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[Music] well uh thank you for being here thanks uh i'm really appreciative of your time and the fact that you are willing to talk about this this is a a very interesting book and extremely controversial and i'm not exactly sure why that is but i think it's a part of the times we're living in yeah how many co your your book is called unsettled correct yes how many copies of this book so we've sold since it was published at the end of april so about 10 months ago we sold more than 120 000 copies 120 000 you know i don't know anything about publishing but my agent and publisher are sort of amazed at the numbers that's a lot and without much fanfare from the media if any well it depends which media you look at where where have you gotten so i've gotten good coverage from the wall street journal but if you look at the new york times washington post not very good coverage at all didn't make the new york times bestseller that seems strange because it's a lot of copies yeah right well you would think right yeah okay cnn nothing um and uh i think you know people are just ignoring it which really surprises me now your book is on the climate it's on climate change and climate science and we should just establish right away um just because i know you're going to experience some criticism right right clearly um first of all your credentials you graduated from high school at 16 you went to mit uh cal tech first i was an undergrad at caltech and then i went to mit i did a phd there in theoretical physics in three years and then i went back to caltech where i was on the faculty for 30 years and you were on the faculty at 23 years of age that's correct pretty extraordinary yeah it's unusual not unprecedented but really quite unusual now um there's a there's a couple criticisms that people have of you just just to get these out of the way right away one of them is that you used to work for bp yeah that is this is a big one so if you work for some sort of an oil company you were chief scientist i was chief scientist at bp for five years after celtic um and you know they didn't bring me
there to uh help them find oil right they knew how to do that really well i was brought in to help figure out what beyond petroleum really meant and that was renewables and alternatives to oil and gas and i helped during my five years to help part a strategy for that which is today now 15 years later are starting to be realized but once you say you work for bp there's a certain section of our population that will immediately dismiss anything you said yeah of course and and you know it's part of a structural problem that the advantage of having been in bp is i learned about the energy system and i teach it at nyu these days i just did my first lecture yesterday and so i actually know quite a bit about how the energy system currently works and a lot of people who want to change the energy system have no idea at all of how it works and so they can do great damage if they do the wrong sort of thing well in reading your book one of the things that became very uh clear is there's so much data to sort through it's it's incredibly complex i actually listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where i had to go back over it again just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening to squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front you are you're very clear about this you believe the climate is changing climate is changing i believe that human beings are having an effect they are influencing those changes yes absolutely mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere absolutely your position though is that there's an either an exaggeration or there's there's a way that people are looking at the data that's alarmist that you don't think is reflected by the actual numbers themselves that's correct i think that you know to put it in a british sense uh they have over egged the custard now why do you think this has happened i you know there's i have in the book one of my favorite quotes from h.l
mencken is the purpose of practical politics is to keep people alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety now if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the climate is changing what what what percentage of an effect are human influences yeah so you know i think we don't really know that the u.n intergovernmental panel on climate change in its last report in august said you know it's all uh human caused in the last many decades all of them all of it but you know they completely forget that the climate was changing at comparable ways well before human influences became important and and so they they said no no we we're going to ignore that we're going to suppress it and say it's all human caused now one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on earth over a period of say like 100 years that if you do it in these blocks of time that there's a way to look at it in a deceptive way that makes it seem in the alarmist way where it makes it seem that radical drastic change is happening over a very short period of time that's all i've ever heard yeah so you know the climate changes a lot on its own maybe we can put up a picture which is one of the ones i wanted to show you can we put up um the second chart in that file called [ __ ] in thumbs and what i'm going to show you is a record of the height of the nile river okay which has been compiled by the egyptians we go to the net there we go so this is the height of the nile river from 640 a.d up until 1450 a.d so about 800 years of data every year about what was the lowest level that the nile river reached in that year the nile was important to the egyptians as you might imagine and so they measured it pretty carefully and what you see are two things the blue spikes are the annual
values they go up and down a lot one year it was up at six meters 20 feet and then the next year it was down to one meter or something like that so a lot of variability from year to year but then if you look at the curve which is the average trend over 30 years you can see for example in the first hundred years it was going down and you can imagine some medieval egyptian climate panel saying new normal new normal we've got to do prayers and sacrifices and of course if they just waited another 100 years it came back up again and this was all before humans had any influence on the climate are we looking at climate and we're looking at these periods of time um are we looking at them incorrectly because we have such a short lifespan ourselves that we tend to think of great change as happening in these incremental ups and downs but realistically we should be looking at it on a broad long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years yes so so climate changes on all time scales it changes on thousand year time scales it changes on ten thousand year time scales and it changes on decades every decade it changes um and you know we also forget a lot um in the midwest there was a drought in 1955 and one of the news magazines time magazine said this drought will be long remembered right nobody remembers 1955 drought anymore so we forget and we think things are unprecedented when in fact they have happened before now you are by training you're a physicist correct correct and another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist people will say that now my question though and uh i think you you'd probably be able to help me on this is like what exactly is a climate scientist because most science you have a hypothesis you run tests you get results and then you do these experiments and that's how you get your data with climate science is it based off models i you know it climate science is a very
integrative discipline it involves physics chemistry biology geology statistics computer modeling and so on so nobody can be an expert in everything many prominent climate scientists are trained as physicists like jim hansen michael mann michael mann actually once applied to be my graduate student and he decided to go to yale instead but that's a different discussion that was many decades ago um and so so some of it is certainly physics i have published in physics and about climate science i published a paper in august where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how shiny the earth was that's very important because if the earth gets less shiny it absorbs more sunlight and so gets warmer and we published a paper and it attracted some attention press releases and so on so i have published in climate science but more importantly the kind of things i point out in the book are obvious to anybody who has any quantitative sense at all it's like you know if i were ordering carpet for a room and the room was 8 by 10 i would need 80 square feet of carpet if the carpet guy comes back and says you need 400 square feet i'm going to ask them some hard questions right and that's the kind of misleading things that i'm pointing out in the book how did you get started on this journey of being i want to say obsessed but if not fascinated with the science of climate change and the data itself so i was exposed to climate science in the uh early 90s when i was working with a group called jason which we can talk about at some point uh for the government and looking at the impact of then high performance computing and small satellites on um uh climate science and the croup group jason is top scientists in their field that are recruited to work for the us government and it's like what is it 70 percent of it is classified yeah something like that we work for all government agencies but a lot of what we do is is for the national security parts
of the government and it's tackling the most complex difficult scientific technical problems sometimes uh you know mysteries that the government finds going on in other countries things of that sort what's going on etc how do we do x y or z technically um and so what was the initial study that you had read or what so the initial thing that got me interested uh was um the department of energy wanted to deploy a fleet of small satellites which remember this was 30 years ago so that was a pretty big innovative deal to look at the earth and monitor what was going on for climate purposes for science and one of the things that you could do was to measure how shiny the earth was the albedo it's called technically whiteness of the earth and of course being curious we asked the question well how was the albedo first measured and the answer was back in the 30s some guy started watching the dark part of the moon and that brightness of the dark part of the moon is lit by light that is reflected from the earth and so is a good measure of how shiny the earth is it hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years and so we started up a program that continues to this day to watch the dark part of the moon to monitor how bright the earth is and we just published a paper in august that showed the earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years and so not surprising it perhaps gotten warmer anyway that sort of got me interested in climate science when i moved into the private sector i was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could develop and deploy or demonstrate and deploy technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions and i did that for quite a while in both bp and then in the government and then in 2014 the american physical society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science they had put out a statement in 2007 which was very controversial among the physicists
because it used the word incontrovertible and for a physicist that's fighting words okay so uh i they asked me you know steve recommend a new statement and so i said heck we're physicists we're not going to take anybody's word for it let's look at the issue ourselves and so i convened a one-day meeting with three mainstream climate scientists and three credentialed skeptical scientists and we sat for a day presentations talk discussion in early 2014 it's all up on the web it was transcribed you can find the transcript and i came away from that thinking this science is not anywhere near as settled as i thought it was because of the problems with the models the observational data and so on and my little group wound up proposing a statement that could not get through the bigger committee that was approving such things people would say things like we can't say that even if it's true because it gives ammunition to the deniers really yeah yep now how frustrate as a scientist i got so frustrated because i'm used to through jason and others of giving advice to decision makers you play it straight you you know you say this could be this may not be here are the options and so on but you don't try to spin the advice to get one answer or another and i was really annoyed by that i wound up resigning from the committee but i wound up then publishing an op-ed in the wall street journal they gave me two thousand words which was great we got a couple of thousand online comments many people said thanks for writing this and trying to expose the real science to what's going on uh of course the establishment trashed me completely even though i was just repeating what's actually in the reports and in the research now what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you oh you know your cherry and and we get it to this day with the book you know you're cherry-picked um you're um misleading um what you said is actually not true
and so on even though i point to you know chapter and verse in the reports where these things are said so is this are the scientists that are claiming you're cherry-picking are they are they signaling to the other people that follow the ideology that you're not to question climate change and that anything that you say that in any way calls doubt to the settling of the data gives some sort of ammunition to the people who are the real climate deniers who are a real problem yes indeed indeed and look my sense is that this is a problem it's not an existential threat by any means and it's a problem that we have time to deal with and we should deal with it uh in time in a graceful way but i think you know when the book first came out there appeared an article in scientific american written by i think 13 mainstream climate scientists that was a couple thousand words of mostly ad hominem criticisms a couple of substantive criticisms which i have rebutted i think quite effectively um but it it you know put a a marker in the ground that people who didn't want to have the book understood uh could point to and said aha you know those guys said kunin's an idiot now what what criticisms made sense that you could rebut um well you know they said for example i said sea level rise was not accelerating and of course i got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise but they would criticize uh a review of what i said by somebody else or they would say sometimes you know kuden said that and it's true but it's not important because of a b and c if you don't mind pull that microphone just a little closer sure how's that perfect now so these criticisms that were levity against you did did anyone uh of prominence that is a climate scientist come out and say this is a very interesting analysis of the data these are things that i hadn't considered coonan makes a lot of really good points um not in public not impossible not in public in private you
know when i first sort of came out in uh that wall street op-ed in 2014 i had a chat with a the chair of a very prominent earth science department at one of our best universities i won't say who or where but suffice it to say it's somebody who was firmly in the business and he said you know steve i agree with almost everything you said but i don't dare say it in public wow all right you know there's a whole organization called covering climate now which is a consortium of media including the bbc and npr i think and so on who have you can look them up on the web and they have signed an agreement or made an agreement that they will not cover anything that diverges from the narrative and who establishes the narrative like where what's the top of the heap um i think you know the authoritate allegedly authoritative voices are uh the u.n intergovernmental panel on climate change ipcc which issues reports major reports every six or seven years there is the u.s national academies of science there is the uk royal society and the u.s government issues reports as well and you know when you get into the meat of these reports they have some problems and you know we can go into them but by and large they're pretty good summaries of the science but when you get to the summaries for policy makers or you get to the media coverage or the political discussion that's where things get really corrupted so it's like a long game of telephone that starts with the basic science and the scientists doing it are by and large you know good honest hard-working people and you talk to them privately and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got but by the time it gets to the end in the public it's you know the science is settled we're headed for doom et cetera et cetera but that's always the case with something that's really controversial right there's there's always the alarmist perspective and the people that are looking at it that have maybe a less extreme point of view are
criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough and then there's what you were saying earlier is that people are saying that like they can't even say certain things because it will give ammunition to the people that are real climate skeptics right the people that aren't paying attention to the science that have an ideology or a dogma that goes in the other direction there's so much analogy here with the reformation when the catholic church started to come at odds with the protestant movement let me give you two examples uh in one of the best recent introductions i've had you know i'm a hummer guy and i usually like to keep the introduction short but this one was real interesting i was compared to william tyndall now i didn't know who william tyndall was i'm not a historian so i had to look up william tyndall in the early 16th century did one of the first translations of the bible from the original greek and hebrew into english so it had been originally in latin and so um that let ordinary people read what was in the bible and of course the establishment got really mad at him for doing that he was eventually burned at the take a stake for that and other reasons um so you know i sort of made these reports accessible at least parts of it uh to ordinary non-experts so that's one the other one which is maybe even more amusing a couple years ago 13 senators led by mr schumer proposed a bill that says the government may not spend any money to challenge the consensus the council of trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about church dogma not about spending money but you know you you'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenge dogma what would possibly motivate the government to come out with a a statement like that that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus and doesn't a consensus mean most it doesn't mean all right so in in cases of dogmatic opinions or ideologically formulated opinions i you know i i'm so
surprised that the government would try to suppress the scientific process like that i think what precipitated it was i had for a number of years been advocating for a red team review of climate reports and where you get a bunch of credentialed people to look at the report and ask what's wrong with this we do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments and i almost got to the point where we could have pulled it off but uh the trump administration in the end decided they wouldn't do it now the trump administration had some of its own problems with climate science in the wrong way correct absolutely absolutely you know i felt i was of course a little bit concerned about going through the administration but i had lined up the national academies to play the blue team i had assembled pretty much a good red team and then it was stopped at the last minute by a political decision so i'm really disappointed because i point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports you know it says x but in fact the truth is why if you look at the data so we need that it's about the integrity of the scientific institutions so let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled when you first walked away from this meeting that you were discussing and you you realize that this is either far more complex or it's influenced in a way where it's not just about the data it's about what the narrative is so how do you go from there before you write this book like what is what are your next steps so i started um uh paying more attention to the disconnect between what was actually in the science versus what was either in the reports or in the political dialogue i think the next turning point came when i was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes
and i turned to the official u.s government report in 2014 at the time and you see this graph in the body of the report of some property of hurricanes going through the roof over the last 30 years and it sure looks like if you look at that graph we're in trouble and so i dig a little deeper i look up the reference that the site and i read in the back of the same report and page 700 and something if i remember right and it says there are no long-term trends in hurricanes which is still largely a true statement all right and i'm looking at that and i said my god that's a swindle in the part of the report that everyone's going to read you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is going to break loose and then in the back it says we don't see any long-term trends so what is the graph like what is this so the graph is basically a graph it's called the power dissipation index which is a graph of how many storms and how intense they are over the last 40 years and what is the trend well in that particular case it was going up okay from 1980 up until uh 2010 but what they didn't show you was there was an earlier part of the graph in which it was going down okay so it was really looked like a return to normal so in the beginning of the graph from 1970 to 1980s that we were saying it's going down yep yep do you have an image of that yeah i i think i do actually hang on maybe and so what they were looking at again we were talking about how we're measuring things on these uh very small increments where time for us is a hundred years it's our lifetime so we're looking at things like as if that's a lot of time that's right and there are these long-term trends as you saw in the egyptian river can we pull up us chart number 35 in uh the unsettled file and we can safely assume that in those long-term trends in the egyptian data that you're not talking about human influence because it's too long no it's too much to yeah right okay so let's pull up
chart 35 and then so there is the original uh graph in the government report from 2014 and what's shown is from 1980 to 2010 and it's going up right right but if you see from 19 it looks like about 70. so let's look at let's look at the whole record which is the next uh picture there it is all right okay so it's real similar to the egyptian data that's up and down now there's a lot of controversy still uh this was um 10 years ago or so um there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense one paper says yes another paper published in july says no and so on so the matter is kind of unsettled at the moment but overall the as i can read for you the official report the official statement from the most recent u.n report let me just get it there is low confidence in most reported long-term multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone that's hurricanes frequency or intensity based metrics now that image jamie can you pull it up again please yep that image when you see 1975 then you see 2005 it's not that much of a difference so the peak of 19 excuse me 1945 the peak of 1945 and then you go to 2005 it's you're not looking at that much of a difference right and clearly there's been a gigantic difference in the amount of human influence of course of course let me show you another one all right can we go to chart three of the other file and this is one i think i'm going to go public with pretty soon in an op-ed but let's put it up this is about greenland okay and for popular image that greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on all right this is the official data set for how much ice greenland is losing every year okay and the it goes up right until 2021 and it starts in 1900 and what's interesting about this there are several things first of all even though human warming influences
have been growing steadily over the course of this there are a lot of ups and downs so it says it's got to be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here the second thing to notice is that in the most recent decades at the right hand end of the chart greenlands is actually starting to melt less rapidly than more rapidly even as the globe has been warming and this is from 2010 to 2020. yeah correct and then if you go back to 1930 you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930 as it was in the last decade or two and the human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today in 1930. so what are the other influences if they're not that's an excellent uh question and the answer is this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the north atlantic and you can find papers that say that all right the research papers uh but you don't hear any of that from the official reports or the media so the the the different factors that play into what we think the different factors are that play into the melting is greenhouse gases warming yes warming warming and what are the other ones the others are ocean currents that have their own dynamics that are not you know just getting warmer they get warmer and colder and the the weather if you like because how much ice cream and loses every year is a balance between how much snow accumulates that's the weather and how much flows out from the glaciers those are the only factors basically there's a little bit of melting and so on that you have to worry about but those ups and downs are really weather does anything have to do with uh where the sun aligns with the earth well equinox well no that's much too slow i mean over this period year by year uh it certainly has a seasonal effect these are the annual values so they average out the seasons but of course the ice grows in the winter and then it melts in the summertime so there's all this data that shows the ups and the downs and there's all this data that shows that sometimes it's
they're losing ice and sometimes they're losing less ice and gaining ice like how do they know what is causing this or that did they just assume that there's these this series of factors they don't they don't okay it it is you know it's a combination of modeling and physical principles and other data that let them try to say how much is natural variability and how much is human influence there's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming that that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss the melting but right now and for the foreseeable many decades it is these natural variabilities and instead in the media all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades and this median narrative do you think this is just one of those things where people gravitate towards the most alarmist perspective so that's the one that makes the headline is it because of the green energy industry that it's all of the above but you know i put a lot of it on activist reporters so this statement that greenland was melting just as fast in the 1930s as it is today i made that i got fact checked by a reporter john greenberg at politifact and he deemed the statement mostly false okay and you can look at how he analyzed things he talked to some experts it's entirely misleading so i got a non-expert reporter with an agenda and a platform criticizing what's actually in the data so the non-expert reporter with an agenda in order for him to print something that's going to get the response that he's looking for he's looking for a positive response from the people that are climate that that believe these models and that think that the climate is of utmost importance and we're headed for catastrophe yes catastrophe and this is the narrative that all uh that's the only thing i've ever heard until i read your book that's all i'd ever heard well that's interesting uh you know the most recent u.n report okay which is 3 949 pages almost 4 000 pages
it took several hundred scientists a couple years to write you can search that report for the words existential threat climate catastrophe and so on you find the words climate crisis once in that report no other alarmist words and the context for climate crisis is not a scientific finding but a description of how the u.s media have over-hyped the situation did this start with i remember global warming in the 80s because i'm a stand-up comic and there was comics that would do jokes about global warming like this is great i can go golfing in january they were joking around about it but then i remember an inconvenient truth and al gore put this documentary out when he was vice president i believe no other justice before or just after i can't remember and when he put this documentary out it it scared a lot of people but there was a lot of predictions in that documentary did any of those come true you know apart from the fact that the globe is going to continue to warm uh and sea levels are going to rise and we can talk about that in a bit most of the predictions you know that hurricanes are going to get more intense or we're going to see more droughts or floods and so on almost all of the high impact things don't show any long-term trend they're all within natural variability one of the things that you point out in your book that i found was interesting that i hadn't considered is when they're talking about the amount of damage that hurricanes do so when they're thinking about what what kind of danger there is to hurricanes they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes and the damage that they do but that damage is accentuated by the fact that the population is increased in these areas so naturally when a hurricane hits it's there's going to be more things there too damage see billions and billions of dollars just because there's more stuff there okay more people but that doesn't necessarily mean the energy of the hurricane is greater or that the energy of the hurricanes over time is great we can put up if you want to see some of the hurricane statistics but that's
essentially right in the hurricane but the the hurricane thing is not settled you were saying that right there's some indication uh with a paper published a year and a half ago that the strongest storms are becoming more common but then there was another paper that said no no it's just a natural fluctuation so i think that's unsettled yet so what how do they come to these conclusions that are different yeah if they're basing it on data because they're doing they're looking at two different kinds of data the paper published in 19 in 2020 looked at satellite images of the hurricanes we see beautiful images of the hurricanes and you can try to infer from that how strong the storms are okay they used a new technique the people who said no no it's a natural fluctuation looked in the north atlantic where only 10 of the world's hurricanes happened or 12 something like that um and they looked at historical records and so there's an issue that as you go back in time you haven't seen all of the hurricanes and you've got to correct the observations for that so they tried to do good job what they found was that the measure of hurricane intensity went down from about 1960 to 1980 and then from 1980 to their 2000s was just coming back to normal so there's a lot of you know there's a lot of controversy about this this is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science this variability when it comes to the temperature of the ocean when it comes to the melting of the ice caps and all these different things that we're talking about why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the earth but you know the the earth there are two reasons um one is that um the earth is subject to external influences or influences outside of the climate the orbit of this earth around the sun the way the sunlight falls on the earth this is what drives the ice ages if you like or the glaciations and so on but the other is that climate is a chaotic system which means it has you know very
complicated and variable internal motions all on its own we know that because we have cartoons of the equations and they show that we know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days two weeks it's chaotic and so has a lot of variability some of these long-term variations we understand for example el nino happens every few years takes a couple years we kind of understand that but these longer term things that take 70 years or in some cases a thousand years having to do with the motion of the ocean currents we don't have a very good handle on at all and part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well and so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations so is it safe to say that what people are looking for or what people would like to to see is sort of a flat easily predictable rise and lower like that it's there's very little variation right and that this is just not consistent with the historical record absolutely let me i'm going to do another one for you we haven't talked about sea level yet can we pull up uh chart 13 of the kunin file um so sea level is one of the things that people worry about most right and we're going to lose miami you're going to lose miami right so here's a chart i live in manhattan some fraction of the time and so i've gotten very interested in sea level at the battery which is the tip of manhattan and there has been a tide gauge there since about 1850 or 1860 and it measures the height of the ocean it got to average out over the tides and the waves and the weather and so on but okay that black line uh on the graph from 1920 to 2020 is a hundred years of actual data showing how fast the sea level is rising and what you can see is it goes up and down in a cycle kind of like the greenland thing we looked at and you know the peak was in 1950 and it was up at five millimeters a year
we can talk about what that means in a second and then in 1980 it was down in two millimeters a year and now again it's up at four millimeters a year and looks like it's headed down and the peak that you're looking at from the 1950s and 2020 is essentially the same height that's right and you know to set a scale three millimeters a year which is kind of the average over that time is a foot a century okay one foot rise a century which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years okay it's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents are happening on these long time scales 70 80 years what's interesting is those colored graphs going out from the present to 2000 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about eight millimeters a year twice as much as we've ever seen and then goes on up from there okay those are the un projections of based on based on models okay and you can see there are large uncertainties and large variations i think you know if it's going to look like that we're going to know pretty soon within the next 10 or 15 years and my bet is it's just going to go down again so why did they have these predictions that are so extreme i don't know you should ask them they don't even match up with what's happening today no all right they they're much more extreme if you're looking at those green lines and the blue lines like much more extreme than anything we've seen over 100 years and you know this is part of why i think we need a really rigorous review of these uh allegedly authoritative reports as a scientist is how frustrating is it when ideology and dogmatic thinking and when someone's trying to push a narrative and it gets involved in something that is a very complex science with many many variables some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect yeah it's very frustrating to talk to non-experts about this but i'm even more frustrated with my
scientific colleagues okay because many of them know that there are these problems in communication and they do nothing about it or in fact they uh abed it they about it and many of them like you said who will talk to you privately will not speak about it publicly for fear of retribution yeah yeah exactly you know one of the reasons i wrote the book was in part to inform people not persuade them but also to inform my fellow scientists who are not climate scientists about the kind of misrepresentation that's going on and many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said steve uh thanks for doing that um thanks for doing that but i have to shut my mouth yeah i don't i don't dare speak out about this has it been a problem for you and your career writing this book no you know i have enough other parts of my life that are interesting and robust um i'm far enough along in my career that frankly i don't really care very much at this point what people think of me i've got enough stature um you know i have been advising the government on non-climate matters for a long time i helped guide the national academies and some of the reports they did to jason i advise companies uh it's fine uh i really just want to get people to understand you know climate literacy and energy literacy we haven't talked yet much about energy are so important and people need to understand let me give you an example of a different field that i think is a terrible example so there's this guy named jonathan gruber who's a professor of economics at mit and he was one of the principal architects of the affordable care act obamacare now whatever you might think about obamacare what he said at one point was the only way we could get a principal provision of that act passed was to rely on the basic ignorance of the american people wow all right and you know there's a videotape of him saying this at a conference and you know for an educator
and for an advisor to say that is terrible by over hyping the climate threat we've taken away from non-experts the ability to make their own judgments we have displaced other priorities and we've got so many priorities that are beyond climate we have scared the jesus out of young people right you talk to young people and they think the world is going to end yeah and so you know that's one of the reasons i wrote the book is to just try to get people to understand did you see that woman i believe it was in canada but they listed her cause of death as climate change no i've not seen that you haven't no but i'm not surprised you need to see that because the first time i saw that i was like oh my god here it comes because uh and then i mean i should say before i read your book i was fairly convinced that we're in for a horrible next 50 years of climate change and rise of sea level and i was i was buying all the catastrophic inc i mean i you know i bought it all and then peter tia turned me on to a book i started reading it i started listening to it rather and i was just like okay this guy i need to talk to him i need to find out what's going on let me see see if you can find that you found the article nobody can hear you i'm trying to confirm its accuracy because i googled it it wasn't coming up a lot of places i had to like i told you duck up ghosts okay when i looked on the internet for it it was coming up only in one very specific spot so i'm trying to find out like is it a bad source it's an interesting source so i'm just okay like got it right when you find it i want to talk about economic impact a little bit because that's another interesting story yeah um and then there's there's a lot of factors that lead to a narrative being established what what year do you think is there a time you can
pinpoint when this sort of alarmist perspective really took took root yeah i i think it was the early 90s um and it was in part um the u.n the first u.n assessment report that said maybe you know we're influencing it and then there was a subsequent report maybe a decade later that said there was a discernible human impact on the climate al gore's movie i think the obama administration pushed pretty hard and now you've got the biden administration trying to infuse climate and energy in all sorts of government and private sector activities um there we go oh come on doctor reveals why he wrote climate change on patient's medical chart when a canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines climate change is what what dr carl kyle merritt wrote alongside a patient's symptoms following a heat wave which resulted in poor air quality across nelson british columbia in late june extreme weather condition during the north american summer the general practitioner believed had deteriorated the health of a 70 year old woman who was suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning the idea that that that you would say that's climate change just i'm going to read that again a 70 year old woman who's suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning so she's in a trailer she's got diabetes and she's suffering from heart failure and they said climate change right and they put that on our eyes not only that medicine but the fact of taking one summer hot water heat wave and calling it climate when it's really weather right is you know displays the ignorance of that doctor but it's also in vogue of course of course and that's who who doesn't want to be uh in vogue yeah who doesn't want to like hop on the trend i'm sure you got a nice pat on the back oh sure congratulations of course i get all clear
what's that it was like added on the chart not her her diagnosis according to him when asked okay it says reflecting on the decision dr merritt said he wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it durr but he felt it was important for both him and his colleagues to recognize the truth in quotes and add the contributive factor of climate change but he doesn't really know what he's talking about of course he doesn't and let's look at the data can we pull up chart seven of the um uh i'm going to show you something about that heat wave um that's of the coonan thumbs no it's the i know when i looked this up though just for clarity too this is what when i looked up the battery sea level trends this is what pops up on the government's website so so that is that's the sea level itself not the shorter term trends but you can see in the upper right it shows it's going up at 2.88 millimeters a year just about three millimeters a year for the last 160 years so but it's so i'm i'm confused here now because in that other chart it showed that the levels in what was it 1940 yeah yeah yeah so that's the scope of the of the other chart that we've been looking at the the shorter term trend in other words you can see like from 1930 to 1940 this level is going up more rapidly right right so that black line i showed you on on my chart is the trend uh how fast it's going up at any given time that's kind of deceptive then right it's hard to look because what i'm looking at at that chart i thought that was the actual no no no it's not the level no it's how fast it's going oh okay okay go back to the other one jamie that you pulled up and thank you for doing that yeah this is uh so this shows a rise a rise sea level's been rising for 10 000 years okay how much um well it's got up 120 meters in twenty thousand and ten thousand years hundred that's five hundred feet five hundred four hundred feet four hundred feet in ten thousand years and how much over like the measurable time that we have so uh
can we pull up chart 11 uh in in my file and i'll show you that there it is so this is determined from geology um and you can see we started 20 000 years ago and to the present it's gone up about 120. so a lot of this is post ice age that's right the glaciers were melting right they started melting 20 000 years ago and what's interesting is that about 8 000 years ago things slowed down a lot as you can see yeah okay and so it flattens out it's not completely flat the real issue is not where the sea level is rising as you can see it's been rising for 20 000 years the real issue is how fast is it rising and whether human influences are making it rise faster and that's what i showed you in there now how do they measure like when they look at the percentage of like how much agriculture has an impact how much methane has an impact how much transportation has an impact how do they measure all that well it's complicated the first question you can ask is how much carbon dioxide uh is the burning of fossil fuels putting up into the atmosphere and we can pretty well measure that we know how much coal is consumed how much oil how much natural gas methane is harder because most of the methane that comes out is not from fossil fuels it's from cal burbs cow cowberbs rice paddies waste water treatment and so on okay and of course if we're going to reduce those emissions we have a much more difficult task than just stopping to burn natural gas so what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases like say what's the biggest contributor yeah so co2 is the biggest and most problematic contributor because it lasts in the atmosphere a long time centuries by some measures methane is much less problematic even though it has an impact about half of co2 currently because it only lives for about 12 years so co2 is the most significant but is it also the most abundant yes but you know you shouldn't talk about abundance because they're very complicated issues about how the greenhouse gases actually trap the heat
in the atmosphere what you really want to talk about is their contributions to what's called radiative forcing which is basically how much they enhance the heat intercepting ability of the atmosphere so the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is co2 that's correct oh but and methane and methane but also there are a couple of other minor gases like nitrous oxide and cfcs but humans also exert a cooling influence on the climate because when we burn dirty coal we make aerosols smog and so on that uh block out the sides that block out the sun a little bit and they um knock off about half of what co2 um warms and if we stop burning dirty coal which we should for other reasons we're going to see the globe get even warmer than we might otherwise how much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth um so as i said it's about half the warming impact of co2 half the warming okay so what so the biggest contributor in terms of greenhouse gases number like what is what industry cost is the biggest so uh power electrical power generation is big uh heat of various kinds both for buildings but also for industrial processes the next biggest contributor transportation which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases globally is only fourteen percent of greenhouse gases now does that vary by country oh absolutely depends upon their regulations oh yeah if you go to china and india it's mostly electrical power in the us about 40 percent of our emissions are transportation 40 yeah interesting yeah but the us as a whole is only about 6 billion tons of co2 a year um whereas um the globe as a whole is about 50. not co2 of greenhouse gases generally uh u.s is about uh one eight eight percent something like that of no more than that um let's see it's about six out of 50. so 12 so then
we have transportation yep um so we have uh transportation in terms of moving goods and services burning burning gasoline and diesel and then what what's below that electrical power in the u.s electrical power and what is that coal like what is coal and gas okay all right wind and solar don't contribute directly to greenhouse gas emissions nor does nuclear right not nuclear certainly doesn't either right and then what's after that um uh you know small potatoes um probably uh home heating and industrial heat but the big ones are power uh transportation and uh agriculture agriculture and globally i don't know the u.s number but globally agriculture is 25 percent of greenhouse gas emissions wow right and this includes animal agriculture and also monocrop agriculture in terms of like growing yeah well fertilizer production but also um rice paddies and wastewater treatments okay okay those bacteria that produce methane that's how you treat waste water and and yeah so when talking about these various factors and how they impact the environment how much into consideration does one have to take like what are the what's the economic impact of making a radical change that's like say one of the things that keeps coming up is electric cars right uh california has uh initiated a new law that i believe it's somewhere in the 2030s right they can no longer sell gasoline vehicles right which is really soon yes i know so so let's talk about economic impacts let me first talk about the economic impact of a changing climate okay and then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition all right so could we put up chart 21 of the um uh kunin file and i'm going to show you a chart that comes right out of the most recent government report on the subject which is on the left and what you see is the horizontal scale is how much the temperature would go up at the end of the century
compared to what it is today and you know it goes up between 1 and 10 degrees or 15 degrees fahrenheit it's a u.s chart so it's in fahrenheit not centigrade and what's shown on the vertical axis is the percent of damage to the u.s economy in 2100 okay and the takeaway from this is first of all as the temperature rise goes up the damages go up but more importantly for temperature rises of up to five degrees centigrade or nine degrees fahrenheit it's four percent of the us economy in twenty one hundred okay i'm not exactly sure what that means that means that the economy if the temperature would go up the economy would be four percent smaller in 2100 than it would have been otherwise now does that take into account the growth of the economy no overall well it's a relative statement so if we go to the next chart that's a wonderful question there's what would happen so i'll show you the u.s economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century uh if it grows at two percent a year which is kind of what everybody thinks it should be doing it might do you get that curve if you assume a four percent impact at the end of the century or even a 10 impact you just delay the growth by two years or a few years in 2100 80 years from now all right so this is not the climate crisis okay the economic impact is projected to be minimal and this is the economic impact of as the way things stand today without any major interventions in terms of that's correct that's well it's no it's really it's done as depending upon how much warmer the globe gets right okay so remember the paris agreement is trying to hold things to two degrees centigrade or about four degrees fahrenheit which is a few percent damage to the economy okay in 2100 yes okay whereas the economy is going to grow by two percent a year right so instead of
70 or 80 years from now it being you know um let's say 400 uh well the u.s economy instead of being 80 trillion dollars it would be 76 trillion dollars or something like that in 20 100. that seems like a lot of money well not as a percentage right it grows by two percent a year so it's a two-year delay in the growth two-year delay in the growth okay and now if major policy changes are implemented that are going to shift like the sales of the combustion vehicles being banned which is what they're doing in california did that pass in california do you know i think that is the the current policy i believe it's 2035 right so you know when we start and the federal government is pushing for the same policy nation nationwide now is there enough of these minerals that make batteries to so so what we forget for people who don't understand energy want to change the energy system is that it is a system and so let's talk about cars okay you have to change the car itself which leads to issues about do you have enough minerals you have to change the fueling infrastructure namely do we have enough charging points and can the grid handle all these cars plugged in at once and then you have to change the fuel or at least provide more electricity to power the cars in addition to what you're doing now and oh by the way they want to electrify heat as well in the houses so the grid is yeah all right so here governor newsome announced california phase out gasoline-powered cars drastically reduced to demand for fossil fuel california's fight against climate change yeah it's 2035 so he wants all new passenger vehicles to be zero emission by 2035 and additional measures to eliminate harmful emissions from the transportation sector yeah um says there the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all california's carbon pollution eighty percent of smog forming pollution and 95 of toxic diesel emissions
all while communities in the los angeles basin and central valley see some of the dirtiest and most toxic air in the country so so you know this conflates i mean it's a wonderful example of the political discussion first of all he's making a policy that will go into effect long time after he's gone okay from the political scene the second is it conflates carbon pollution and i hate that word because co2 which is what they're talking about is essential for plant growth the more co2 the more plants grow all right so in that sense it's not at all is that an inconvenient truth yes that's and you know the earth has gotten 40 percent greener since 1980 yeah i'd heard about that from randall carlson yeah he explained that to me and then when i saw you it's it's actually in your book as well the um the thought process of carbon is only that carbon is a negative thing that's put out by human emissions emissions from vehicles yeah but it's the fuel of plants the fuel plants so we can talk about the carbon cycle for a second but let me continue with governor newsom for a moment okay okay i think what is going to happen as people start heading in that direction is that and with other emissions reducing measures is there's going to be popular pushback people won't be able to buy the kind of cars that they want or need actually they're going to see their electricity rates go up they're going to see the grid becoming less reliable certainly a phenomenon you know about here in texas and they're going to say tell me again why we're doing all of this when the u.s is only 13 of global emissions are we're going to see geopolitical leverage disappear as we rely more on imported oil it's already happened that kind of push back in the uk where the government tried to mandate heat pumps in the houses it would have been about 15 000 pounds per house and people the legislature just said hell no we're not going to do this and i believe that that's what's going to happen in this country because they're pushing too far and too fast i like to
say you need to change the energy system not by tooth extraction but by orthodontic slow steady changes is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's required to create a battery specifically the type of conflict minerals and very rare earth minerals that we need right now currently that that would shift by 2035 no i you know people are doing a lot of research on batteries i think that's one of the fields we should be researching uh more but it's not as though people haven't been trying all right and you know there are issues not only with the minerals you use but the lifetime of the batteries because they get charged and discharged and that does mayhem at the molecular level that tries to destroy the structure there's also the weight and size of the battery so and there are many things that go into making a good viable battery i think we will see slow steady progress but i'm not optimistic that where there will be great breakthroughs people have been trying this for a long time but there's no great breakthroughs on the horizon or uh concepts that may lead to some sort of do you know here you hear people saying well we can produce a battery that's 50 better but that's not enough that's not enough and what i've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long difficult job that you often fail at have they done an analysis on all the rare earth minerals and what the quantities are and what would be required to make all the vehicles on earth electric um i i'm sure somebody has done those numbers i don't have them at my fingertips is it possible yeah so let me tell you about resource okay whether it's minerals or oil or gas and so on the amount that you can get out depends upon the cost to get it out and that depends upon the technology as well as how much is there and so as the price goes up you're willing to consider more extreme technology which might cost more but you can still produce it oil's a wonderful example
you know at twenty dollars a barrel there are very few ways to produce oil but at eighty or ninety dollars a barrel which where we are today then offshore production shale many other technologies become economically viable and so you shouldn't think about you know are we going to run out but are we going to be able to open up new resources with new technologies fast enough in order to be able to satisfy the demand um okay so you can't just look at it in terms of uh what you want to see you have to look at it in terms of there's a lot of factors yes so you know nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the u.s let alone the globe a sensible plan would entail technology economics business because people have to make money doing this it would entail what are the right policies and regulations and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference the plans that are put out by the national academy by universities are generally formulated by if you'll excuse me a bunch of academics okay and i can say that because i used to be one and i still am okay but very few people who have experience with the real energy system of having to create and operate whether it's fueling or electrical power and so on so i think the best thing that can be done right now is to get that kind of group together spend a while we've got the time and let's come up with something that will let us decarbonize in a graceful way rather than the kind of very disruptive things that are being proposed now we were looking at this proposal for an enormous machine that was like the size of a skyscraper have you seen this no well tell me what does the machine do the idea was that this machine extracts carbon and particulates from the atmosphere so it reduces pollution yes so there are a number of people working on that it's called direct air capture and the question is can you do it cheaply enough per ton and can you do it at scale namely to do enough of it to make a material difference in how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere
right now it's about 500 a ton of co2 to extract it from the atmosphere how much is co2 worth yes well unless the government intervenes it's not worth anything but if you look at the right question i think to ask is what does the price need to be to start to shift the power sector away from coal and the answer is about forty dollars a ton or fifty dollars at times okay so people who are trying to do this hope to bring that five hundred dollars a ton down to a hundred dollars a ton still too expensive but if the price of carbon goes up to a hundred dollars a ton then you can start to make money but then the real question is can you do this at scale right and there i'm very doubtful you need to suck out 10 billion tons a year of co2 and to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass through this machine with the capture efficiency you have and so on nah if you want to capture co2 the best way to do it is to plant trees really yeah so a little bit about the carbon cycle all right real interest you know when i was a kid i hated earth science because you had to know too much all right i like math physics because you don't need to know much you just need to be clever but as i've gotten older you'd start to realize these things are just wonderful science so about 200 billion tons of carbon so roughly 800 billion tons of co2 go up and back between the atmosphere and the earth's surface every year more or less in balance 800 billion up 800 billion down having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on so 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember we are digging out of the ground about um 9 billion tons of carbon every year in the form of oil gas and coal and burning some forest as well and putting it up into the atmosphere into this cycle okay and it's gradually going up about half of it stays in the atmosphere every year okay so if you could tweak that big cycle of 200 every year by a little bit you could compensate
in pot or perhaps in whole for those nine billion tons that we're putting in every year and the way to do that is to grow more trees or other living things because they suck carbon out of the atmosphere to make what they to make plain material and when you pointed this out in your book you were talking about the study of green leaves and the percentage of green leaves this is all gotten through satellite imagery yes so we can measure what's called well not only the color but what's called the leaf area index which is the fraction of the land covered by leaves in any particular place of course it's really high in the amazon it's pretty low in the sahara or the southwest and we can watch that over the years and we've been watching it for 40 50 60 years and it's gone up as i said by about 40 percent globally the world is getting greener because there's more co2 that's inconvenient because we don't want to think about it that way we want to think everything's catching on fire and it's all brown and there's no more water you know crop yields have been going up steadily since 1960. a lot of that is agronomy that we've gotten better at farming we've gotten better genetic strains of plants but some of it also is more co2 plants love co2 we put co2 into greenhouses to get them to grow more they also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons and so for example i don't like to cite you know this year etc but i will in this case you know india has seen record grain harvests this year more than any other year and long term over the world the yields have been going up okay because it's getting warmer we're getting better at agronomy and there's more co2 now is there a point of diminishing returns like is there a point where there's so much co2 in the atmosphere that then it becomes detrimental yes so so there's a lot of controversy about that some people say you know eventually you're going to be limited by water or
nutrients in the soil but we haven't seen it yet all right we haven't seen it yet um so these factors that lead to climate change the the human contributions of agriculture all the various ones you discussed earlier how much of that can be eliminated at what cost all right and here i want to take a global view okay we in the u.s have a very distorted view of the world we're a big country many people don't travel they have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world in the developed world the u.s europe japan australia canada and so on about one and a half billion people and we have high energy use and we have a pretty good standard of living there are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic lot one point something billion people in china another one point something billion people in india and so on the best way for them to get their energy in terms of reliability and convenience is fossil fuels and who are we to tell them no you can't do that that's a moral issue as alex epstein for example has pointed out and so when you say can we reduce and what's it going to cost i think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world where we can do it you know we can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it but what are you going to do about the people in indonesia china india who need the energy what do you tell them and nobody has a good answer for that so we're looking at it from perspective of this first world country and we're not taking into consideration that there's a lot of countries particularly third world countries that are already struggling and if we implemented these radical restrictions it would devastate their economy well we can't implement restrictions on them we can implement
restrictions on ourselves which will come at some cost and benefit uh cost minimal benefit we're only 13 in the us 13 of emissions right now when we look at all these factors agriculture transportation all these different things if you eliminated that how much of an impact would that have on overall climate change and you know warming yeah so you want to do that for the world as a whole or just for the u.s let's just do it for the u.s yeah so we're 13 of emissions what you need to understand is that emissions accumulate in the atmosphere and so by eliminating u.s emissions you have only slowed down the rate at which the amount in the atmosphere accumulating when you say we're third so we're 13 globally globally correct correct uh so the rest of the world the emissions are growing because they're burning coal and they're burning oil and gas because they need all that right so our 13 decrease if we could do it tomorrow would be wiped out by about a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world um so the growth in the rest of the world they would just contribute so much that it wouldn't matter what we take that's right and so they're growing and their economies are booming and who's going to tell them you shouldn't do that right i'd like to say you know um they've got the wolf at the door all right a real immediate problem with they need lighting refrigeration transportation and so on and they're not going to worry about their cholesterol the long-term uh you know what's going to happen two generations from now and it's kind of vague and who knows exactly what's going to happen so they are making what i would think is actually a pretty sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view let's say if that didn't happen let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now what what we do if we could what what is possible to do to eliminate our impact yeah you if the rest of the world stayed static um our influences would still contin global influences would continue to grow because they keep emitting and it keeps accumulating even if they're not emitting any more in the future they're
still emitting and it's accumulating if we wanted to just stabilize human influences not let them grow we would have to go to net zero namely zero emissions overall by 2050 30 years from now if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise we'd have to go to zero by 2075 if we wanted to stabilize at two degree rise and if i look at the issues of development demographics technology economics and so on i would say both of those goals are fantasy just not going to happen because people need the energy they need to develop we in the developed world in the u.s might reduce our emissions but it ain't going to make much difference so the proposals that you hear when you hear about government proposals for addressing climate change and when you hear about these summits where these countries get together and talk about what they're going to do to implement climate change how much of that is just sort of signaling that they're working towards doing something good i mean they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place which is very odd but what what what what impact could happen from any of these things they're proposing uh well let me let's talk about what has happened okay pass first we just finished in glasgow in november the cop 26 the 26th annual conference of parties and during that time it started 26 years ago which is probably 1995 or so um greenhouse gas emissions have grown spectacularly right despite all of the rhetoric and the treaties or accords promises and so on um and the u.n itself said that a lot of the pledges that countries have made to reduce their emissions over the next five to ten years are not going to be met are not being met right so i i think it's a lot of politicians talking so they're not met but what if they were so we might reduce emissions now from 52
billion tons a year equivalent down to 46 or something like that still a lot remember we got to go to zero in 30 years yeah if you want to stabilize and but is that real so if they go to zero in 30 years what is the actual result well we will have stabilized not eliminated but just prevent it from growing human influences on the climate and what percentage of the change in the climate is human influence we said that's uh you know a subject of some debate right now what is is what is the half half maybe of the warming okay but there's a lot more than warming going on there are storms and there are droughts and floods and so on um most of those are within natural variability so in terms of like your 100 year chart of ups and downs mostly not going to change that not going to change so is it a percentage point no i don't think people have tried to quantify yeah at that level because it's too complex it's too complex yeah and we have limited data okay we don't have a hundred years worth of data right in many variables and again this is what we're talking about at the beginning that when you're looking at a human lifetime it's such a short period of time that we we look at a shift in our lifetime when you're like oh my god the sky is falling yep think about the egyptians in the river right oh my god it's coming and you just wait another hundred years and it comes back up again right that's not true for everything humans are certainly having an influence but a lot of the variability the daily weather that the weather people talk about is climate change it drives me crazy when i hear al roker uh talk about that as climate change it's not it's not it's just the variability and the chaos of weather itself yeah and this is for certain based on the models well you know it's our best guess this is an uncertain science the models are kind of all over the place and um if you had a bet many of these phenomena are not being influenced by a human now what prominent scientists and climate scientists have arguments against your your book and against you and the way you're relaying this
information um so you know michael mann for example naomi oreskis alan dressler um carrie emanuel at mit i'll tell you an interesting story about kerry in a minute uh have all spoken out and said you know koonins doesn't have it right very few of them offer specifics kerry did um so um and i think i have i have a medium page that people can look at where i've written detailed rebuttals to the science i mean when people say you're a show for the oil business or you're a physicist what do you know about climate i can't answer those all right but i can try to rebut the specific facts that they say i have misrepresented and i do i think effectively again you can find it on my medium page um sorry about kerry so uh kerry was one of the people who criticized me early on he said you know anybody who talks about 100-year trends in hurricanes doesn't understand that we only have good data until 80 years but previously in this conversation i read you the official statement which says no long-term trends over a century all right so he was being i think uh you know he's putting on his cambridge bow tie and say nobody who understands etc etc i had the opportunity to share a stage with kerry at mit in october and it was convened by john deutch who's a good friend of both of us and a senior scientific figure and i had my 10 15 minute presentation and i went through some of the things we've talked about kerry had 10 or 15 minutes and he didn't challenge the science at all i was really surprised instead he started talking about fat tales namely improbable things that might happen with high consequence but no disagreement with the science so the improbable things with high consequences these this is the sky is falling there yeah so greenland starts melting yeah the permafrost outgasses
the atlantic circulation slows down the amazon dries out did you try to press him uh no i didn't uh because i was too polite he was being too polite interesting and unfortunately that exchange was not recorded um even more interesting even more i would love to be on a stage with some of these scientists okay what about on a podcast like oh yeah one of the things that i know i understand this this is going to be a very controversial podcast and your book is controversial i would like to get someone to come on opposite of you next and either by themselves first and then you with them together or depending upon their what they would like i would certainly be up for that but let me tell you what you should do um have somebody else on and you can have them say where that guy kunin is wrong but then have them write it down okay you you really if you're going to do a scientific discussion debate you got to put it in writing okay you can't call names and you can't say okay so get them to write it down i've of course written down everything with citations get on the write it down and then get the two of us on together and let's have a discussion now i know there's been some articles that have sort of attempted to debunk this is what is the best one that you've seen you know i don't think any of them are really very good um there's a young guy who i'll get his name wrong but you can look him up who's a real climate scientist and he wrote a book review and he said you know in terms of the data and the historical data i got it about right which was a very brave thing for him to say but he said i underestimated the ability of the models to talk about what's going to happen in the future i would disagree with that we can have a discussion about that but i thought that was a pretty fair uh review now how do they shape the models like how do they can construct them boy the model so projecting the future
more generally is very complicated first of all you've got to say what emissions are going to be going forward and that depends on technology and regulations but even given some scenario for emissions over the next 80 years you've got to feed that into a climate model and you use that to predict the temperature and other changes in the climate um the climate models cut the earth into uh zillions hundreds millions of cubes that cover the earth they go up into the atmosphere 20 30 layers of cubes and then down into the atmosphere down into the ocean of layers okay and then the models use the laws of physics to move water air energy light and so on through these cubes 10 minutes at a time typically okay and you do that for centuries so millions of steps in time there are a number of fundamental problems in doing that but let me just highlight two of them one is that the boxes are typically 60 miles on a side you can't make them smaller because then you've got too many boxes and the computer can't follow them all rapidly in our 60 mile scale there are a lot of things that happen in the weather that are much smaller than 60 miles how many clouds are there are there thunderheads is it raining and so on and so you have to make assumptions about you know given the temperature in the box and the humidity and so on how much how much clouds are there what kind of clouds are there and so on and different people make different assumptions and so you get different answers coming out of the models that's one the second is the models human influences are physically very small
the flows of sunlight and heat in the climate system are measured in hundreds of watts per square meter the human influences are two watts per square meter and so the model has to be very precisely balanced if you're going to see the effect of human influences balanced at about a percent right and there are different ways to getting that balance to tuning the models for example one of the models changes um the way in which marine organisms on the surface produce a chemical called dimethyl sulfide this is a wonderful bit of earth science okay so there are these bacteria microorganisms plankton that live on the surface of the ocean and if they get too hot they excrete they put out a chemical that creates a haze so it's a kind of natural sunshade that they make and depending upon how much you say they do that you can change the reflectivity a little bit and tune the model who would have thought that that's what you need in order to get the climate of the earth right but okay so those are the knobs that they turn different people tune in different ways and so you get different answers even more importantly there are these long-term oscillations we've talked about a little bit and the models don't necessarily produce the amount of those or their timing and so you get different answers as well so as some of the modelers have said in professional papers but not in the media they only give us a hazy picture of what might happen globally and other people have said again credentialed members of the consensus that for local or regional predictions like the sea level in the battery or the drought in texas uh they're not capable of giving us anything useful so these people that think that there is an established settled climate change what are they pointing to they point to the global temperature rise global temperature rise and then they'll point to things like greenland melting of
course which we've seen is up and down and kind of not driven by human influences right but they'll point to the temperature wise we could pull that up if you want to sure see that let's do that okay and i think this is something most it's one of the first charts in one of the files which number is it uh i'll tell you in one moment is it uh yeah that's it great let's go okay so on the left uh is a measure of the global temperature it's not the global temperature itself averaged over the globe because we don't know that number actually very accurately no we don't know it to within a degree centigrade or so maybe a bit more when we start knowing it well we know changes it's easier to note changes and you can see this graph of changes in the global temperature averaged over the globe starts in about 1860. this is data from a project at berkeley led by my friend rich muller who i i helped get this project funded and off the ground and what you can see is that uh the data show up until about 18 1920 from 1860 it wasn't doing very much and then the temperature started to rise in about 1910 it went up by about half a degree to 1940 it then actually went down a little bit until 1970 and then it started to go up again and it's been going up now okay and the dashed line shows somebody's projection or it was just continuation of the trend uh to 2060. and what's interesting about this graph is first of all you can see that the rise has not been steady that the rate of rise from 1910 to 1940 is about the same as the rate of rise from 1980 uh to 2010. how could that be and in fact it was even cooling from 1940 to 1970 how could that be if human influences have been growing steadily since 1900 and the answer is they don't know okay they don't know now when you're looking at this from 1860 to 2020 how far back can we look with this
and do we do it based on core samples like so so that's a great question uh this is the instrumental record as it's called so it's based on thermometers on the ground these days in the last 30 40 years we have satellites also but this is just the measurements of weather stations and there's a problem that there weren't too many weather stations starting in 1860 and even before that far fewer the thermometer was only invented in the 18th century i think the mercury thermometer and so we have proxies we have weather records um not measured temperatures we have crop diaries uh and so on and and then ice cores of course can tell us at particular places what the temperature was doing we do know you know if you go back to the 1600s 1700s there was the little ice age and while they're still people who say it was only a regional phenomena it certainly looks like it was around the globe and then it was about one and a half degrees cooler than what is shown there and what year would did this start at oh late 1600s early 1700s and how did they measure it back then uh we have ice records from um up from of course well not only that but the thames in london was frozen over winters were much harsher than than they were the world was in a pretty sorry state actually and so this is just through anecdotal reports or newspaper of course yeah and and we have ice core data also where you see the little ice age we can also an interesting thing we can't go back too far um you know if you drill into a oil well or a well in the ground uh the water in the well remembers the temperature when uh what the surface temperature was and so you can get some measure over the last hundred and some odd years how so how's it remember well you know the heat diffuses kind of travels down from the surface and by it travels and so by looking down you can get a measure of what it was like 100 years ago people do that you know paleoclimatology is a wonderful field or we can there's a lot more techniques to look even further back uh
it's just great uh science when you put this out were you uneasy about this at all were you like oh boy here we go no i knew what i was in for uh but i was pretty confident i you know everything in the book is reference to the official government reports or the quality data or the research literature that has happened since the reports were issued so people say kunin's not up to date well in fact most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the in the book okay so um i was pretty confident obviously i wouldn't put it out if i didn't feel i was confident in it i knew i'd make a lot of people mad um but you know i see my job again is to inform people not to persuade them yeah the the making the people ba mad thing uh when you when that initially started happening was there any consideration that maybe you could have worded things differently or maybe you could have appeased them in any way was there um you know i wanted to do something that was kind of in your face because in fact i wanted to get their attention i'm still i believe very accurate and very fair and balanced in the way i talk about the science but uh i didn't want to soften it at all because i i've been doing that a bit in other things i wrote and it kind of people tend to dismiss it at that point so i really wanted to get people's attention but still remain accurate uh to what the official science is and when it wasn't listed in the new york times bestseller list were you shocked by that nah what what has shocked me not so much that particular incident is that i think there really are two media universes in the country and i think quite apart from climate uh there are um that's a very bad thing to happen let me give you one example so when the book was just about to come out we had sent copies around and my wife and kids turn on bill maher one night in i think
early april and bill maher goes off on a 10-minute rant about this guy kunin who publishes a book that says climate science etc etc i haven't had the stomach to watch it again but um you know bill maher of all people who you know is against religion and dogma and so on he obviously hadn't read the book but he just went off it's just you know really bad what do you think motivated him to do something like that you know there is a narrative to preserve and anything like the council or trent or the senators but why bill maher because bill maher's not a politician bill maher what is what does bill demar know about climate right right okay i don't know so is it that he's signaling to the tribe i think so yeah i think so well he has to do a little of that i think unfortunately i can't get into his head but i can tell you and i'll say it people can hear it i'd love to get on a stage with him and show him x y and z and bill tell me why this is not true and it's counter to what you probably believe well the problem is if anybody hasn't read your book and they would make an assumption based on the idea that you are a climate denier so it starts with that which is very clear from the very beginning of the book that's not the case right how can i deny what is actually in the official reports you know if you say i'm a denier let's have a conversation about who's denying what all right yeah okay you're going to deny the greenland story you're going to deny the hurricane story you're going to deny the economic impact story um i think it's really hard when you look at the actual documents and see it's right there and particularly that you're not saying that the climate isn't changing you're not saying that human beings don't have an influence on it you're saying what is unsettled is the amount of impact we have and why it's happening the way it's happening and the consequences of it for ecosystems in society right yes you know there is let me come back to economic impact for a minute i mean i believe we should be doing something about this but what is being proposed is much too fast and is much too sweeping
there's a guy named william nordhaus who won the nobel prize in economics in 2018 for a fundamental insight about this problem and that is that there is an optimal best pace to decarbonize if you decarbonize too rapidly change out the energy system as it's being proposed you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption you know eight percent of the us gdp is oil and gas production um you also deploy immature technology less than the best solar panels or nuclear reactors or whatever if you do it too slowly you incur a greater risk that something bad might happen with the climate due to human causes bad things are going to happen anyway but maybe they happen more often when humans are influencing the climate and so there is an optimal pace and his initial estimate was we could let the temperature go up to three degrees by the end of the century and still be optimal best course i think he's revised that downward a little bit now but still we've got the time and we should do it in a thoughtful and graceful way and not again try to do tooth extraction so there should be some intervention something done to deal with what we're doing and to mitigate the effect that human beings are having on the climate yeah i think the other yes we should do that um we've got time it's going to be very difficult because of the developing world problem the other thing we need to do is be thinking about adaptation and resilience you know i like to think about three categories of things we could do we should do and we will do okay and i like to try to stay away from the should because you've got to balance all these competing demands particularly the developed world what i think we will do looking at all the drivers is we're going to adapt that's going to be the main way in which we will respond to a changing climate and you know adaptation has got a lot of things
going for it it doesn't matter whether the climate is changing because of human influences or because of natural phenomena it's proportional if the climate changes a lot will adapt a lot climate changes a little adapt a little um adaptation is local and so it's much more palatable politically you're spending for the here and now and not for something halfway around the world and a couple generations away and it's also very effective considering the consider the following that the globe as i showed you has warmed about a degree centigrade two degrees fahrenheit since nineteen hundred during that time we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare we've ever had the population in 1900 was two billion people today it's almost eight so it's gone up by a factor of four and we've seen spectacular improvement in nutrition in health in literacy etc etc right to think that another one or one and a half degrees is going to completely derail that just beggars belief and this one into one and a half degrees is projected over a period of how many that's by the end of this country by the end of that so i should say the best u.n projection right now making some assumptions about emissions is that we'll go up another one and a half degrees now what is the worst case scenario if it does go over this one and a half degrees and like what what is the impact on it is it mostly on the coasts is it well you know you saw the sea level uh projections i don't think it's gonna change very much maybe it goes from one foot a century to two feet a century even that would be pretty spectacular if that happened um we might see more high temperatures but then there are other parts of the globe as you move north that will become more temperate uh and on a time scale of 100 years society learns how to adapt to that at least in the developed world you were saying also in your book that when they're looking at the global temperatures and they're listing these highest global temperature years that there's also lowest temperature that sometimes
coincides with those years so what's happening globally is that the record high temperatures are not going up very much but they are going up but what's also interesting is that the record low temperatures are going up faster name faster yeah and so we're getting the climate in some ways is becoming milder temperature wise than it is at the same time as it's warming and and also the warm parts of the globe the tropics are warming not as rapidly as the polar regions particularly the uh the arctic okay that's warming pretty rapidly so the arctic is warming rapidly but other parts of the globe are not warming as rapidly as rapidly and what did they attribute that to um there are various processes in the arctic that are happening that accelerate the warming for example the ice the sea ice in the arctic ocean or on the land disappears or at least doesn't come back as rapidly uh in the winter time and consequently um uh the earth absorbs a little bit more energy because the ice is reflective whereas the sea water is not now when you talk about adaptation and you talk about the rise in the global temperature so if it does rise up a couple degrees what sort of adaptation will be required and what areas of the world or at least of our country will actually benefit from a warming is that a is that a real factor yeah sure i mean you know again because the projected economic impact is pretty small there are going to be winners and losers all right and i would say the southern parts of the u.s are going to get warmer uh the northern parts will become more temperate and so kansas the dakotas montana etc will become a little bit more tempered agriculture will probably shift north
as it's already happening you change the genetics of what you're growing you change the agronomic technologies and we'll do just fine we've already been warming a degree a century and uh i don't see that there have been great disruptions but we've really only had the the sort of large-scale industrial age you know over this past sense and that makes us more capable of adapting than but it also makes us terrified that the changes happen so quickly and it it leads to this fear of what's going to happen and what kind of damage we're doing it's irreversible right so okay people in the end what we do about this i like to say is a value judgment okay the science is what it is i've tried to portray it accurately certainties and uncertainties what we decide to do about it depends on risk tolerance intergenerational equity north-south equity and just cost benefit generally those are not scientific issues those are value issues they're the proper concern of the politicians and uh but you have to have an accurate representation of the risks and certainties and uncertainties in order to have that discussion so and i think what people have done in the political and popular discussion is over-hyped the threat in order to move the discussion one way or the other is it safe to say that even if there was no impact by human beings on climate change if there was zero impact because of our society and civilization that there would still be change that we would have to work with absolutely look we had the dust bowl in this country in the 30s okay and that was partly climate natural climate and partly farming practices and of course we had to deal with that and we had the little ice age uh not in you know in anybody's lifetime but it was certainly there and they had to deal with it and it was pretty bad and there's a thing about the coast too that always drive me kind of nuts when i think about it it's like we know when you look at maps of the world you know when you go back a
million years or a hundred thousand years the the tides have risen and like the where the coastline is yeah you saw it was you know 400 feet in 20 000 years all right now 400 feet pushes the the coastline in tremendously of course it happens but for the time that we've had accurate measurements you know with tide gauges and so on it's been going up in less than a foot a century right and we've been perfectly fine in adapting to it and you think that that's going to continue to happen who can say what's really going to happen in the future but if i had a bet i would and you know the politicians believe that too i mean you see the former president obama you see bill gates all of whom are raising alarm they got houses on the beachfront all right so if he really believed that yeah he'd be living in colorado all right okay now there was some alarmism in i think it was the 1970s worried about the next ice age that an ice age was coming what was that based on yeah so uh you saw that cooling trend and people started to get the uh data from ice cores for the first time to understand the cycle of not what are called ice ages but glaciations and interglacials okay they happen because of the way in which the sunlight falls on the earth and how it changes due to the earth's orbit and tilt of the axis of the earth and so on they happen about once every hundred thousand years the last interglacial the last time it the earth was mostly ice free happened 125 000 years ago the temperature was thought to be two degrees warmer than it is currently and the sea level was thought to be 20 feet higher than it is currently so 125 000 years ago was very little ice yeah wow yeah and it's got to do again with how sunlight falls on the earth it's called the eemian named after a river in holland where they first realized it and we see that kind of thing happen pretty regularly roughly seventy hundred thousand year intervals uh back uh for a million years at least
okay and and it's paced by again the way in which the earth's orbit changes and allows sunlight to fall on the north pole yeah i mentioned randall carlson and one of the things that randall had said to me he said what we really should be scared of is global cooling we don't know so you know by some measures we're due okay it's been you saw the last glaciers disappeared about twenty thousand years or started disappearing about twenty thousand years ago um and twenty thousand years is about how long these interglacials last before the ice starts growing again takes a long time for it to grow and then it warms up pretty suddenly i have often thought you know what what are the signatures that we could start to enter a glaciation again what should we be looking for one of the obvious ones is that the snow cover in the northern hemisphere starts to last through the summers if and when that happened it would of course take some thousands of years for the glaciers to build up but you might ask also what geoengineering could we do what interventions would we do if we saw that starting to happen in order to forestall it from happening or slow it down and i don't think anybody at least i haven't found anybody who's thought seriously about that it's a great academic exercise i think well there have been some theories uh some suggestions on geoengineering as far as cooling the earth right there's a suspension of reflective particles and good yes so this is an idea that's been around for you know some number of decades um and the idea is to put as you said some reflective particles into the stratosphere where they will hang around for a couple years and uh enhance the reflectivity by a little bit and you don't need to do very much in order to offset the warming there are several downsides to doing that um one is that you got to keep putting the particles up there because they fall out and if they fall out it's going to
get warmer again all right so how how do they fall there's just so there's suspension gravity and they get trapped by water vapor and they fall out as rain and so on okay this is what happens every time a big volcano goes off right so you remember punitubo perhaps lovely sunsets after in the whenever it went off in the 90s 91 or 92 and then it fades off after about two years right so we'd have to keep doing it otherwise the temperature would rebound uh if we uh stopped and the fear would be that those suspension particles those suspended particles would get into our water supply no no no it's so this is we already put a lot of junk up into the atmosphere by burning dirty coal those stay in the lower atmosphere and come down pretty quickly they get rained out um this amount you'd have to put up there is only one tenth of what we put into the lower atmosphere already and would it change the way the sky looked yep it would make it a little bit hazier and dimmer it would look like what happened after a volcano but the other bad thing or at least somewhat downside to it is it doesn't exactly cancel out the greenhouse gases because it only cools when the sun is shining whereas the greenhouse gases are effective all the time it'll change precipitation patterns somewhat and people have done studies and with models about how it would change um you can just imagine the fights that would uh occur if the world decided to start to do this uh somebody would say hey you know it was rainy the last two years and much more rainy than it should have been and it was your geo engineering that did it and therefore you owe me money okay so there is some geo engineering that i was reading about i believe it's abu dhabi that does uh they do cloud seeding i think they do it once a week so 52 times a year they make it rain yeah so those are local effects yeah and and that's about weather modification and you know the chinese are said to have done that before the beijing summer games uh to keep the rain away really yeah
and so it's possible that it works actually but this is different okay because that's in the lower atmosphere this is way up there there are other schemes besides stuff in the atmosphere people have proposed creating mist near the ocean surface like low-lying clouds and you can calculate how many boats you need to do that and putting stuff up into the lower atmosphere to make that happen so is there a technology that would involve the boats extracting water from the ocean and steaming it somehow yeah salt crystals actually uh as well salt crystals there's nucleate you know ships already create tracks behind them just from the diesel exhaust that they have you can see them on the satellite and can tell you where the ship's been for a day or two so it would be more of that we could develop the technology the question is you know who's allowed to do it is the world really going to do this one nation could decide to do it but it would affect the global climate uh the real issues are governance not the technology so much and also the potential negative consequences of some of those technologies you know balance the pluses and minuses and i'm all for research into this both the technology and the impacts both positive and negative i'm very much against deployment of it but we should know whether we have it as a tool that we might take out someday if the climate started to go really bad there's a lot to think about this is complicated it's very complicated it's nuanced the the amount of climate illiteracy and energy illiteracy is stunning and we're trying to make these decisions without people really understanding how much we know and what we don't know what the possibilities are so that's why i wrote the book you know there's also this reflexive pejorative term of you know a climate science denier okay i you know if i were younger i would say you're triggering me all right so if you go back two generations in my family 200 of my relatives died in the holocaust okay in
the camps um so denier by itself just the word the word defense if i were younger i'd say you're triggering me um but in fact you know what am i denying i'm just telling you what's in the reports no i'm not no in any way of course i'm just no i'm i'm speaking to a hypothetical it's a provocateur it's so reflexive i mean it's just a reflex people do it and you know and they say it with such conviction and and and confidence and it's i know that just this episode getting out there is going to do that especially of course in this day and age where everybody reacts uh sort of signaling to their tribe almost before they analyze the science right so so what i hope is that you know people will read the book before they criticize although that usually doesn't happen and those who do read it will look up some of the references and say yeah that guy kunin seems to be right go ask your favorite climate scientist is that guy kuden right and if he is what else haven't you told me well other than bill maher criticizing it was there anybody else that criticized it that you clearly could tell that they haven't read the science or haven't read your book oh i think um many of the scientists who wrote the criticism and scientific american clearly hadn't read the book because they say kunin says x when in fact kunin actually said not x uh so what can you do about that when a public article you know i actually submitted a rebuttal to scientific american they refused to publish it wow okay that's crazy that's not right scientific you know as a kid i used to read scientific american cover to cover because it was interesting and it discussed science i and many other people i know have stopped reading it over the last 20 years because it's become so political um and the content has been dumbed down if you like when did that start happening i you know there was a german firm that took over the ownership of the magazine
at least a decade ago i don't know exactly when we can look it up um and i think that has exercised a lot of editorial control and that editorial control is going through an ideological filter i believe so yes right well steve is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up is there anything that you feel like we missed no you know i mean maybe just a summary um i'm a scientist i try to stick with the data and reasonable implications of it i understand something about modeling from a previous life i wrote a book on computational physics 40 years ago that did pretty well people should really understand that this is not a simple subject as we've been exploring and to do a little bit of investigating for themselves don't believe everything you hear like so many other things these days in the media all right well thank you very much for your time i really appreciate it and thank you for writing this book and sticking your neck out and uh examining this at a very detailed level it was uh it was very interesting to read and listen to actually and i really enjoyed our conversation great my you know my goal is always to just inform people they can make their own decisions about what to do but at least they should do it on the basis of the facts we've certainly stirred up a lively debate great good thank you thank you very much really appreciate it all right bye everybody [Music] you