00:07:28.100And anyone who disagreed with it was shut out of the discussion.
00:07:30.560And then after the vaccine campaigns, they had to start reporting that people who were fully vaccinated were getting COVID again,
00:07:40.220and that it was spreading just as rapidly among vaccinated as unvaccinated people.
00:07:45.580So in that sense, people got to see a really clear example of how this narrative-based standing distorted the whole discussion,
00:07:55.440because you weren't allowed to hear from the people who predicted that and who were critical of the vaccine campaigns.
00:08:04.640In the case of climate change, it's a bigger problem because a lot of the discussion centers around things that you and I can't actually see with our own eyes.
00:08:14.080So if you're told it's the warmest year in 1,000 years, well, how on earth would we know whether that's true or not?
00:08:22.600A statement like that is an abstraction.
00:08:25.400All it means is somebody drew a chart using some statistical methodology and the line either slopes up or slopes down.
00:08:34.920But it doesn't correspond to anything that you and I could go out and measure.
00:08:37.980Similarly, if let's say a tornado hits somewhere in Ontario and someone says, well, this is caused by climate change.
00:08:55.540And then if you do try to challenge it, then we get back to this narrative-based dismissal of these things.
00:09:03.260Right now, we're at a stage where every bad thing that happens, including the forest fires this summer, right away that's held up as proof of climate change.
00:09:16.100And again, the claims, the scientific issues there are really subtle, really difficult.
00:09:21.260They involve trying to deal with a lot of data and a lot of uncertainty.
00:09:27.180And the farther away you get from the media and politicians, the more you encounter the uncertainty and the hesitation on the part of experts to make these kinds of claims.
00:09:38.480With regard to that piece that you mentioned about the disinformation, I was responding to what I think is a really appalling report by the, I can't remember what it's called now, the Canadian Academies Society, something or other.
00:09:56.700And the whole report was based on this premise that there's this plague of disinformation and misinformation by bad actors out there.
00:10:06.340And what we need to do is get the government to censor social media.
00:10:09.500And so you have academics who aren't particularly qualified in any of these areas, putting a report out that was, at least in the climate area, had no experts involved in writing it and made lots of claims that were dubious at best.
00:10:27.480And yet this was, this group of people were wanting the authority to shut down all other discussion on that topic and on COVID and others.
00:10:37.940So I guess I've just described the problem, but I don't really have an answer to how we got here or why this has happened.
00:10:45.200And all I can say is we have to do everything we can to fight it and make sure that we don't give up our rights to have fulsome debates on public issues.
00:11:12.520So could you break it down for the layperson why your research and that of other scholars shows that the standard climate change models tend to overpredict the extent of global warming?
00:11:26.620Well, so this is an issue I've looked at for a long time.
00:11:32.540I've co-authored with meteorologists and with other statisticians.
00:11:40.000It's a big topic in the field, basically comparing model reconstructions of the last few decades with what was actually observed.
00:11:48.400And it's important to do this because climate models, when they're built, they embed what people understand about the processes that drive weather and climate.
00:12:01.560But you never have enough information to be sure you've got the right equations in your model.
00:12:07.700So you have to run the model and see how it does in comparison against reality.
00:12:12.740And the particular question we're interested in is how much warming do you get if you add more CO2 to the atmosphere?
00:12:19.400And so all the models predict warming.
00:12:39.740Just looking at the main climate models, you've got climate models that will say if you double the CO2 in the air, you don't get much warming at all.
00:12:47.140And it's very slow and other models that will say you'll rapidly warm five or six degrees and cause all kinds of problems.
00:12:57.600My co-authors and I have focused on a particular part of the climate called the tropical troposphere.
00:13:04.440Now, the troposphere is the layer of air from about one kilometers up to about 10 kilometers.
00:13:10.380And that region of the atmosphere is where the greenhouse gases mix.
00:13:17.100And it's where climate models all say there should be the most rapid warming, but especially in the troposphere over the tropics.
00:13:26.360And over the tropics, you get a huge buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere.
00:13:31.560And so there's a notion called the hotspot in climate models, which is a very amplified response to greenhouse gases in that large section of the atmosphere.
00:13:46.280So for a long time, people in the modeling field have known that every model predicts that you add greenhouse gases to your model, you get a lot of warming in the troposphere over the tropics.
00:13:58.560So we looked at that and I've been I've published papers.
00:14:05.420Others have published papers said, you know, pretty much every climate model predicts too much warming in that part of the atmosphere.
00:14:12.540And in subsequent papers, we showed a couple of years ago that the excess warming now occurs everywhere in the troposphere through its global now.
00:14:21.620And this is important because there aren't many mechanisms in these models that will give you warming in the troposphere.
00:14:30.720So if they're getting that wrong, it's probably there's too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
00:14:35.400So you have to kind of set the dial somewhere in your model how much warming you get from greenhouse gases.
00:14:40.960Now, from the modeling side, there was one data set that they could appeal to that suggested, no, we actually may have this right.
00:14:49.460There are a bunch of data sets based on weather balloon measurements and other data sets based on satellite measurements.
00:14:57.060And the data sets tended to all agree, except there was one that was a bit of an outlier.
00:15:02.600And that was called the STAR data set produced by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which we call NOAA in the U.S.
00:15:11.640And they had quite a bit of warming in the troposphere and enough warming that the modelers could point to it and say, well, if that data set's correct, we're on the right track.
00:15:22.860Still a bit too much warming, but within the bound of uncertainty, we're OK.
00:15:27.380Earlier this year, the authors of the STAR data set did a complete revision of how they assembled their data set.
00:15:37.160And in particular, they responded to some critics from the University of Alabama and Huntsville and came to agree with them.
00:15:45.820And so we've added a false warming trend in this data set in the way that they had calibrated a few different satellite series together.
00:15:55.840And their revised data set now has the lowest warming of all the satellite data sets.
00:16:01.140And so that removed one of the big defenses of the climate models.
00:16:08.660And so now the picture that's there, I think, is very clear in the data that models have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
00:16:15.160And that means all these projections that we're hearing about and reading about, they're based on models that overpredict the climate response to greenhouse gases.
00:16:24.740So, Russ, do you think this is a benign error of the people who built these models?
00:16:34.820Or, you know, I know this question sounds a little speculative, but is there an intention to ramp up alarm by making the models predict more global warming than we're actually having?
00:16:46.740Good question, because right now there's about 40 of these models and they're big undertakings to build a large climate model.
00:16:59.940And that means there's a community and that means there's peer pressure.
00:17:03.120And there is discussion and it's there in the journals that people recognize, especially, well, ironically, the models have gotten warmer over time,
00:17:15.600even as evidence has emerged that they warm too much.
00:17:20.060We're now in what's called the sixth generation of climate models, as the labeling goes.
00:17:26.500And they're even warmer than the fifth generation.
00:17:29.160And when that came out, when the data started being pumped out by these models and they had even higher climate sensitivity than before,
00:17:38.360there was trepidation in the literature.
00:17:40.800I mean, it emerged in some commentaries in Science Magazine and places like that, that the modelers themselves were saying,
00:17:47.840this is the wrong direction that we're going and they don't know why it is.
00:17:52.700It's a puzzle, though, why some of the individual modeling labs, like, for instance, the worst of the bunch is the Canadian climate model.
00:17:59.700And it was singled out in a study, I mentioned this in an earlier op-ed of mine, but a study by a team in England that looked at this bias in the tropospheric warming data.
00:18:10.540And they pointed out the Canadian climate model warms seven times faster than observations over the test period.
00:18:17.380So you're feeding greenhouse gases in that model, and you get a spectacular amount of warming, but it just doesn't conform to reality.
00:18:27.120So at a certain point, I have to wonder, why don't the modelers themselves get discouraged by that?
00:18:33.320I mean, they're making predictions that everybody in the field knows are too hot.
00:18:39.540So why don't they go back and fix that?
00:18:44.880I would say there's a huge reluctance just reading the papers and like what they'll do is they'll come up with a list of what might explain the excess warming.
00:18:58.860And it'll include on the list, maybe we have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
00:19:04.900But there's a bunch of other possibilities.
00:19:08.080And I think what they're doing is looking at every other possibility first.
00:19:12.620And eventually, I think they'll get to, well, we have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.
00:19:19.400But if they fix all the models and they fix them all in the same direction, if an IPCC report came out, for instance, that said, all right, we're cutting our projections in half or more.
00:19:30.960I think that a field would be devastated by that, given how much credence has been placed and how much just the whole public debate's been dominated by model projections.
00:19:45.140And going back to the earlier discussion, how they shut down any criticism and said, unless you work in this little clique of climate modelers, you don't get to talk about this.
00:19:55.080Yeah, I mean, related to that, I mean, in June, you called out this rhetoric around wildfires, forest fires, that the rhetoric was that they're at their worst ever this summer.
00:20:10.840And then you pointed to evidence, as did I.
00:20:14.300I think we both shared the same chart on Twitter, or X, as it's called now.
00:20:21.000You pointed to evidence which shows that forest fires peaked in the 80s and have been getting less severe since then.
00:20:28.600And you wrote about it for the Financial Post.
00:20:31.060Could you explain why forest fires have been trending down?
00:20:35.760And also, you know, this past summer, we've certainly seen, you get the perception that you've seen a lot of forest fires.
00:20:45.060Do you think that's an outlier in this generally falling trend?
00:20:49.880Well, to the first question, I don't know why the number of forest fires has been trending down.
00:20:54.360There's a few metrics that are followed.
00:21:53.640And then as far as fire severity goes, there are different measures.
00:21:58.040And one of the papers that I've seen, it's got the numbers trending down.
00:22:04.660And then people working in the field have sent me other papers that measure differently and it trends out.
00:22:11.760Although, compared to the 1700s and 1800s, as much as we can reconstruct or as they can reconstruct measures from back then, fire severity was much worse before the 20th century.
00:22:26.360So the whole picture is a really complicated one, as you can imagine.
00:22:33.700It's complicated by the fact that there is the weather influence, the fire weather, dryness, for instance, the amount of wind, the conditions that you need, thunderstorms or lightning to start most fires.
00:22:50.120But there's also the human role, the aggressiveness of fire suppression, the intrusion of people into forested areas.
00:23:02.220There's delayed effects of disease outbreaks.
00:23:05.140So the mountain pine beetle that hit 20 years ago in British Columbia has now left behind stands of dried out pegs that if fire breaks out in those areas, you get a huge coverage.
00:23:49.900And this is where we can now use satellite data.
00:23:53.200And there's a couple of satellite-based data series that both show the total area burn from wildfire activity has been going down over the past 20 years.
00:24:05.920So there again, when you have a bad year, like this has been a terrible year for forest fires in Canada, an exceptionally bad start to the year.
00:24:19.100And then what caught people's attention was the fact that we not only had a lot of wildfires, but the wind pattern was different.
00:24:27.380So it was blowing the smoke to the south instead of taking it up to the north and dispersing it.
00:24:34.060So this year, everybody noticed the fires because the wind blew down over the eastern seaboard.
00:24:42.140But you can't take a single bad year and then say, well, that's proof of a trend when the actual trends are going in the other direction.
00:24:52.800And so the tweet that I sent, a couple of tweets, and then also the op-ed that I wrote just made this point that if you want to talk about this based on the long-term trends,
00:25:06.960the trends are actually going in the opposite direction of this glib claim that climate change means more and bigger forest fires.
00:25:15.400And you don't just get to pull one year out and say, this proves my theory.
00:25:21.480If you're going to pull one year out, why don't we pull out 2020?
00:25:24.620Which, like I say, was the lowest in the whole record.
00:25:45.400Let's, you know, take a step back and look at the big picture question here.
00:25:53.520I think we all agree that human activity increases greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
00:26:00.540The real question is, what is the magnitude of that effect on the climate?
00:26:06.660You know, alarmists will say that we're basically at the point of no return and we're heading into a doomsday scenario.
00:26:14.620You know, what do you make of such claims and really what is a sensible perspective?
00:26:22.080What's a sensible take on climate change?
00:26:24.080You can start with the points that are universally agreed.
00:26:34.540So carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.
00:26:37.500So that means technically what it means is that it absorbs energy in the infrared part of the spectrum.
00:26:45.800And so other things being equal, if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, we should expect warming to happen.
00:27:00.860That process happens in the middle, though, of a much larger, extremely complex process of thermodynamics, of motions of air and water and large scale weather systems and all the other things that influence temperature and precipitation.
00:27:20.320And so that basic theory doesn't get you very far in terms of predicting, do these emissions of carbon dioxide, is that going to be a big problem or a little problem?
00:27:31.840That's never been something you could just answer based on the simple theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.
00:27:37.960That's where you get into the model, which is necessary, but also into the data analysis.
00:27:45.320And this is a different strand of the discussion that doesn't get much attention.
00:27:50.340But there's now a long enough data record, both of emissions and greenhouse gas levels and warming, that we can begin to draw some inferences about just how sensitive the climate system is likely to be.
00:28:07.560And the simplified number is something called the equilibrium climate sensitivity, or how much warming you'd get if you double the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
00:28:17.800And the traditional range from the IPCC has always been between one and a half and four and a half degrees.
00:28:25.420So there's some models that go above that, but generally it's one and a half to four and a half degrees.
00:28:30.880On the economic side, we can then plug that kind of number into an economic model and project very approximately, is this a big problem or a little problem based on how economic activity is affected by weather changes?
00:28:45.520And the answer would be, if the climate sensitivity is between one and a half and two degrees, this is a non-issue.
00:29:01.360We couldn't justify any climate policy.
00:29:04.360If it's two to two and a half degrees, it's worth trying to reduce some of the CO2 emissions, but we wouldn't want to spend a lot on it.
00:29:17.480Even when you get up to three degrees, that's the assumption of the analysis by, for instance, William Nordhaus, a well-known economist, got a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on this.
00:29:29.240At three degrees, it's worth trying to reduce emissions later in the century in order to avoid a small fraction of the warming later in the century.
00:29:46.140Not a lot of it, but try to cap emissions later in the century and not, sorry, not cap emissions, but slow down emissions later in the century in order to reduce some of the warming.
00:30:00.060It's only when you get to the high numbers, like a four degree climate sensitivity or a five degree climate sensitivity, that models would then start to say, yeah, this is going to be a really big problem, especially for third world countries.
00:30:14.720And we have an obligation to try to stop emissions from growing and begin to reduce them by the middle of the century.
00:30:24.340You can get all those different messages, all those different prescriptions in the expert literature.
00:30:29.680And the problem with alarmism is they'll take the message from the upper end of the literature and make it look like that's all that there is.
00:30:38.520And also they'll try to make it sound like that's the path that we're on.
00:30:42.200The empirical literature on climate sensitivity is all clustered at the low end.
00:30:48.380It's very difficult to look at the historical record and get a climate sensitivity above two and a half degrees.
00:30:57.400There are tons of studies based on the empirical literature that have it between one and a half and two and a half degrees.
00:31:05.460And so, like I say, you stick that in the model and I've done this with co-authors.
00:31:12.160We've taken the integrated assessment models that have the economic side and the climate side and put in a sensitivity around two degrees and what we call the social cost of carbon drops to close to zero.
00:31:27.720And then so that means you just can't justify policy intervention.
00:31:33.140The other side that makes this, the other part of it that makes this so difficult is CO2 is a very difficult type of emissions to control.
00:31:44.200So in a country like Canada, we've done an amazing job at reducing other types of air pollution.
00:32:11.380So on your car, if you have a car, you have a thing on it called a catalytic converter in the exhaust system, which reduces by a surprising amount.
00:32:21.460About 90% of the carbon monoxide is eliminated by the catalytic converter.
00:32:26.020And effectively, it doesn't cost anything.
00:32:37.060There's no technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, though.
00:32:41.380If you burn fossil fuels, you're going to generate a certain amount of CO2 based on the carbon content of that fuel.
00:32:50.400And we've fiddled around with things like underground carbon capture and storage.
00:32:55.880And in a few places in the world, it's feasible, but it's still very expensive.
00:33:00.140But that's not a solution, and it doesn't reduce it from mobile sources like cars.
00:33:05.980As long as we use fossil fuels, we're going to be releasing CO2 emissions.
00:33:12.340And fossil fuels are our best, most reliable form of energy, which is why even over the past 30 years, when countries have been talking about little else besides climate change, fossil fuel use continues to grow and CO2 emissions continue to grow.
00:33:30.420Because they're so essential to economic growth and development.
00:33:34.360So you have these two main considerations.
00:33:38.540The first is CO2 emissions are really, really costly and difficult to reduce.
00:33:44.860And don't believe politicians when they say the energy transition is a big economic opportunity and we're going to get rich by moving off of fossil fuels.
00:33:56.820But then the other side of it is, it's not even clear that this is really necessary.
00:34:03.000When you set aside the rhetoric and just look at the numbers in climate models and the numbers used in mainstream economic analysis, we could live with this.
00:34:18.720And we could destroy our living standards in a vain attempt to try to stop it.
00:34:23.720But based on what I think are the most credible mainstream projections of the outcome of continued use of fossil fuels, we can live with it and adapt to it.
00:34:38.560And the gain in living standard from fossil fuels will far away any costs associated with climate change.
00:34:45.980So speaking of adaptation and, you know, on how we respond to it.
00:34:52.460So, you know, touching upon policies and based on your own assessment of how pressing the climate situation actually is, how would you go about what are some sensible economic policies out there to deal with it?
00:35:06.640In particular, do you think the use of carbon taxes, you know, that jacked up the cost of living here, you know, for Canadians when inflation is already very high?
00:35:18.480Does that kind of thing make any sense?
00:35:22.540From an economic point of view, it does.
00:35:44.140But some of the activity may not be all that necessary, just unnecessary car trips or things like that, that people are pretty indifferent to.
00:35:54.580But what a carbon tax does is it just puts a little price signal up there that helps people identify which is the least valuable activity that's generating carbon dioxide emissions and will eliminate those first.
00:36:10.360The level of the carbon tax is kind of a cutoff point.
00:36:14.920And it says find the cheapest ways of reducing emissions and implement those.
00:36:21.620But once the cost of reducing emissions goes above the level of the carbon tax, you're better off to just keep using the fossil fuels and live with the outcome.
00:36:31.720The problem for the people who want to use carbon taxes to reach something like the Paris climate targets, which are very aggressive.
00:36:42.780The problem is the kind of carbon taxes that people are willing to pay may not be happy about paying it, but at least they're willing to pay.
00:36:50.740It doesn't get you anywhere close to the Paris target.
00:36:53.460Gasoline and fuel use, energy use in general, tends to be pretty non-responsive to the price.
00:37:08.900So it's very difficult to change energy consumption just by increasing the price.
00:37:14.380All that happens is people still buy the energy, but they're paying more for it.
00:37:18.580That doesn't mean, though, that there are other policies that would be less expensive for reducing CO2 emissions.
00:37:29.440In the economic way of looking at this, a carbon tax is always going to give you the cheapest emission reductions.
00:37:35.560So what we're seeing in Canada now is the federal government, they put a carbon tax in place.
00:37:42.960They have a plan to increase it and keep increasing it to a pretty high level by the end of the decade.
00:37:49.160But they can also see that this isn't going to reduce CO2 emissions by all that much.
00:37:54.140So now we've got all these other policies being brought in.
00:37:57.820The clean fuel standard is one, product energy efficiency rules, the electric vehicle mandate, building energy efficiency rules that will kick in after 2025.
00:38:15.260And so people don't yet perceive how expensive these are going to be.
00:38:21.600They're going to be incredibly expensive policies to implement.
00:38:24.740And in a way, they have to be, because by definition, your carbon tax has already identified all the lowest cost diminution reductions.
00:38:34.940Everything that gets forced through by regulation had to be more expensive than paying the carbon tax.
00:38:40.500And so in the economics area, we don't like all these other policies because they destroy the efficiency that the carbon tax had.
00:38:51.820The reason for them, though, is this unstated problem with the carbon taxes, which is it gives you the cheapest emission reductions.
00:39:03.240It's just there aren't many cheap emission reductions to be had.
00:39:41.720But you have to understand there are no inexpensive emission reduction options out there with current technology.
00:39:50.260Maybe somebody will invent like cold fusion will appear and all of a sudden we'll get all the emissions free electricity that we want a year from now.
00:39:58.920But with current technology, it's going to be very expensive to reduce emissions.
00:40:06.300So a carbon tax can get you a small amount of emission reductions with minimal effect on the economy.
00:40:11.580But if you want really large emission reductions on a short time scale, there's no way to do it without what I think would be devastating economic consequences.
00:40:24.300So, Ross, I mean, that's a great assessment of, I mean, how afraid should the average person be?
00:40:34.780Should we continue to live in, you know, I was, I was stunned to discover this, that there's something called climate change induced anxiety.
00:40:47.360And there are these meditation apps out there that actually very specifically deal with people who experience climate change, anxiety induced by climate change.
00:41:00.500And, and, and, and, and this is, you know, there are people who literally live in fear, because, you know, it's fairly hazy day out there.
00:41:12.380You know, whereas, you know, the rest of the world, like I've lived in India, where, honestly, the smog is like that.
00:41:19.800I mean, it's not, it's not a healthy environment, but people are not like panicking about it necessarily.
00:41:25.220You know, you know, you go on with your life, and you have some good days, and you have some bad days.
00:41:30.320But I find that people here, especially here in Canada, there's a great deal of fear.
00:41:34.700And again, it's also related to things that we've seen in the, during the pandemic.
00:41:39.440And, you know, what, what really, you know, what would you say to those people?
00:41:46.320What you're, what you're describing is very real, the anxiety, the fear, the climate change fear.
00:41:52.260However, it's not the fear connected to climate change itself.
00:41:57.540It's fear connected to all the alarmist media coverage of climate change.
00:42:04.240Even for someone, let's see, I'm in my 50s.
00:42:08.400So, I suppose I've lived long enough that if I compare current weather conditions to my childhood, I might be able to notice a difference.
00:42:22.740But remember, when we're talking about climate change, we're talking about long-term averages.
00:42:26.500Over a couple of decades, the change might be 0.1 or 0.2 degrees, like small enough that you wouldn't even be able to notice it.
00:42:38.020And one of the things I like to do with my undergrad students, since Guelph has weather records that go back to the late 1800s,
00:42:46.420is show them daily temperature records for a bunch of different years from the 1880s to the present and ask them,
00:42:56.180can you tell which year is which, which was a recent year and which was from the 1800s?
00:43:00.980Because the normal variability is so large that typically, no, they can't.
00:43:08.420It's not like the current climate looks completely different from what our great-great-grandparents experienced in this same location.
00:43:19.300But, for instance, in Ontario, spring tends to come a bit earlier.
00:43:25.460The snow melts a bit earlier than it did in the 60s.
00:43:29.400But the fall, if anything, has gotten a little cooler.
00:43:34.620And unless you show people a graph, they wouldn't know that.
00:43:40.340But what people have in their minds is this constant bombardment of headlines that says climate change is going to make the weather worse.
00:43:50.460Climate change is going to kill all the species.
00:43:52.420Climate change is going to spread diseases.
00:43:56.560And it's this, again, it's this abstract concept that you can't relieve your anxiety by actually looking at something for yourself and seeing it.
00:44:08.460Like if I told you that there's a wolf at your door and provoke fear,
00:44:15.920but you can look out your window and see there's nothing at your door and that will resolve the fear.
00:44:22.200Or if there is a wolf, then you can deal with it.
00:44:25.200But if I tell you climate change is going to wreck your life, well, what do you look at to assess this threat?