is the intergovernmental panel on climate changes. temperature history for the world. we have two periods of warming in the early 20th century that couldn't have anything of carbon dioxide because we haven't put enough in the air and the period where it cools a little bit and then here on out where we see warming beginning in 1977, a very interesting period beginning in 1998 where it doesn't warm which i'll talk about in a second. but let's compare this to wheat

yields and corn yields. corn yields have quintupletled. paul ehrlich right around hero predicted they would begin to cross immediately. right around here and predicted they would crash immediately and they have continued at the exact same of rate of increase that was established by the time people were talking about the end of the world. the climate of extreme began a long time ago, didn't it? and take a look here at wheat yields. you see wheat this is much more drought tolerant than corn shows an increase of about 100% over the course of the years. to take a look at agriculture in general, let's get closer at home. this is augusta county, virginia, write used to live. the mean average temperature is 53 degrees. annually precipitation 38 inches. here is sussex county in southeastern virginia at 5 degrees warmer. and 20% more precipitation and the corn yields are the same.

why? because people adapt. they adapt their practices. what's different between the temperature warming 5 degrees or a warmer moving from sussex county to augusta county? the thing is -- the answer is absolutely nothing. so people adapt to varying and large changes. well, that's the climate of extremes. now, i'd like to ask a very, very interesting question in this climate. i'm going to ask you the question, have the global warming climate models failed? and this is touched on in the book. i want to expand on that. when we talk about the effects of global warming like mr. gore was talking about in 10 years we start with changes in the atmosphere meaning changes in the carbon dioxide concentration. we put them into climate models and then we put these into usually economic impact models for agriculture or energy or whatever you might want to do. there are many of these models. i'm going to take a look at 21 of the ipcc, intergovernmental panel on climate change models.

i'm going to look at the midrange emission scenario and i'm going to run these things for thousands of iterations. they give you different answers each time you ask them. they have el ninos put in as random spots. they have cold la ninas. you can get them for running them a very long period of time the actual frequency distribution of warming trends that comes out of these models and then you could make a statistical test couldn't you. you could find out if the observed warming trends say for five years, six years, on out to 15 years back or even 20 years back are running at -- within the statistical confidence limits of these models. each one of these colored lines by the way is a computer model. they go up and down. this is an el nino in this model. that's a la nina which is colder in that model. they don't have volcanos.

that the change in carbon dioxide is large. the response to carbon dioxide is log rhythmic. and i guess we spent $10 billion if you have an exponent in a a log you get a straight line. anyway, this is a close-up of the behavior of the models in the near term. we are right here. so we've gone through half of this -- a little less than half of this 2000/2020 period and you can see the change models are very linear, constant rates of warming. and this is the warming since the beginning of the second warming of the 20th century beginning around 1977 and, in fact, if you fit a straight line to it, that's the best statistical fit to the data. you could fit a log rhythm but it won't explain a variance.

any second order fit does not fit as well as a simple first order straight line. so we've got a test on our hands, don't we? the models predict a constant rate of warming. and we've observed a constant rate of warming. that allows us to compare apples and apples in a statistical test. now, bear with me on this. this is the 95% confidence range for the computer models for iterations of different lengths of time. five years, six years. do you notice some of these models predict cooling trends for five-year periods in their 95% confidence range. this is integrated over all the models. why? because they might start with a la nina which is a cold event in the pacific ocean but eventually they home in on this warming trend of about .2-some odd degrees c per decade and here are the observed temperature trends for the last five years, six years, seven years and out to the last 15 years. this is the 95% confidence

system, 95% of the models run within here. 2.5%, if we're below here, we are at 2.5% of the data on the cold side or 2.5% on the warm side. and guess what? it's very obvious that we are following the line of failure. if the model doesn't work at the .05 level or the .02 level on one side, scientists say you must reject the hypothesis created by these models and so does law in many ways. there was a very important case held that an award could not be given in a lawsuit where the testimony for the science was on science that did not meet the normal criteria for statistical significance. ah, this may have very interesting ramifications. very interesting ramification physical indeed congress does not pass a cap-and-trade and epa instead chooses to regulate. this could be a lot of fun.

now, we could do this out for 20 years. you know, you might pick on me and say, oh, michaels you picked the last 15 years that begins in 1993, somewhere around here. and, you know, maybe there's something funny about that so let's go all the way back to 1988 and do all the way out to the last 20 years. and what you see -- here's the same trump. these are five-year trends out to 20. in 1991 a volcano went off. they do not have models in them and otherwise they would blow up and that's a joke. so i could take out the effect of the volcano. i published a paper with me with my colleague a couple of years ago, a few years ago. anyway, and you see now on out 15 to 20 years it's very clear that the models are falling beneath 95% confidence level on both sides or the .97.5 confidence level on the cold

side. this is failure. a1b models are failing. this is the dirty secret. and the temperature record i'm using here for comparison happens to be the united nations intergovernmental panel on climate change. most sighted temperature record the university of angolia. this is published in nature a year ago. it was a paper on the distribution of sea surface temperatures in the atlantic and in the tropical pacific and it was concluded that it's not likely to warm for another few years. more recently another paper just came out a couple of weeks ago where somebody said -- i think it was from the university of wisconsin, milwaukee, that this could run out for 30 years. but, therefore, we need to do something now. excuse me, but i want to ask you a question. taking a look at the -- each one of these individual models, does

anybody here see a 15-year period in which there's no net warming? in any one of these models? no. by the way, here's a cooling in one of these down here. you can see it starts with a la nina. it's very, very clear that's what's happening is outside of the range -- the statistically confident range of our computer models. ah, other misconceptions in the climate of fear. unchallenged assumptions. this one is a whopper. atmospheric methane. that's the second most important greenhouse gas that we put in. and it has generally thought to have result from four sources. one, bovine flatulence. you think that's funny. but the new zealand government is spending an incredible amount of money to try to get sheep that produce less methane because new zealand have an awful lot of sheep and there's a

lot of pressure to reduce emissions in the cap-and-trade program or something like that. bovine flatulence aren't going down and there are an increasing number of bovine. rice paddy agriculture. more people are eating more food. coal mining well, that's not going down. people might think it is but it's not. and there's a lot of methane that's released at the face where you mine the goal down there. -- coal down there. or leaky pipes. it was thought that the soviet union's pipes were so -- natural gas pipes were so leaky that methane was leaking into the atmosphere but that's a long time ago. so we got to end that. let's take a look at the assumptions for the -- for methane in the atmosphere. this is from the united nations, again, their a1b, midrange scenario and it actually goes backwards as well as forwards. you can see here around 1970. what do you see? it starts at 1500 parts per billion in the atmosphere and it keeps going up, up, up till

2050. at the same rate. this is what's used today. in the latest compendium by the ipcc. here are the concentrations of methane in the atmosphere while they were being predicted to increase at the same rate. the concentration was beginning to drop so that finally in recent years there are actually some years in which the concentration in the atmosphere is going negative. and yet this wasn't -- nobody challenged this in the ipcc process. i was a reviewer. i wrote, hey, look at these numbers. no change. so that's the climate of extremes that's not just in public discourse, it's clearly in the scientific discourse. well, this is cato and i would be foolhardy if i said this but there is an assumption that people are -- that as places warm, as our cities warm people will just slowly fry and die.

that there will not be adaptation. the united nations wrote that by the year 2020 the death rate in cities in north america, that's here, from heat-related deaths in heat waves will increase several fold. you know, obviously, the temperature has been going up so let's take a look. the cities provide us is wonderful natural laboratory. before we do that let's take a look at the heat wave of the summer of 2003 in europe. which we all know was caused by global warming. this is the integrated atmospheric temperature in the lower atmosphere. this is published by chase in 2006. i talk about it in my book. this is the best way we measure temperature and you can see if you look at the temperature departures from normal, that most of the world is kind of this color right here for the summer of 2003. in other words, it was a cool summer. embedded in this cool summer is this tiny bubble of hot, very,

very hot air which just happened to be centered over europe. if you take a look at other summers, particularly, el nino summers, you'll see this entire map might be a little bit orange or have an awful lot of orange on it. this was not an unusual summer at all and it's very, very hard to relate an anomaly of that scale that small to say it was caused by global warming but nonetheless, we might as well and we could make a computer model to predict how many deaths that would produce. this is from 2008. in 2003, the solid line is the observed mortality. whoops! solid line is the observed mortality and the dash line is a standard computer model for mortality. and you can see that the observed deaths dramatically exceeded those from the computer, about 19 or 20 per

100,000 people with a computer predicting 15 per 100,000 people. this was a disaster of major proportion. and the fact is people aren't stupid. and that they do adapt. down here, is the heat wave of 2006 in france, which i bet you didn't hear about. nobody heard about it. but, in fact, it was just about as warm as 2003. not enough people died to make headlines. here's the predicted warming. you can see the predicted warming in 2006 is just about the same as the predicted warming in 2003. a predicted number of deaths, i'm sorry and here are the observed number of deaths in 2003. what happened? people adapted. and they do it worldwide. they've been doing it in the united states. we in our cities, heat-related deaths have been declining for decades. heat waves are in our cities, the fewer people die. you know, we hear that it's the old and it's the infirm that die

in a city in a heat wave. well, the places where the heat related deaths are tampa and phoenix. this is the oldest age distribution in the country. there is one city in the united states where heat-related deaths are going up. that's seattle. it has the youngest age distribution amongst population of cities that we looked at. but it also has the coldest summers. it's very clear where heat frequent and infrequent they will learn to adapt. they will learned in france. so many people died of 2003 because of lack of air conditioning. we don't want this artificial air. you should see what air conditioner sales did between swe and 2006 in france and the

political process adapted. where you could go if it was hot that had this wonder called air conditioning. and mortality dropped dramatically. we saw the same thing in chicago. the great heat wave of the mid-1990s resulted in 700 excess deaths in one weekend. a similar heat wave took place a few years later and excess death toll was minimal. the city adapted. elected officials does not do well when bodies fill up in the street when it gets hot. but back to the climate of extremes. i have two more examples. of simply not checking the facts. these two are shocking to me and will demonstrate the bipartisan nature of this particular climate of extremes. my favorite here is something called warming island. now, you may remember this story from a couple of years ago. this is john collins rudolf writing in the "new york times" january 16th, 2007.

a peninsula long thought to be a part of greenland's main land turned out to be an island when a glacier retreated. the ominous implications were not lost on dennis schmitt who says he hopes the island he discovered in greenland will become an international symbol of the effects of climate change. mr. schmitt named the island uunartoq here's warming island. it's very interesting. it's got an interesting shape. this is an image from 1985 and you can see it's connected to the rest of greenland. by 2002, the ice ridge is becoming less and less and by 2005, in fact, it opens up and reveals itself to be an island. here's a current relatively current map of greenland showing what people thought.

approximate this is the place called carls bad fjord and you noticed this three-fingered area and this was considered to be part of the mainland. now, every scientist who's studied greenland knows that it was warmer or as warm for an integrated period much longer than the current time in the early and mid-20th century and it just turns out that there's a weather station which is about 50 nautical miles away from warming island. it's not very far at all. it doesn't take that many clicks to get to this data either. it takes a few more than it does to get to the u.s. data but the danish meteorological institute has a very, very nice set of weather records around greenland. the integrated warming for the last 10 years around warming island would average somewhere around here and i would submit that's not much different than

what you see here from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. what fact-checking editor would not ask, hey, has that been this warm in the past? or, b, is it really true that this thing has not been uncovered for millennia or something going back into the last ice age? in a climate of extreme you don't bother. more importantly, apparently, no scientist chimes in and says, hey, wait a minute, it was warmer back in the early 20th century. you better check on that before you go with this story. well, how long did it take my assistant to find this book? not very long. published by a fellow -- written by a game named ernst hofer of 1957 with the intriguing title of "arctic riviera" and it was a book talking about how warm it

is in eastern greenland. he did aerial photography. he assisted the expeditionary and scientific crews that would go out to greenland, you know, it's a lot clear up to go to greenland than it is to antarctica. you still see a lot of ice and it's real thick and you can do a lot of scientific work in greenland. well, anyway, so "arctic riviera" contained a map, which i would like to show to you. here's northeast greenland. if you read closely that's carls bad fjord and if you look closely, oh, my god, there's the three-fingered island in a book published in 1957. nobody bothered to check on this. and it was covered not in the "new york times" print edition when this map was uncovered by my assistant but in a blog.

and mr. schmitts response is his map has to be wrong. well, i haven't seen another map yet. things that we say are true go unquestioned in this climate and like i said, it's not just one party. i'd like to close with the red red koyapigaktoruk comes bob, bob, bobbin along. robins in the arctic. you've all heard this. look, senator john mccain, 2004. the inuit language for 10,000 years never had a word for robin and thousand there are robins all over their villages. the bbc program on climate change title, no word for robin: climate change in the canadian arctic. where are the fact-checkers on this one? come on. there are staffers over here