The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin

00:00:12.000 Well, thank you for being here.

00:00:14.000 Thanks.

00:00:15.000 I'm really appreciative of your time and the fact that you are willing to talk about this.

00:00:21.000 This is a very interesting book and extremely controversial.

00:00:27.000 And I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I think it's part of the times we're living in.

00:00:33.000 Your book is called Unsettled?

00:00:35.000 Correct.

00:00:37.000 There it is.

00:00:38.000 Yes.

00:00:38.000 How many copies of this book?

00:00:39.000 So we've sold, since it was published at the end of April, so about 10 months ago, we've sold more than 120,000 copies.

00:00:47.000 120,000 copies.

00:00:49.000 Which, you know, I don't know anything about publishing, but my agent and publisher are sort of amazed at the numbers.

00:00:54.000 That's a lot.

00:00:54.000 And without much fanfare from the media, if any.

00:00:58.000 Well, it depends which media you look at.

00:01:01.000 Where have you gotten coverage?

00:01:02.000 So I've gotten good coverage from the Wall Street Journal.

00:01:05.000 But if you look at the New York Times, Washington Post, not very good coverage at all.

00:01:12.000 Didn't make the New York Times bestseller list.

00:01:13.000 That seems strange because it's a lot of copies.

00:01:15.000 Yeah, right.

00:01:16.000 Well, you would think, right?

00:01:18.000 CNN, nothing.

00:01:20.000 And I think people are just ignoring it, which really surprises me.

00:01:25.000 Now, your book is on the climate.

00:01:28.000 It'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?

00:01:38.000 Right.

00:01:38.000 Clearly, first of all, your credentials.

00:01:41.000 You graduated from high school at 16. You went to MIT. Caltech first.

00:01:47.000 Caltech.

00:01:47.000 I was an undergrad at Caltech, and then I went to MIT. I did a PhD there in theoretical physics in three years.

00:01:54.000 And then I went back to Caltech where I was on the faculty for 30 years.

00:01:58.000 And you were on the faculty at 23 years of age.

00:02:01.000 That's correct.

00:02:02.000 Which is pretty extraordinary.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, it's unusual, not unprecedented, but really quite unusual.

00:02:06.000 Now, there's a couple criticisms that people have of you, just to get these out of the way right away.

00:02:12.000 One of them is that you used to work for BP. Yeah.

00:02:15.000 This is a big one.

00:02:17.000 So 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.

00:02:25.000 And, you know, they didn't bring me there to help them find oil.

00:02:29.000 They knew how to do that really well.

00:02:31.000 I was brought in to help figure out what Beyond Petroleum really meant.

00:02:36.000 And that was renewables and alternatives to oil and gas.

00:02:40.000 And I helped during my five years to help part a strategy for that, which is today, now, 15 years later, are starting to be realized.

00:02:50.000 But once you say you work for BP, there's a certain section of our population that will immediately dismiss anything you've said.

00:02:57.000 Yeah, of course.

00:02:57.000 And, you know, it's part of a structural problem that The advantage of having been in BP is I learned about the energy system.

00:03:07.000 And I teach it at NYU these days.

00:03:09.000 I just did my first lecture yesterday.

00:03:11.000 And so I actually know quite a bit about how the energy system currently works.

00:03:16.000 And a lot of people who want to change the energy system have no idea at all of how it works.

00:03:24.000 And so they can do great damage if they do the wrong sort of thing.

00:03:29.000 Well, in reading your book, one of the things that became very clear is there's so much data to sort through.

00:03:38.000 It's incredibly complex.

00:03:40.000 I actually listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where I had to go back Over it again, just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening.

00:03:50.000 To squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front, you're very clear about this.

00:03:57.000 You believe the climate is changing.

00:04:00.000 Climate is changing.

00:04:01.000 Absolutely.

00:04:02.000 You believe that human beings are having an effect.

00:04:04.000 They are influencing those changes, yes.

00:04:07.000 Absolutely.

00:04:08.000 Mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere.

00:04:12.000 Absolutely.

00:04:13.000 Your 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.

00:04:29.000 That's correct.

00:04:30.000 I think, you know, to put it in a British sense, they have over-egged the custard.

00:04:36.000 Now, why do you think this has happened?

00:04:39.000 You 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.

00:04:57.000 Now, 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?

00:05:08.000 Yeah.

00:05:08.000 So, you know, I think we don't really know that.

00:05:10.000 The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last report in August It's all human-caused in the last many decades.

00:05:21.000 All of it.

00:05:22.000 All of it.

00:05:23.000 But, you know, they completely forget that the climate was changing in comparable ways well before human influences became important.

00:05:32.000 And so they say, no, no, we're going to ignore that.

00:05:37.000 We're going to suppress it and say it's all human-caused.

00:05:40.000 Now one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on Earth over a period of say like 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,

00:05:59.000 in the alarmist way, where it makes it seem that radical drastic change is happening over a very short period of time.

00:06:04.000 That's all I've ever heard.

00:06:06.000 Yeah.

00:06:06.000 So, you know, the climate changes a lot on its own.

00:06:10.000 Maybe we can put up a picture, which is one of the ones I wanted to show you.

00:06:14.000 Can we put up the second chart in that file called Kunin Thumbs?

00:06:23.000 And what I'm going to show you...

00:06:25.000 Is a record of the height of the Nile River, which has been compiled by the Egyptians.

00:06:33.000 There we go.

00:06:35.000 So, 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.

00:06:52.000 The Nile was important to the Egyptians, as you might imagine, and so they measured it pretty carefully.

00:06:58.000 And what you see are two things.

00:07:00.000 The blue spikes are the annual values.

00:07:04.000 They go up and down a lot.

00:07:06.000 One year it was up at six meters, 20 feet, and then the next year it was down to one meter or something like that.

00:07:12.000 So a lot of variability from year to year.

00:07:15.000 But then if you look at the curve, which is the average Trend over 30 years.

00:07:21.000 You can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down.

00:07:26.000 And you can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, new normal, new normal. 0.61

00:07:33.000 We've got to do prayers and sacrifices.

00:07:35.000 And of course, if they just waited another 100 years, it came back up again.

00:07:39.000 And this was all before humans had any influence on the climate.

00:07:44.000 Are 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,

00:08:03.000 but realistically we should be looking at it on a broad, long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years.

00:08:10.000 Yes.

00:08:10.000 So climate changes on all timescales?

00:08:13.000 It changes on 1,000-year timescales, it changes on 10,000-year timescales, and it changes on decades.

00:08:21.000 Every decade, it changes.

00:08:24.000 And, you know, we also forget a lot.

00:08:27.000 In the Midwest, there was a drought in 1955, and one of the news magazines, Time magazine, said, this drought will be long remembered.

00:08:37.000 Nobody remembers 1955 drought anymore, so we forget and we think things are unprecedented when in fact they have happened before.

00:08:47.000 Now, you are, by training, you're a physicist, correct?

00:08:51.000 Correct.

00:08:51.000 And another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist.

00:08:56.000 Yeah.

00:08:56.000 People will say that.

00:08:57.000 Now, my question though, and I think you'd probably be able to help me on this, is like, what exactly is a climate scientist?

00:09:07.000 Yeah.

00:09:08.000 Most science, you have a hypothesis, you run tests, you get results, and then you do these experiments, and that's how you get your data.

00:09:19.000 With climate science, is it based off models?

00:09:23.000 You know, climate science is a very integrative discipline.

00:09:28.000 It involves physics, chemistry, biology, geology, statistics, computer modeling, and so on.

00:09:37.000 So nobody can be an expert in everything.

00:09:41.000 Many prominent climate scientists are trained as physicists.

00:09:44.000 Look at Jim Hansen, Michael Mann.

00:09:47.000 Michael Mann actually once applied to be my graduate student.

00:09:50.000 He decided to go to Yale instead, but that's a different discussion.

00:09:54.000 That was many decades ago.

00:09:56.000 And so some of it is certainly physics.

00:10:00.000 I have published in physics about climate science.

00:10:04.000 I published a paper in August where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how shiny the earth was.

00:10:12.000 That's very important because if the earth gets as shiny, it absorbs more sunlight and so gets warmer.

00:10:17.000 And we published a paper and it attracted some attention, press releases and so on.

00:10:21.000 So, I have published in Climate Science.

00:10:23.000 But more importantly, the kind of things I point out in the book are obvious to anybody who has any quantitative sense at all.

00:10:32.000 It's like, you know, if I were ordering carpet for a room And the room was 8 by 10, I would need 80 square feet of carpet.

00:10:40.000 If the carpet guy comes back and says, you need 400 square feet, I'm going to ask him some hard questions. 0.99

00:10:47.000 And that's the kind of...

00:10:51.000 Misleading things that I'm pointing out in the book.

00:10:55.000 How did you get started on this journey of being, I want to say obsessed, but if not fascinated with the science of climate change and the data itself?

00:11:05.000 So 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.

00:11:26.000 And the group Jason is top scientists in their field that are recruited to work for the U.S. government.

00:11:33.000 And it's, what is it, 70% of it is classified projects?

00:11:37.000 Yeah, something like that.

00:11:38.000 We work for all government agencies, but a lot of what we do is for the national security parts of the government.

00:11:45.000 And it's tackling the most complex scientific...

00:11:48.000 The 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.

00:11:57.000 Or how do we do X, Y, or Z technically?

00:12:00.000 And so what was the initial study that you had read or what...

00:12:04.000 So 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,

00:12:24.000 for science.

00:12:25.000 And one of the things that you could do Was to measure how shiny the Earth was.

00:12:31.000 The albedo, it's called, technically.

00:12:33.000 Whiteness of the Earth.

00:12:35.000 And, of course, being curious, we asked the question, well, how was the albedo first measured?

00:12:41.000 And the answer was, back in the 30s, some guy started watching the dark part of the Moon.

00:12:46.000 And that brightness of the dark part of the Moon is lit by light that is reflected from the Earth, and so is a good measure of how shiny the Earth is.

00:12:57.000 It hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years, and so we started up a program that continues to this day to watch the dark part of the Moon to monitor how bright the Earth is.

00:13:09.000 And we just published a paper in August that showed the Earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years, and so not surprising it perhaps gotten warmer.

00:13:19.000 Anyway, that sort of got me interested in climate science.

00:13:22.000 When I moved into the private sector, I was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could develop and deploy or demonstrate and deploy technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

00:13:37.000 And I did that for quite a while in both BP and then in the government.

00:13:42.000 And then in 2014, the American Physical Society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science.

00:13:52.000 They had put out a statement in 2007, which was very controversial among the physicists.

00:14:00.000 Because it used the word incontrovertible.

00:14:03.000 And for a physicist, that's fighting words.

00:14:05.000 Okay?

00:14:07.000 So they asked me, you know, Steve, recommend a new statement.

00:14:11.000 And so I said, heck, we're physicists.

00:14:13.000 We're not going to take anybody's word for it.

00:14:15.000 Let's look at the issue ourselves.

00:14:17.000 And so I convened a one-day meeting with three mainstream climate scientists and three credentialed skeptical scientists.

00:14:27.000 And we sat for a day.

00:14:30.000 Presentations, talk, discussion in early 2014. It's all up on the web.

00:14:37.000 It was transcribed.

00:14:38.000 You can find the transcript.

00:14:40.000 And I came away from that thinking, this science is not anywhere near as settled as I thought it was.

00:14:48.000 Because of the problems with the models, the observational data, and so on.

00:14:53.000 And my little group Wound up proposing a statement that could not get through the bigger committee that was approving such things.

00:15:04.000 People would say things like, we can't say that even if it's true because it gives ammunition to the deniers.

00:15:11.000 Really?

00:15:11.000 Yeah.

00:15:12.000 As a scientist, how frustrating is that?

00:15:15.000 I got so frustrated because I'm used to, through Jason and others, of giving advice to decision makers.

00:15:20.000 You play it straight.

00:15:22.000 You say, this could be, this may not be, here are the options and so on.

00:15:27.000 But you don't try to spin the advice to get one answer or another.

00:15:32.000 And I was really annoyed by that.

00:15:34.000 I wound up resigning from the committee.

00:15:37.000 But I wound up then publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

00:15:41.000 They gave me 2,000 words, which was great.

00:15:44.000 We got a couple of thousand online comments.

00:15:47.000 Many people said, thanks for writing this and trying to expose the real science to what's going on.

00:15:53.000 Of course, the establishment trashed me completely, even though I was just repeating what's actually in the reports and in the research.

00:16:01.000 And what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you?

00:16:03.000 Oh, 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.

00:16:22.000 So 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,

00:16:50.000 who are a real problem.

00:16:52.000 Yes, indeed, indeed.

00:16:53.000 And look, my sense is that this is a problem.

00:16:57.000 It's not an existential threat by any means, and it's a problem that we have time to deal with, and we should deal with it in time in a graceful way.

00:17:06.000 But I think, you know, when the book first came out, there appeared an article in Scientific American, written by, I think, 13 mainstream climate scientists, That was a couple thousand words of mostly ad hominem criticisms, a couple of substantive criticisms,

00:17:22.000 which I have rebutted, I think, quite effectively. 0.99

00:17:25.000 But 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. 0.86

00:17:38.000 Now, what criticisms made sense that you could rebut? 0.84

00:17:43.000 Well, you know, they said, for example, I said sea level rise was not accelerating.

00:17:49.000 And, of course, I got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise.

00:17:54.000 But 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,

00:18:10.000 pull that microphone just a little closer. 0.95

00:18:11.000 Sure, how's that?

00:18:12.000 Perfect.

00:18:13.000 Now, 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?

00:18:28.000 Not in public.

00:18:30.000 Not in public.

00:18:31.000 In private.

00:18:32.000 You 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.

00:18:48.000 I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who is firmly in the business.

00:18:54.000 And he said, you know, Steve, I agree with almost everything you said, but I don't dare say it in public.

00:19:00.000 Wow.

00:19:01.000 All right?

00:19:01.000 You know, there's a whole organization called Covering Climate Now, which is a consortium of media, including the BBC and NPR, I think, and so on, who have—you can look them up on the web—and they have signed an agreement or made an agreement that they will not cover anything that diverges from the narrative.

00:19:22.000 And who establishes the narrative?

00:19:24.000 Like, what's the top of the heap?

00:19:27.000 I 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.

00:19:41.000 There is the U.S. National Academies of Science.

00:19:45.000 There is the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. government issues reports as well.

00:19:51.000 And, you know, when you get into the meat of these reports, they have some problems and, you know, we can go into them.

00:19:59.000 But by and large, they're pretty good summaries of the science.

00:20:02.000 But 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.

00:20:13.000 So it's like a long game of telephone that starts with the basic science and the scientists doing it are by and large, you know, Good, honest, hardworking people, and you talk to them privately, and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got.

00:20:27.000 But 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.

00:20:33.000 But that's always the case with something that's really controversial, right?

00:20:37.000 There's always...

00:20:39.000 The alarmist perspective and the people that are looking at it that have maybe a less extreme point of view are criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough.

00:20:51.000 And then there's what you were saying earlier is that people are saying that like they can't even say certain things because it will give ammunition to the people that are real climate skeptics.

00:21:01.000 Right.

00:21:01.000 The people that aren't paying attention to the science that have an ideology or a dogman that goes in the other direction.

00:21:07.000 There's so much analogy here.

00:21:09.000 With the Reformation, when the Catholic Church started to come at odds with the Protestant movement, let me give you two examples.

00:21:18.000 In 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.

00:21:28.000 I was compared to William Tyndall.

00:21:31.000 Now, I didn't know who William Tyndall was.

00:21:33.000 I'm not a historian, so I had to look up.

00:21:35.000 William Tyndall in the early 16th century did one of the first translations of the Bible From the original Greek and Hebrew into English.

00:21:46.000 So it had been originally in Latin.

00:21:49.000 So that let ordinary people read what was in the Bible.

00:21:54.000 And of course the establishment got really mad at him for doing that.

00:21:58.000 He was eventually burned at the stake for that and other reasons.

00:22:03.000 So I sort of made these reports accessible, at least parts of it, to ordinary non-experts.

00:22:12.000 So that's one.

00:22:13.000 The other one, which is maybe even more amusing, a couple years ago, 13 senators led by Mr. Schumer proposed a bill that says the government may not spend any money to challenge the consensus.

00:22:29.000 The Council of Trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about church dogma, not about spending money, but you know, you would You'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenged dogma.

00:22:41.000 What would possibly motivate the government to come out with a statement like that, that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus?

00:22:50.000 And doesn't a consensus mean most?

00:22:52.000 It doesn't mean all.

00:22:54.000 So 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.

00:23:09.000 I think what precipitated it was I had, for a number of years, been advocating for a red team review of climate reports.

00:23:19.000 And where you get a bunch of credentialed people to look at the report and ask, what's wrong with this?

00:23:26.000 We do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft, Other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments.

00:23:34.000 And 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.

00:23:41.000 Now, the Trump administration had some of its own problems with climate science in the wrong way, correct?

00:23:46.000 Absolutely.

00:23:47.000 Absolutely.

00:23:48.000 You know, I felt I was, of course, a little bit concerned about going through the administration, but I had lined up the national academies to play the blue team.

00:23:59.000 I had assembled pretty much a good red team, and then it was stopped at the last minute by a political decision.

00:24:07.000 So I'm really disappointed because I point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports.

00:24:13.000 You know, it says X, but in fact the truth is Y, if you look at the data.

00:24:18.000 So we need that.

00:24:19.000 It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.

00:24:22.000 So let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled.

00:24:28.000 When 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.

00:24:44.000 So how do you go from there before you write this book?

00:24:48.000 What are your next steps?

00:24:49.000 So 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.

00:25:03.000 I think the next turning point came when I was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes.

00:25:14.000 And 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.

00:25:31.000 And it sure looks like if you look at that graph, we're in trouble.

00:25:36.000 And so I dig a little deeper.

00:25:37.000 I look up the reference that they cite, and I read in the back of the same report on page 700 and something, if I remember right.

00:25:44.000 And it says there are no long-term trends in hurricanes, which is still largely a true statement.

00:25:51.000 And I'm looking at that, and I said, my God, that's a swindle.

00:25:54.000 In the part of the report that everybody's going to read, you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is going to break loose.

00:26:00.000 And then in the back it says we don't see any long-term trends.

00:26:03.000 So, what is the graph?

00:26:04.000 Like, what is the data?

00:26:05.000 So, the graph is basically a graph.

00:26:08.000 It's called the power dissipation index, which is a graph of how many storms and how intense they are over the last 40 years.

00:26:16.000 And what is the trend?

00:26:18.000 Well, 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?

00:26:31.000 So it really looked like a return to normal.

00:26:34.000 So in the beginning of the graph from 1970 to 1980, is that what you're saying is going down?

00:26:40.000 Yep.

00:26:40.000 Do you have an image of that?

00:26:42.000 Yeah, I think I do, actually.

00:26:44.000 Hang on.

00:26:45.000 And 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.

00:27:00.000 It's our lifetime.

00:27:01.000 So we're looking at things like as if that's a lot of time.

00:27:03.000 That's right.

00:27:04.000 And there are these long-term trends, as you saw in the Egyptian river.

00:27:07.000 Can we pull up chart number 35 in the unsettled file?

00:27:13.000 And we can safely assume that in those long-term trends in the Egyptian data that you're not talking about human influence because it's too long ago.

00:27:20.000 No, it's too much too long.

00:27:22.000 Yeah, right.

00:27:22.000 Okay.

00:27:23.000 So 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?

00:27:36.000 Right, but if you see from 19, looks like 1979-ish.

00:27:40.000 So let's look at the whole record, which is the next picture.

00:27:44.000 There it is.

00:27:45.000 All right?

00:27:46.000 So it's real similar to the Egyptian data.

00:27:49.000 It's up and down and up and down.

00:27:51.000 Now, there's a lot of controversy still.

00:27:54.000 This was...

00:27:56.000 Ten years ago or so, there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense.

00:28:03.000 One paper says yes, another paper published in July says no, and so on.

00:28:08.000 So 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,

00:28:30.000 multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone, that's hurricanes, frequency or intensity based metrics.

00:28:39.000 Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?

00:28:42.000 That image when you see 1975 and then you see 2005, it's not that much of a difference.

00:28:48.000 So 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.

00:29:03.000 Of course, of course.

00:29:04.000 Let me show you another one, alright?

00:29:05.000 Can we go to chart three of the other file?

00:29:09.000 And this is one I think I'm going to go public with pretty soon in an op-ed.

00:29:13.000 Let's put it up.

00:29:14.000 This is about Greenland, okay?

00:29:17.000 And the popular image that Greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on, all right?

00:29:23.000 This is the official data set for how much ice Greenland is losing every year, okay?

00:29:32.000 And it goes up right until 2021 and it starts in 1900. And what's interesting about this, there are several things.

00:29:43.000 First of all, even though human warming influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, there are a lot of ups and downs.

00:29:54.000 So, it says it's got to be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here.

00:29:59.000 The 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.

00:30:15.000 And this is from 2010 to 2020. Yeah, correct.

00:30:18.000 And then if you go back to 1930, you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930 as it was in the last decade or two.

00:30:30.000 And the human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today in 1930. So, what are the other influences if they're not just- That's an excellent question.

00:30:42.000 And the answer is this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the North Atlantic.

00:30:52.000 And you can find papers that say that.

00:30:56.000 All right.

00:30:57.000 They're research papers.

00:31:00.000 You don't hear any of that from the official reports or the media.

00:31:04.000 So the different factors that play into what we think the different factors are that play into the melting is greenhouse gases.

00:31:14.000 Warming.

00:31:14.000 Yes, warming.

00:31:15.000 Warming.

00:31:16.000 And what are the other ones?

00:31:17.000 The others are ocean currents that have their own dynamics that are not, you know, just getting warmer.

00:31:23.000 They get warmer and colder.

00:31:24.000 And the weather, if you like, because how much ice Greenland loses every year is a balance between how much snow accumulates.

00:31:33.000 That's the weather.

00:31:34.000 And how much flows out from the glaciers.

00:31:37.000 And those are the only factors?

00:31:38.000 Basically.

00:31:38.000 There's a little bit of melting and so on that you have to worry about.

00:31:41.000 But those ups and downs are really weather.

00:31:44.000 Does anything have to do with where the sun aligns with the earth and the site of the equinoxes?

00:31:52.000 Well, no, that's much too slow.

00:31:54.000 I mean, over this period, year by year, it certainly has a seasonal effect.

00:31:59.000 These are the annual values, so they average out the seasons, but of course the ice grows in the winter and then it melts in the summertime.

00:32:08.000 So 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.

00:32:18.000 How do they know what is causing this or do they just assume that there's this series of factors?

00:32:26.000 They don't.

00:32:27.000 They don't, okay?

00:32:28.000 It's a combination of modeling and physical principles and other data that let them try to say how much is natural variability and how much is human influence.

00:32:41.000 There's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming, That that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss, the melting.

00:32:49.000 But right now, and for the foreseeable many decades, it is these natural variabilities.

00:32:56.000 And instead, in the media, all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades.

00:33:02.000 And this media narrative, do you think this is just one of those things where people gravitate towards the most alarmist perspective?

00:33:11.000 So that's the one that makes the headline?

00:33:13.000 Is it because of the green energy industry?

00:33:18.000 It's all of the above, but I put a lot of it on activist reporters.

00:33:22.000 So this statement that Greenland was melting just as fast in the 1930s as it is today, I made that.

00:33:30.000 I got fact-checked.

00:33:31.000 By a reporter, John Greenberg at PolitiFact, and he deemed the statement mostly false.

00:33:37.000 And you can look at how he analyzed things, he talked to some experts, it's entirely misleading.

00:33:44.000 So I got a non-expert reporter with an agenda and a platform criticizing what's actually in the data.

00:33:51.000 So the non-expert reporter with an agenda, in order for him to Print something that's going to get the response that he's looking for.

00:34:02.000 He'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.

00:34:13.000 And we're headed for catastrophe.

00:34:14.000 Yes, catastrophe.

00:34:15.000 And this is the narrative that all, that's the only thing I've ever heard.

00:34:17.000 Until I read your book, that's all I had ever heard.

00:34:20.000 Well, that's interesting.

00:34:21.000 You know, the most recent UN report Okay, which is 3,949 pages, almost 4,000 pages.

00:34:30.000 It took several hundred scientists a couple years to write.

00:34:34.000 You can search that report for the words existential threat, climate Catastrophe and so on.

00:34:43.000 You find the words climate crisis once in that report.

00:34:47.000 No other alarmist words.

00:34:50.000 And the context for climate crisis is not a scientific finding, but a description of how the US media have overhyped the situation.

00:35:00.000 Did this start with, I remember global warming in the 80s, because I'm a stand-up comic, and there was comics that would do jokes about global warming, like, this is great, I can go golfing in January.

00:35:11.000 They were joking around about it.

00:35:12.000 But then I remember An Inconvenient Truth.

00:35:15.000 And Al Gore put this documentary out when he was vice president, I believe.

00:35:20.000 No, just before or just after, I can't remember.

00:35:23.000 And when he put this documentary out, it scared a lot of people.

00:35:28.000 But there was a lot of predictions in that documentary.

00:35:32.000 Did any of those come true?

00:35:33.000 You 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.

00:35:53.000 They're all within natural variability.

00:35:56.000 One of the things that you point out in your book that I found was interesting that I hadn't considered is when they're talking about the amount of damage that hurricanes do.

00:36:04.000 So when they're thinking about what kind of danger there is to hurricanes, they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes.

00:36:13.000 And the damage that they do.

00:36:14.000 But that damage is accentuated by the fact that the population is increased in these areas.

00:36:19.000 So naturally, when a hurricane hits, there's going to be more things there to damage.

00:36:24.000 You're going to see billions and billions of dollars just because there's more stuff there, okay?

00:36:28.000 More people.

00:36:29.000 But that doesn't necessarily mean the energy of the hurricane is greater or that the energy of the hurricanes over time is greater.

00:36:36.000 We can put up if you want to see some of the hurricane statistics, but that's essentially right.

00:36:41.000 But the hurricane thing is not settled, you were saying?

00:36:45.000 There's some indication with a paper published A year and a half ago that the strongest storms are becoming more common.

00:36:54.000 But then there was another paper that said, no, no, it's just a natural fluctuation.

00:36:59.000 So I think that's unsettled yet.

00:37:01.000 So how do they come to these conclusions that are different if they're basing it on data?

00:37:05.000 Because they're looking at two different kinds of data.

00:37:09.000 The paper published in 2020 looked at satellite images of the hurricanes.

00:37:16.000 We see beautiful images of the hurricanes and you can try to infer from that how strong the storms are, okay?

00:37:23.000 They used a new technique.

00:37:25.000 The 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.

00:37:36.000 And they looked at historical records And so there's an issue that as you go back in time, you haven't seen all of the hurricanes and you've got to correct the observations for that.

00:37:47.000 So they tried to do a good job.

00:37:49.000 What 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.

00:38:03.000 So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of controversy about this.

00:38:07.000 This is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science.

00:38:10.000 This variability when it comes to the temperature of the ocean, when it comes to the melting of the ice caps and all these different things we're talking about, why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the Earth?

00:38:25.000 You know, the Earth, there are two reasons.

00:38:30.000 One is That the Earth is subject to external influences or influences outside of the climate.

00:38:38.000 The 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.

00:38:48.000 But the other is that climate is a chaotic system, which means it has very Complicated and variable internal motions, all on its own.

00:39:02.000 We know that because we have cartoons of the equations, and they show that.

00:39:08.000 We know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days, two weeks.

00:39:13.000 It's chaotic, and so it has a lot of variability.

00:39:17.000 Some of these long-term variations we understand.

00:39:20.000 For example, El Nino Happens every few years, takes a couple years.

00:39:26.000 We kind of understand that.

00:39:28.000 But 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.

00:39:40.000 And part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well.

00:39:44.000 And so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations.

00:39:49.000 So 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?

00:40:05.000 Right.

00:40:06.000 And that this is just not consistent with the historical record?

00:40:09.000 Absolutely.

00:40:10.000 I'm going to do another one for you.

00:40:12.000 We haven't talked about sea level yet.

00:40:14.000 Can we pull up a chart 13 of the Kunin file?

00:40:19.000 So sea level is one of the things that people worry about most, right?

00:40:24.000 We're going to lose Miami.

00:40:26.000 You're going to lose Miami, right?

00:40:27.000 So here's a chart.

00:40:29.000 I live in Manhattan some fraction of the time, and so I've gotten very interested in sea level at the battery, which is the tip of Manhattan.

00:40:38.000 And there has been a tide gauge there since about 1850 or 1860, and it measures the height of the ocean.

00:40:46.000 It got to average out over the tides and the waves and the weather and so on, but okay.

00:40:51.000 That black line on the graph from 1920 to 2020 is 100 years of actual data showing how fast the sea level is rising.

00:41:06.000 And what you can see is it goes up and down in a cycle, kind of like the Greenland thing we looked at.

00:41:13.000 And, you know, the peak was in 1950, and it was up at 5 millimeters a year.

00:41:19.000 We can talk about what that means in a second.

00:41:21.000 And 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.

00:41:30.000 And the peak that you're looking at from the 1950s and 2020 is essentially the same height.

00:41:35.000 That's right.

00:41:36.000 And, you know, to set a scale, three millimeters a year, which is kind of the average over that time, is a foot a century.

00:41:44.000 One foot rise a century, which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years, okay?

00:41:52.000 It's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents happening on these long timescales, 70, 80 years.

00:42:03.000 What'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.

00:42:19.000 Those are the UN projections based on models.

00:42:26.000 And you can see there are large uncertainties.

00:42:29.000 And large variations.

00:42:30.000 I think, you know, if it's going to look like that, we're going to know pretty soon within the next 10 or 15 years.

00:42:36.000 And my bet is it's just going to go down again.

00:42:39.000 So why did they have these predictions that are so extreme?

00:42:43.000 I don't know.

00:42:43.000 You should ask them.

00:42:45.000 They don't even match up with what's happening today.

00:42:48.000 No.

00:42:49.000 They're much more extreme.

00:42:51.000 If you're looking at those green lines and the blue lines, much more extreme than anything that we've seen over 100 years.

00:42:57.000 And, you know, this is part of why I think we need a really rigorous review of these.

00:43:02.000 Allegedly authoritative reports.

00:43:05.000 As 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,

00:43:21.000 many variables, some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect?

00:43:25.000 Yeah.

00:43:25.000 It'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,

00:43:41.000 or in fact, they abet it.

00:43:45.000 They abet it.

00:43:45.000 And many of them, like you said, who will talk to you privately, will not speak about it publicly for fear of retribution?

00:43:53.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:43:54.000 You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book Was in part to inform people, not persuade them, but also to inform my fellow scientists, who are not climate scientists, about the kind of misrepresentation that's going on.

00:44:09.000 And many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said, Steve, thanks for doing that.

00:44:17.000 Thanks for doing that, but I have to shut my mouth.

00:44:19.000 Yeah, I don't dare speak out about this.

00:44:22.000 Has it been a problem for you in your career writing this book?

00:44:24.000 No.

00:44:25.000 You know, I have enough other parts of my life that are interesting and robust.

00:44:31.000 I'm far enough along in my career that, frankly, I don't really care very much at this point what people think of me.

00:44:39.000 I've got enough stature.

00:44:41.000 You know, I... I've been advising the government on non-climate matters for a long time.

00:44:46.000 I help guide the national academies in some of the reports they did.

00:44:51.000 I do JSON. I advise companies.

00:44:55.000 It's fine.

00:44:56.000 I really just want to get people to understand.

00:45:01.000 Climate literacy and energy literacy—we haven't talked yet much about energy—are so important and people need to understand.

00:45:10.000 Let me give you an example of a different field that I think is a terrible example.

00:45:16.000 So there's this guy named Jonathan Gruber, who's a professor of economics at MIT. And he was one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.

00:45:30.000 Now, whatever you might think about Obamacare, What he said at one point was the only way we could get a principal provision of that act passed was to rely on the basic ignorance of the American people.

00:45:45.000 Wow.

00:45:45.000 All right?

00:45:46.000 And, you know, there's a videotape of him saying this at a conference.

00:45:48.000 That's a crazy thing to say.

00:45:49.000 And, you know, for an educator and for an advisor to say that is terrible.

00:45:55.000 By overhyping the climate threat, we've taken away from non-experts the ability to make their own judgments.

00:46:04.000 We have displaced other priorities, and we've got so many priorities that are beyond climate.

00:46:11.000 We have scared the bejesus out of young people, right? 1.00

00:46:15.000 You talk to young people and they think the world is going to end.

00:46:18.000 And so, you know, that's one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to just try to get people to understand.

00:46:23.000 Did you see that woman, I believe it was in Canada, but they listed her cause of death as climate change?

00:46:30.000 No, I've not seen that.

00:46:31.000 You haven't seen that?

00:46:32.000 No, but I'm not surprised.

00:46:33.000 You need to see that, because the first time I saw that, I was like, oh my god, here it comes.

00:46:39.000 I should say, before I read your book...

00:46:42.000 I was fairly convinced that we're in for a horrible next 50 years of climate change and rise of sea level, and I was buying all the catastrophic...

00:46:55.000 I mean, I bought it all.

00:46:57.000 And then Peter Attia turned me on to a book.

00:47:01.000 I started reading it.

00:47:02.000 I started listening to it, rather.

00:47:03.000 And I was just like, okay, this guy, I need to talk to him.

00:47:08.000 I need to find out what's going on.

00:47:09.000 Let me see if you can find that.

00:47:10.000 Have you found the article?

00:47:11.000 Yeah.

00:47:13.000 No one can hear you.

00:47:14.000 I'm trying to confirm its accuracy.

00:47:19.000 Because when I Googled it, it wasn't coming up a lot of places.

00:47:21.000 I told you, duck, duck, go.

00:47:23.000 Okay, when I looked on the internet for it, it was coming up only in one very specific spot, so I'm trying to find out why.

00:47:30.000 Is it a bad source?

00:47:33.000 It's an interesting source, so I'm just trying to see.

00:47:35.000 Got it.

00:47:35.000 When you find it, I want to talk about economic impact a little bit, because that's another interesting story.

00:47:41.000 Yeah.

00:47:45.000 There's a lot of factors that lead to a narrative being established.

00:47:52.000 What year do you think?

00:47:55.000 Is there a time you can pinpoint when this sort of alarmist perspective really took root?

00:48:01.000 Yeah, I think it was the early 90s and it was in part the first UN assessment report that said maybe, you know, we're influencing it.

00:48:16.000 And then there was a subsequent report maybe a decade later that said there was a discernible human impact on the climate.

00:48:24.000 Al Gore's movie, I think the Obama administration pushed pretty hard.

00:48:31.000 And now you've got the Biden administration trying to infuse climate And energy in all sorts of government and private sector activities.

00:48:42.000 There we go.

00:48:43.000 Oh, come on. 0.87

00:48:45.000 Doctor reveals why he wrote climate change on patients' medical chart.

00:48:49.000 When a Canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart, he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines.

00:48:55.000 Climate 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.

00:49:06.000 Extreme weather condition during the North American summer, the general practitioner believed had deteriorated the health of a 70-year-old woman who was suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.

00:49:20.000 The idea that you would say that's climate change.

00:49:23.000 I'm going to read that again.

00:49:25.000 A 70-year-old woman who's suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.

00:49:33.000 So she's in a trailer, she's got diabetes, and she's suffering from heart failure.

00:49:38.000 And they said, climate change.

00:49:39.000 Right.

00:49:40.000 And they put that on her autopsy. 0.86

00:49:41.000 Not 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.

00:49:55.000 But it's also in vogue, right?

00:49:57.000 Of course, of course.

00:49:59.000 Who doesn't want to be in vogue?

00:50:02.000 Yeah, who doesn't want to, like, hop on the track?

00:50:04.000 I'm sure you got a nice pat on the back.

00:50:06.000 Oh, sure.

00:50:06.000 And, of course, I get all clarity.

00:50:10.000 What's that?

00:50:10.000 It was, like, added on the chart, not her diagnosis, according to him when asked.

00:50:15.000 Okay, 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.

00:50:27.000 But he doesn't really know what he's talking about.

00:50:29.000 Of course he doesn't.

00:50:30.000 And let's look at the data.

00:50:31.000 Can we pull up chart seven of the...

00:50:34.000 I'm going to show you something about that heat wave.

00:50:39.000 That's of the Kunin thumbs. 0.95

00:50:41.000 No, it's the other five.

00:50:42.000 I know.

00:50:42.000 When I looked this up, though, just for clarity, too, this is what – when I looked up the battery sea level trends, this is what pops up on the government's website.

00:50:50.000 So that is – that's the sea level itself, not the – Shorter-term trends, but you can see in the upper right, it shows it's going up at 2.88 millimeters a year, just about 3 millimeters a year for the last 160 years.

00:51:06.000 So I'm confused here now, because in that other chart, it showed that the levels in, what was it, 1940?

00:51:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:51:14.000 So that's the slope of the other chart that we've been looking at, the shorter-term trend.

00:51:21.000 In other words, you can see, like, from 1930 to 1940, This level is going up more rapidly, right?

00:51:29.000 Right.

00:51:29.000 So that black line I showed you on my chart is the trend, how fast it's going up at any given time.

00:51:39.000 That's kind of deceptive then, right?

00:51:41.000 It's hard to look, because what I'm looking at, at that chart, I thought that was the actual level of the sea.

00:51:45.000 No, no, no, it's not the level.

00:51:46.000 No, it's how fast it's going up.

00:51:47.000 Oh, okay.

00:51:49.000 Okay, so go back to the other one, Jamie, that you pulled up, and thank you for doing that.

00:51:52.000 Yep.

00:51:53.000 So this shows a rise in sea level.

00:51:56.000 Sea level has been rising for 10,000 years.

00:51:59.000 How much?

00:52:00.000 Well, it's got up 120 meters in 10,000 years.

00:52:06.000 That's 500 feet.

00:52:08.000 No, 400 feet.

00:52:09.000 400 feet in 10,000 years and how much over like the measurable time that we've been paying attention?

00:52:16.000 So, can we pull up chart 11 in my file?

00:52:22.000 And I'll show you that.

00:52:23.000 There it is.

00:52:23.000 So, this is determined from geology.

00:52:27.000 And you can see we started 20,000 years ago and to the present it's gone up about 120. So a lot of this is post ice age.

00:52:36.000 That's right.

00:52:36.000 The glaciers were melting.

00:52:37.000 They started melting 20,000 years ago and what's interesting is that about 8,000 years ago Things slow down a lot, as you can see.

00:52:47.000 It flattens out.

00:52:48.000 It flattens out.

00:52:48.000 It's not completely flat.

00:52:50.000 The real issue is not where the sea level is rising.

00:52:53.000 As you can see, it's been rising for 20,000 years.

00:52:56.000 The real issue is how fast is it rising and whether human influences are making it rise faster.

00:53:03.000 And that's what I showed you in the...

00:53:05.000 Now, how do they measure?

00:53:08.000 When 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?

00:53:23.000 Well, it's complicated.

00:53:26.000 The first question you can ask is how much carbon dioxide is the burning of fossil fuels putting up into the atmosphere?

00:53:37.000 And we can pretty well measure that.

00:53:39.000 We know how much coal is consumed, how much oil, how much natural gas.

00:53:44.000 Methane is harder because most of the methane That comes out is not from fossil fuels.

00:53:53.000 It's from cow burps, right?

00:53:54.000 It's from cow burps, rice paddies, wastewater treatment, and so on.

00:53:59.000 Okay?

00:54:00.000 And, of course, if we're going to reduce those emissions, we have a much more difficult task than just stopping to burn natural gas.

00:54:07.000 So, what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases?

00:54:10.000 Like, say, what's the biggest contributor?

00:54:12.000 Yeah.

00:54:12.000 So, CO2 is the biggest and most problematic contributor because it lasts in the atmosphere a long time.

00:54:19.000 Centuries, by some measures.

00:54:22.000 Methane is much less problematic, even though it has an impact about half of CO2 currently, because it only lives for about 12 years.

00:54:31.000 So CO2 is the most significant, but is it also the most abundant?

00:54:35.000 Yes.

00:54:35.000 But, 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.

00:54:45.000 What you really want to talk about is their contributions to what's called radiative forcing, Which is basically how much they enhance the heat-intercepting ability of the atmosphere.

00:54:55.000 So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2. That's correct.

00:55:02.000 And methane.

00:55:03.000 And methane.

00:55:04.000 But also, there are a couple of other minor gases like nitrous oxide and CFCs, but humans also exert a cooling influence on the climate.

00:55:13.000 How so?

00:55:14.000 Because when we burn dirty coal, we make aerosols, smog, and so on.

00:55:20.000 That block out the sun a little bit.

00:55:23.000 And they knock off about half of what CO2 warms.

00:55:29.000 And if we stop burning dirty coal, which we should for other reasons, we're going to see the globe get even warmer than we might otherwise.

00:55:36.000 How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth?

00:55:39.000 So as I said, it's about half the warming impact of CO2. Half the warming.

00:55:44.000 Okay, so the biggest contributor in terms of greenhouse gases, what industry causes the biggest?

00:55:52.000 So power, electrical power generation is big.

00:55:57.000 Heat of various kinds, both for buildings but also for industrial processes, the next biggest contributor.

00:56:07.000 Transportation, which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases, globally is only 14% of greenhouse gases.

00:56:17.000 Now, does that vary by country to country?

00:56:19.000 Oh, absolutely.

00:56:20.000 Depending upon the regulations?

00:56:21.000 Oh, yeah.

00:56:22.000 If you go to China and India, it's mostly electrical power.

00:56:25.000 In the U.S., about 40% of our emissions are transportation.

00:56:29.000 40%?

00:56:30.000 Yeah.

00:56:31.000 Interesting.

00:56:31.000 Yeah.

00:56:31.000 But the U.S. as a whole is only about 6%.

00:56:37.000 Billion tons of CO2 a year, whereas the globe as a whole is about 50 – not CO2, greenhouse gases generally.

00:56:48.000 U.S. is about 1, 8 percent, something like that.

00:56:53.000 No, more than that.

00:56:55.000 Let's see, it's about 6 out of 50, so 12 percent.

00:56:59.000 So then we have transportation.

00:57:02.000 So we have transportation in terms of moving goods and services.

00:57:07.000 Yes, burning gasoline and diesel.

00:57:10.000 And then what's below that?

00:57:12.000 Electrical power.

00:57:13.000 In the US, electrical power.

00:57:16.000 Is that coal?

00:57:17.000 Coal and gas.

00:57:19.000 Wind and solar don't contribute directly to greenhouse gas emissions.

00:57:23.000 Nor does nuclear, right?

00:57:24.000 Nuclear certainly doesn't either, right?

00:57:27.000 And then what's after that?

00:57:29.000 You know, small potatoes, probably home heating and industrial heat.

00:57:38.000 But the big ones are power, transportation, and agriculture.

00:57:45.000 And globally, I don't know the U.S. number, but globally, agriculture is 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

00:57:51.000 Wow.

00:57:52.000 And this includes animal agriculture and also monocrop agriculture in terms of like growing...

00:57:58.000 Well, fertilizer production, but also rice paddies and wastewater treatments.

00:58:05.000 Okay.

00:58:06.000 Those bacteria that produce methane, that's how you treat wastewater and...

00:58:11.000 So, when talking about these various factors and how they impact the environment, how much into consideration does one have to take?

00:58:23.000 Like, what's the economic impact of making a radical change that's like, say, one of the things that keeps coming up is electric cars.

00:58:32.000 California has initiated a new law that I believe it's Somewhere in the 2030s, right?

00:58:40.000 They can no longer sell gasoline vehicles, which is really soon.

00:58:44.000 Yes, I know.

00:58:45.000 So let's talk about economic impacts.

00:58:48.000 Let me first talk about the economic impact of a changing climate, okay?

00:58:52.000 And then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition, all right?

00:58:56.000 So could we put up chart 21 of the Kunin file?

00:59:04.000 And I'm going to show you a chart that comes right out of the most recent government report on the subject, which is on the left.

00:59:15.000 And what you see is The horizontal scale is how much the temperature would go up at the end of the century compared to what it is today.

00:59:26.000 And, you know, it goes up between 1 and 10 degrees or 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

00:59:31.000 It's a US chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade.

00:59:35.000 And 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.

00:59:51.000 But 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.

01:00:07.000 That 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.

01:00:15.000 Now, does that take into account the growth of the economy overall?

01:00:19.000 Well, it's a relative statement.

01:00:21.000 So, if we go to the next chart, that's a wonderful question.

01:00:24.000 There's what would happen.

01:00:26.000 So, I'll show you the US economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century.

01:00:32.000 If it grows at 2% a year, which is kind of what everybody thinks it should be doing and might do, you get that curve.

01:00:40.000 If 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?

01:00:52.000 So this is not the climate crisis, okay?

01:00:56.000 The economic impact is projected to be minimal.

01:01:00.000 And this is the economic impact as the way things stand today without any major interventions in terms of...

01:01:08.000 That's correct.

01:01:09.000 Well, no, it's really...

01:01:10.000 It's done as depending upon how much warmer the globe gets.

01:01:14.000 Right.

01:01:14.000 Okay?

01:01:15.000 So, 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.

01:01:27.000 Okay?

01:01:29.000 Whereas the economy is going to grow by 2% a year.

01:01:33.000 So 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.

01:01:52.000 Well, not as a percentage.

01:01:54.000 It grows by 2% a year, so it's a two-year delay in the growth.

01:01:59.000 Two-year delay in the growth.

01:02:00.000 Okay.

01:02:01.000 And now, if major policy changes are implemented that are going to shift, like the sales of the combustion vehicles being banned, which is what they're doing in California, did that pass in California?

01:02:15.000 Do you know?

01:02:16.000 I think that is the current policy in California.

01:02:18.000 I believe it's 2035. Right.

01:02:20.000 Is that what it is?

01:02:22.000 And the federal government is pushing for the same policy nationwide.

01:02:27.000 Now is there enough of these minerals that make batteries to...

01:02:34.000 So what we forget for people who don't understand energy, want to change the energy system, is that it is a system.

01:02:41.000 And so let's talk about cars, okay?

01:02:44.000 You have to change the car itself, which leads to issues about do you have enough minerals.

01:02:50.000 You have to change the fueling infrastructure, namely do we have enough charging points, and can the grid handle all these cars plugged in at once?

01:02:59.000 And then you have to change the fuel, or at least provide more electricity to power the cars in addition to what you're doing now.

01:03:07.000 And oh, by the way, they want to electrify heat as well in the houses.

01:03:11.000 So the grid is, yeah.

01:03:13.000 So here, Governor Newsom announced California to phase out gasoline-powered cars, drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel.

01:03:20.000 California's fight against climate change.

01:03:22.000 Yeah, it's 2035. So he wants all new passenger vehicles to be zero emission by 2035 and additional measures to eliminate harmful emissions from the transportation sector.

01:03:33.000 Yeah.

01:03:34.000 It 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.

01:03:53.000 So, you know, this conflates.

01:03:55.000 I mean, it's a wonderful example of the political discussion.

01:03:59.000 First of all, he's making a policy that will go into effect a long time after he's gone, okay, from the political scene.

01:04:07.000 The second is it conflates carbon pollution, and I hate that word because CO2, which is what they're talking about, is essential for plant growth.

01:04:16.000 The more CO2, the more plants grow, all right?

01:04:19.000 So in that sense, it's not at all pollution.

01:04:21.000 Is that an inconvenient truth?

01:04:22.000 Yes.

01:04:23.000 And you know, the Earth has gotten 40% greener since 1980. Yeah, I'd heard about that from Randall Carlson, who explained that to me.

01:04:31.000 And then when I saw, it's actually in your book as well.

01:04:35.000 The thought process of carbon is only that carbon is a negative thing that's put out by human emissions, emissions from vehicles.

01:04:45.000 Yeah.

01:04:45.000 But it's the fuel of plants.

01:04:46.000 The fuel of plants.

01:04:47.000 So we can talk about the carbon cycle for a second, but let me continue with Governor Newsom for a moment, okay?

01:04:53.000 Okay.

01:04:54.000 I think what is going to happen as...

01:04:58.000 People start heading in that direction, and with other emissions reducing measures, is there's going to be popular pushback.

01:05:06.000 People won't be able to buy the kind of cars that they want or need, actually.

01:05:12.000 They're going to see their electricity rates go up.

01:05:15.000 They're going to see the grid becoming less reliable, certainly a phenomenon you know about here in Texas.

01:05:22.000 And they're going to say, tell me again why we're doing all of this when the U.S. is only 13 percent of global emissions.

01:05:30.000 We're going to see geopolitical leverage disappear as we rely more on imported oil.

01:05:36.000 It's already happened that kind of pushback in the U.K. Where the government tried to mandate heat pumps in the houses.

01:05:44.000 It would have been about 15,000 pounds per house.

01:05:47.000 And people, the legislature just said, hell no, we're not going to do this.

01:05:52.000 And I believe that that's what's going to happen in this country because they're pushing too far and too fast.

01:05:58.000 I like to say you need to change the The energy system, not by tooth extraction, but by orthodonture.

01:06:06.000 Slow, steady changes.

01:06:08.000 Is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's required to create a battery, specifically the type of conflict minerals and very rare earth minerals that we need right now currently, that that would shift by 2035?

01:06:25.000 You know, people are doing a lot of research on batteries.

01:06:27.000 I think that's one of the fields we should be researching more, but it's not as though people haven't been trying.

01:06:35.000 And, you know, there are issues not only with the minerals you use, but the lifetime of the batteries, because they get charged and discharged, and that does mayhem at the molecular level that tries to destroy the structure.

01:06:48.000 There's also the weight and size of the batteries, so...

01:06:52.000 There are many things that go into making a good, viable battery.

01:06:56.000 I think we will see steady progress, but I'm not optimistic that there will be great breakthroughs.

01:07:02.000 People have been trying this for a long time.

01:07:03.000 But there's no great breakthroughs on the horizon or concepts that may lead to some sort of new technology?

01:07:11.000 Well, you know, you hear people saying, well, we can produce a battery that's 50% better, but that's not enough.

01:07:17.000 And what I've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab, to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long, difficult job that you often fail at.

01:07:31.000 Have they done an analysis on all the rare earth minerals and what the quantities are and what would be required to make all the vehicles on earth electrical?

01:07:42.000 I'm sure somebody has done those numbers.

01:07:44.000 I don't have them at my fingertips.

01:07:45.000 Is it possible?

01:07:46.000 Yeah, so let me tell you about resource, okay?

01:07:49.000 Whether it's minerals or oil or gas and so on.

01:07:53.000 The amount that you can get out depends upon the cost to get it out.

01:08:01.000 And that depends upon the technology as well as how much is there.

01:08:05.000 And so, as the price goes up, you're willing to consider more extreme technology, which might cost more, but you can still produce it.

01:08:17.000 Oil's a wonderful example.

01:08:19.000 You know, at $20 a barrel, there are very few ways to produce oil.

01:08:26.000 But at $80 or $90 a barrel, which we're at today, then offshore production, shale, many other technologies become economically viable.

01:08:36.000 And so you shouldn't think about, you know, are we going to run out?

01:08:40.000 But are we going to be able to open up new resources with new technologies fast enough in order to be able to satisfy the demand?

01:08:51.000 So, you can't just look at it in terms of what you want to see.

01:08:57.000 You have to look at it in terms of there's a lot of factors.

01:09:00.000 Yes.

01:09:01.000 So, you know, nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the U.S., let alone the globe.

01:09:10.000 A sensible plan would entail technology.

01:09:14.000 Economics, business, because people have to make money doing this. 0.90

01:09:17.000 It would entail what are the right policies and regulations, and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference.

01:09:25.000 The plans that are put out by the National Academy, by universities, are generally formulated by, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of academics, okay?

01:09:35.000 And I can say that because I used to be one and I still am, okay?

01:09:39.000 But very few people who have experience with the real energy system of having to create and operate, whether it's fueling or electrical power and so on.

01:09:51.000 So I think the best thing that can be done right now is to get that kind of group together, spend a while, we've got the time, and let's come up with something that will let us decarbonize in a graceful way rather than the kind of very disruptive things that are being proposed now.

01:10:07.000 We were looking at this proposal for an enormous machine that was like the size of a skyscraper.

01:10:15.000 Have you seen this?

01:10:16.000 No.

01:10:16.000 Well, tell me, what does the machine do?

01:10:18.000 The idea was that this machine extracts carbon and particulates from the atmosphere, so it reduces pollution.

01:10:24.000 Yes.

01:10:24.000 So there are a number of people working on that.

01:10:26.000 It's called direct air capture.

01:10:28.000 And the question is, can you do it cheaply enough per ton?

01:10:33.000 And can you do it at scale, namely to do enough of it to make a material difference in how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere?

01:10:42.000 Right now, it's about $500 a ton of CO2 to extract it from the atmosphere.

01:10:51.000 How much is CO2 worth?

01:10:53.000 Yes, well, unless the government intervenes, it's not worth anything.

01:10:57.000 But if you look at the right question, I think, to ask is, what does the price need to be to start to shift the power sector away from coal?

01:11:08.000 And the answer is about $40 a ton or $50 a ton, okay?

01:11:12.000 So people who are trying to do this hope to bring that $500 a ton down to $100 a ton, still too expensive.

01:11:21.000 But if the price of carbon goes up to $100 a ton, then you can start to make money.

01:11:26.000 But then the real question is, can you do this at scale?

01:11:29.000 And there I'm very doubtful.

01:11:31.000 You need to suck out 10 billion tons a year of CO2 and to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass through this machine with the capture efficiency you have and so on.

01:11:42.000 Nah.

01:11:43.000 If you want to capture CO2, the best way to do it is to plant trees.

01:11:47.000 Really?

01:11:48.000 Yeah.

01:11:48.000 So a little bit about the carbon cycle.

01:11:50.000 It's real interesting.

01:11:52.000 You know, when I was a kid, I hated earth science because you had to know too much.

01:11:57.000 I like math, physics, because you don't need to know much.

01:12:00.000 You just need to be clever.

01:12:01.000 But as I've gotten older, you start to realize these things are just wonderful science.

01:12:06.000 So, about 200 billion tons of carbon, so roughly 800 billion tons of CO2, go up and back between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface every year, more or less in balance.

01:12:21.000 800 billion up, 800 billion down, having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on.

01:12:30.000 So, 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember.

01:12:34.000 We 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.

01:12:50.000 And it's gradually going up.

01:12:52.000 About half of it stays in the atmosphere every year.

01:12:55.000 So, if you could tweak that big cycle of 200 every year, By a little bit.

01:13:01.000 You could compensate in part or perhaps in whole for those 9 billion tons that we're putting in every year.

01:13:08.000 And the way to do that is to grow more trees or other living things because they suck carbon out of the atmosphere to make plant material.

01:13:18.000 And when you pointed this out in your book, you were talking about the study of green leaves and the percentage of green leaves.

01:13:25.000 This is all gotten through satellite imagery?

01:13:28.000 Yes.

01:13:28.000 So we can measure what's called, well, not only the color, but what's called the leaf area index, which is the fraction of the land covered by leaves in any particular place.

01:13:38.000 Of course, it's really high in the Amazon.

01:13:40.000 It's pretty low in the Sahara or the Southwest.

01:13:42.000 And we can watch that over the years, and we've been watching it for 40, 50, 60 years.

01:13:48.000 And it's gone up, as I said, by about 40% globally.

01:13:52.000 The world is getting greener because there's more CO2. That's inconvenient because we don't want to think about it that way.

01:13:59.000 We want to think everything's catching on fire and it's all brown and there's no more water.

01:14:04.000 Right.

01:14:05.000 You know, crop yields have been going up steadily since 1960. A lot of that is agronomy, that we've gotten better at farming, we've gotten better genetic strains of plants, but some of it also is more CO2. Plants love CO2. We put CO2 into greenhouses to get them to grow more.

01:14:26.000 They also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.

01:14:30.000 So, for example, I don't like to cite, you know, this year, etc., but I will in this case.

01:14:35.000 You know, India has seen record grain harvests this year, more than any other year.

01:14:41.000 And long-term over the world, the yields have been going up.

01:14:45.000 Hmm.

01:14:45.000 Okay?

01:14:46.000 Because it's getting warmer, we're getting better at agronomy, and there's more CO2. Now, is there a point of diminishing returns?

01:14:57.000 Like, is there a point where there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that then it becomes detrimental?

01:15:01.000 Yes.

01:15:01.000 So there's a lot of controversy about that.

01:15:04.000 Some people say, you know, eventually you're going to be limited by water or nutrients in the soil, but we haven't seen it yet.

01:15:12.000 We haven't seen it yet.

01:15:13.000 So 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?

01:15:31.000 At what cost?

01:15:32.000 All right.

01:15:33.000 And here I want to take a global view, okay?

01:15:38.000 We in the US have a very distorted view of the world.

01:15:42.000 We're a big country.

01:15:44.000 Many people don't travel.

01:15:46.000 They have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world.

01:15:49.000 In 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.

01:16:04.000 There are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic heart.

01:16:13.000 One point something billion people in China, another one point something billion people in India and so on.

01:16:20.000 The best way for them to get their energy in terms of reliability and convenience is fossil fuels.

01:16:29.000 And who are we to tell them, no, you can't do that?

01:16:36.000 That's a moral issue, as Alex Epstein, for example, has pointed out.

01:16:42.000 And so when you say, can we reduce and what's it going to cost?

01:16:45.000 I think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world where we can do it.

01:16:51.000 You know, we can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it.

01:16:56.000 But what are you going to do about the people in Indonesia, China, India who need the energy?

01:17:03.000 What do you tell them?

01:17:04.000 And nobody has a good answer for that.

01:17:07.000 So, 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.

01:17:18.000 And if we implemented these radical restrictions, it would devastate their economy.

01:17:23.000 Well, we can't implement restrictions on them.

01:17:26.000 We can implement restrictions on ourselves, which will come at some cost and benefit, cost, minimal benefit.

01:17:33.000 We're only 13, in the US, 13% of emissions, right?

01:17:36.000 Now, 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?

01:17:49.000 Yeah.

01:17:49.000 So, you want to do that for the world as a whole or just for the U.S.? Let's just do it for the U.S. Yeah.

01:17:54.000 So, we're 13% of emissions.

01:17:56.000 What you need to understand is that emissions accumulate in the atmosphere.

01:18:02.000 And so, by eliminating U.S. emissions, You have only slowed down the rate at which the amount in the atmosphere accumulates.

01:18:11.000 When you say we're 13% globally?

01:18:14.000 Globally, correct.

01:18:15.000 Correct.

01:18:16.000 So the rest of the world, the emissions are growing because they're burning coal and they're burning oil and gas because they need all that.

01:18:25.000 So our 13% decrease, if we could do it tomorrow, would be wiped out by about a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world.

01:18:33.000 So the growth in the rest of the world, they would just contribute so much that it wouldn't matter what we take out.

01:18:39.000 That's right.

01:18:39.000 So they're growing and their economies are booming.

01:18:42.000 And who's going to tell them you shouldn't do that?

01:18:45.000 I like to say, you know, they've got the wolf at the door, all right?

01:18:49.000 A real immediate problem with They need lighting, refrigeration, transportation, and so on.

01:18:55.000 And 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.

01:19:06.000 So they are making what I would think is actually a pretty Sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view.

01:19:13.000 Let's say if that didn't happen, let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now, what we'd do, what is possible to do to eliminate our impact?

01:19:28.000 If 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.

01:19:41.000 Even if they're not emitting anymore in the future, they're still emitting and it's accumulating.

01:19:47.000 If we wanted to just stabilize human influences, not let them grow, We would have to go to net zero, namely zero emissions overall, by 2050, 30 years from now,

01:20:02.000 if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise.

01:20:07.000 We'd have to go to zero by 2075, If we want it to stabilize at two-degree rise.

01:20:14.000 And if I look at the issues of development, demographics, technology, economics, and so on, I would say both of those goals are fantasy.

01:20:24.000 It's just not going to happen because people need the energy.

01:20:28.000 They need to develop.

01:20:29.000 We in the developed world in the US might reduce our emissions, but it ain't going to make much difference.

01:20:35.000 So, the proposals that you hear when you hear about government proposals for addressing climate change and when you hear about these summits where these countries get together and talk about what they're going to do to implement climate change, how much of that is just sort of signaling that they're working towards doing something good?

01:20:54.000 I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place, which is very odd.

01:21:00.000 Yeah.

01:21:01.000 What impact could happen from any of these things that they're proposing?

01:21:06.000 Well, let's talk about what has happened in the past first.

01:21:09.000 We just finished in Glasgow in November COP26, the 26th annual conference of parties.

01:21:19.000 And 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,

01:21:35.000 and so on.

01:21:37.000 The 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.

01:21:51.000 So, I think it's a lot of politicians talking.

01:21:55.000 So they're not met, but what if they were?

01:21:58.000 So we might reduce emissions now from 52 billion tons a year equivalent down to 46 or something like that.

01:22:07.000 It's still a lot.

01:22:08.000 Remember, we've got to go to zero in 30 years if you want to stabilize.

01:22:12.000 But is that real?

01:22:14.000 So if they go to zero in 30 years, what is the actual result?

01:22:17.000 Well, we will have stabilized, not eliminated, but just prevented from growing human influences on the climate.

01:22:25.000 And what percentage of the change in the climate is human influence?

01:22:29.000 We said that's a subject of some debate right now.

01:22:33.000 What is the...

01:22:35.000 Half, maybe, of the warming.

01:22:38.000 But there's a lot more than warming going on.

01:22:40.000 There are storms and there are droughts and floods and so on.

01:22:44.000 Most of those are within natural variability.

01:22:47.000 So in terms of like your 100-year chart of ups and downs, most of those...

01:22:51.000 Not going to change that.

01:22:52.000 Not going to change that.

01:22:53.000 So is it a percentage point?

01:22:55.000 No, I don't think people have tried to quantify at that level.

01:22:58.000 Because it's too complex?

01:22:59.000 It's too complex.

01:23:00.000 And we have limited data, okay?

01:23:03.000 We don't have a hundred years worth of data in many variables.

01:23:06.000 And again, this is what we're talking about at the beginning, that when you're looking at a human lifetime, it's such a short period of time that we look at a shift in our lifetime and you're like, oh my god, the sky is falling.

01:23:18.000 Yep.

01:23:19.000 Think about the Egyptians and the river, right?

01:23:21.000 Oh my god, drought's coming.

01:23:23.000 And you just wait another hundred years and it comes back up again.

01:23:26.000 That's not true for everything.

01:23:28.000 Humans 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.

01:23:41.000 It's not.

01:23:42.000 It's not.

01:23:43.000 It's just the variability and the chaos of weather itself.

01:23:48.000 And this is for certain based on the models?

01:23:51.000 Well, you know, it's our best guess.

01:23:52.000 This is an uncertain science.

01:23:54.000 The models are kind of all over the place.

01:23:56.000 And if you had a bet, many of these phenomena are not being influenced by humans.

01:24:02.000 Now, what prominent scientists and climate scientists have arguments against your book and against you and the way you're relaying this information?

01:24:13.000 So, 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.

01:24:30.000 Very few of them offer specifics.

01:24:33.000 Kerry did.

01:24:37.000 I think I have a medium page that people can look at where I've written detailed rebuttals to the science.

01:24:44.000 I mean, when people say you're a show for the oil business or you're a physicist, what do you know about climate?

01:24:49.000 I can't answer those, all right?

01:24:51.000 But I can try to rebut the specific facts that they say I've misrepresented, and I do, I think, effectively.

01:24:59.000 Again, you can find it on my medium page.

01:25:04.000 Sorry about Kerry.

01:25:05.000 So Kerry was one of the people who criticized me early on.

01:25:11.000 He said, you know, anybody who talks about 100-year trends and hurricanes doesn't understand that we only have good data until 80 years.

01:25:19.000 But previously in this conversation, I read you the official statement which says no long-term trends over a century.

01:25:27.000 So he was being, I think, You know, he's putting on his Cambridge bow tie and say, nobody who understands, et cetera, et cetera.

01:25:37.000 I had the opportunity to share a stage with Kerry at MIT in October.

01:25:43.000 And it was convened by John Deutsch, who's a good friend of both of us and a senior scientific figure.

01:25:51.000 And I had my 10-15 minute presentation and I went through some of the things we've talked about.

01:25:58.000 Kerry had 10 or 15 minutes and he didn't challenge the science at all.

01:26:02.000 I was really surprised.

01:26:03.000 Instead, he started talking about fat tails, namely improbable things that might happen with high consequence.

01:26:11.000 But no disagreement with the science.

01:26:14.000 So the improbable things with high consequence, this is the sky that's falling there.

01:26:19.000 Yeah.

01:26:19.000 So Greenland starts melting, the permafrost outgasses, the Atlantic circulation slows down, the Amazon dries out, and so on.

01:26:27.000 Did you try to press him?

01:26:29.000 No, I didn't, because I was too polite.

01:26:32.000 He was being too polite.

01:26:34.000 Interesting.

01:26:35.000 And unfortunately, that exchange was not recorded.

01:26:38.000 Even more interesting.

01:26:39.000 I would love to be on a stage with some of these scientists, okay?

01:26:44.000 What about on a podcast?

01:26:46.000 One of the things that I know, I understand this is going to be a very controversial podcast and your book is controversial.

01:26:52.000 I would like to get someone to come on opposite of you next and either by themselves first and then you with them together or depending upon what they would like.

01:27:05.000 I would certainly be up for that but let me tell you what you should do.

01:27:09.000 Have somebody else on and you can have them say where that guy Kunin is wrong.

01:27:14.000 But then have them write it down, okay?

01:27:17.000 You really, if you're going to do a scientific discussion, debate, you got to put it in writing, okay?

01:27:23.000 You can't call names and you can't say, okay.

01:27:26.000 So get them to write it down.

01:27:27.000 I've, of course, written down everything with citations.

01:27:31.000 Get her to write it down and then get the two of us on together and let's have a discussion.

01:27:36.000 Now, I know there's been some articles that have sort of attempted to debunk this.

01:27:43.000 What is the best one that you've seen?

01:27:50.000 You know, I don't think any of them are really very good.

01:27:54.000 There's a young guy who, I'll get his name wrong, but you can look him up, who's a real climate scientist, and he wrote a book review.

01:28:05.000 And he said, you know, in terms of the data and the Historical data, I got it about right, which was a very brave thing for him to say.

01:28:15.000 But he said, I underestimated the ability of the models to talk about what's going to happen in the future.

01:28:23.000 I would disagree with that.

01:28:24.000 We can have a discussion about that.

01:28:26.000 But I thought that was a pretty fair review.

01:28:31.000 Now, how do they shape the models?

01:28:33.000 Like, how do they construct them?

01:28:35.000 Boy, the model, so projecting the future more generally is very complicated.

01:28:40.000 First of all, you've got to say what emissions are going to be going forward, and that depends on technology and regulations.

01:28:47.000 But 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.

01:29:01.000 The 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,

01:29:18.000 and then down into the ocean, 20, 30 layers.

01:29:25.000 And then the models use the laws of physics to move water, air, energy, light, and so on through these cubes, 10 minutes at a time, typically.

01:29:37.000 And you do that for centuries, so millions of steps in time.

01:29:42.000 There are a number of fundamental problems in doing that, but let me just highlight two of them.

01:29:49.000 One is that the boxes are typically 60 miles on a side.

01:29:55.000 You can't make them smaller.

01:29:58.000 Because then you got too many boxes and the computer can't follow them all rapidly.

01:30:02.000 In our 60-mile scale, there are a lot of things that happen in the weather that are much smaller than 60 miles.

01:30:12.000 How many clouds are there?

01:30:13.000 Are there thunderheads?

01:30:14.000 Is it raining?

01:30:15.000 And so on.

01:30:15.000 And 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?

01:30:25.000 What kind of clouds are there?

01:30:26.000 And so on.

01:30:27.000 And different people make different assumptions.

01:30:30.000 And so you get different answers coming out of the models.

01:30:34.000 That's one.

01:30:36.000 The second is the model's human influences are physically very small.

01:30:44.000 The flows of sunlight and heat in the climate system are measured in hundreds of watts per square meter.

01:30:53.000 The human influences are two watts per square meter.

01:30:58.000 And so the model has to be very precisely balanced if you're going to see the effect of human influences.

01:31:05.000 Balanced at about a percent.

01:31:07.000 And there are different ways to getting that balance, to tuning the models.

01:31:11.000 For example, one of the models It changes the way in which marine organisms on the surface produce a chemical called dimethyl sulfide.

01:31:24.000 This is a wonderful bit of earth science, okay?

01:31:26.000 So there are these bacteria, microorganisms, plankton, that live on the surface of the ocean.

01:31:32.000 And if they get too hot, they excrete, they put out a chemical that creates a haze.

01:31:39.000 So it's a kind of natural sunshade that they make.

01:31:43.000 And depending upon how much you say they do that, you can change the reflectivity a little bit and tune the model.

01:31:49.000 Who would have thought that that's what you need in order to get the climate of the Earth right?

01:31:54.000 But okay, so those are the knobs that they turn.

01:31:57.000 Different people tune in different ways, and so you get different answers.

01:32:02.000 Even more importantly, there are these long-term oscillations we've talked about a little bit.

01:32:07.000 And the models don't necessarily produce the amount of those or their timing, and so you get different answers as well.

01:32:15.000 So, as some of the modelers have said in professional papers, but not in the media, they only give us a hazy picture of what might happen globally.

01:32:28.000 And other people have said, again, credentialed members of the consensus, that for local or regional predictions, like the sea level in the battery or the drought in Texas, they're not capable of giving us anything useful.

01:32:44.000 So, these people that think that there is an established, settled climate change, what are they pointing to?

01:32:54.000 They point to the global temperature rise.

01:32:56.000 Global temperature rise.

01:33:01.000 Up and down and kind of not driven by human influences.

01:33:05.000 But they'll point to the temperature rise.

01:33:07.000 We could pull that up if you want to see that.

01:33:09.000 Let's do that, okay?

01:33:10.000 And I think this is something most...

01:33:12.000 It's one of the first charts in one of the files.

01:33:19.000 Which number is it?

01:33:21.000 I'll tell you in one moment.

01:33:22.000 Is it?

01:33:23.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:33:24.000 Great.

01:33:24.000 Okay.

01:33:25.000 So, on the left...

01:33:27.000 Is a measure of the global temperature.

01:33:31.000 It's not the global temperature itself, averaged over the globe, because we don't know that number actually very accurately.

01:33:38.000 No, we don't know it to within a degree centigrade or so, maybe a bit more.

01:33:42.000 When did we start knowing it?

01:33:44.000 Well, we know changes.

01:33:45.000 It's easier to know changes.

01:33:47.000 And you can see this graph of changes In the global temperature, averaged over the globe, starts in about 1860. This is data from a project at Berkeley led by my friend Rich Muller whom I helped get this project funded and off the ground.

01:34:06.000 And what you can see Is that the data show up until about 1920 from 1860, it wasn't doing very much.

01:34:17.000 And then the temperature started to rise in about 1910. It went up by about half a degree To 1940, it then actually went down a little bit until 1970, and then it started to go up again, and it's been going up now.

01:34:34.000 And 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.

01:34:49.000 That 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?

01:35:10.000 And the answer is, they don't know.

01:35:13.000 They don't know.

01:35:14.000 Now, when you're looking at this from 1860 to 2020, how far back can we look with this?

01:35:22.000 And do we do it based on core samples?

01:35:24.000 So that's a great question.

01:35:27.000 This is the instrumental record, as it's called.

01:35:30.000 So it's based on thermometers on the ground.

01:35:33.000 These days, in the last 30, 40 years, we have satellites also.

01:35:36.000 But this is just the measurements of weather stations.

01:35:41.000 And there's a problem that There weren't too many weather stations starting in 1860, and even before that, far fewer.

01:35:49.000 The thermometer was only invented in the 18th century, I think, the mercury thermometer.

01:35:53.000 And so we have proxies.

01:35:55.000 We have weather records, not measured temperatures.

01:35:59.000 We have crop diaries and so on.

01:36:03.000 And then ice cores, of course, can tell us at particular places what the temperature was doing.

01:36:09.000 We do know, you know, if you go back to the 1600s, 1700s, there was the Little Ice Age.

01:36:16.000 And while there are still people who say it was only a regional phenomena, it certainly looks like it was around the globe.

01:36:22.000 And then it was about one and a half degrees cooler than what is shown there.

01:36:27.000 And what year did this start at?

01:36:28.000 Oh, late 1600s, early 1700s.

01:36:31.000 And how did they measure it back then?

01:36:33.000 We have ice records from...

01:36:36.000 Oh, from coarse apples.

01:36:37.000 Well, not only that, but the Thames in London was frozen over.

01:36:41.000 Winters were much harsher.

01:36:43.000 The world was in a pretty sorry state, actually.

01:36:46.000 And so this is just through anecdotal reports or newspaper reports?

01:36:50.000 Yeah, and we have ice core data also where you see the little ice age.

01:36:53.000 We can also, an interesting thing, we can't go back too far.

01:36:57.000 You know, if you drill into an oil well or a well in the ground, the water in the well remembers the temperature.

01:37:06.000 What the surface temperature was.

01:37:08.000 And so you can get some measure over the last 100 and some odd years.

01:37:11.000 How so?

01:37:11.000 How does it remember?

01:37:12.000 Well, you know, the heat diffuses, kind of travels down from the surface.

01:37:16.000 And it travels.

01:37:18.000 And so by looking down, you can get a measure of what it was like 100 years ago.

01:37:23.000 People do that.

01:37:25.000 You know, paleoclimatology is a wonderful field.

01:37:29.000 There's a lot more techniques to look even further back.

01:37:32.000 It's just great science.

01:37:35.000 When you put this out, were you uneasy about this at all?

01:37:40.000 Were you like, oh boy, here we go?

01:37:41.000 No, I knew what I was in for, but I was pretty confident.

01:37:45.000 You 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.

01:37:56.000 So people say, Kunin's not up to date.

01:37:58.000 Well, in fact, most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the book.

01:38:06.000 So, I was pretty confident.

01:38:09.000 Obviously, I wouldn't put it out if I didn't feel I was confident in it.

01:38:14.000 I knew I'd make a lot of people mad.

01:38:16.000 But, you know, I see my job, again, is to inform people, not to persuade them.

01:38:23.000 Yeah, 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?

01:38:37.000 You know, I wanted to do something that was Kind of in your face.

01:38:44.000 Because, in fact, I wanted to get their attention.

01:38:49.000 I'm still, I believe, very accurate and very fair and balanced in the way I talk about the science.

01:38:56.000 But I didn't want to soften it at all.

01:38:59.000 Because I've been doing that a bit in other things I wrote, and it kind of, people tend to dismiss it at that point.

01:39:07.000 So I really wanted to get people's attention.

01:39:10.000 But still remain accurate to what the official science is.

01:39:15.000 And when it wasn't listed in the New York Times bestseller list, were you shocked by that?

01:39:21.000 Nah.

01:39:21.000 What has shocked me, not so much that particular incident, is that I think there really are two media universes in the country, and I think quite apart from climate, that's a very bad thing to happen.

01:39:37.000 Let me give you one example.

01:39:39.000 So when the book was just about to come out, we had sent copies around, and My wife and kids turn on Bill Maher one night in, I think, early April.

01:39:52.000 And Bill Maher goes off on a 10-minute rant about this guy, Coonan, who publishes a book that says climate science, etc., etc.

01:40:01.000 I haven't had the stomach to watch it again.

01:40:04.000 But, you know, Bill Maher, of all people, Who, you know, is against religion and dogma and so on.

01:40:12.000 He obviously hadn't read the book, but he just went off.

01:40:15.000 It's just, you know, really bad.

01:40:18.000 What do you think motivated him to do something like that?

01:40:21.000 You know, there is a narrative to preserve.

01:40:24.000 And anything like the Council of Trent or the Senators.

01:40:27.000 But why Bill Maher?

01:40:29.000 Because Bill Maher's not a politician.

01:40:31.000 Bill Maher is...

01:40:32.000 What does Bill Maher know about climate, right?

01:40:33.000 Right.

01:40:34.000 Okay.

01:40:34.000 I don't know.

01:40:35.000 So is it that he's signaling to the tribe?

01:40:38.000 I think so.

01:40:39.000 Yeah.

01:40:39.000 I think so.

01:40:40.000 Well, he has to do a little of that, I think, unfortunately.

01:40:43.000 I can't get into his head, but I can tell you, and I'll say it, people can hear it, I'd love to get on a stage with him and show him X, Y, and Z, and Bill, tell me why this is not true, and it's counter to what you probably believe.

01:40:57.000 Well, the problem is, if anybody hasn't read your book, and they would make an assumption based on the idea that you are a climate denier, so it starts with that, which is very clear from the very beginning of the book that's not the case.

01:41:10.000 Right.

01:41:10.000 How can I deny What is actually in the official reports?

01:41:15.000 You know, if you say I'm a denier, let's have a conversation about who's denying what.

01:41:20.000 Yeah.

01:41:20.000 You're going to deny the Greenland story.

01:41:22.000 You're going to deny the hurricane story.

01:41:24.000 You're going to deny the economic impact story.

01:41:27.000 I think it's really hard when you look at the actual documents and see it's right there.

01:41:32.000 And particularly that you're not saying that the climate isn't changing.

01:41:36.000 You're not saying that human beings don't have an influence on it.

01:41:39.000 You're saying what is unsettled is the amount of impact we have And why it's happening the way it's happening.

01:41:48.000 And the consequences of it for ecosystems and society, right?

01:41:52.000 Yes.

01:41:52.000 Let me come back to economic impact for a minute.

01:41:56.000 I believe we should be doing something about this, but what is being proposed is much too fast and is much too sweeping.

01:42:05.000 There's a guy named William Nordhaus.

01:42:08.000 Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for a fundamental insight about this problem.

01:42:15.000 And that is that there is an optimal best pace to decarbonize.

01:42:21.000 If you decarbonize too rapidly, change out the energy system, as is being proposed, you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption.

01:42:32.000 You know, 8% of the U.S. GDP is oil and gas production.

01:42:37.000 You also deploy immature technology, less than the best solar panels or nuclear reactors or whatever.

01:42:44.000 If you do it too slowly, you incur a greater risk that something bad might happen with the climate due to human causes.

01:42:52.000 Bad things are going to happen anyway, but maybe they happen more often when humans are influencing the climate.

01:42:57.000 And so there is an optimal pace.

01:43:00.000 And his initial estimate was we could let the temperature go up to three degrees by the end of the century and still be optimal, best course.

01:43:10.000 I think he's revised that downward a little bit now, but still, we've got the time and we should do it in a thoughtful and graceful way and not, again, try to do tooth extraction.

01:43:22.000 So there should be some intervention, something done to deal with what we're doing and to mitigate the effect that human beings are having on the climate.

01:43:33.000 Yeah.

01:43:33.000 I think the other...

01:43:34.000 Yes, we should do that.

01:43:36.000 We've got time.

01:43:38.000 It's going to be very difficult because of the developing world problem.

01:43:41.000 The other thing we need to do is be thinking about adaptation and resilience.

01:43:46.000 You know, I like to think about three categories of things We could do, we should do, and we will do.

01:43:55.000 And I like to try to stay away from the should because you've got to balance all these competing demands, particularly the developed world.

01:44:04.000 What I think we will do, looking at all the drivers, is we're going to adapt.

01:44:09.000 That's going to be the main way in which we will respond to a changing climate.

01:44:15.000 And, you know, adaptation has got a lot of things going for it.

01:44:19.000 It doesn't matter whether the climate is changing because of human influences or because of natural phenomena.

01:44:26.000 It's proportional.

01:44:28.000 If the climate changes a lot, we'll adapt a lot.

01:44:31.000 Climate changes a little, we'll adapt a little.

01:44:35.000 Adaptation is local, and so it's much more It's palatable politically.

01:44:39.000 You're spending for the here and now and not for something halfway around the world and a couple of generations away.

01:44:46.000 And it's also very effective.

01:44:48.000 Consider the following.

01:44:50.000 That 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.

01:45:04.000 The population in 1900 was two billion people.

01:45:07.000 Today it's almost eight, so it's gone up by a factor of four.

01:45:10.000 And we've seen spectacular improvement in nutrition, in health, in literacy, et cetera, et cetera, right?

01:45:18.000 To think that another one or one and a half degrees is going to completely derail that, just beggars belief.

01:45:25.000 And this one to one and a half degrees is projected over a period of how many years?

01:45:30.000 That's by the end of the century.

01:45:31.000 By the end of the century.

01:45:32.000 So 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.

01:45:40.000 Now, what is the worst case scenario if it does go over this one and a half degrees?

01:45:45.000 And what is the impact on it?

01:45:47.000 Is it mostly on the coasts?

01:45:49.000 Is it...

01:45:49.000 Well, you know, you saw the sea level projections.

01:45:52.000 I don't think it's going to...

01:45:54.000 Change very much.

01:45:55.000 Maybe it goes from one foot a century to two feet a century even.

01:45:59.000 That would be pretty spectacular if that happened.

01:46:02.000 We might see more high temperatures, but then there are other parts of the globe as you move north that will become more temperate.

01:46:10.000 And on a time scale of a hundred years, society learns how to adapt to that, at least in the developed world.

01:46:16.000 You were saying also in your book that when they're looking at the global temperatures and they're listing these highest global temperature years, that there's also lowest temperature that sometimes coincides with those years.

01:46:32.000 So, what's happening globally is that the Record high temperatures are not going up very much, but they are going up.

01:46:45.000 But what's also interesting is that the record low temperatures are going up faster.

01:46:52.000 Faster than the high temperatures?

01:46:53.000 Faster than the high temperatures, yeah.

01:46:55.000 And so we're getting the climate in some ways is becoming milder temperature-wise than it is at the same time as it's warming.

01:47:05.000 And also, the warm parts of the globe, the tropics, are warming not as rapidly as the polar regions, particularly the Arctic.

01:47:17.000 That's warming pretty rapidly.

01:47:21.000 So the Arctic is warming rapidly, but other parts of the globe are not warming as rapidly.

01:47:28.000 And what did they attribute that to?

01:47:31.000 There are various processes in the Arctic that are happening that accelerate the warming.

01:47:37.000 For 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.

01:47:57.000 Now, when you talk about adaptation and you talk about the rise in the global temperature, so if it does rise up a couple degrees, what sort of adaptation will be required and what areas of the world, or at least of our country, will actually benefit from a warming?

01:48:13.000 Is that a real factor?

01:48:16.000 Yeah, sure.

01:48:16.000 I mean, you know, again, because the projected economic impact is pretty small, there are going to be winners and losers.

01:48:23.000 All right?

01:48:23.000 And I would say the southern parts of the U.S. are going to get warmer.

01:48:27.000 The northern parts will become more temperate.

01:48:30.000 And so Kansas, the Dakotas, Montana, etc., will become a little bit more temperate.

01:48:38.000 Agriculture will probably shift north, as it's already happening.

01:48:43.000 You change the genetics of what you're growing.

01:48:45.000 You change the agronomic technologies.

01:48:48.000 And we'll do just fine.

01:48:51.000 We've already been warming a degree a century, and I don't see that there have been great disruptions.

01:48:58.000 Well, we've really only had the sort of large-scale industrial age, you know, over this past century.

01:49:06.000 This century.

01:49:07.000 And that makes us more capable of adapting than...

01:49:10.000 But 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.

01:49:18.000 It's irreversible.

01:49:19.000 Right.

01:49:19.000 So, okay.

01:49:20.000 People, in the end, what we do about this, I like to say, is a value judgment, okay?

01:49:25.000 The science is what it is.

01:49:27.000 I've tried to portray it accurately, certainties and uncertainties.

01:49:30.000 What we decide to do about it depends on risk tolerance, Intergenerational equity, North-South equity, and just cost-benefit generally.

01:49:43.000 Those are not scientific issues.

01:49:46.000 Those are value issues.

01:49:48.000 They'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.

01:50:00.000 And 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.

01:50:13.000 Is it safe to say that even if there was no impact by human beings on climate change, if there was zero impact because of our society and civilization, that there would still be change that we would have to work with?

01:50:25.000 Absolutely.

01:50:26.000 Look, we had the Dust Bowl in this country in the 30s, okay?

01:50:29.000 And that was partly climate, natural climate, and partly farming practices.

01:50:35.000 And, of course, we had to deal with that.

01:50:38.000 We had the Little Ice Age.

01:50:40.000 Not in, you know, in anybody's lifetime, but it was certainly there.

01:50:44.000 And they had to deal with it.

01:50:46.000 And it was pretty bad.

01:50:47.000 And there's a thing about the coast, too, that always drives me kind of nuts when I think about it.

01:50:53.000 It's like we know when you look at maps...

01:50:57.000 You know, when you go back a million years or 100,000 years, the tides have risen and, like, where the coastline is has shifted.

01:51:06.000 Yes, you saw it.

01:51:06.000 It was, you know, 400 feet in 20,000 years.

01:51:10.000 All right?

01:51:11.000 400 feet pushes the...

01:51:14.000 The coastline in tremendously.

01:51:16.000 Of course it happens.

01:51:17.000 But 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?

01:51:27.000 And we've been perfectly fine in adapting to it.

01:51:31.000 And you think that that's going to continue to happen?

01:51:32.000 Well, who can say what's really going to happen in the future?

01:51:35.000 But if I had a bet, I would.

01:51:36.000 And, you know, the politicians believe that, too.

01:51:39.000 I mean, you see the former President Obama, you see Bill Gates, all of whom are raising alarm.

01:51:45.000 They got houses on the beachfront.

01:51:47.000 All right?

01:51:48.000 So, if he really believed that...

01:51:49.000 Yeah.

01:51:50.000 He'd be living in Colorado.

01:51:53.000 Now, there was some alarmism in, I think it was the 1970s, worried about the next ice age, that an ice age was coming.

01:52:03.000 What was that based on?

01:52:04.000 Yeah, 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.

01:52:19.000 They happen because of the way in which the sunlight falls on the Earth and how it changes due to the Earth's orbit and tilt of the axis of the Earth and so on.

01:52:30.000 They happen about once every 100,000 years.

01:52:35.000 The last interglacial, the last time the Earth was mostly ice-free, happened 125,000 years ago.

01:52:45.000 The 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.

01:52:55.000 So, 125,000 years ago, it was very little ice?

01:52:57.000 Yeah.

01:52:58.000 Wow.

01:52:59.000 And it's got to do, again, with how sunlight falls on the Earth.

01:53:02.000 It's called the Eemian, named after a river in Holland, where they first realized it.

01:53:07.000 And we see that kind of thing happen pretty regularly, roughly 70,000, 100,000 year intervals, back for a million years at least.

01:53:17.000 And it's paced by, again, the way in which the Earth's orbit changes and allows sunlight to fall on the North Pole.

01:53:25.000 I mentioned Randall Carlson, and one of the things that Randall had said to me, he said, what we really should be scared of is global cooling.

01:53:31.000 We don't know.

01:53:32.000 So, you know, by some measures we're due, okay?

01:53:36.000 It's been, you saw the last glaciers disappeared about 20,000 years or started disappearing about 20,000 years ago.

01:53:44.000 And 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.

01:53:56.000 I have often thought, you know, what are the signatures that we'd start to enter a glaciation again?

01:54:02.000 What should we be looking for?

01:54:04.000 One of the obvious ones is that the snow cover in the northern hemisphere starts to last through the summers.

01:54:12.000 If and when that happened, it would of course take some thousands of years for the glaciers to build up.

01:54:17.000 But you might ask also, what geoengineering could we do?

01:54:22.000 What interventions would we do if we saw that starting to happen in order to forestall it from happening or slow it down?

01:54:29.000 And I don't think anybody, at least I haven't found anybody who's thought seriously about that.

01:54:33.000 It's a great academic exercise, I think.

01:54:36.000 Well, there have been some theories, some suggestions on geoengineering as far as cooling the earth, right?

01:54:44.000 Yeah.

01:54:44.000 There's a suspension of reflective particles and… Good.

01:54:47.000 Yes.

01:54:48.000 So, this is an idea that's been around for, you know, some number of decades.

01:54:53.000 And 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.

01:55:05.000 And you don't need to do very much in order to offset the warming.

01:55:08.000 There are several downsides to doing that.

01:55:13.000 One 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.

01:55:19.000 So how do they fall out?

01:55:21.000 Just big gravity and they get trapped by water vapor and they fall out as rain and so on.

01:55:27.000 This is what happens every time a big volcano goes off.

01:55:30.000 So you remember Punitubo, perhaps?

01:55:33.000 Lovely sunsets whenever it went off in the 90s, 91 or 92. And then it fades off for about two years.

01:55:42.000 So we'd have to keep doing it, otherwise the temperature would rebound if we stopped.

01:55:49.000 And the fear would be that those suspended particles would get into our water supply?

01:55:55.000 No, no, no.

01:55:58.000 We already put a lot of junk up into the atmosphere by burning dirty coal.

01:56:03.000 Those stay in the lower atmosphere and come down pretty quickly.

01:56:07.000 They get rained out.

01:56:09.000 The amount you'd have to put up there is only one-tenth of what we put into the lower atmosphere already.

01:56:15.000 And would it change the way the sky looked?

01:56:17.000 Yep.

01:56:18.000 It would make it a little bit hazier and dimmer.

01:56:20.000 It would look like what happened after a volcano.

01:56:23.000 The other bad thing, or at least somewhat downside to it, is it doesn't exactly cancel out the greenhouse gases because it only cools when the sun is shining, whereas the greenhouse gases are effective all the time.

01:56:37.000 It'll change precipitation patterns somewhat.

01:56:40.000 And people have done studies with models about how it would change.

01:56:44.000 You can just imagine the fights that would occur if the world decided to start to do this.

01:56:51.000 Somebody would say, hey, you know, it was rainy the last two years, and much more rainy than it should have been, and it was your geoengineering that did it, and therefore you owe me money.

01:57:01.000 There is some geoengineering that I was reading about, I believe it's Abu Dhabi, that does, they do cloud seeding.

01:57:09.000 I think they do it once a week.

01:57:11.000 So 52 times a year, they make it rain.

01:57:14.000 Yeah.

01:57:14.000 So those are local effects?

01:57:16.000 Yeah.

01:57:16.000 And that's about weather modification.

01:57:18.000 And, you know, the Chinese are said to have done that before the Beijing Summer Games to keep the rain away.

01:57:25.000 Really?

01:57:26.000 Yeah.

01:57:26.000 And so...

01:57:27.000 It's plausible that it works, actually.

01:57:30.000 But this is different, okay?

01:57:32.000 Because that's in the lower atmosphere.

01:57:34.000 This is way up there.

01:57:35.000 There are other schemes besides stuff in the atmosphere.

01:57:38.000 People have proposed creating mist near the ocean surface, like low-lying clouds.

01:57:44.000 And you can calculate how many boats you need to do that and putting stuff up into the lower atmosphere to make that happen.

01:57:52.000 So is there a technology that would involve the boats extracting water from the ocean and steaming it somehow?

01:57:58.000 Yeah, salt crystals actually.

01:58:00.000 Salt crystals.

01:58:01.000 Yeah, they're nucleate.

01:58:02.000 You know, ships already create tracks behind them just from the diesel exhaust that they have.

01:58:07.000 You can see them on the satellite and can tell you where the ship's been for a day or two.

01:58:12.000 So it would be more of that.

01:58:13.000 We could develop the technology.

01:58:15.000 The question is, you know, who's allowed to do it?

01:58:18.000 Is the world really going to do this?

01:58:20.000 One nation could decide to do it, but it would affect the global climate.

01:58:25.000 The real issues are governance, not the technology so much.

01:58:29.000 And also the potential negative consequences of some of this technology that they didn't anticipate.

01:58:34.000 You're going to have to, you know, balance the pluses and minuses.

01:58:37.000 And I'm all for research into this, both the technology and the impacts, both positive and negative.

01:58:44.000 I'm very much against deployment of it.

01:58:47.000 But we should know whether we have it as a tool that we might take out someday if the climate started to go really bad.

01:58:56.000 There's a lot to think about.

01:58:57.000 This is complicated stuff.

01:58:59.000 It's very complicated stuff.

01:59:00.000 It's nuanced.

01:59:01.000 The amount of climate illiteracy and energy illiteracy is stunning.

01:59:06.000 And we're trying to make these decisions without people really understanding how much we know and what we don't know, what the possibilities are.

01:59:14.000 So that's why I wrote the book, you know?

01:59:16.000 There's also this reflexive, pejorative term of, you know, a climate science denier.

01:59:23.000 Okay.

01:59:24.000 You know, if I were younger, I would say, you're triggering me.

01:59:28.000 All right?

01:59:29.000 So, if you go back two generations in my family, 200 of my relatives died in the Holocaust, okay, in the camps. 0.60

01:59:38.000 So, denier by itself.

01:59:40.000 Just the word.

01:59:41.000 The word.

01:59:41.000 Offensive.

01:59:42.000 If I were younger, I'd say, you're triggering me.

01:59:44.000 But, in fact, You know, what am I denying?

01:59:47.000 I'm just telling you what's in the reports.

01:59:49.000 No, I'm not in any way, of course.

01:59:51.000 No, I'm speaking to a hypothetical interlocutor.

01:59:55.000 It's so reflexive.

01:59:57.000 I mean, it's just a reflex.

01:59:59.000 People do it, and, you know, and they say it with such conviction and confidence, and it's...

02:00:05.000 I know that just this episode getting out there is going to do that, especially in this day and age where everybody reacts...

02:00:14.000 Sort of signaling to their tribe almost before they analyze the science.

02:00:19.000 Right.

02:00:19.000 So what I hope is that, you know, people will read the book before they criticize, although that usually doesn't happen, and those who do read it will look up some of the references and say, yeah, that guy Kunin seems to be right.

02:00:33.000 Go ask your favorite climate scientist, is that guy Cootin right?

02:00:37.000 And if he is, what else haven't you told me?

02:00:39.000 Well, other than Bill Maher criticizing it, was there anybody else that criticized it that you clearly could tell that they haven't read the science or haven't read your book?

02:00:47.000 Oh, 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?

02:01:05.000 You know, I actually submitted a rebuttal to Scientific American.

02:01:08.000 They refused to publish it.

02:01:10.000 Wow.

02:01:11.000 Okay?

02:01:11.000 That's crazy.

02:01:12.000 That's not scientific.

02:01:14.000 You know, as a kid, I used to read Scientific American cover to cover.

02:01:18.000 Because it was interesting and it discussed science.

02:01:21.000 I 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.

02:01:31.000 When did that start happening?

02:01:32.000 You know, there was a German firm that took over the ownership of the magazine at least a decade ago.

02:01:39.000 I don't know exactly when.

02:01:40.000 We can look it up.

02:01:41.000 And I think that has exercised a lot of editorial control.

02:01:45.000 And that editorial control is going through an ideological filter.

02:01:48.000 I believe so, yes.

02:01:50.000 Well, Steve, is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up?

02:01:53.000 Is there anything that you feel like we missed?

02:01:55.000 No.

02:01:55.000 You know, I mean, maybe just a summary.

02:01:59.000 I'm a scientist.

02:02:01.000 I try to stick with the data and reasonable implications of it.

02:02:05.000 I understand something about modeling from a previous life.

02:02:08.000 I wrote a book on computational physics 40 years ago that did pretty well.

02:02:15.000 People should really understand that this is not a simple subject.

02:02:20.000 As we've been exploring, and to do a little bit of investigating for themselves.

02:02:25.000 Don't believe everything you hear, like so many other things these days in the media.

02:02:31.000 All right.

02:02:32.000 Well, thank you very much for your time.

02:02:34.000 I really appreciate it.

02:02:35.000 And thank you for writing this book and sticking your neck out and examining this at a very detailed level.

02:02:41.000 It was very interesting to read and listen to, actually.

02:02:46.000 And I really enjoyed our conversation.

02:02:48.000 Great.

02:02:48.000 You know, my goal is always to just inform people.

02:02:50.000 They can make their own decisions about what to do, but at least they should do it on the basis of the facts.

02:02:55.000 Well, you've certainly stirred up a lively debate.

02:02:57.000 Great.

02:02:58.000 Good.

02:02:58.000 Thank you.

02:02:58.000 Thank you very much.

02:02:59.000 I really appreciate it.

02:03:00.000 All right.

02:03:00.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 11, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript