Debunking SEBTS Speakers on Climate Change

Introduction to the Climate Change Debate at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Hi everyone, welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a special guest today that's gonna help me discuss some recent developments. Actually, they're really not that recent, but they've become controversial more recently at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, where I went for my own MDiv.

And the person we have with us today though is Colin Reeves. Colin Reeves is a mathematician and a scientist. He's a professor emeritus at Covenantry Seminary in England. University. University. I'm sorry, I wrote down seminary.

Yeah, I was wondering if they had mathematicians at seminary. So what did you teach? So you taught some mathematics and you also taught just general science or?

Yeah, general, basic epistemology in some ways really for students doing research. Because I was mostly involved in research more than teaching. We had to do our ration, but the latter half of my career was all research.

Now, I know we've been emailing back and forth about climate change. And this has been one of the things you've been studying lately. Is that because of the controversy surrounding it then, or was that part of your professional work?

I suppose I first got interested in it because of the quite well-known book, The Hockey Stick Illusion. I don't know if you've read that. I haven't read it, but I've heard about it. Yeah, and the point about that book was the egregious abuse of mathematics and statistics in it.

That's really got me interested. So that's 12 or more years ago now, I think. And I thought, well, if somebody has to abuse statistics so much to make his point, there must be something seriously wrong here.

And so I started reading into it in a more disciplined way.

Why Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Hosted Climate Change Speakers

Yeah, well, we're really grateful to have you and your knowledge on this. I know you have a slideshow prepared that we're gonna go over. And this may be a long one, just so everyone knows, because there's two videos from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, that I, and there was more, by the way, but there's at least these two that I wanted to talk through.

And I may do a follow-up podcast and talk a little bit about the ethics professor I had at Southeastern as well, because he's viewed as more of the conservative, but I don't consider him that on this climate change topic.

But two of these people were more radical. And just to give everyone a quick background before we jump into it, Catherine Hayhoe, some of you might remember a few months ago, there was, at the World Economic Forum, there was this pagan shaman who was blessing all these different, I guess, speakers on a panel on climate change.

And Catherine Hayhoe is there. And this shaman came up and blessed her and all this. Well, Megan Basham caught that, wait a minute, is that the same Catherine Hayhoe who says she's a Christian who spoke at the Southern Baptist University and other Christian universities?

And sure enough, it is. She didn't object to it. She allowed that to happen. And so this created kind of a disturbance. And I knew that these videos were there. I had watched the one with Jonathan Moo, at least parts of it that we're gonna discuss later, but I hadn't really listened to Catherine Hayhoe.

And so I went back and I listened to what the seminary had put out. And I just thought, wow, this is fascinating to me that this is a quote unquote conservative seminary, Bible believing, training pastors, but they're fine signaling a radical climate change agenda.

And their claim is that at the time, Ken Keithley apparently was telling Megan Basham that it was a balanced approach. They had different views, but all the views that I can locate, including Liederbach, who's one of the professors there, seem to be tilting towards we have a problem with climate change.

It's caused by man. These are just assumptions and we need to do something about it. And so anyway, so that created a controversy. And then last week, Tom Buck, who's a prominent Southern Baptist pastor, decided to go on Twitter and post a clip from Jonathan Moo's presentation, which we'll be looking at.

And the reactions to it were quite interesting. I actually have one of them here. A number of professors jumped in this thread. Some people might be able to read that, some can't, but essentially he posted this clip saying that Christians should be in favor of carbon credits.

And one of the forthcoming, or I should say, aspiring students, I'm not sure if they've been accepted or what, but there was a student that wanted to go to Southeastern and said, this concerns me. And then a number of professors, Stephen McKinnon and Ryan Hutchinson, Todd Borger, and then someone who used to work for the seminary, Griffin Goolidge, all jumped in to defend the seminary and their choice of having Jonathan Moo.

And Tom Buck just kept asking him, like, do you reject the teaching in this video? And no one would reject it. No one would reject the teaching. And so this is kind of now on them in a way. I mean, they hosted it at the seminary.

And so I thought, you know what, we should really talk about this. And so that's what we're gonna do. And so Dr. Reeves, I think we're gonna start, it's a longer one, but we're gonna start with Catherine Hayhoe and listen to a number of what she thinks she has to say, which are not as, she's not as nuts and bolts as Jonathan Moo.

And then maybe make a few comments and then we'll go to Jonathan Moo. And once we get there, we're gonna make some, you have some actual facts to present to contradict what Jonathan Moo is saying. So with that, sound good?

Yeah. Okay, so with that, let's start with this presentation. From Catherine Hayhoe. And this was, I believe this was about a year and a half ago at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Climate Change, Dispensationalism, and a Modern Gnosticism

Idea of dispensationalism, where all sort of our apocalyptic theology today comes from. A lot of that can be placed squarely at the door of J .N. Darby. And Mark Knowles' classic, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, I think does a really good job of unpacking that connection.

And it's almost sort of unintentionally humorous for me growing up in that church to read the profound impact that it's had on American culture, far beyond, I think, what Darby would have ever imagined or intended, and to the point where it's not even really recognizable as the route it came from.

And that actually relates to what I do with climate change, because so many people think, oh, well, you know, when the world gets bad enough, we'll just push the eject button, so to speak, and God will take us home, and it doesn't matter what happens to the planet after we leave.

And so that kind of thinking feeds into, well, it doesn't matter. So, you know, the majority of the species on the planet have already become extinct because of our actions. And so 8 million people die from air pollution every year.

You know, so what? It's all gonna end anyways. And so that actually feeds ironically into my work today.

Yeah, I'm thinking of one author that I read who was expressing those sentiments in that he said, if I don't like the wallpaper at a hotel I'm staying in, I don't try to change it. I'm only gonna be there that night.

You know, I don't call the management demanding they change the wallpaper. So that would be, you know, illustrating that mindset, I think, very well.

If I could expand on that, I think you're right. And I would actually categorize that as a modern day form of Gnosticism. Because the Gnostic philosophy, very broadly, there were many different aspects to it that you're more familiar with than I am, but very broadly, it was the idea that the physical didn't matter.

It was just the spiritual that mattered. And the Apostle John wrote his letters to, in part, combat that philosophy very strongly. And he said, you know, Jesus came in the flesh. We saw him, we touched him, he was fully human.

And that carries through to our disregard for this incredible planet, which God handcrafted for us. It is perfect for life. He gave it to us and gave us responsibility over every living thing on this planet in Genesis 1 .1.

And yet somehow, today, we have this modern form of Gnosticism where we don't think the physical matters, even though in the Bible, it's very clear that it does. From the smallest aspects of creation that God cares about, you know, that it talks about in the Bible, to the fact that Jesus actually became a physical human and walked on this physical earth.

We believe that. So how could this not matter to God? Tell us about.

If I could just stop right there, Dr. Reeves. Catherine Hayhoe accuses Christians of Gnosticism, which to me seems like a fairly serious charge because they don't care about the environment enough. And this kind of bothers me.

It just seems like a very heavy thing to accuse someone of.

Yeah, I mean, she doesn't really know what Gnosticism is, I think. She seems to think, to confuse it with asceticism. Gnosticism, you could really turn that back on her because Gnosticism is the idea that you can have some sort of special knowledge, gnosis.

And that is precisely what the advocates of human-caused climate change are saying, that they have some special knowledge and the rest of the world has got to just bow to that. And that if you try and use what we might call traditional approaches to knowledge, we will be making a mistake.

We have to bow down to climate change as conceived by people like Catherine Hayhoe.

No, that's good. I didn't even think of that, that they're the ones that if you wanted to categorize Gnostics, they would be closer. So, okay. Well, let's see if I can pull it up. We'll keep going here.

How your experiences in Columbia may have informed you about understanding the impact of climate change. How would living among those who are at the margins economically, how did that impact your thinking in this area?

When disaster strikes, it is devastating. I mean, it is orders of magnitude worse than it is here. Something here that we might shrug off to there, it can be life-threatening, life-ending, threatening your food supply, your family, your water, your economic stability.

It could mean the difference between having a house versus living on the street. The difference is just extraordinary. Climate change is not only an environmental issue, so to speak, it's an everything issue.

Climate change affects people who are poor the most, people who are hungry the most, people who are vulnerable the most, people who are living in precarious situations who don't have a home for their family, people who live on marginalized lands, like my friends who are building shanty, their houses in shanty towns on the side of a very steep mountain.

When the floods came, then they're the first to be swept down the mountain. And don't get me wrong, we've always had floods and droughts and heat waves and disasters, they've always happened. But I learned that climate change is loading the weather dice against us.

It's making these events more frequent, more damaging, or more severe. And in fact, the U .S. military calls climate change a threat multiplier.

Ah, pause right there. Define, that's the term you used in your lecture at the conference. Please define threat multiplier. I would be glad to, thank you for asking.

A threat multiplier is not something that creates a threat. It takes a threat that already exists, a problem that already exists, and it makes it worse. So climate change does not create poverty. It does not create inequality.

It does not create hunger, lack of access to clean water, disease, political instability, refugee crises. It does not create these. These are unfortunately the product of our lack of management of the resources God gave us.

Here in North America, for just as an example, we throw out over 40 of the food we produce. There is more than enough food to feed the world. There is no logistical reason in terms of how much food we produce that anybody should be hungry in this world.

I'm not saying everybody can be eating, you know, massive steaks every day, and it's not good for us either, but there is enough food to go around. The fact that there's hunger is a flaw in our human systems.

So that is, that's on us. But where does climate change come in? Climate change is increasing the risk of the heat waves and the droughts, and it's disrupting the traditional rainfall patterns that they depend on in Africa, for example, where many people are subsistence farmers.

And so as a result, on average, since the 1980s, we've seen about $5 billion of crop losses every year on average because of climate change impacts loading the dice against us. And much of those losses are happening in the poorest parts of the world.

That's how climate change is taking an already existing problem and making it worse. But decade by decade by decade, we see the world getting warmer.

Okay, if I could just stop right here for one second, Professor Reeves. So she makes a few claims, but she seems to indicate that our human actions are what have prevented third world countries from having access to food because they can't grow because of droughts and all these threat multiplier.

But somehow we in the first world countries are still able to produce enough food for the entire world and the effects of climate change aren't damaging our crops. Am I hearing that right?

Yeah, her whole argument is actually based on a fallacy. She says that disasters are getting more extreme, more frequent, more severe. The data shows otherwise. The book that your listeners should read is the one by Stephen Koonin.

It's called Unsettled with question mark at the end. Koonin was a high official in Obama's government under secretary of state for science or something like that. And he was asked to convene a meeting on climate change.

And he did so with a number, he's a physicist with a number of people. And I think the auspices of the American physics society. And they looked at the data and his book shows that in fact, the data are not showing this increase that Catherine Hayhoe is talking about.

There are not more hurricanes or more energetic hurricanes. There are not more droughts or worse droughts. There are not more wildfires. She says somewhere in that talk that the acreage is increased. Well, Koonin shows that that is not the case.

In fact, the acreage damaged by wildfires has actually gone down. All these allegations that things are more extreme, Koonin just debunks, that isn't the case. So her argument is hold right at the start really.

As to whether it affects other issues,.

We'll come on to that with Jonathan Moo, I think in a few minutes. It just seems to pull on our heartstrings because you envision someone in the third world who's impoverished suffering because of actions that we're taking in the West.

But it doesn't add up that somehow our actions aren't at the source where we're the ones doing them. It's not bothering our crops somehow. We have enough to feed the world, but it does bother theirs, even though we're the ones.

Yeah, I mean, there has been in the last 50 years, there was an unprecedented rise in food crops. And some scientists I know would say that was due to the increase in carbon dioxide. And that is something that they just will not accept.

You know, but that is something that should be taken into account. Koonin talks about that a little in his book, but not very much. It's mostly based on debunking this idea that extremes are getting worse.

And incidentally, the data that he uses is all taken from the IPCC's publications, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC. And so it's official data. It's contained in the science chapters of their reports.

But you would never think that from the way the press and the media report it.

No, not even close. But as we go year by year, we still have winter and summer. We've had record cold in Texas in 2011 and 1989, and the power grid did not prepare for those. And so that's why they were unprepared now.

But at the same time, what we experience where we live is not always warmer temperatures. What we see is what I call global weirding. Like I talked about before, things are getting weirder as climate change loads the dice against us.

And in fact, I was picking up my son from Sunday school a couple of years ago, and I was standing in line behind somebody who goes to our church, and he was just making conversation because they hadn't let the kids out yet.

And he turned to me and said, do you feel like the weather's getting weirder? Drought's getting longer, heat wave's getting stronger, heavy rainfall getting more frequent. And I said, yes, I study this, and I have seen that it is getting weirder.

And he said, I knew it. I've lived here for 30 years, and I can just tell it's not the same as it used to be. That's how we're seeing climate change affect us in the places where we live.

Yeah, I mean, when I was a boy growing up in the Ozarks of Missouri, we did not have armadillos. I know you do in Texas, but I can remember the first time I saw an armadillo dead on the side of the road.

I thought, what in the world is that? And then when I realized what it was, what is it doing here? Yes. And that's indicative of the kind of changes we're talking about.

You're exactly right. And we see it differently depending on where we live. So for example, in the Gulf Coast, they're seeing not more frequent hurricanes, but they're seeing much stronger hurricanes.

As somebody who went through Katrina, I know exactly what you're talking about. Exactly. And then out in the West Coast, we're not seeing more frequent wildfires because most of them are just started by accidental human ignition, but we're seeing that they're burning a lot greater area.

Where I live in Texas, we never used to have fire ants. Fire ants are an invasive species that were introduced to the United States, but they had been kept at bay by our cold winter temperatures in Lubbock because we're actually, we get pretty cold in the winter in Lubbock, but our winters have been warming faster than any other season in Texas.

And so a few years ago, one of our friend's grandmother who was in her nineties, still living on her own, very independent, dedicated gardener, she was out gardening and she saw these ants running around and she thought nothing of it because we had never had fire ants in this part of Texas, never.

So unfortunately she didn't have great circulation in her legs, so she was standing there gardening. The fire ants went all over her. They bit her so badly that she ended up in intensive care in the hospital before she realized what was happening.

And that's an example of how our warmer winters are increasing our risks where we live. So you see armadillos, we see fire ants in Texas, and where I grew up in Ontario, in Canada, we never had ticks.

So Lyme disease and ticks, that was, we didn't even know what that was. In fact, one student who was working with me, she got Lyme disease through studying kudzu through tramping through all of the woods in the Southeast US.

And when she went back to Canada, it took them forever to diagnose it because they'd never seen Lyme disease. Well, fast forward 15 years, ticks and Lyme disease are all over Southern Ontario. Why? Because our, and so is kudzu.

Kudzu is also in Southern Ontario because our cold winters are no longer cold enough to kill off these pests and invasives. And on climate change, the people who care least about it and who are most

Climate Change, Species Migration, and the Limits of Weather Memory

Okay, let's stop there.

So what do you say, Dr. Reeves, to armadillos in Missouri, fire ants in Texas, and ticks and kudzu in Ontario? Are these, and I don't know if that's true or not, I don't live in these regions, but are these species invading areas that were once too cold and now they're warming up because of human activity or what?

Well, climate does change. There's no doubt about that. And it's not unreasonable to find that different populations of different animals, insects, and so on will move around according to the climate that they're experiencing.

But to build this whole edifice of climate change and climate emergency, climate crisis, and all that, to build that on a few observations like that is going far too far. I mean, I've lived long enough to have experienced one of the coldest winters ever in the UK, which was 1963, and one of the hottest summers ever in 1976.

And nothing since then has been, no summer has been hotter, no winter has been colder. So what do I make of that? The weather is warming or the weather is cooling down? The climate, sorry. The climate is just accumulated weather, if you like.

Do you think this plays on the short, like the memories of people who only lived decades? So the example that I have is I'd live in New York and there'll be old timers who will say, when I was a kid, we used to go make fires on the ice and we'd spend all day out on the lake and ice fish.

And you rarely get a summer, or a winter, I should say, that gets cold enough to do that kind of thing. And in the mountains, you might have that, but we just had a very mild winter. And so you'll have guys who are older, they'll think back to, hey, the 1950s weren't like this.

But during that time, my understanding is we actually had a fairly cold spell in New York. And so they're comparing it to memories of a child that their first memories were during a uniquely cold period.

And so we haven't been measuring temperature even that long, right? So I guess I'm just wondering like over the long span, over centuries, wouldn't you need a longer view to make the case that we're indeed going through a crazy climate change?

Exactly, you're quite right. I mean, I think this will come up in discussing some of Jonathan Moo's arguments later as well. But that is true. There is a very interesting website you can get called realclimatescience .com.

It's run by a guy called Tony Heller. He lives out in the Southwest USA somewhere, I think. And he specializes in getting newspaper reports of extreme weather in 1930, 1910, 1896, and things like this.

And you can look at that and you can just see, well, had the climate change, human-caused climate change narrative been going then, you would have found all sorts of stories that people could have made up.

But it's just climate changes, that's how it does. You can't tie it down to the one single cause.

Right, okay. Yeah, let's see if we can get through this. I don't know, we have a few more minutes here and then we'll jump into Jonathan Moo's stuff.

Local and attacking scientists are very sadly often people who self-identify as either white Catholics or white evangelicals, either one. I mean, I can literally count on the fingers of my hands over 10 years, how many people have specifically told me, well, you can't be a real scientist or I don't trust your science because you're a Christian.

But unfortunately, I need all my hands and all my toes, all my fingers and all my toes to count the number of Christians who tell me I'm not a real Christian because I'm a scientist on a weekly basis.

That is hard to hear. That is really tough. And the fact that you are handling it so well, you seem to handle it so well, is quite remarkable. And that's a great question for us to close with in that Southeastern Seminary is a Southern Baptist institution.

We are part of the Southern Baptist Convention. And as Southern Baptists, we do understand how economic and socioeconomic and political issues can cloud the judgment of otherwise very good people. You know, we as Southern Baptists have made some, I mean, the origin of our denomination is a very tragic story over the whole issue of slavery.

So these are so many of the people who are disagreeing with you. If you knew them on a daily basis, you'd see them in a Sunday school class, they'd be just be wonderful. And yet on this issue or something to this, it's very distorted and that's hard to take.

So how can we have a conversation that models the love of Christ? How do we do that?

Well, that is a very interesting link you just drew because there is an evangelical Christian who's a historian. His name is Jean François Mouhal. And he has studied the relationship between climate change and slavery.

And what he's found is he would read the letters to the editor and the comments that people would publish in the newspaper back in the pre-Civil War era. And then he compared that to the letters to the editor and the comments that people would publish today in support of continuing a fossil fuel-based economy.

And what he found is in some of those letters, you could literally take out slavery and replace it with fossil fuels. The same economic arguments were being used to argue for both of them. And of course, everyone wants a healthy economy.

Of course, everyone wants people to have good jobs, to be able to feed their families. Of course, we all want this, but do we want it at the price of truth and justice? And I think the answer to that is we do not.

And in that answer, Christians have always led the way. They've led the way in the anti-slavery movement. They've led the way in civil rights. They've led the way in championing the rights of, again, the poorest and most vulnerable in some of the most remote parts of the world.

We know that we are called to walk justly and to show love. And so when I talk with people about climate change, I don't assume that they're motivated by bad reasons. I assume they're motivated by good reasons.

I assume that they want to be a good person. I assume that if they're a Christian, they have a new heart. I assume that they have the Holy Spirit living in them. I actually have some people on my list who I pray for along those exact lines, who it's really been impossible to have a positive conversation with because they're so steeped in their political ideology.

Their ideological glasses, so to speak, are so thick they can't see past them. I talked in my presentation about how I really see what I do is what it talks about in the book of James, where it's like, we're like the man who looked in the mirror and forgot what he looked like, went away and forgot what he looked like.

So I see myself as holding up the mirror, and some people's glasses are so thick they literally can't see who God has made them. But I still have people who I pray for along those lines because I believe if they are Christians, and we don't know, we can't see someone's heart, but if they are, then God's spirit is speaking to them.

It might be at a very faint whisper, but it's there, even in the back of their brain. So starting with the idea that people wanna do the right thing, that they wanna be a good person is really important to a constructive conversation.

Because if somebody comes up to you wagging a bony finger of judgment, telling you that you're doing something wrong, especially if it's something you didn't think was wrong, we immediately, our human reaction is just to say, oh, yeah, well, fine, I'm gonna double down on that then.

So starting from that place of mutual respect, of not making any negative assumptions, and then the next assumption I make is, first of all, they're doing what they think is right. The second assumption I make is, if they're truly Christians, they believe what the Bible says, and we can have a conversation about what the Bible says.

And I believe that if they really understand what the Bible says, then they too would understand that they're the perfect person to care, not despite of who they are, or not because they have to change of who they are, but because of who they already are, because of who God has already made them.

So God has already made us perfect children of God. Our behavior isn't perfect. We all know that. We have a lot of behavior improvement to work on as we are continually being renewed. But God has created a, has conducted a heart surgery, so to speak, at our core, giving us that new heart, that new hardware, so to speak, that we need to truly understand who we are.

And if we approach conversations like that, not every conversation is gonna end well, because some people, you know, their ears are stopped, their eyes are closed, as Jesus talks about with the Pharisees.

Sometimes the most religious people are the hardest people to talk to, and Jesus saw this and talks about this. But many others are able to look, to think, to ponder. And as one Christian said to me, he said, he had been very skeptical before, and he followed me on social media very quietly, once in a while, asked a few questions.

Then finally, he said this to me, he said, you dragged my sorry denier's ass to the truth. He said, and he went on to say how as a Christian, he thought in truth was important. And so that's where he ended up.

And I just, that is my favorite line that I've ever received. That's a great story.

Well, it's on that hopeful note, we wanna say thank you, Dr. Hayhoe, for taking the time to have this conversation. And we're encouraged by the very exciting ministry that the Lord has given you in the area of climate change.

Thank you for joining us.

Jonathan Moo on Creation Care, the Gospel, and Carbon Credits

Okay, well, Dr. Reeves, I just heard, I don't even know what to say to that. Like, how do you have a respectful conversation? Well, you have to realize that the people you're talking to are good people, even though they forgot who they were, like James says, they're against justice and truth, and they might even be deploying pro-slavery arguments, but they're good people.

That's what I just heard. So I don't know if you have any comments on that. It's not even about climate change, but the tactic to kind of inject this into Christianity is just super odd to me.

Yeah, it seems unlikely that she has really thought theologically about climate change. I think it seemed to be very superficial. Yeah. I'd like to assume all those nice things about her as well. Yeah.

But on some level, I'm sure it's all true, but it's a lack of understanding, biblical understanding, I think.

Yeah, well, the music and everything, I guess this is just me at the end. It almost sounded like we were leading up to an almost an altar call experience here that we're going to all give up our diesel trucks.

And anyway, all right. So that was, do you want me to show any slides on this specifically before we go to Jonathan Moo or do you wanna just jump into Jonathan Moo?

Well, I did prepare a few, but if you make them available. We can do that, yeah, we can. To your listeners online, that'll probably do it rather than go into long discussion now.

Okay, yeah. So, all right, let's get into Jonathan Moo then and we can display, you just let me know if you wanna display a slide and I have them all here. So this is Jonathan Moo who actually was, both Catherine Hayhoe and Jonathan Moo were at Southeastern Seminary giving presentations.

And then Catherine Hayhoe also did this interview, which is what we just played clips from. But I wanna play for Jonathan Moo, his actual lecture that he gave. And remember, these are aspiring pastors.

These are people that will be in your pulpits. Some of them already are preaching to you and they went to seminary so that they could learn how to rightly divide the word of truth. And this is the kind of thing that the seminary thinks is useful for them to be exposed to and hear.

So here's Jonathan Moo.

Faithful to the gospel, we must care well for God's creation. It's not an option. It's not just something we might add on to lots of other programs we might do. It's not even just a clever strategy for evangelism.

Although I do consider it one of the ways in which faithful Christian witness must be lived out in our time. And one that many people around us, many of my students are longing to see the church do more fully.

And the reasons why this is absolutely vital, it should be woven into all that we do and proclaim is first and foremost, because it is part of the gospel. It is part of what it is to love God and neighbor.

I'm ignoring all the advice of social. Can I just jump in?

I know that was really short there, but I think I just heard heresy potentially, because he just said, loving God and neighbor is part of the gospel. And this is fighting climate change, which is the rest of his presentation and environmental issues and so forth.

That if you're not on board with this, that you're somehow not being faithful to the gospel, which that's scary to me. How do you even get there? But he's merging his version of the law with the grace of Christ.

And I just need to make that theological point before we get into the science. I don't know if you have anything on that, but that's my opinion though. Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, all right. Social scientists and even of someone who I respect deeply, like Catherine Hayhoe, who says giving people lots of data is pointless. It just goes over the heads. Kind of, we don't pay attention to it.

All we should have is stories and that sort of thing. Many people in the world starve and are still starving right now, but there's enough food on earth. It's because of the inequity in how food is distributed because of the injustices built into our system that people starve.

The topsoil upon which we depend is being lost at rates 10 to 40 times the rate it can be as fast as it can be replenished.

Okay, so I wanna stop with some of these claims that he makes that are very detailed. So he just talked about the topsoil rates and right after talking about how we have enough food, but we have injustice and injustice is keeping the food from getting out there.

But then he turns around and makes this claim that actually, maybe it's not the injustice so much, it's our topsoil, 40 of it's gone. It's being eroded. So what's he talking about? I didn't even know what he was talking about when I heard that.

I've never heard that before. I don't know if there was any paper, written paper with citations or anything on it. I just heard that and I thought, well, where does that come from? Okay, you had the same thought I did then, okay.

So we don't have anything in your slides.

About that particular claim. Okay. He has got some slides in a minute. Within my lifetime, we just live on an earth that has 68 fewer wild vertebrates than it did then.

Okay, so I don't know if, I'm gonna just stop every time he makes a claim. So 68 less wild vertebrates, anything on that? It may be true.