Juno News - The Rupa Subramanya Show ｜ The climate alarmists are out in full force

00:00:00.000 Hi everyone and welcome to the Rupa Subramanya show.

00:00:20.300 Now for many of us in Canada and other parts of the world, it sure has been a hot summer.

00:00:26.500 We've seen heat waves, heat advisories in many U.S. and Canadian cities, as well as

00:00:33.000 in Europe and parts of Asia, and raging wildfires in both the East and the West, which led to

00:00:39.720 a haze of smog over many cities across the East Coast, including right here in Ottawa.

00:00:46.200 And yes, it was bad for a few days.

00:00:48.640 However, here's the crux.

00:00:50.400 Is it a sign that we're in the midst of some life and death climate emergency that many

00:00:56.960 of our establishment politicians and folks in the legacy media are claiming?

00:01:02.460 Not a day goes by that some story of a type called climate change alarmism, where something

00:01:08.460 or the other is blamed on climate change, whether it's heat or forest fires.

00:01:13.400 Some of the stories are really a stretch and rather hysterical, where the temperature or

00:01:19.140 the climate is incidental.

00:01:21.720 For example, there was a story in the U.S. recently where eight dogs died in an un-air-conditioned

00:01:28.440 and unventilated cargo area of a truck.

00:01:32.080 That's absolutely horrific and tragic.

00:01:34.660 But the fault here is not the climate.

00:01:36.580 The fault is the driver who was oblivious of the fact that the air conditioning in the

00:01:42.220 truck had stopped working, or maybe the company he worked for, for not keeping their equipment

00:01:48.340 properly maintained.

00:01:50.320 It's either a tragic accident or perhaps a case of animal abuse.

00:01:55.720 Even without climate change, if you lock up an animal or a human being, for that matter,

00:02:01.380 in a cage with absolutely no ventilation or cooling on a hot summer day, the consequences

00:02:08.600 will inevitably be tragic.

00:02:11.520 This is just one example of many stories out there that's been in the news recently.

00:02:17.320 My own view is that climate change activists have seized on a summer of hot weather to ramp

00:02:23.820 up alarmism around climate change.

00:02:26.460 That includes the government and, of course, the legacy media.

00:02:30.480 Here in eastern Ontario, for example, an emergency alert went off a few days ago on everyone's

00:02:37.880 cell phones because of an impending thunderstorm.

00:02:42.840 It's almost as if they think we've never dealt with thunderstorms and rain before.

00:02:48.420 As you might expect, here in Canada, like with many issues, there's been very little pushback

00:02:55.500 against climate change alarmism.

00:02:57.780 But there is one important voice, one important exception, and that is my guest today.

00:03:03.920 Please welcome Ross McKittrick, who is a professor of environmental economics at Guelph University

00:03:09.580 and a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute.

00:03:13.140 He does both academic research and writes op-eds on climate issues, and it's a real pleasure

00:03:18.860 to have him on the podcast to share his insights with us.

00:03:22.240 Ross, welcome to the show.

00:03:27.720 It's a real pleasure to have you here.

00:03:30.020 Now, I was hoping to frame our conversation around a couple of recent pieces you wrote in

00:03:35.880 the Financial Post back in February.

00:03:39.780 You very rightly raised the alarm of the danger of censorship when it comes to diverging views

00:03:46.400 on issues that relate to climate change and the apparent enthusiasm of the Trudeau government

00:03:52.440 and big chunks of the legacy media to label as disinformation or misinformation any view

00:03:59.100 that challenges the orthodox establishment view on climate change,

00:04:04.040 that climate change is an impending disaster and the sky is about to fall on us.

00:04:08.320 How do you think we got into this situation in Canada, and how is it that the spirit of free

00:04:13.880 debate on this issue, along with many other such issues, has all but extinguished?

00:04:22.580 It's been building for a long time.

00:04:25.820 Since I've been writing and studying on the climate change issue now for, I guess, close to 30 years,

00:04:32.040 there's always been, even decades ago, there was a claim that the science has settled,

00:04:39.900 debates over, and that was made by people who thought that there's only a small group of people

00:04:47.640 that are qualified to speak to the issue.

00:04:50.420 And I think the mechanism that you're referring to that is very active in the climate change field,

00:04:57.980 but it's also active, and we saw it with respect to COVID as well.

00:05:03.520 It's that you're standing to discuss the issue publicly or in an official capacity

00:05:08.800 isn't based on your qualifications or the data you have or the scientific background that you bring.

00:05:15.480 It's based on your willingness to adhere to a narrative.

00:05:19.040 So when you see this narrative-based standing emerge, then it's departed from what we usually think of

00:05:30.080 as the kind of public debate that we want to have on important issues.

00:05:35.280 So with COVID, for instance, you would see the phrase like, well, we should follow the science,

00:05:41.480 and somebody might say something challenging, whether the vaccines were effective in stopping transmission,

00:05:47.900 and they'd be shut down because someone might say, well, I'm going to listen to qualified experts.

00:05:54.920 Now, the retort that you could bring at that point would be to say, well, okay,

00:05:59.060 I'll bring you qualified experts who are saying that.

00:06:02.120 But then they'll do the switch and say, well, because they disagree with the official line,

00:06:07.200 they're not actually qualified.

00:06:09.260 And so it's this tautological definitions.

00:06:11.940 Then the same thing happens and has been happening all the way through on the climate change issue,

00:06:16.220 that you'll have journalists or politicians or people with an agenda to push who will say,

00:06:23.040 we're only going to listen to qualified climate scientists on this point.

00:06:28.040 And so then if I say, okay, well, here's a scientist who disagrees with you.

00:06:33.240 Oh, well, they're not qualified, because we're only going to listen to qualified scientists who stick to the narrative.

00:06:40.560 So that kind of mechanism, I assume that it emerges in these contentious debates,

00:06:47.040 because there's an agenda and there's a narrative that supports the agenda.

00:06:51.580 And then the narrative becomes the one thing everybody needs to uphold.

00:06:58.420 And then you look for something that will break through the noise.

00:07:01.640 So in the case of COVID, a lot of things happened in a very short time span,

00:07:07.580 like over about two years, that I've been watching happen over decadal time spans on the climate change issue.

00:07:14.100 But I think a big one for people was they got told that the vaccine will prevent transmission.

00:07:21.600 If you take the vaccine, you can't get COVID and you can't give it to anyone else.

00:07:25.580 And that was a very strong message.

00:07:28.100 And anyone who disagreed with it was shut out of the discussion.

00:07:30.560 And then after the vaccine campaigns, they had to start reporting that people who were fully vaccinated were getting COVID again,

00:07:40.220 and that it was spreading just as rapidly among vaccinated as unvaccinated people.

00:07:45.580 So in that sense, people got to see a really clear example of how this narrative-based standing distorted the whole discussion,

00:07:55.440 because you weren't allowed to hear from the people who predicted that and who were critical of the vaccine campaigns.

00:08:04.640 In 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.

00:08:14.080 So 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?

00:08:22.600 A statement like that is an abstraction.

00:08:25.400 All it means is somebody drew a chart using some statistical methodology and the line either slopes up or slopes down.

00:08:34.920 But it doesn't correspond to anything that you and I could go out and measure.

00:08:37.980 Similarly, if let's say a tornado hits somewhere in Ontario and someone says, well, this is caused by climate change.

00:08:47.620 Well, how can we respond to that?

00:08:50.660 I mean, it's a statement that can't be proven or disproven.

00:08:54.040 It's just put out there.

00:08:55.540 And then if you do try to challenge it, then we get back to this narrative-based dismissal of these things.

00:09:03.260 Right 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.

00:09:16.100 And again, the claims, the scientific issues there are really subtle, really difficult.

00:09:21.260 They involve trying to deal with a lot of data and a lot of uncertainty.

00:09:27.180 And 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.

00:09:38.480 With 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.

00:09:56.700 And the whole report was based on this premise that there's this plague of disinformation and misinformation by bad actors out there.

00:10:06.340 And what we need to do is get the government to censor social media.

00:10:09.500 And 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.

00:10:27.480 And 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.

00:10:37.940 So 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.

00:10:45.200 And 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.

00:10:56.620 Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:10:58.920 You know, I want to turn to an important climate change study that very few people are talking about.

00:11:05.340 And I happen to come across the study in your op-ed for the Financial Post.

00:11:10.700 The study is a little technical.

00:11:12.520 So 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?

00:11:26.620 Well, so this is an issue I've looked at for a long time.

00:11:32.540 I've co-authored with meteorologists and with other statisticians.

00:11:40.000 It's a big topic in the field, basically comparing model reconstructions of the last few decades with what was actually observed.

00:11:48.400 And 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.

00:12:01.560 But you never have enough information to be sure you've got the right equations in your model.

00:12:07.700 So you have to run the model and see how it does in comparison against reality.

00:12:12.740 And the particular question we're interested in is how much warming do you get if you add more CO2 to the atmosphere?

00:12:19.400 And so all the models predict warming.

00:12:23.960 There's a huge spread in the models.

00:12:26.260 This is one thing people need to understand.

00:12:28.280 If you decide, I'm going to tailor my views on climate change to the mainstream.

00:12:33.760 I'm just going to be, I'm going to follow the mainstream of science.

00:12:37.160 Well, that's a huge range.

00:12:39.740 Just 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.

00:12:47.140 And it's very slow and other models that will say you'll rapidly warm five or six degrees and cause all kinds of problems.

00:12:57.600 My co-authors and I have focused on a particular part of the climate called the tropical troposphere.

00:13:04.440 Now, the troposphere is the layer of air from about one kilometers up to about 10 kilometers.

00:13:10.380 And that region of the atmosphere is where the greenhouse gases mix.

00:13:17.100 And it's where climate models all say there should be the most rapid warming, but especially in the troposphere over the tropics.

00:13:26.360 And over the tropics, you get a huge buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere.

00:13:31.560 And 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.

00:13:46.280 So 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.

00:13:58.560 So we looked at that and I've been I've published papers.

00:14:05.420 Others have published papers said, you know, pretty much every climate model predicts too much warming in that part of the atmosphere.

00:14:12.540 And in subsequent papers, we showed a couple of years ago that the excess warming now occurs everywhere in the troposphere through its global now.

00:14:21.620 And this is important because there aren't many mechanisms in these models that will give you warming in the troposphere.

00:14:30.720 So if they're getting that wrong, it's probably there's too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

00:14:35.400 So you have to kind of set the dial somewhere in your model how much warming you get from greenhouse gases.

00:14:40.960 Now, from the modeling side, there was one data set that they could appeal to that suggested, no, we actually may have this right.

00:14:49.460 There are a bunch of data sets based on weather balloon measurements and other data sets based on satellite measurements.

00:14:57.060 And the data sets tended to all agree, except there was one that was a bit of an outlier.

00:15:02.600 And that was called the STAR data set produced by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which we call NOAA in the U.S.

00:15:11.640 And 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.

00:15:22.860 Still a bit too much warming, but within the bound of uncertainty, we're OK.

00:15:27.380 Earlier this year, the authors of the STAR data set did a complete revision of how they assembled their data set.

00:15:37.160 And in particular, they responded to some critics from the University of Alabama and Huntsville and came to agree with them.

00:15:45.820 And 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.

00:15:55.840 And their revised data set now has the lowest warming of all the satellite data sets.

00:16:01.140 And so that removed one of the big defenses of the climate models.

00:16:08.660 And so now the picture that's there, I think, is very clear in the data that models have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

00:16:15.160 And 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.

00:16:24.740 So, Russ, do you think this is a benign error of the people who built these models?

00:16:34.820 Or, 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?

00:16:46.740 Good question, because right now there's about 40 of these models and they're big undertakings to build a large climate model.

00:16:59.940 And that means there's a community and that means there's peer pressure.

00:17:03.120 And there is discussion and it's there in the journals that people recognize, especially, well, ironically, the models have gotten warmer over time,

00:17:15.600 even as evidence has emerged that they warm too much.

00:17:20.060 We're now in what's called the sixth generation of climate models, as the labeling goes.

00:17:26.500 And they're even warmer than the fifth generation.

00:17:29.160 And when that came out, when the data started being pumped out by these models and they had even higher climate sensitivity than before,

00:17:38.360 there was trepidation in the literature.

00:17:40.800 I mean, it emerged in some commentaries in Science Magazine and places like that, that the modelers themselves were saying,

00:17:47.840 this is the wrong direction that we're going and they don't know why it is.

00:17:52.700 It's a puzzle, though, why some of the individual modeling labs, like, for instance, the worst of the bunch is the Canadian climate model.

00:17:59.700 And 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.

00:18:10.540 And they pointed out the Canadian climate model warms seven times faster than observations over the test period.

00:18:17.380 So you're feeding greenhouse gases in that model, and you get a spectacular amount of warming, but it just doesn't conform to reality.

00:18:27.120 So at a certain point, I have to wonder, why don't the modelers themselves get discouraged by that?

00:18:33.320 I mean, they're making predictions that everybody in the field knows are too hot.

00:18:39.540 So why don't they go back and fix that?

00:18:44.880 I 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.

00:18:58.860 And it'll include on the list, maybe we have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

00:19:04.900 But there's a bunch of other possibilities.

00:19:08.080 And I think what they're doing is looking at every other possibility first.

00:19:12.620 And eventually, I think they'll get to, well, we have too much sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

00:19:19.400 But 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.

00:19:30.960 I 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.

00:19:45.140 And 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.

00:19:55.080 Yeah, 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.

00:20:10.840 And then you pointed to evidence, as did I.

00:20:14.300 I think we both shared the same chart on Twitter, or X, as it's called now.

00:20:21.000 You pointed to evidence which shows that forest fires peaked in the 80s and have been getting less severe since then.

00:20:28.600 And you wrote about it for the Financial Post.

00:20:31.060 Could you explain why forest fires have been trending down?

00:20:35.760 And also, you know, this past summer, we've certainly seen, you get the perception that you've seen a lot of forest fires.

00:20:45.060 Do you think that's an outlier in this generally falling trend?

00:20:49.880 Well, to the first question, I don't know why the number of forest fires has been trending down.

00:20:54.360 There's a few metrics that are followed.

00:20:58.020 So one is the number of fires.

00:21:00.740 Another is the total area burned.

00:21:03.540 And then there are different measures of severity of fires.

00:21:08.680 On the first one, the number of fires, the data for Canada goes back to the late 1950s.

00:21:16.100 It goes even farther, but the data that the government's willing to publish goes back to the late 50s.

00:21:20.680 So the number of fires each year grew up to about 1990, and then it peaked, and then it's been going down ever since then.

00:21:29.280 The area burned also grew up to about 1990.

00:21:33.660 And then that series kind of flattened out.

00:21:37.240 It's gone up and down.

00:21:39.880 For instance, 2020 was the lowest area burned in at least 30 years.

00:21:46.880 And then this year was the largest area burned.

00:21:50.900 So there's a lot of volatility.

00:21:53.640 And then as far as fire severity goes, there are different measures.

00:21:58.040 And one of the papers that I've seen, it's got the numbers trending down.

00:22:04.660 And then people working in the field have sent me other papers that measure differently and it trends out.

00:22:11.760 Although, 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.

00:22:26.360 So the whole picture is a really complicated one, as you can imagine.

00:22:33.700 It'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.

00:22:50.120 But there's also the human role, the aggressiveness of fire suppression, the intrusion of people into forested areas.

00:23:02.220 There's delayed effects of disease outbreaks.

00:23:05.140 So 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.

00:23:18.560 A lot of land will burn very quickly.

00:23:22.820 So there are a lot of conflicting forces there.

00:23:28.840 As to why the number of fires went down, as far as I know, there isn't a clear explanation of that.

00:23:37.300 If there's a simple climate change story, though, we should see increasing area burn around the world.

00:23:45.640 Because climate change isn't just in Canada.

00:23:47.620 It should happen around the world.

00:23:49.900 And this is where we can now use satellite data.

00:23:53.200 And 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.

00:24:02.100 Not by a lot, but it isn't going up.

00:24:04.880 It's going down.

00:24:05.920 So 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.

00:24:19.100 And then what caught people's attention was the fact that we not only had a lot of wildfires, but the wind pattern was different.

00:24:27.380 So it was blowing the smoke to the south instead of taking it up to the north and dispersing it.

00:24:34.060 So this year, everybody noticed the fires because the wind blew down over the eastern seaboard.

00:24:42.140 But 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.

00:24:52.800 And 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,

00:25:06.960 the trends are actually going in the opposite direction of this glib claim that climate change means more and bigger forest fires.

00:25:15.400 And you don't just get to pull one year out and say, this proves my theory.

00:25:21.480 If you're going to pull one year out, why don't we pull out 2020?

00:25:24.620 Which, like I say, was the lowest in the whole record.

00:25:27.800 Exactly.

00:25:29.180 And were you called a climate change denier for pointing out facts?

00:25:35.900 That is par for the course.

00:25:37.980 Yeah.

00:25:38.780 The serious way to get called a denier is to show people data.

00:25:43.100 Yeah.

00:25:43.940 No, absolutely.

00:25:45.400 Let's, you know, take a step back and look at the big picture question here.

00:25:53.520 I think we all agree that human activity increases greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

00:26:00.540 The real question is, what is the magnitude of that effect on the climate?

00:26:06.660 You know, alarmists will say that we're basically at the point of no return and we're heading into a doomsday scenario.

00:26:14.620 You know, what do you make of such claims and really what is a sensible perspective?

00:26:22.080 What's a sensible take on climate change?

00:26:24.080 You can start with the points that are universally agreed.

00:26:34.540 So carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

00:26:37.500 So that means technically what it means is that it absorbs energy in the infrared part of the spectrum.

00:26:45.800 And so other things being equal, if you increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, we should expect warming to happen.

00:27:00.860 That 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.

00:27:20.320 And 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?

00:27:31.840 That's never been something you could just answer based on the simple theory that CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

00:27:37.960 That's where you get into the model, which is necessary, but also into the data analysis.

00:27:45.320 And this is a different strand of the discussion that doesn't get much attention.

00:27:50.340 But 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.

00:28:04.880 So the models occupy this range.

00:28:07.560 And 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.

00:28:17.800 And the traditional range from the IPCC has always been between one and a half and four and a half degrees.

00:28:25.420 So there's some models that go above that, but generally it's one and a half to four and a half degrees.

00:28:30.880 On 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?

00:28:45.520 And the answer would be, if the climate sensitivity is between one and a half and two degrees, this is a non-issue.

00:29:01.360 We couldn't justify any climate policy.

00:29:04.360 If 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.

00:29:17.480 Even 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.

00:29:29.240 At 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.

00:29:46.140 Not 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.

00:30:00.060 It'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.

00:30:14.720 And we have an obligation to try to stop emissions from growing and begin to reduce them by the middle of the century.

00:30:24.340 You can get all those different messages, all those different prescriptions in the expert literature.

00:30:29.680 And 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.

00:30:37.300 That's the mainstream.

00:30:38.520 And also they'll try to make it sound like that's the path that we're on.

00:30:42.200 The empirical literature on climate sensitivity is all clustered at the low end.

00:30:48.380 It's very difficult to look at the historical record and get a climate sensitivity above two and a half degrees.

00:30:57.400 There are tons of studies based on the empirical literature that have it between one and a half and two and a half degrees.

00:31:05.460 And so, like I say, you stick that in the model and I've done this with co-authors.

00:31:12.160 We'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.

00:31:27.720 And then so that means you just can't justify policy intervention.

00:31:33.140 The 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.

00:31:44.200 So in a country like Canada, we've done an amazing job at reducing other types of air pollution.

00:31:50.600 Sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, particulates.

00:31:53.580 We've reduced ground level ozone, NOx emissions, as we call it, nitrogen-based gases.

00:32:01.080 They've all been reduced dramatically since the 1970s, even as our economy has grown considerably in size.

00:32:09.800 The technology allows for that.

00:32:11.380 So 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.

00:32:21.460 About 90% of the carbon monoxide is eliminated by the catalytic converter.

00:32:26.020 And effectively, it doesn't cost anything.

00:32:28.700 It's just stuck on there.

00:32:30.280 And you can still drive your car, but you don't release much carbon monoxide.

00:32:35.100 The technology allowed us to do that.

00:32:37.060 There's no technology to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, though.

00:32:41.380 If you burn fossil fuels, you're going to generate a certain amount of CO2 based on the carbon content of that fuel.

00:32:50.400 And we've fiddled around with things like underground carbon capture and storage.

00:32:55.880 And in a few places in the world, it's feasible, but it's still very expensive.

00:33:00.140 But that's not a solution, and it doesn't reduce it from mobile sources like cars.

00:33:05.980 As long as we use fossil fuels, we're going to be releasing CO2 emissions.

00:33:12.340 And 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.

00:33:30.420 Because they're so essential to economic growth and development.

00:33:34.360 So you have these two main considerations.

00:33:38.540 The first is CO2 emissions are really, really costly and difficult to reduce.

00:33:44.860 And 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.

00:33:55.680 That's not possible.

00:33:56.820 But then the other side of it is, it's not even clear that this is really necessary.

00:34:03.000 When 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.

00:34:13.220 We can adapt to it fairly easily.

00:34:16.420 We certainly can't stop it.

00:34:18.720 And we could destroy our living standards in a vain attempt to try to stop it.

00:34:23.720 But 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.

00:34:38.560 And the gain in living standard from fossil fuels will far away any costs associated with climate change.

00:34:45.980 So speaking of adaptation and, you know, on how we respond to it.

00:34:52.460 So, 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?

00:35:06.640 In 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?

00:35:18.480 Does that kind of thing make any sense?

00:35:22.540 From an economic point of view, it does.

00:35:24.540 It's a bit of a theoretical point.

00:35:27.000 But if you think about all the activities out there that generate carbon dioxide emissions, some of them are incredibly valuable.

00:35:36.920 So think about like gas for our ambulance fleet.

00:35:39.880 Well, that's really valuable activity.

00:35:41.920 We don't want to restrict that.

00:35:44.140 But some of the activity may not be all that necessary, just unnecessary car trips or things like that, that people are pretty indifferent to.

00:35:54.580 But 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.

00:36:10.360 The level of the carbon tax is kind of a cutoff point.

00:36:14.920 And it says find the cheapest ways of reducing emissions and implement those.

00:36:21.620 But 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.

00:36:31.720 The problem for the people who want to use carbon taxes to reach something like the Paris climate targets, which are very aggressive.

00:36:42.780 The 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.

00:36:50.740 It doesn't get you anywhere close to the Paris target.

00:36:53.460 Gasoline and fuel use, energy use in general, tends to be pretty non-responsive to the price.

00:37:01.980 People need their fuels.

00:37:04.500 They need to heat their homes. 0.98

00:37:05.540 They need to travel.

00:37:06.900 They need to get to work.

00:37:08.900 So it's very difficult to change energy consumption just by increasing the price.

00:37:14.380 All that happens is people still buy the energy, but they're paying more for it.

00:37:18.580 That doesn't mean, though, that there are other policies that would be less expensive for reducing CO2 emissions.

00:37:29.440 In the economic way of looking at this, a carbon tax is always going to give you the cheapest emission reductions.

00:37:35.560 So what we're seeing in Canada now is the federal government, they put a carbon tax in place.

00:37:42.960 They have a plan to increase it and keep increasing it to a pretty high level by the end of the decade.

00:37:49.160 But they can also see that this isn't going to reduce CO2 emissions by all that much.

00:37:54.140 So now we've got all these other policies being brought in.

00:37:57.820 The clean fuel standard is one, product energy efficiency rules, the electric vehicle mandate, building energy efficiency rules that will kick in after 2025.

00:38:15.260 And so people don't yet perceive how expensive these are going to be.

00:38:21.600 They're going to be incredibly expensive policies to implement.

00:38:24.740 And in a way, they have to be, because by definition, your carbon tax has already identified all the lowest cost diminution reductions.

00:38:34.940 Everything that gets forced through by regulation had to be more expensive than paying the carbon tax.

00:38:40.500 And so in the economics area, we don't like all these other policies because they destroy the efficiency that the carbon tax had.

00:38:51.820 The reason for them, though, is this unstated problem with the carbon taxes, which is it gives you the cheapest emission reductions.

00:39:03.240 It's just there aren't many cheap emission reductions to be had.

00:39:06.060 So it doesn't get you very far.

00:39:08.240 In principle, we could get to the Paris target with carbon taxes.

00:39:11.580 But I think you'd need a carbon tax of close to $500 a tonne and the economic consequences would be devastating.

00:39:20.240 And so that's why governments like to switch around, try different alternative policies like they're doing.

00:39:30.420 Now, I lost track of where we started with the discussion, but on the question of do carbon taxes make sense?

00:39:40.580 Yes, they do.

00:39:41.720 But you have to understand there are no inexpensive emission reduction options out there with current technology.

00:39:50.260 Maybe 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.

00:39:58.920 But with current technology, it's going to be very expensive to reduce emissions.

00:40:06.300 So a carbon tax can get you a small amount of emission reductions with minimal effect on the economy.

00:40:11.580 But 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.

00:40:22.560 Interesting.

00:40:24.300 So, Ross, I mean, that's a great assessment of, I mean, how afraid should the average person be?

00:40:34.780 Should we continue to live in, you know, I was, I was stunned to discover this, that there's something called climate change induced anxiety.

00:40:47.360 And there are these meditation apps out there that actually very specifically deal with people who experience climate change, anxiety induced by climate change.

00:41:00.500 And, 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.

00:41:12.380 You know, whereas, you know, the rest of the world, like I've lived in India, where, honestly, the smog is like that.

00:41:19.800 I mean, it's not, it's not a healthy environment, but people are not like panicking about it necessarily.

00:41:25.220 You know, you know, you go on with your life, and you have some good days, and you have some bad days.

00:41:30.320 But I find that people here, especially here in Canada, there's a great deal of fear.

00:41:34.700 And again, it's also related to things that we've seen in the, during the pandemic.

00:41:39.440 And, you know, what, what really, you know, what would you say to those people?

00:41:46.320 What you're, what you're describing is very real, the anxiety, the fear, the climate change fear.

00:41:52.260 However, it's not the fear connected to climate change itself.

00:41:57.540 It's fear connected to all the alarmist media coverage of climate change.

00:42:04.240 Even for someone, let's see, I'm in my 50s.

00:42:08.400 So, 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.

00:42:22.740 But remember, when we're talking about climate change, we're talking about long-term averages.

00:42:26.500 Over 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.

00:42:38.020 And one of the things I like to do with my undergrad students, since Guelph has weather records that go back to the late 1800s,

00:42:46.420 is show them daily temperature records for a bunch of different years from the 1880s to the present and ask them,

00:42:56.180 can you tell which year is which, which was a recent year and which was from the 1800s?

00:43:00.980 Because the normal variability is so large that typically, no, they can't.

00:43:08.420 It's not like the current climate looks completely different from what our great-great-grandparents experienced in this same location.

00:43:17.660 There are little differences.

00:43:19.300 But, for instance, in Ontario, spring tends to come a bit earlier.

00:43:25.460 The snow melts a bit earlier than it did in the 60s.

00:43:29.400 But the fall, if anything, has gotten a little cooler.

00:43:34.620 And unless you show people a graph, they wouldn't know that.

00:43:40.340 But what people have in their minds is this constant bombardment of headlines that says climate change is going to make the weather worse.

00:43:50.460 Climate change is going to kill all the species.

00:43:52.420 Climate change is going to spread diseases.

00:43:56.560 And 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.

00:44:08.460 Like if I told you that there's a wolf at your door and provoke fear,

00:44:15.920 but you can look out your window and see there's nothing at your door and that will resolve the fear.

00:44:22.200 Or if there is a wolf, then you can deal with it.

00:44:25.200 But if I tell you climate change is going to wreck your life, well, what do you look at to assess this threat?

00:44:32.420 It's an abstraction.

00:44:34.380 It's a computer model.

00:44:38.420 It's a scenario.

00:44:40.120 It's something that's completely invisible.

00:44:44.700 And as a result, well, the famous saying by FDR, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

00:44:52.660 He went on to say nameless unreasoning fear.

00:44:57.560 He was talking during the Depression about, okay, now people are afraid of the economy in the abstract,

00:45:05.880 that there's just something out there that's destroying our way of life.

00:45:10.100 And so he wanted people to try to focus on concrete things.

00:45:14.740 And if people focus on the concrete things, including the weather they experience in a typical year,

00:45:23.820 I think they'll realize I can deal with this.

00:45:26.800 Here in Canada, we deal with winter, we deal with summer and everything in between.

00:45:30.900 So it's not like we're going to experience a world that's outside of that range.

00:45:39.520 It's always going to be somewhere in that range.

00:45:41.380 More specifically, I will say that there's a particular, it's called a climate change scenario

00:45:52.840 that is, that dominates the academic field.

00:45:55.680 It's called RCP 8.5.

00:45:58.680 It's an emission scenario that was cooked up about 10 years ago.

00:46:02.680 And it's an extreme upper end emission scenario.

00:46:05.800 It was meant as a kind of a far out worst case scenario.

00:46:09.400 Basically, what happens if we just massively increase coal consumption around the world

00:46:14.040 and we become much less efficient in our electricity system

00:46:17.380 and we generate so many, so much greenhouse gas emissions

00:46:20.360 that we warm the planet up by six degrees over the next 80 years?

00:46:27.320 It's not going to happen.

00:46:28.440 There's no way it could happen.

00:46:29.860 Nobody who uses that scenario thinks it's a realistic scenario.

00:46:33.680 Economically, it couldn't happen.

00:46:35.080 And just physically, it's not going to happen.

00:46:37.640 But most of the studies that you see in the press are RCP 8.5 scenarios.

00:46:43.340 So you plug that into a model and then suddenly you get big ecological chaos

00:46:49.240 or you get big stresses on economies around the world.

00:46:54.560 You wipe out the wine industry in France or something like that.

00:46:58.240 So then by the time it hits the headlines, and those studies always make the headlines.

00:47:04.440 The studies were, I saw one recently, a journal article looking at the wine industry in France

00:47:12.180 and agriculture in France generally.

00:47:14.020 And the conclusion of it was that farmers have adapted in such a way

00:47:17.880 that the climate changes over the past 40 years have actually made them better off.

00:47:21.800 And so no one's going to write a newspaper article about that.

00:47:26.540 They should.

00:47:27.240 But the headline is going to be somebody ran an RCP 8.5 scenario

00:47:32.860 and agriculture in France gets wiped out.

00:47:36.640 And then they don't tell you that this was a far-fetched, extreme outlier case.

00:47:44.080 So that's part of what's going on.

00:47:49.200 And it really is, I think, an indictment of the academics who do these studies

00:47:53.900 and then they feed them to journalists.

00:47:56.460 The journalists write them up without proper context.

00:47:59.260 And it does a lot of damage.

00:48:00.800 It's doing the psychological damage to people of filling their minds with this notion

00:48:05.380 that the climate change that we're seeing is part of a devastating trend that we can't stop.

00:48:14.960 And all you can do is huddle in anxiety and hope that you'll die before it happens.

00:48:25.000 And it's a sad situation.

00:48:27.880 But I guess I come down to what's driving it is not climate change.

00:48:32.180 It's this alarmist media industry around climate change is that they sell a lot of papers

00:48:39.240 and they attract a lot of viewers on websites by fanning the flames of climate fear and alarm.

00:48:47.480 Yeah, fear definitely seems to sell or bad news seems to sell.

00:48:53.780 And the media has been doing that on a range of different issues, not just climate change,

00:48:59.520 but we saw that during the pandemic as well.

00:49:02.180 But, Ross, I really appreciate you taking the time to speak to me

00:49:07.180 and share your very valuable insights with us.

00:49:10.300 And I've really enjoyed your writing in the Financial Post.

00:49:13.580 I also write for the National Post.

00:49:15.620 And I really urge people to check out your columns

00:49:19.320 and educate themselves on learning more about climate change

00:49:27.500 and your very, very sensible takes on the topic.

00:49:30.820 So thank you very much.

00:49:32.500 I really appreciate you coming on the show.

00:49:34.320 And I hope to have you back again soon.

00:49:37.200 Thanks, Rupa.

00:49:38.060 And if people want to follow my writings, it's available at rasmckittrick.com.

00:49:44.020 Okay, absolutely.

00:49:45.600 Wonderful.

00:49:46.360 Thank you.

00:49:47.240 Take care.

00:49:47.780 Bye.

00:49:48.000 Bye.

00:49:48.580 Bye.

00:49:48.620 Bye.

00:49:55.100 Bye.

00:49:55.620 Bye.

00:49:57.620 Bye.

00:50:06.700 Bye.

00:50:07.040 Bye.

00:50:08.260 Bye.

00:50:08.860 Bye.

00:50:09.480 Bye.

00:50:10.100 Bye.

00:50:10.620 Bye.

00:50:11.260 Bye.

00:50:11.860 Bye.

00:50:12.420 Bye.

00:50:13.060 Bye.

00:50:14.100 Bye.

00:50:14.480 Bye.

00:50:14.880 Bye.

00:50:15.000 Bye.

00:50:15.220 Bye.

00:50:17.040 Bye.

00:50:17.420 Bye.

Juno News - August 05, 2023

The Rupa Subramanya Show ｜ The climate alarmists are out in full force

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