Thom Hartmann: And welcome back Thom Hartmann here with you. Brian Sussman is on the line with us. He’s the author of, he’s a veteran meteorologist, as in weather man, and the author of a new book, “Climategate.” The subtitle, “A Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam.” DebateMeAlGore.com Brian’s website. Brian welcome to the show.
Brian Sussman: Hey Thom, it’s a pleasure being on your program. I really appreciate you. We probably only agree on about 30% of the stuff together between the two of us. But what I like about you is you’re man enough to allow people to come on the program that disagree with you and I think that’s pretty cool.
Thom Hartmann: Well let’s do that then, Brian, thank you. Your book was published by World Net Daily.
Brian Sussman: Yes.
Thom Hartmann: World Net Daily you know is, has Clark Jones, going after rather Clark Jones who was a fund raiser for Al Gore calling him a dope dealer. They ended up saying oops, sorry. I’m concerned about the veracity of your information. Let me just lay it out here. You tell brilliant stories. The book is really well written, I mean it’s story telling throughout. But you’re a meteorologist, you’re not a climatologist.
Brian Sussman: Well the way I look at it Thom is you don’t really need to even be a meteorologist to talk about this particular issue because I’m not coming up with any of this research, I’m just quoting the research that’s been conducted by other scientists and sharing it with the public and then adding to that a social and political commentary.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah like Floyd Brown, the Western Center for Journalism, the guy who runs the ExposeObama.com and ImpeachObama.com campaign who did the Willy Horton ads, was the founding chairman of Citizens United. These are the people who are publishing your book.
Brian Sussman: Well I don’t have much to say about that. I know that I had an opportunity with Penguin and Penguin publishes all of Al Gore’s stuff. They wanted to publish the book first but they wanted to make some alterations to the content that I wouldn’t go along with so they were the first opportunity I had as a publisher and I didn’t want to listen to anyone telling me how to run my particular book.
Just like, Thom, you’re a prolific author. I’m sure you don’t want editors telling you what to say. With World Net Daily they took the book, they didn’t add a thing to it.
Thom Hartmann: Yeah I’ve been published by Random House, by Viking, you know the biggest houses in America. I’ve never had anybody say to me you have to change the content of your book for political or editorial you know…
Brian Sussman: Yeah what they wanted to do was…
Thom Hartmann: Other than saying that’s a badly written sentence, you know.
Brian Sussman: Well what they wanted to do was they wanted me to add, and you’ll, hopefully you’ll get a laugh out of this. Because I think you know a little bit about me now. They wanted me to add a chapter on being green.
Thom Hartmann: Okay. Yeah.
Brian Sussman: See I did get a laugh out of you.
Thom Hartmann: Just and the reason why and let me just, quote for our listeners so that they can share in this. In your acknowledgements, the third paragraph of your acknowledgements, “Hearty acknowledgements must be given to El Rushbo for motivating me to trade the restrictive environment of the television news room for a liberating career in talk radio and Mark Levin for emboldening my world view.” I think you’re wearing your politics on your sleeve here. Which is fine, you know, I get that, I do the same in much of my writing although I don’t you know credit talk show hosts for getting me all excited.
But you know some of the stories, some of the quotes. For example, you tell the story about going out to, in the San Francisco bay area, when you were working in television and being assigned to go out to a bank where it was 105 but it would actually be 110 because of the black asphalt in the parking lot, and you quote your boss saying that a lot of viewers with ratings meters would be out there too and things. That’s not how television viewership is measured. I doubt your boss actually said that and I’m just wondering how the, you know, and you’re telling these stories but what, I couldn’t find anywhere in the book, maybe you can point me to it, Brian Sussman, where you actually take the real science that is being presented by the, by all the various scientists around the world and particularly the UN, you know, climatology, the UN group, and refute it. It’s full of anecdotes.
Brian Sussman: Okay, so the first thing is, if I could just go back to that television meter story, this was the first, San Francisco was the first market in the country to use the meters that are on the back of people’s televisions. So we, and we would know exactly where those meters were. We knew in Walnut Creek there were 15 or 20 meters and so showing up in those particular locations was very important. So just to set the record straight on that, you didn’t quite have that right.
Thom Hartmann: You’re talking Nielsen. Nielsen set tops.
Brian Sussman: I can’t remember if it was Nielsen or Arbitron but that’s the way it would work back then. So again, getting back to the science. What I’m showing you is that the science at least is uncertain when it comes to the theory of anthropogenic global warming. It doesn’t withhold the scientific methods.
Thom Hartmann: Well it’s, the point that you keep making throughout the book is that it’s only uncertain to the point that we’ve really only had thermometers as long as, you know, for a couple of hundred years, accurate thermometers, but…
Brian Sussman: No wait a second you can go back using everything from ice core samples to tree rings to..
Thom Hartmann: Well that was the point I was going to make.
Brian Sussman: Right. I mean you can use those proxies to go back and note the temperature changes we’ve had. And we do know this, Thom. This is only an occurrence that’s taken place in the last 15 years whereby the medieval warm period, which was clearly a global event, and was clearly warmer than today, has been massaged to make it look as if it wasn’t all that impressive of a warming.
Thom Hartmann: It had nothing, there’s no way Brian that the rate of increase in climate change during the medieval warming period was similar to what we’re experiencing over the last 20 or 30 years. It just wasn’t.
Brian Sussman: Wait a second, you can’t say it just wasn’t.
Thom Hartmann: It wasn’t!
Brian Sussman: You’ve got lots of proxy data including the things that everyone, the little barbs that everyone likes to throw out. Well they were growing grapes in England. Well you can look at the tree line throughout Europe and just note that it was significantly warmer a couple thousand years ago so that’s our, well in recent history, we don’t have to go back to the ancient history, to show that.
Thom Hartmann: You go after Al Gore in this book really aggressively.
Brian Sussman: Big time. Big time.
Thom Hartmann: And suggest that he’s just doing this for the bucks.
Brian Sussman: Yes.
Thom Hartmann: Al Gore was born rich. I mean what’s, I’m curious about if you would reveal to us about the people on your side and what kind of bucks they’re making. How much is Floyd Brown making in this thing? How much is World Net Daily making in this thing? How much are you making in this thing? There’s an entire industry that has been created, that in large part is being funded by people who are associated with fossil fuel industries who are making billions of dollars who are promoting the kind of pseudo science that you’re promoting in your book, Brian.
Brian Sussman: Okay this is where you’ll find that we have an agreement. You have a lot to say about corporatists and corporations and so do I. Al Gore, Inc., stands to make bank off of this. Goldman Sachs stands to make bank off of this. Venture capitalists in the Silicon Valley have to make bank off this and I don’t quite frankly think it’s moral. I will tell you also who’s making bank off of this. And that’s General Electric. Without global warming, General Electric would go the way of Westinghouse. This is the kind of corporate…
Thom Hartmann: You know who’s making the biggest bank off this, Brian, is the king of Saudi Arabia.
Brian Sussman: True.
Thom Hartmann: And I’m not, I’m not finding you know a serious indictment in your book of our energy policies in terms of national security. It's all about how evil Al Gore is and anybody who decides to speak up about climate science.
Brian Sussman: Okay, we have the new senate energy bill which was just trotted out yesterday, it’s been downloaded on my computer. They’re talking about energy security here, or national security vis à vis our energy policy. Here’s the problem…
Thom Hartmann: But you’re not.
Brian Sussman: I don’t see anything in that senate energy bill that allows for the drilling of oil on our own soil and our federal lands. We have the largest oil reserves in the world…
Thom Hartmann: We have the largest, we have among the largest wind reserves in the world, Brian.
Brian Sussman: Yeah but, you know, okay here.
Thom Hartmann: We’ve got enough solar energy to power the entire planet.
Brian Sussman: Here’s the deal bro, right outside my window is the Altamont Pass Wind Farm. It’s the largest wind farm in the world. From the moment this thing was erected law suits were being filed after law suit after law suit. Who by? Environmentalists. Why don’t they like the wind farm? 1: it takes up a lot of space. 2: it kills birds. So the wind, that’s just not going to happen.
Thom Hartmann: The number of birds that are killed by cats in one day in the United States is greater than the number of birds that are killed by all the wind farms in America over a 10 year period.
Brian Sussman: Well I will tell you…
Thom Hartmann: I mean, I’m just not buying it.
Brian Sussman: That's fine. Then you’re taking a point against the environmentalists, I think that’s pretty funny.
Thom Hartmann: Well I’m taking a point against people who make lawsuits about wind farms. Brian Sussman is the author of the book, “Climategate: a Veteran Meteorologist Exposes the Global Warming Scam.” DebateMeAlGore.com, his website. Thank you Brian.
Brian Sussman: Thom, thank you.
Transcribed by Suzanne Roberts, Portland Psychology Clinic.
