In February 2002, Kary Mullis, the Nobel
prize winning inventor of the PCR test (which unfortunately
was used by some people with ill intentions to misdiagnose
hundreds of thousands – or rather hundreds of millions – of people
when operated at too high a number of cycles), gave a talk at Ted
on what he thought should constitute the proper foundations
of science. His talk ended with a snipe at scientists who are
willing to compromise integrity for monetary gain, in particular
those scientists pushing the global warming narrative for such a
reason.
I find it interesting that a previous lead-in description I managed to retrieve from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (the oldest version archived there does not go back in time any later than 26th December 2013) was couched in prose a little more florid and engaging:
Nobel-winning biochemist Kary Mullis talks about the basis of modern science: the experiment. Sharing tales from the 17th century and from his own backyard-rocketry days, Mullis celebrates the curiosity, inspiration and rigor of good science in all its forms. Filled with insights and a few thought-provoking “heresies” (listen for Mullis’ take on global warming), this is a talk to settle into and enjoy. (Recorded February 2002 in Monterey, California. Duration: 29:32.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20131226084531/http://blog.ted.com/2009/01/05/celebrating_the_2/
I suppose that some editor at Ted.com felt that highlighting in too positive a manner a talk given by one of their guests known for his strong contrarian take on the global warming narrative was too risky for their audience – which I would be very surprised if it were not mostly comprised of liberals or other left-leaning people – and had the talk’s lead-in description changed to its present wording.
I find it interesting that a previous lead-in description I managed to retrieve from the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (the oldest version archived there does not go back in time any later than 26th December 2013) was couched in prose a little more florid and engaging:
Nobel-winning biochemist Kary Mullis talks about the basis of modern science: the experiment. Sharing tales from the 17th century and from his own backyard-rocketry days, Mullis celebrates the curiosity, inspiration and rigor of good science in all its forms. Filled with insights and a few thought-provoking “heresies” (listen for Mullis’ take on global warming), this is a talk to settle into and enjoy. (Recorded February 2002 in Monterey, California. Duration: 29:32.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20131226084531/http://blog.ted.com/2009/01/05/celebrating_the_2/
I suppose that some editor at Ted.com felt that highlighting in too positive a manner a talk given by one of their guests known for his strong contrarian take on the global warming narrative was too risky for their audience – which I would be very surprised if it were not mostly comprised of liberals or other left-leaning people – and had the talk’s lead-in description changed to its present wording.
Source:
Links
https://www.karymullis.com/lectures.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20060701230034/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html
https://www.karymullis.com/lectures.shtml
https://web.archive.org/web/20060701230034/https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1993/mullis-autobio.html
TRANSCRIPT
[...]
Now, let’s see... I’ve got another five minutes, right? OK, I want to take … all scientists aren’t like that, you know. And there is a lot … there is a lot … a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and … and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before – and as sure as hell afterwards – government got … realised that scientists aren’t strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with … with a test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. I mean they made faster things; they made uh bigger guns to shoot them down with, you know; they made uh drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of … and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, ‘we ought to invest in this shit because uh whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways’. And they got involved in it and the scientific-industrial establishment was born and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren’t the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air, they were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean: later, then they all got into business … I mean: there are waves of … going into your high school, person saying ‘you want to be rich’, you know, ‘be a scientist’, you know – not anymore: ‘You want to be rich, you be a businessman’. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel – that’s back when travel was easy. And like … those people don’t think … they don’t … they don’t always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage, always, to tell you the truth. And the people I’m talking about are people that like … they say that they’re a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they … and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we’re going to … how we’re going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer when that’s actually contrary to most people’s sensations. I mean if you actually measure the temperature over a period … I mean the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50-60 years – longer than that it’s been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years – and in fact, the temperature hasn’t really gone up. It’s like the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit because the night-time temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there’s a good explanation for that and it’s that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town’s moved out there, there’s concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And then … most responsible people that measure temperatures realise you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the day-time and they keep it a little warmer at night, so the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been, but not a lot. Not like, you know, the first guy … the first guy that got the idea that we’re going to fry ourselves here; actually, he didn’t think of it that way. His name was Svante Arrhenius. He was Swedish and he said: ‘if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere’, which he thought might – this is in 1900 – ‘the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees’, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as kind of like, you know, like a … a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it: really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said ‘this will be cool because it’ll be a longer growing season in Sweden’, you know, and the surfers liked it; the surfers thought ‘that’s a cool idea because it’s pretty cold in the ocean sometimes’ … and … but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know, but nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean the temperature as measured – and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASA’s records and all the Weather Bureau’s records, and you’ll look at it yourself, and you’ll see, the temperature has just – the night-time temperature measured on the surface of the planet – has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the day-time temperature, it looks like it went up about 0.7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up: it was the night-time: the daytime temperatures didn’t go up. So, and Arrhenius’s theory and all the …the … the global warmers, they would say, ‘yeah, it should go up in the day-time, too, if it’s the greenhouse effect’. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean … but people don’t like things like this, so most I mean, you don’t get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be [he reads from a slip of paper taken from his chest pocket] Evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It’s a paper that came out in February and most of you probably hadn’t heard about it. Uh ‘Evidence for large decadal variability in the tropical mean radiative energy budget’ [He coughs.] Excuse me, those papers were published by NASA and some scientists at Columbia and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these … the conclusion in both of these papers – and in also the Science editor’s uh like descriptions of these papers for, you know, for the quickie – is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean what these guys were doing – and this is what the NASA people have been saying this for a long time – they say ‘if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn’t going up. It’s not going up at all. We’ve doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn’t going up’. And in this paper, they show something much more striking and that was that they did what they call a radiation – and I’m not going to go into the details of it; actually it’s quite complicated, but it isn’t as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers – if you really get down to it, they say ‘the sun puts out a certain amount of energy – we know how much that is – it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount; when it gets warm it … it generates – it … it makes redder energy – I mean like infra red, like something that’s warm gives off infra red. The whole business of the global warming … trash, really, is that ‘if the … if there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that’s trying to escape won’t be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the… the – it’s like 350 nanometres, which is where it’s centred – that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don’t dissipate any’. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean you can talk about that stuff and you can write these large reports and you can get government money to do it, but these – they actually measured it, and ... and it turns out that in the last 10 years – that’s why they say ‘decadal’ there – that the energy … the level of what they call ‘imbalance’ has been way the hell over what was expected – like the amount of imbalance, meaning, heat’s coming in and it’s not going out that you would get from having double the CO2 – which we’re not anywhere near that by the way – but if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would increase the … the energy budget by about … in other words, one watt per square centimetre more would be coming in than going out, so the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study – these two studies by two different teams – that … that five and a half watts per square metre had been coming in from 1998, 1999 and the place didn’t get warmer. So the theory’s kaput … it’s not ... these papers should have been called ‘The end to the … the global warming fiasco’, you know. But they … they’re concerned – and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers – because they’re talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said: ‘You know what? There isn’t a problem with global warming any longer, so we can’ … you know, but their funding … and if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, ‘global warming obviously hasn’t happened’... if they … if they … if they actually … if they actually said that [Mr Mullis mimics being hit.] I’m getting out, I’ll stand up too …I’ll slowly get back … they have to say that, they have to be very cautious. But what I’m saying is: you can be delighted because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional … really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say ‘what this means is that what we’ve been thinking was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated, that it’s all wrong. It’s wrong by a large factor. It’s not by a small one. They just … they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth – there’s obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about because the heat’s coming in and it isn’t getting warmer.’ So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it’s big and horrible … and big and wonderful … and it does all kinds of things we don’t know anything about. So I mean: the reason I put those things all together, OK, here’s the way you’re supposed to do science: some science is done for other reasons than just curiosity. And there’s a lot of things like global warming and the ozone hole, and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues that if you’re interested in them, then you have to get down the details and read the papers called ‘Large decadal variability in the ...’ You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues – and making a lot of money out of it –, you’ll be misinformed and you’ll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The …one of them … and the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean: you’ve got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here.
Now, let’s see... I’ve got another five minutes, right? OK, I want to take … all scientists aren’t like that, you know. And there is a lot … there is a lot … a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and … and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before – and as sure as hell afterwards – government got … realised that scientists aren’t strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with … with a test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. I mean they made faster things; they made uh bigger guns to shoot them down with, you know; they made uh drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of … and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, ‘we ought to invest in this shit because uh whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways’. And they got involved in it and the scientific-industrial establishment was born and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren’t the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air, they were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean: later, then they all got into business … I mean: there are waves of … going into your high school, person saying ‘you want to be rich’, you know, ‘be a scientist’, you know – not anymore: ‘You want to be rich, you be a businessman’. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel – that’s back when travel was easy. And like … those people don’t think … they don’t … they don’t always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage, always, to tell you the truth. And the people I’m talking about are people that like … they say that they’re a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they … and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we’re going to … how we’re going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer when that’s actually contrary to most people’s sensations. I mean if you actually measure the temperature over a period … I mean the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50-60 years – longer than that it’s been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years – and in fact, the temperature hasn’t really gone up. It’s like the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit because the night-time temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there’s a good explanation for that and it’s that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town’s moved out there, there’s concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And then … most responsible people that measure temperatures realise you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the day-time and they keep it a little warmer at night, so the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been, but not a lot. Not like, you know, the first guy … the first guy that got the idea that we’re going to fry ourselves here; actually, he didn’t think of it that way. His name was Svante Arrhenius. He was Swedish and he said: ‘if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere’, which he thought might – this is in 1900 – ‘the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees’, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as kind of like, you know, like a … a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it: really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said ‘this will be cool because it’ll be a longer growing season in Sweden’, you know, and the surfers liked it; the surfers thought ‘that’s a cool idea because it’s pretty cold in the ocean sometimes’ … and … but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know, but nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean the temperature as measured – and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASA’s records and all the Weather Bureau’s records, and you’ll look at it yourself, and you’ll see, the temperature has just – the night-time temperature measured on the surface of the planet – has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the day-time temperature, it looks like it went up about 0.7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up: it was the night-time: the daytime temperatures didn’t go up. So, and Arrhenius’s theory and all the …the … the global warmers, they would say, ‘yeah, it should go up in the day-time, too, if it’s the greenhouse effect’. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean … but people don’t like things like this, so most I mean, you don’t get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be [he reads from a slip of paper taken from his chest pocket] Evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It’s a paper that came out in February and most of you probably hadn’t heard about it. Uh ‘Evidence for large decadal variability in the tropical mean radiative energy budget’ [He coughs.] Excuse me, those papers were published by NASA and some scientists at Columbia and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these … the conclusion in both of these papers – and in also the Science editor’s uh like descriptions of these papers for, you know, for the quickie – is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean what these guys were doing – and this is what the NASA people have been saying this for a long time – they say ‘if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn’t going up. It’s not going up at all. We’ve doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn’t going up’. And in this paper, they show something much more striking and that was that they did what they call a radiation – and I’m not going to go into the details of it; actually it’s quite complicated, but it isn’t as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers – if you really get down to it, they say ‘the sun puts out a certain amount of energy – we know how much that is – it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount; when it gets warm it … it generates – it … it makes redder energy – I mean like infra red, like something that’s warm gives off infra red. The whole business of the global warming … trash, really, is that ‘if the … if there’s too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that’s trying to escape won’t be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the… the – it’s like 350 nanometres, which is where it’s centred – that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don’t dissipate any’. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean you can talk about that stuff and you can write these large reports and you can get government money to do it, but these – they actually measured it, and ... and it turns out that in the last 10 years – that’s why they say ‘decadal’ there – that the energy … the level of what they call ‘imbalance’ has been way the hell over what was expected – like the amount of imbalance, meaning, heat’s coming in and it’s not going out that you would get from having double the CO2 – which we’re not anywhere near that by the way – but if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would increase the … the energy budget by about … in other words, one watt per square centimetre more would be coming in than going out, so the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study – these two studies by two different teams – that … that five and a half watts per square metre had been coming in from 1998, 1999 and the place didn’t get warmer. So the theory’s kaput … it’s not ... these papers should have been called ‘The end to the … the global warming fiasco’, you know. But they … they’re concerned – and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers – because they’re talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said: ‘You know what? There isn’t a problem with global warming any longer, so we can’ … you know, but their funding … and if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, ‘global warming obviously hasn’t happened’... if they … if they … if they actually … if they actually said that [Mr Mullis mimics being hit.] I’m getting out, I’ll stand up too …I’ll slowly get back … they have to say that, they have to be very cautious. But what I’m saying is: you can be delighted because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional … really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say ‘what this means is that what we’ve been thinking was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated, that it’s all wrong. It’s wrong by a large factor. It’s not by a small one. They just … they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth – there’s obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about because the heat’s coming in and it isn’t getting warmer.’ So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it’s big and horrible … and big and wonderful … and it does all kinds of things we don’t know anything about. So I mean: the reason I put those things all together, OK, here’s the way you’re supposed to do science: some science is done for other reasons than just curiosity. And there’s a lot of things like global warming and the ozone hole, and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues that if you’re interested in them, then you have to get down the details and read the papers called ‘Large decadal variability in the ...’ You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues – and making a lot of money out of it –, you’ll be misinformed and you’ll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The …one of them … and the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean: you’ve got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here.
Lausanne, the lines above were posted on the nineteenth day of the seventh month of the year two thousand and twenty-two, with some corrections – the talk was held in 2002, not 2009 – and three additional paragraphs and two links inserted both on the same day and in the early hours of the next.
