Looking around on YouTube over the weekend for videos illustrating Michael Nesmith’s career in music, I came across Steve Hayward’s 2014 Hillsdale College lecture titled “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Global Warming.” Video of the lecture was posted here on YouTube (embedded below).
Steve adapted the the title of his lecture from the musical that introduced the comic Roman playwright Plautus to Broadway with a little help from Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart as well as songs by Stephen Sondheim. An alternative title for Steve’s lecture might take off from the Nick Lowe song made famous by Elvis Costello — “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love, and Global Warming?”
Steve’s lecture has now gone over 1,000,000 views. Congratulations are in order. Perhaps even more surprising, it is still available on YouTube, although the authorities have imposed a UN Climate Action link on it.
The points Steve made in 2014 seem to me mostly to apply even more so now. Yesterday I asked Steve if the point he made about the falsification of climate models near the top of his lecture is still accurate. He responded that his point is “still basically accurate. There have been a few developments since that lecture, but they all tend in the same direction of concluding the climatistas continue to overestimate the future.” He has promised to append a comment to this post explaining a few of the recent developments.
STEVE adds: Well it certainly is flattering to see a talk go over the 1 million mark, though my kids would still mock me. (My son’s YouTube channel of custom sports highlight videos, Savage Brick Sports, has a couple with over 20 million views.) And I have no explanation for why this one caught on.
I’m not following the climate change circus as closely as I once did, chiefly because there are better things to do than obsess about this dreary and unchanging farce. But I still track the highlights, and nothing in the years since this talk has changed—except the whispers in the scientific community, including in the last IPCC report itself—that maybe they’ve overestimated the problem. I wrote about this a few months ago in this post, if anyone is interested in going back for a look. And Steven Koonin’s recent book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters is highly recommended. I’m hoping to have Koonin on for a podcast at some point in the near future.
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