Coffee With Scott Adams — Knowledge Archive July 10, 2026
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Episodes Episode #2517 Segments
MainContent Climate & Environment

Back to episode — Episode 2517 A Conversation With Michael Ian Black

Context —

ed with the statement that Trump said Nazis are very fine people. So I don't know. He agreed with it. He agreed with it. He didn't. Why don't we get we've played it twice. Let's play it a third time. All right. All right. So listen for the yes Mr. Vice President are you aware that you were misquoting Donald Trump in Charlottesville. He never called neo-Nazis very fine people. No he called all thos…

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it just because they said it. I don't think you could.

I agree with you. You can't trust it on its face. Yes. Okay. So climate. Really trust any opinion on its face.

Well so I earlier I said that if somebody who's on the other side from you politically ends up agreeing with you that's a little more credible because they're taking risk. You know it's the opposite of being paid. Unpaid. So there are some cases like that. All right. So in climate science if you were a climate scientist and you said climate change is not real you would lose your job basically. You really wouldn't have a chance at.

At what point? Because decades ago there were people saying I don't. Scientists saying I don't think this is real and I don't think any of them lost their jobs at the moment. Because as the science became clearer and clearer and clear that climate change is real and manmade which even the Republican party at this point agrees with.

All right. Let me say what I believe just in case so people don't get. I don't know if the planet is getting warmer. I don't know that. I don't know if humans are causing it a little bit or a lot or none. I don't know that because that's the domain of science. My criticism is the climate models and the credibility of the people. Now the cred. If you ever heard of this scam. There's a scam where you get in the mail a recommendation for a stock and it says this is going to go up way if you buy it and then you don't buy it because it looks like a scam. Next week they send you another stock and they say look at this one. You can check for yourself it went up 50%. And you get three in a row and you say finally these guys are magic. I'm going to invest in the fourth one. Yeah turns out to be a scam. Now the way that's done is they send out different recommendations to thousands of people. Some of them are right by luck. Then the ones that are right they send out just new ones to just that group and there will always be a few people left who magically got a whole bunch of correct recommendations and they'll think oh these guys are magic. So that's how the scam works. That's the way the climate models work.

No hold on let me finish it. Okay. There are hundreds of climate models and the reason there's not one is that they disagree on what the climate model should do. The climate models are revised and the ones that don't work the ones that don't hindcast as they call it. Have you heard that word? Hindcasting means it's the opposite of a forecast. It means if this model had existed it would have predicted the past. Right. Exactly the way we model the big bang for example. Right. The big bang which has been largely debunked. I'm not sure if you saw that story but it has largely been debunked. However there is controversy in the field about it. Yes it but it definitely has not been debunked.

So here's the thing. Having experience you just threw out a huge statement that isn't true. You just said the big bang theory has been debunked. It has not.

Oh it's been debunked in the sense that they found universes that couldn't exist.

They have not found other universes. Hold on. They found other galaxies that should not exist if we're really 13.9 billion years old. Yes. So that would mean that what they thought about it must be wrong in some substantial way but they don't know what that is. But that does not debunk the Big Bang even a little bit. You're conflating different things.

Well I would say it's debunked in terms of a smooth. It started as a thing 13.9 billion years ago and then the age of the universe may be in doubt. That is true. But to say the Big Bang has been debunked is just flat out incorrect. And when you say things like that you're misleading your audience. It's not true.

Well I would argue that simulation. I have to argue it. It's not true. Hold on. You didn't hear the rest of the sentence. I apologize. I apologize. All right. I'm a proponent of simulation theory as is Elon Musk and a lot of smart people. And defined for people who don't know simulation theory is the theory that we are currently living in a simulation.

We're in a simulation. Yes. So if we're in a simulation then none of that stuff's real. Yes. In other words the big bang and the logic of it is it's probably a trillion to one odds that we're a simulation. Although even in a simulation model the Big Bang could also still be true because the simulation could have started with a big bang.

Yeah. But it wouldn't be true in base reality. It would just be true in our simulation. Sure. Yeah. All right. So anyway but the point of that was that if you have lots of models and you're allowed to tweak them in the past. Oh it didn't work for the past. Now I have to tweak it. And you can add models and you can tweak them. That's not modeling and that's not a science. That's more like horoscopes.

No because I think you're mischaracterizing how modeling works. Modeling works by inserting assumptions into an algorithm and having them spit out the results. Right. We agree with that. Yeah. Okay. So what scientists are trying to do in hindcasting what you're trying to do is insert parameters into the model so that it spits out a model that resembles what we observe and in doing so you're getting closer and closer to what you believe to be the truth. It is not the same as horoscopes. What you're doing is you're trying to find what is the correct representation of the universe. So for example the scam that you put forward which I agree is absolutely a scam I'm familiar with it does not in any way shape or form bear a relationship to climate modeling. And here's why. I agree that was an analogy just to. It's a bad analogy. It's a bad analogy because the scam artist is going into it with the intention of scamming people. In other words they know that they are entering false information into the bloodstream with the hopes that gullible people will believe that. Let me just finish. As opposed to climate modelers who are entering information into their models to the best of their ability to determine what in fact is the truth. That's a very different scenario.

What would happen if a climate modeler came up with a model that said that the climate is not getting warmer? What would happen then? You would submit that for peer review. You would have people look at your model and if they agreed with it and were able to replicate your findings they would treat it seriously. If they can't they wouldn't. That's the way science works. Now in the real world they would shut up and they would tweak it until it agreed with the real world modeling. In other words anybody who's working for money yeah they don't have the option to disagree and keep their jobs. That's just not an option.

That's not true in the real world. It's true. It's not true. Where I think there is truth in what you're saying and I do think there's truth in what you're saying is that there are certain assumptions in the scientific world and in all industries in all worlds that if you're an iconoclast and you go against them you're going to get tremendous amounts of push back to the accepted wisdom. That is certainly true. And there will be times when the person who is pushing back against the accepted wisdom is 100% correct and that will be borne out over time if they submit their work to peer-reviewed journals or they're able to have their findings replicated by other scientists. That is the scientific method.

Now we've had climate models since probably the 70s right and they've predicted that by now the oceans would be rising and the hurricanes would be worse and that hasn't happened.

And what we're seeing is that hurricanes are worse and the season. Oh no. Fact check. Hurricanes are about. Again like this is not a topic that I am familiar enough with to debate the science of. But let's just go to the NOAA National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and let me just say. I'm just Googling right now. I have no idea what I'll get. Are hurricanes getting worse? Let's see what they say. According to NOAA climate change is making hurricanes stronger and more common