California, maybe there's some state where it's different. You cannot control another person's body if they don't want to be controlled. The exception being prisoners who have committed crimes, you can put them in jail. But if somebody has not committed a crime or let's say has not been convicted of a crime, there is no way anybody, including the parents, can touch their body. And if you can't touch physically you can't hold them, you can't handcuff them, you can't tie them up. If you can't physically stop anybody because it's illegal, the kid can just stand up and walk out the front door. There's nothing you can do legally. Suppose you tried to physically constrain him. Well it would get violent whatever, but in the end you can't keep a kid handcuffed forever. As soon as the handcuff comes off they walk out the door.

Now you can commit somebody who's a danger to themselves. There's a process where they can be hospitalized for a short time and even tied to a bed. And of course you'll find that many, many parents of addicts have actually done that. They've actually taken their addict kid, committed them, and they get tied to a bed, literally tied to a bed. They can't even move their arms. And you give them all good medical treatment, etc. But what does the addict do when the time that that is legal expires? They get up, they walk out the door, and they do drugs. Why? Because the drugs are better than their alternatives. They like it. It's their choice. There's nothing you can do to stop a human being from taking drugs.

So back to the free needle exchange thing. When you say I would prefer that we spend our energy getting them off drugs, you have to understand there is no path to that. If the people wanted to get off drugs they also wouldn't need this needle exchange thing. They would be working through a system. They'd be in rehab. They'd be doing what they needed to do. If they don't want it you can't make them want it and you can't make them do anything. So for those people you only have a choice of essentially addict death or this needle exchange thing which keeps them alive long enough maybe they can come around on their own. They decide life is better, life without drugs. And most of them won't. So I wanted to add that piece of information that if you assume that you can help these people who don't want to be helped, you've missed the most important variable in the entire conversation. The drugs are better than anything you could take away from them. The drugs are better than any penalty that you could give them. The drugs are better than their family, everything they love. The drugs are better.

All right, I'd like to end on these climate discussions now. You may have noticed that I've created a little bit of a kerfuffle on the internet with my so far at least a little bit balanced discussion of climate because you've never seen a balanced discussion of climate and it makes everybody mad. Both sides are hating me at the moment because they're like oh you said that one thing about my side. But they're both saying it right now. So apparently I got the attention of Judith Curry, who most of you know as maybe the most prominent skeptical voice in climate. I don't know if she would label herself that way but she doesn't agree with the mainstream. And she addressed one of my tweets. So I followed her. I didn't realize she was following me on Twitter. And I'm imagining that I might invite her to come on a Periscope because she would be a good voice.

Now here's the interesting thing. The thing she responded to is I tweeted that it is literally impossible for a citizen, people like me who are not climate scientists, to understand the debate. And I've been proving this every single day. So every single day the following thing happens. I'll take a climate claim, doesn't matter what it is, something about ice or sea level or temperatures, whatever the claim is, and they'll say here's the claim. Here's a really credible sounding critic and they say that this is all BS and they show their work. So you see the claim and you think well that's pretty convincing. It's all the scientists are on the same side and they all say this. Then the critic comes in and goes okay here's what they did wrong. It's obvious. I'm using the same information they are. I told you what they did wrong. I'm telling you how to fix it. I'm laying it out here. There's nothing hidden. Look at my work. And you can tell clearly that the climate scientists got this wrong. And then I look at the skeptic. I'm like huh, that is very convincing. And then the scientist or somebody who's on the same side as a scientist comes in behind the skeptic and they say ah, this skeptic, they're always saying crazy stuff. Here's five other things they said that weren't true. And by the way here's why they're wrong in this case too because they did something wrong or they're doing something with the numbers, etc.

Now when the scientist comes back in they are totally credible because I can't judge the scientist. I can't judge the critic and I can't judge the scientist again when they come behind the critic. Now what happens after the scientist comes back the second time and says the critic was wrong? The critic comes back in and the critic says no, your objections to my criticism are off base and here's why. And then you read them and you say okay those sound like pretty good reasons. To infinity. Whoever talks last in any narrow topic on climate science, you believe whoever just goes last.

And so Judith Curry was agreeing with my general statement that we citizens cannot penetrate the topic. I would say with certainty now, this was a suspicion that has now moved to a certainty in my mind, that you cannot do your own homework and get an answer on climate science. That it just can't be done. And it's because the ping-pong between the opinions will be infinite and you'll always get to a point where you don't understand what they're saying. So even if you start at the top and the claim is something just dead simple: sea level is rising too quickly. Just a dead simple claim. Critic says no it isn't because this or that. Scientist comes in and says yes it is, you forgot to include this or that. By about the fourth iteration they're going to be talking science and you're gone, right? They're going to be talking about words you haven't heard, concepts you're not aware of, contexts you don't fully understand. So if you think you can follow that chain to a conclusion and you're not a scientist working in this field, that is just a hallucination.

What happens instead, and it's quite obvious to me at this point, is that people have a bias or they're willing to have a bias I guess, and they simply go down the chain of no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no until they're exhausted or they can't find the next reply. And when they can't find the next reply they say okay, the last person I read, that must be the one. I don't exactly know what they said or why but that last person who talked was pretty smart. So really the people who think that they have good opinions and that they've researched and they've come to their own independent opinion, total illusion. All they've done is they've come down to the bottom of the chain and they don't know what the next response is or it hasn't happened or they don't understand it. There's no thinking going on in the public. None. No thinking. It's an illusion that we're giving ourselves based on the fact that we don't have the capability of understanding the argument.

Now what's funny is Judith Curry said she agreed with, in a broad way, she agreed with the statement that it was hard for the citizens to penetrate the topic. And she said this is why I put it in simple form. And then she connected to a document that is just on the question of whether the sea level is rising in a way that's unusual. Now how many pages do you think her simplification was? Right? So here's somebody who agrees with me that the topic is too complicated for the average person. So she simplifies it and she sends me a link to it and then I read it. 72 pages. One question: is sea level rising in an unusual way? It's the unusual part that's the important part. So because apparently the sea level has been rising for a long time. 72 pages to answer the question is sea level going up or do we know now? I'm pretty smart but I also don't have infinite time so I skimmed it. I looked at the executive summaries. I looked at a few charts and stuff. But that 72 pages of simplification were so far above my ability to really judge them for credibility it didn't help me at all. Didn't help me at all.

The other thing that I know for sure is if I took her document, which by the way was completely credible, meaning that I looked at it and I thought huh, this is a smart person who knows this topic. The things they're saying must be easy to check so you wouldn't say something that was wrong that was just so easy to check, right? So completely convincing. And her point was that we don't have a signal of human involvement so far that we can sort out from the natural variations to know whether CO2 is making the ocean rise so far. Which is different from will it happen in the future but so far. But I also know that if I took her 72-page paper and handed it to any scientist who's working in the field, specifically ocean sea level stuff in climate science, they would look at her paper and they would say well here are all the things she got wrong or the things she didn't consider or why there's some context that matters or the study that she didn't mention. And I would read the new one and I would say okay that looks pretty good. I can't really judge it. I'm not a scientist. I don't know if any of the claims are true but they sure look good. And I'm sure that if I said hey Judith Curry, this scientist who has good credentials just said that your 72 pages has some flaws and it's wrong, what would she say? Do you think there's any chance she would say oh darn, good criticism, I changed my paper, I changed my mind? No, there's no chance of that. She would tell you with 100% certainty she would go in and say no, that scientist got it wrong. I say in the original paper and he's ignoring what I said and what he's saying has already been debunked by this paper so I'm actually right after all, etc., forever. The scientist would disagree, she would disagree. You cannot penetrate this topic.

Here are the current outstanding questions about climate, and if anybody has anything to add to this I would love to see it. I think I called for this on Twitter already but I haven't seen it. So there's a skeptical notion that the CO2 does affect temperature but that its effect tapers off, meaning that the first amounts of CO2 do affect temperature but it starts to make less and less of a difference the more CO2 there is. That seems like maybe the simplest thing that you could test. Do you think even that simple question we could look at what the scientists say and then look at what the skeptics say and again you know how each of them respond to each other, do you think we could even find out the answer to that simple question? I don't think so. And it's the basic question that's driving this entire thing. No, I don't think we can.

Well let me put it this way. I'm not claiming that science doesn't know the answer. I'm claiming that we non-scientists will never know if science knows the answer. We could know maybe how many people are on each side but when we look at the arguments we're helpless. We can't judge the arguments.

And so I hear some of you flailing around in your own hallucinations. So here's somebody who's hallucinating and you can tell from the comments. Somebody said CO2, think of it as a tiny oscillation and it can only absorb so much. Right? If you believe whoever said that comment, if you believe you have a grasp on this topic, I guarantee you you're hallucinating because you do not. If I put you in a room with a bunch of climate scientists do you think they would say oh Bob, we didn't think of this tiny oscillating thing, nobody had mentioned before the idea that CO2 might have a maximum and might be saturated. This is the first time we've ever heard that argument. Do you think that's going to happen? No. They're going to tell you why you're full of baloney and then you're going to find a skeptic who says why they're full of baloney, etc., forever. You cannot penetrate this topic.

All right, that's enough on that. We might need to double back when the president does his speech because it's going to