In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with climate scientist Dr. Carl Sagan to discuss his controversial new book, Unsettled: The Truth About Climate Change . In this episode, Dr. Sagan explains why he thinks climate change is happening, what it means, and why we should be worried about it. We talk about the dangers of climate change, how to deal with it, and whether or not human beings are to blame for climate change. We also talk about what he thinks about climate change and its impact on the economy, the environment, and our understanding of the climate, and how we should respond. This is an [Expert] level episode, which means some parts of the conversation may not make sense unless you ve read the book. If you haven t done so, please take some time to check out the book and give us your thoughts on it in the comments section below. Thanks for listening and share it with a friend or become a supporter of the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever else you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening! Timestamps: 1:00 - What is climate change? 2:30 - What does climate change mean to you? 3:15 - Why do you think humans have an effect on climate? 4:00 5:40 - Is climate change caused by humans? 6:10 - What are we to blame? 7:35 - How do we know what we should do about it? 8:20 - Why are we all affected by climate change ? 9: What does it matter? 11:20 12:30 What do we need to do? 13:10 15: What are the most important thing we can do about climate science? 16:40 17:30 | What is the most effective way to mitigate climate change 14:40 | What s our role in climate change in the 21st century? 15 - How should we know about climate 21:00 | What are you can do to prepare for climate science 18: What s the best way to prepare? 19: What do you want? ? 22:20 | How do you know about the climate change problem? 26:10 | How can we know more? 27:40 // What s your answer to climate change so we can prepare for the climate crisis?
00:01:28.000It's on climate change and climate science, and we should just establish right away, just because I know you're going to experience some criticism, right?
00:02:17.000So if you worked for some sort of an oil company, you were chief scientist at BP? I was chief scientist at BP for five years after Caltech.
00:02:25.000And, you know, they didn't bring me there to help them find oil.
00:03:40.000I 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.
00:03:50.000To squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front, you're very clear about this.
00:04:13.000Your position, though, is that there's either an exaggeration or 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.
00:04:30.000I think, you know, to put it in a British sense, they have over-egged the custard.
00:04:36.000Now, why do you think this has happened?
00:04:39.000You know, 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.
00:04:57.000Now, if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the climate is changing, what percentage of an effect are human influences?
00:05:23.000But, you know, they completely forget that the climate was changing in comparable ways well before human influences became important.
00:05:32.000And so they say, no, no, we're going to ignore that.
00:05:37.000We're going to suppress it and say it's all human-caused.
00:05:40.000Now 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 a hundred 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,
00:05:59.000in the alarmist way, where it makes it seem that radical drastic change is happening over a very short period of time.
00:06:35.000So, this is the height of the Nile River from 640 AD up until 1450 AD. So, about 800 years of data every year about what was the lowest level that the Nile River reached in that year.
00:06:52.000The Nile was important to the Egyptians, as you might imagine, and so they measured it pretty carefully.
00:07:06.000One year it was up at six meters, 20 feet, and then the next year it was down to one meter or something like that.
00:07:12.000So a lot of variability from year to year.
00:07:15.000But then if you look at the curve, which is the average Trend over 30 years.
00:07:21.000You can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down.
00:07:26.000And you can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, new normal, new normal.
00:07:33.000We've got to do prayers and sacrifices.
00:07:35.000And of course, if they just waited another 100 years, it came back up again.
00:07:39.000And this was all before humans had any influence on the climate.
00:07:44.000Are we looking at climate and we're looking at these periods of time, 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,
00:08:03.000but realistically we should be looking at it on a broad, long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years.
00:10:51.000Misleading things that I'm pointing out in the book.
00:10:55.000How 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?
00:11:05.000So I was exposed to climate science in the early 90s when I was working with a group called Jason, which we can talk about at some point, for the government and looking at the impact of then high-performance computing and small satellites on climate science.
00:11:26.000And the group Jason is top scientists in their field that are recruited to work for the U.S. government.
00:11:33.000And it's, what is it, 70% of it is classified projects?
00:11:38.000We work for all government agencies, but a lot of what we do is for the national security parts of the government.
00:11:45.000And it's tackling the most complex scientific...
00:11:48.000The most difficult technical problems, sometimes, you know, mysteries that the government finds going on in other countries, things of that sort, what's going on, etc.
00:11:57.000Or how do we do X, Y, or Z technically?
00:12:00.000And so what was the initial study that you had read or what...
00:12:04.000So the initial thing that got me interested was 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,
00:12:35.000And, of course, being curious, we asked the question, well, how was the albedo first measured?
00:12:41.000And the answer was, back in the 30s, some guy started watching the dark part of the Moon.
00:12:46.000And 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.
00:12:57.000It 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.
00:13:09.000And 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.
00:13:19.000Anyway, that sort of got me interested in climate science.
00:13:22.000When 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.
00:13:37.000And I did that for quite a while in both BP and then in the government.
00:13:42.000And then in 2014, the American Physical Society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science.
00:13:52.000They had put out a statement in 2007, which was very controversial among the physicists.
00:14:00.000Because it used the word incontrovertible.
00:14:03.000And for a physicist, that's fighting words.
00:15:34.000I wound up resigning from the committee.
00:15:37.000But I wound up then publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
00:15:41.000They gave me 2,000 words, which was great.
00:15:44.000We got a couple of thousand online comments.
00:15:47.000Many people said, thanks for writing this and trying to expose the real science to what's going on.
00:15:53.000Of course, the establishment trashed me completely, even though I was just repeating what's actually in the reports and in the research.
00:16:01.000And what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you?
00:16:03.000Oh, you know, and we get it to this day with the book, you know, you're cherry-picked, you're misleading, 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.
00:16:22.000So is this the scientists that are claiming your 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,
00:16:53.000And look, my sense is that this is a problem.
00:16:57.000It'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 in time in a graceful way.
00:17:06.000But 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,
00:17:22.000which I have rebutted, I think, quite effectively.
00:17:25.000But it, you know, put a marker in the ground that people who didn't want to have the book understood could point to and said, aha, you know, those guys said Kuhn is an idiot.
00:17:38.000Now, what criticisms made sense that you could rebut?
00:17:43.000Well, you know, they said, for example, I said sea level rise was not accelerating.
00:17:49.000And, of course, I got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise.
00:17:54.000But they would criticize a review of what I said by somebody else, Or they would say sometimes, you know, Koonin said that and it's true, but it's not important because of A, B, and C. If you don't mind,
00:18:10.000pull that microphone just a little closer.
00:18:13.000Now, so these criticisms that were levied against you, did anyone 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, Koonin makes a lot of really good points?
00:18:32.000You know, when I first sort of came out in that Wall Street op-ed in 2014, I had a chat afterward with the chair of a very prominent earth science department at one of our best universities.
00:18:48.000I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who is firmly in the business.
00:18:54.000And he said, you know, Steve, I agree with almost everything you said, but I don't dare say it in public.
00:19:01.000You 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.
00:19:27.000I think, you know, the allegedly authoritative voices are the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, which issues major reports every six or seven years.
00:19:41.000There is the U.S. National Academies of Science.
00:19:45.000There is the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. government issues reports as well.
00:19:51.000And, you know, when you get into the meat of these reports, they have some problems and, you know, we can go into them.
00:19:59.000But by and large, they're pretty good summaries of the science.
00:20:02.000But when you get to the summaries for policymakers or you get to the media coverage or the political discussion, that's where things get really corrupted.
00:20:13.000So 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, hardworking people, and you talk to them privately, and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got.
00:20:27.000But by the time it gets to the end and the public, it's, you know, the science is settled, we're headed for doom, etc., etc.
00:20:33.000But that's always the case with something that's really controversial, right?
00:20:39.000The 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.
00:20:51.000And 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.
00:21:09.000With the Reformation, when the Catholic Church started to come at odds with the Protestant movement, let me give you two examples.
00:21:18.000In one of the best recent introductions I've had, you know, I'm a humble guy and I usually like to keep the introduction short, but this one was real interesting.
00:22:13.000The 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.
00:22:29.000The 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 would You'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenged dogma.
00:22:41.000What would possibly motivate the government to come out with a statement like that, that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus?
00:22:54.000So in cases of dogmatic opinions or ideologically formulated opinions, You know, I'm so surprised that the government would try to suppress the scientific process like that.
00:23:09.000I think what precipitated it was I had, for a number of years, been advocating for a red team review of climate reports.
00:23:19.000And where you get a bunch of credentialed people to look at the report and ask, what's wrong with this?
00:23:26.000We do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft, Other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments.
00:23:34.000And I almost got to the point where we could have pulled it off, but the Trump administration in the end decided they wouldn't do it.
00:23:41.000Now, the Trump administration had some of its own problems with climate science in the wrong way, correct?
00:23:48.000You 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.
00:23:59.000I had assembled pretty much a good red team, and then it was stopped at the last minute by a political decision.
00:24:07.000So I'm really disappointed because I point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports.
00:24:13.000You know, it says X, but in fact the truth is Y, if you look at the data.
00:24:19.000It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.
00:24:22.000So let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled.
00:24:28.000When you first walked away from this meeting that you were discussing and you realized 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.
00:24:44.000So how do you go from there before you write this book?
00:24:49.000So I started 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.
00:25:03.000I think the next turning point came when I was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes.
00:25:14.000And I turned to the official US 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.
00:25:31.000And it sure looks like if you look at that graph, we're in trouble.
00:26:18.000Well, in that particular case, it was going up, okay, from 1980 up until 2010. But what they didn't show you was there was an earlier part of the graph in which it was going down, okay?
00:26:31.000So it really looked like a return to normal.
00:26:34.000So in the beginning of the graph from 1970 to 1980, is that what you're saying is going down?
00:26:45.000And so what they were looking at, again, we were talking about how we're measuring things on these very small increments where time for us is 100 years.
00:27:04.000And there are these long-term trends, as you saw in the Egyptian river.
00:27:07.000Can we pull up chart number 35 in the unsettled file?
00:27:13.000And 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 ago.
00:27:23.000So let's pull up chart 35. So there is the original graph in the government report from 2014. And what's shown is from 1980 to 2010, and it's going up, right?
00:27:36.000Right, but if you see from 19, looks like 1979-ish.
00:27:40.000So let's look at the whole record, which is the next picture.
00:27:56.000Ten years ago or so, there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense.
00:28:03.000One paper says yes, another paper published in July says no, and so on.
00:28:08.000So the matter is kind of unsettled at the moment, but overall, as I can read for you, the official report, the official statement from the most recent UN report, let me just get it, There is low confidence in most reported long-term,
00:28:30.000multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone, that's hurricanes, frequency or intensity based metrics.
00:28:39.000Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?
00:28:42.000That image when you see 1975 and then you see 2005, it's not that much of a difference.
00:28:48.000So the peak of 1945 and then you go to 2005, you're not looking at that much of a difference and clearly there's been a gigantic difference in the amount of human influence.
00:29:17.000And the popular image that Greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on, all right?
00:29:23.000This is the official data set for how much ice Greenland is losing every year, okay?
00:29:32.000And it goes up right until 2021 and it starts in 1900. And what's interesting about this, there are several things.
00:29:43.000First of all, even though human warming influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, there are a lot of ups and downs.
00:29:54.000So, it says it's got to be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here.
00:29:59.000The second thing to notice Is that in the most recent decades, at the right-hand end of the chart, Greenland's is actually starting to melt less rapidly than more rapidly, even as the globe has been warming.
00:30:15.000And this is from 2010 to 2020. Yeah, correct.
00:30:18.000And 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.
00:30:30.000And 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 just- That's an excellent question.
00:30:42.000And 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.
00:30:52.000And you can find papers that say that.
00:31:54.000I mean, over this period, year by year, it certainly has a seasonal effect.
00:31:59.000These 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.
00:32:08.000So there's all this data that shows the ups and the downs and there's all this data that shows that sometimes they're losing ice and sometimes they're losing less ice and gaining ice.
00:32:18.000How do they know what is causing this or do they just assume that there's this series of factors?
00:32:28.000It'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.
00:32:41.000There's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming, That that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss, the melting.
00:32:49.000But right now, and for the foreseeable many decades, it is these natural variabilities.
00:32:56.000And instead, in the media, all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades.
00:33:02.000And this media narrative, do you think this is just one of those things where people gravitate towards the most alarmist perspective?
00:33:11.000So that's the one that makes the headline?
00:33:13.000Is it because of the green energy industry?
00:33:18.000It's all of the above, but I put a lot of it on activist reporters.
00:33:22.000So this statement that Greenland was melting just as fast in the 1930s as it is today, I made that.
00:33:31.000By a reporter, John Greenberg at PolitiFact, and he deemed the statement mostly false.
00:33:37.000And you can look at how he analyzed things, he talked to some experts, it's entirely misleading.
00:33:44.000So I got a non-expert reporter with an agenda and a platform criticizing what's actually in the data.
00:33:51.000So 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.
00:34:02.000He's looking for a positive response from the people that are climate, that believe these models and that think that the climate is of utmost importance.
00:34:50.000And the context for climate crisis is not a scientific finding, but a description of how the US media have overhyped the situation.
00:35:00.000Did 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.
00:35:33.000You know, apart from the fact that the globe is going to continue to warm 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.
00:35:53.000They're all within natural variability.
00:35:56.000One 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.
00:36:04.000So when they're thinking about what kind of danger there is to hurricanes, they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes.
00:37:25.000The people who said, no, no, it's a natural fluctuation, looked in the North Atlantic where only 10 percent of the world's hurricanes happen or 12 percent, something like that.
00:37:36.000And 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.
00:37:49.000What they found was that the measure of hurricane intensity went down from about 1960 to 1980 and then from 1980 to the 2000s was just coming back to normal.
00:38:03.000So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of controversy about this.
00:38:07.000This is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science.
00:38:10.000This 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 we're talking about, why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the Earth?
00:38:25.000You know, the Earth, there are two reasons.
00:38:30.000One is That the Earth is subject to external influences or influences outside of the climate.
00:38:38.000The orbit of the 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.
00:38:48.000But the other is that climate is a chaotic system, which means it has very Complicated and variable internal motions, all on its own.
00:39:02.000We know that because we have cartoons of the equations, and they show that.
00:39:08.000We know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days, two weeks.
00:39:13.000It's chaotic, and so it has a lot of variability.
00:39:17.000Some of these long-term variations we understand.
00:39:20.000For example, El Nino Happens every few years, takes a couple years.
00:39:28.000But these longer-term things that take 70 years, or in some cases 1,000 years, having to do with the motion of the ocean currents, we don't have a very good handle on it all.
00:39:40.000And part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well.
00:39:44.000And so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations.
00:39:49.000So is it safe to say that what people are looking for or what people would like to see is sort of a flat, easily predictable rise and lower, like that there's very little variation?
00:40:29.000I 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.
00:40:38.000And there has been a tide gauge there since about 1850 or 1860, and it measures the height of the ocean.
00:40:46.000It got to average out over the tides and the waves and the weather and so on, but okay.
00:40:51.000That black line on the graph from 1920 to 2020 is 100 years of actual data showing how fast the sea level is rising.
00:41:06.000And what you can see is it goes up and down in a cycle, kind of like the Greenland thing we looked at.
00:41:13.000And, you know, the peak was in 1950, and it was up at 5 millimeters a year.
00:41:19.000We can talk about what that means in a second.
00:41:21.000And then in 1980, it was down in 2 millimeters a year, and now again it's up at Four millimeters a year, and looks like it's headed down.
00:41:30.000And the peak that you're looking at from the 1950s and 2020 is essentially the same height.
00:41:36.000And, you know, to set a scale, three millimeters a year, which is kind of the average over that time, is a foot a century.
00:41:44.000One foot rise a century, which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years, okay?
00:41:52.000It's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents happening on these long timescales, 70, 80 years.
00:42:03.000What's interesting is those colored graphs going out from the present to 2000 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about 8 millimeters a year, twice as much as we've ever seen, and then goes on up from there.
00:42:19.000Those are the UN projections based on models.
00:42:26.000And you can see there are large uncertainties.
00:43:05.000As a scientist, 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,
00:43:21.000many variables, some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect?
00:43:25.000It's very frustrating To talk to non-experts about this, but I'm even more frustrated with my scientific colleagues, because many of them know that there are these problems in communication, and they do nothing about it,
00:43:54.000You 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.
00:44:09.000And many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said, Steve, thanks for doing that.
00:44:17.000Thanks for doing that, but I have to shut my mouth.
00:44:19.000Yeah, I don't dare speak out about this.
00:44:22.000Has it been a problem for you in your career writing this book?
00:44:56.000I really just want to get people to understand.
00:45:01.000Climate literacy and energy literacy—we haven't talked yet much about energy—are so important and people need to understand.
00:45:10.000Let me give you an example of a different field that I think is a terrible example.
00:45:16.000So 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.
00:45:30.000Now, 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.
00:46:33.000You need to see that, because the first time I saw that, I was like, oh my god, here it comes.
00:46:39.000I should say, before I read your book...
00:46:42.000I was fairly convinced that we're in for a horrible next 50 years of climate change and rise of sea level, and I was buying all the catastrophic...
00:48:45.000Doctor reveals why he wrote climate change on patients' medical chart.
00:48:49.000When a Canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart, he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines.
00:48:55.000Climate change is what Dr. 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.
00:49:06.000Extreme 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.
00:49:20.000The idea that you would say that's climate change.
00:49:41.000Not only that medicine, but the fact of taking one summer heat wave and calling it climate when it's really weather displays the ignorance of that doctor.
00:50:10.000It was, like, added on the chart, not her diagnosis, according to him when asked.
00:50:15.000Okay, it says, reflecting on the decision, Dr. Merritt said he wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it, 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.
00:50:27.000But he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
00:50:42.000When 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.
00:50:50.000So 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 3 millimeters a year for the last 160 years.
00:51:06.000So I'm confused here now, because in that other chart, it showed that the levels in, what was it, 1940?
00:53:08.000When they look at the percentage of how much agriculture has an impact, how much methane has an impact, how much transportation has an impact, how do they measure all that?
00:54:35.000But, you know, you shouldn't talk about abundance because there are very complicated issues about how the greenhouse gases actually trap the heat in the atmosphere.
00:54:45.000What 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.
00:54:55.000So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2. That's correct.
00:55:23.000And they knock off about half of what CO2 warms.
00:55:29.000And 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.
00:55:36.000How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth?
00:55:39.000So as I said, it's about half the warming impact of CO2. Half the warming.
00:55:44.000Okay, so the biggest contributor in terms of greenhouse gases, what industry causes the biggest?
00:55:52.000So power, electrical power generation is big.
00:55:57.000Heat of various kinds, both for buildings but also for industrial processes, the next biggest contributor.
00:56:07.000Transportation, which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases, globally is only 14% of greenhouse gases.
00:56:17.000Now, does that vary by country to country?
00:58:48.000Let me first talk about the economic impact of a changing climate, okay?
00:58:52.000And then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition, all right?
00:58:56.000So could we put up chart 21 of the Kunin file?
00:59:04.000And 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.
00:59:15.000And 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.
00:59:26.000And, you know, it goes up between 1 and 10 degrees or 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:59:31.000It's a US chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade.
00:59:35.000And what's shown on the vertical axis is the percent of damage to the US economy in 2100. And the takeaway from this is, first of all, as the temperature rise goes up, the damages go up.
00:59:51.000But more importantly, for temperature rises of up to 5 degrees centigrade or 9 degrees Fahrenheit, it's 4% of the U.S. economy in 2100. I'm not exactly sure what that means.
01:00:07.000That means that the economy, if the temperature were to go up, the economy would be 4% smaller in 2100 than it would have been otherwise.
01:00:15.000Now, does that take into account the growth of the economy overall?
01:00:26.000So, I'll show you the US economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century.
01:00:32.000If it grows at 2% a year, which is kind of what everybody thinks it should be doing and might do, you get that curve.
01:00:40.000If you assume a 4% 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?
01:00:52.000So this is not the climate crisis, okay?
01:00:56.000The economic impact is projected to be minimal.
01:01:00.000And this is the economic impact as the way things stand today without any major interventions in terms of...
01:01:15.000So, remember, the Paris Agreement is trying to hold things to 2 degrees centigrade or about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a few percent damage to the economy in 2100. Yes.
01:01:29.000Whereas the economy is going to grow by 2% a year.
01:01:33.000So instead of 70 or 80 years from now, it being, you know, let's say 400, well, the US economy, instead of being 80 trillion dollars, it would be 76 trillion dollars or something like that in 2100. That seems like a lot of money.
01:02:01.000And 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?
01:02:44.000You have to change the car itself, which leads to issues about do you have enough minerals.
01:02:50.000You 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?
01:02:59.000And 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.
01:03:07.000And oh, by the way, they want to electrify heat as well in the houses.
01:03:13.000So here, Governor Newsom announced California to phase out gasoline-powered cars, drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel.
01:03:20.000California's fight against climate change.
01:03:22.000Yeah, 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.
01:03:34.000It says there, the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California's carbon pollution, 80% 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.
01:03:55.000I mean, it's a wonderful example of the political discussion.
01:03:59.000First of all, he's making a policy that will go into effect a long time after he's gone, okay, from the political scene.
01:04:07.000The 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.
01:04:16.000The more CO2, the more plants grow, all right?
01:04:19.000So in that sense, it's not at all pollution.
01:06:08.000Is 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?
01:06:25.000You know, people are doing a lot of research on batteries.
01:06:27.000I think that's one of the fields we should be researching more, but it's not as though people haven't been trying.
01:06:35.000And, 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.
01:06:48.000There's also the weight and size of the batteries, so...
01:06:52.000There are many things that go into making a good, viable battery.
01:06:56.000I think we will see steady progress, but I'm not optimistic that there will be great breakthroughs.
01:07:02.000People have been trying this for a long time.
01:07:03.000But there's no great breakthroughs on the horizon or concepts that may lead to some sort of new technology?
01:07:11.000Well, you know, you hear people saying, well, we can produce a battery that's 50% better, but that's not enough.
01:07:17.000And 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.
01:07:31.000Have 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 electrical?
01:07:42.000I'm sure somebody has done those numbers.
01:09:01.000So, you know, nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the U.S., let alone the globe.
01:09:10.000A sensible plan would entail technology.
01:09:14.000Economics, business, because people have to make money doing this.
01:09:17.000It would entail what are the right policies and regulations, and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference.
01:09:25.000The 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?
01:09:35.000And I can say that because I used to be one and I still am, okay?
01:09:39.000But 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.
01:09:51.000So 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.
01:10:07.000We were looking at this proposal for an enormous machine that was like the size of a skyscraper.
01:10:53.000Yes, well, unless the government intervenes, it's not worth anything.
01:10:57.000But 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?
01:11:08.000And the answer is about $40 a ton or $50 a ton, okay?
01:11:12.000So people who are trying to do this hope to bring that $500 a ton down to $100 a ton, still too expensive.
01:11:21.000But if the price of carbon goes up to $100 a ton, then you can start to make money.
01:11:26.000But then the real question is, can you do this at scale?
01:11:31.000You 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.
01:12:01.000But as I've gotten older, you start to realize these things are just wonderful science.
01:12:06.000So, 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.
01:12:21.000800 billion up, 800 billion down, having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on.
01:12:30.000So, 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember.
01:12:34.000We are digging out of the ground About 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 the cycle.
01:13:28.000So 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.
01:13:38.000Of course, it's really high in the Amazon.
01:13:40.000It's pretty low in the Sahara or the Southwest.
01:13:42.000And we can watch that over the years, and we've been watching it for 40, 50, 60 years.
01:13:48.000And it's gone up, as I said, by about 40% globally.
01:13:52.000The world is getting greener because there's more CO2. That's inconvenient because we don't want to think about it that way.
01:13:59.000We want to think everything's catching on fire and it's all brown and there's no more water.
01:14:05.000You 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.
01:14:26.000They also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.
01:14:30.000So, for example, I don't like to cite, you know, this year, etc., but I will in this case.
01:14:35.000You know, India has seen record grain harvests this year, more than any other year.
01:14:41.000And long-term over the world, the yields have been going up.
01:15:13.000So these factors that lead to climate change, the human contributions of agriculture, transportation, all the various ones that you discussed earlier, how much of that can be eliminated?
01:15:46.000They have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world.
01:15:49.000In the developed world, the US, 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.
01:16:04.000There are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic heart.
01:16:13.000One point something billion people in China, another one point something billion people in India and so on.
01:16:20.000The best way for them to get their energy in terms of reliability and convenience is fossil fuels.
01:16:29.000And who are we to tell them, no, you can't do that?
01:16:36.000That's a moral issue, as Alex Epstein, for example, has pointed out.
01:16:42.000And so when you say, can we reduce and what's it going to cost?
01:16:45.000I think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world where we can do it.
01:16:51.000You know, we can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it.
01:16:56.000But what are you going to do about the people in Indonesia, China, India who need the energy?
01:17:04.000And nobody has a good answer for that.
01:17:07.000So, we're looking at it from a 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.
01:17:18.000And if we implemented these radical restrictions, it would devastate their economy.
01:17:23.000Well, we can't implement restrictions on them.
01:17:26.000We can implement restrictions on ourselves, which will come at some cost and benefit, cost, minimal benefit.
01:17:33.000We're only 13, in the US, 13% of emissions, right?
01:17:36.000Now, when we look at all of 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?
01:18:16.000So 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.
01:18:25.000So 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.
01:18:33.000So the growth in the rest of the world, they would just contribute so much that it wouldn't matter what we take out.
01:18:39.000So they're growing and their economies are booming.
01:18:42.000And who's going to tell them you shouldn't do that?
01:18:45.000I like to say, you know, they've got the wolf at the door, all right?
01:18:49.000A real immediate problem with They need lighting, refrigeration, transportation, and so on.
01:18:55.000And they're not going to worry about their cholesterol, the long term, 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.
01:19:06.000So they are making what I would think is actually a pretty Sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view.
01:19:13.000Let's say if that didn't happen, let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now, what we'd do, what is possible to do to eliminate our impact?
01:19:28.000If the rest of the world stayed static, Our influences would still—global influences would continue to grow because they keep emitting and it keeps accumulating.
01:19:41.000Even if they're not emitting anymore in the future, they're still emitting and it's accumulating.
01:19:47.000If 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,
01:20:02.000if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise.
01:20:07.000We'd have to go to zero by 2075, If we want it to stabilize at two-degree rise.
01:20:14.000And if I look at the issues of development, demographics, technology, economics, and so on, I would say both of those goals are fantasy.
01:20:24.000It's just not going to happen because people need the energy.
01:20:29.000We in the developed world in the US might reduce our emissions, but it ain't going to make much difference.
01:20:35.000So, 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?
01:20:54.000I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place, which is very odd.
01:21:01.000What impact could happen from any of these things that they're proposing?
01:21:06.000Well, let's talk about what has happened in the past first.
01:21:09.000We just finished in Glasgow in November COP26, the 26th annual conference of parties.
01:21:19.000And during that time, it started 26 years ago, which is probably 1995 or so, greenhouse gas emissions have grown spectacularly, despite all of the rhetoric and the treaties or accords, promises,
01:21:37.000The UN 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.
01:21:51.000So, I think it's a lot of politicians talking.
01:21:55.000So they're not met, but what if they were?
01:21:58.000So we might reduce emissions now from 52 billion tons a year equivalent down to 46 or something like that.
01:23:03.000We don't have a hundred years worth of data in many variables.
01:23:06.000And 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 look at a shift in our lifetime and you're like, oh my god, the sky is falling.
01:23:28.000Humans are certainly having an influence, but a lot of the variability, the daily weather that the weather people talk about as climate change, it drives me crazy when I hear Al Roker talk about that as climate change.
01:23:54.000The models are kind of all over the place.
01:23:56.000And if you had a bet, many of these phenomena are not being influenced by humans.
01:24:02.000Now, what prominent scientists and climate scientists have arguments against your book and against you and the way you're relaying this information?
01:24:13.000So, you know, Michael Mann, for example, Naomi Oreskes, Alvin Dressler, Kerry Emanuel at MIT, I'll tell you an interesting story about Kerry in a minute, have all spoken out and said, you know, Kunin doesn't have it right.
01:26:46.000One of the things that I know, I understand this is going to be a very controversial podcast and your book is controversial.
01:26:52.000I 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 what they would like.
01:27:05.000I would certainly be up for that but let me tell you what you should do.
01:27:09.000Have somebody else on and you can have them say where that guy Kunin is wrong.
01:27:14.000But then have them write it down, okay?
01:27:17.000You really, if you're going to do a scientific discussion, debate, you got to put it in writing, okay?
01:27:23.000You can't call names and you can't say, okay.
01:28:35.000Boy, the model, so projecting the future more generally is very complicated.
01:28:40.000First of all, you've got to say what emissions are going to be going forward, and that depends on technology and regulations.
01:28:47.000But even given some scenario for emissions over the next 80 years, You got to feed that into a climate model and you use that to predict the temperature and other changes in the climate.
01:29:01.000The climate models cut the earth into zillions, hundreds, millions of cubes that cover the earth They go up into the atmosphere, 20, 30 layers of cubes,
01:29:18.000and then down into the ocean, 20, 30 layers.
01:29:25.000And 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.
01:29:37.000And you do that for centuries, so millions of steps in time.
01:29:42.000There are a number of fundamental problems in doing that, but let me just highlight two of them.
01:29:49.000One is that the boxes are typically 60 miles on a side.
01:30:15.000And so you have to make assumptions about You know, given the temperature in the box and the humidity and so on, how much clouds are there?
01:31:07.000And there are different ways to getting that balance, to tuning the models.
01:31:11.000For example, one of the models It changes the way in which marine organisms on the surface produce a chemical called dimethyl sulfide.
01:31:24.000This is a wonderful bit of earth science, okay?
01:31:26.000So there are these bacteria, microorganisms, plankton, that live on the surface of the ocean.
01:31:32.000And if they get too hot, they excrete, they put out a chemical that creates a haze.
01:31:39.000So it's a kind of natural sunshade that they make.
01:31:43.000And depending upon how much you say they do that, you can change the reflectivity a little bit and tune the model.
01:31:49.000Who would have thought that that's what you need in order to get the climate of the Earth right?
01:31:54.000But okay, so those are the knobs that they turn.
01:31:57.000Different people tune in different ways, and so you get different answers.
01:32:02.000Even more importantly, there are these long-term oscillations we've talked about a little bit.
01:32:07.000And the models don't necessarily produce the amount of those or their timing, and so you get different answers as well.
01:32:15.000So, 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.
01:32:28.000And 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, they're not capable of giving us anything useful.
01:32:44.000So, these people that think that there is an established, settled climate change, what are they pointing to?
01:32:54.000They point to the global temperature rise.
01:33:47.000And 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 whom I helped get this project funded and off the ground.
01:34:06.000And what you can see Is that the data show up until about 1920 from 1860, it wasn't doing very much.
01:34:17.000And 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.
01:34:34.000And the dashed line shows somebody's projection, or at least just continuation of the trend to 2060. And what's interesting about this graph is, first of all, you can see that the rise has not been steady.
01:34:49.000That the rate of rise from 1910 to 1940 is about the same as the rate of rise from 1980 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?
01:37:41.000No, I knew what I was in for, but I was pretty confident.
01:37:45.000You know, everything in the book is referenced to the official government reports or the quality data or the research literature that has happened since the reports were issued.
01:37:56.000So people say, Kunin's not up to date.
01:37:58.000Well, in fact, most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the book.
01:38:16.000But, you know, I see my job, again, is to inform people, not to persuade them.
01:38:23.000Yeah, the making the people mad thing, 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?
01:38:37.000You know, I wanted to do something that was Kind of in your face.
01:38:44.000Because, in fact, I wanted to get their attention.
01:38:49.000I'm still, I believe, very accurate and very fair and balanced in the way I talk about the science.
01:38:56.000But I didn't want to soften it at all.
01:38:59.000Because I've been doing that a bit in other things I wrote, and it kind of, people tend to dismiss it at that point.
01:39:07.000So I really wanted to get people's attention.
01:39:10.000But still remain accurate to what the official science is.
01:39:15.000And when it wasn't listed in the New York Times bestseller list, were you shocked by that?
01:39:21.000What 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, that's a very bad thing to happen.
01:39:39.000So 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.
01:39:52.000And Bill Maher goes off on a 10-minute rant about this guy, Coonan, who publishes a book that says climate science, etc., etc.
01:40:01.000I haven't had the stomach to watch it again.
01:40:04.000But, you know, Bill Maher, of all people, Who, you know, is against religion and dogma and so on.
01:40:12.000He obviously hadn't read the book, but he just went off.
01:40:40.000Well, he has to do a little of that, I think, unfortunately.
01:40:43.000I 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.
01:40:57.000Well, 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.
01:42:08.000Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for a fundamental insight about this problem.
01:42:15.000And that is that there is an optimal best pace to decarbonize.
01:42:21.000If you decarbonize too rapidly, change out the energy system, as is being proposed, you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption.
01:42:32.000You know, 8% of the U.S. GDP is oil and gas production.
01:42:37.000You also deploy immature technology, less than the best solar panels or nuclear reactors or whatever.
01:42:44.000If you do it too slowly, you incur a greater risk that something bad might happen with the climate due to human causes.
01:42:52.000Bad things are going to happen anyway, but maybe they happen more often when humans are influencing the climate.
01:43:00.000And 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.
01:43:10.000I 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.
01:43:22.000So 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.
01:43:38.000It's going to be very difficult because of the developing world problem.
01:43:41.000The other thing we need to do is be thinking about adaptation and resilience.
01:43:46.000You know, I like to think about three categories of things We could do, we should do, and we will do.
01:43:55.000And I like to try to stay away from the should because you've got to balance all these competing demands, particularly the developed world.
01:44:04.000What I think we will do, looking at all the drivers, is we're going to adapt.
01:44:09.000That's going to be the main way in which we will respond to a changing climate.
01:44:15.000And, you know, adaptation has got a lot of things going for it.
01:44:19.000It doesn't matter whether the climate is changing because of human influences or because of natural phenomena.
01:44:50.000That the globe, as I showed you, has warmed about a degree centigrade, two degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. During that time, we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare we've ever had.
01:45:04.000The population in 1900 was two billion people.
01:45:07.000Today it's almost eight, so it's gone up by a factor of four.
01:45:10.000And we've seen spectacular improvement in nutrition, in health, in literacy, et cetera, et cetera, right?
01:45:18.000To think that another one or one and a half degrees is going to completely derail that, just beggars belief.
01:45:25.000And this one to one and a half degrees is projected over a period of how many years?
01:45:32.000So I should say, the best UN projection right now, making some assumptions about emissions, is that we'll go up another one and a half degrees.
01:45:40.000Now, what is the worst case scenario if it does go over this one and a half degrees?
01:45:55.000Maybe it goes from one foot a century to two feet a century even.
01:45:59.000That would be pretty spectacular if that happened.
01:46:02.000We might see more high temperatures, but then there are other parts of the globe as you move north that will become more temperate.
01:46:10.000And on a time scale of a hundred years, society learns how to adapt to that, at least in the developed world.
01:46:16.000You 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.
01:46:32.000So, what's happening globally is that the Record high temperatures are not going up very much, but they are going up.
01:46:45.000But what's also interesting is that the record low temperatures are going up faster.
01:47:31.000There are various processes in the Arctic that are happening that accelerate the warming.
01:47:37.000For example, The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean or on the land disappears or at least doesn't come back as rapidly in the wintertime and consequently the Earth absorbs a little bit more energy because the ice is reflective whereas the seawater is not.
01:47:57.000Now, 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?
01:49:07.000And that makes us more capable of adapting than...
01:49:10.000But it also makes us terrified that the changes happen so quickly and it leads to this fear of what's going to happen and what kind of damage we're doing.
01:49:48.000They're the proper concern of the politicians But you have to have an accurate representation of the risks and certainties and uncertainties in order to have that discussion.
01:50:00.000And I think what people have done in the political and popular discussion is overhyped the threat in order to move the discussion one way or the other.
01:50:13.000Is 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?
01:51:17.000But for the time that we've had accurate measurements, you know, with tide gauges and so on, it's been going up at less than a foot a century, right?
01:51:27.000And we've been perfectly fine in adapting to it.
01:51:31.000And you think that that's going to continue to happen?
01:51:32.000Well, who can say what's really going to happen in the future?
01:52:04.000Yeah, so you saw that cooling trend, and people started to get the data from ice cores for the first time to understand the cycle of Not what are called ice ages, but glaciations and interglacials.
01:52:19.000They 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.
01:52:30.000They happen about once every 100,000 years.
01:52:35.000The last interglacial, the last time the Earth was mostly ice-free, happened 125,000 years ago.
01:52:45.000The temperature was thought to be 2 degrees warmer than it is currently, and the sea level was thought to be 20 feet higher than it is currently.
01:52:55.000So, 125,000 years ago, it was very little ice?
01:52:59.000And it's got to do, again, with how sunlight falls on the Earth.
01:53:02.000It's called the Eemian, named after a river in Holland, where they first realized it.
01:53:07.000And we see that kind of thing happen pretty regularly, roughly 70,000, 100,000 year intervals, back for a million years at least.
01:53:17.000And it's paced by, again, the way in which the Earth's orbit changes and allows sunlight to fall on the North Pole.
01:53:25.000I 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.
01:53:32.000So, you know, by some measures we're due, okay?
01:53:36.000It's been, you saw the last glaciers disappeared about 20,000 years or started disappearing about 20,000 years ago.
01:53:44.000And 20,000 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.
01:53:56.000I have often thought, you know, what are the signatures that we'd start to enter a glaciation again?
01:54:48.000So, this is an idea that's been around for, you know, some number of decades.
01:54:53.000And the idea is to put, as you said, some reflective particles into the stratosphere where they will hang around for a couple of years and enhance the reflectivity by a little bit.
01:55:05.000And you don't need to do very much in order to offset the warming.
01:55:08.000There are several downsides to doing that.
01:55:13.000One is that you've got to keep putting the particles up there because they fall out, and if they fall out, it's going to get warmer again.
01:56:18.000It would make it a little bit hazier and dimmer.
01:56:20.000It would look like what happened after a volcano.
01:56:23.000The 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.
01:56:40.000And people have done studies with models about how it would change.
01:56:44.000You can just imagine the fights that would occur if the world decided to start to do this.
01:56:51.000Somebody 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 geoengineering that did it, and therefore you owe me money.
01:57:01.000There is some geoengineering that I was reading about, I believe it's Abu Dhabi, that does, they do cloud seeding.
01:59:01.000The amount of climate illiteracy and energy illiteracy is stunning.
01:59:06.000And 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.
01:59:14.000So that's why I wrote the book, you know?
01:59:16.000There's also this reflexive, pejorative term of, you know, a climate science denier.
02:00:19.000So 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.
02:00:33.000Go ask your favorite climate scientist, is that guy Cootin right?
02:00:37.000And if he is, what else haven't you told me?
02:00:39.000Well, 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?
02:00:47.000Oh, I think many of the scientists who wrote The criticism in Scientific American clearly hadn't read the book because they say Koonin says X when in fact Koonin actually said not X. So what can you do about that when a public article is published?
02:01:05.000You know, I actually submitted a rebuttal to Scientific American.
02:01:14.000You know, as a kid, I used to read Scientific American cover to cover.
02:01:18.000Because it was interesting and it discussed science.
02:01:21.000I and many other people I know have stopped reading it over the last 20 years because it's become so political and the content has been dumbed down, if you like.