Conversations on Climate Change

well there's no a veritable Hockey League which is to say there are dozens of these sorts of reconstructions that have been done using different methods different data and they all come to the same conclusion that the recent warming is unprecedented as far back as we can go in fact if those attendant of evidence that the warming spike of the past century is unprecedented in tens of thousands of years as far back as even the tentative estimates now go you need to look at the entire elephant and the bottom line is that we don't yet have a unified theory of climate variability and change that integrates all this predictive sense can we take some prudent measures to reduce the likelihood of that risk in the military we have a say if you wait for a hundred percent certainty you'll be a hundred percent dead so just remember every any time anybody shows you a correlation inferring that it's a causation do not accept it at face value welcome to conversations on climate change the climate change event of the decade a rare occasion in which nationally renowned climate experts dr. Michael Mann Admiral David titli dr. Judith curry and dr. Patrick Moore participated in an intellectually engaging dialogue on the same stage at the same time this presentation is brought to you by Spillman Thomas and battle a full-service super-regional law firm serving local national and international clients through its offices in West Virginia Pennsylvania Virginia and North Carolina Spillman Thomas and battle expect different good evening and welcome to Spillman Thomas and battle's conversations on climate change my name is Nick prezerv Otte and with bill Herlihy I'm the co-chair of Spillman's energy practice I like to specially thank the University of Charleston for hosting us Metro news our media partner all the people at Spelman Thomason battle who helped make this happen including our world-class marketing department and I'd like to especially acknowledge Mike Gerard at the founder and director of the savin Center on climate change law at Columbia University Law School in New York City Mike helped us formulate the format for this evening he helped us select speakers and actually helped us formulate questions and Mike as unfortunately is not able to make it here with us tonight but he is listening on the webcast so thank you Mike for all of your work several housekeeping items the evening I ask that everybody cut off their cell phones or at least silence your phone's audio or video recording is prohibited and just to give you an idea each speaker will be given 15 minutes to present their own presentation I will give them a 5-minute warning and a one-minute warning so please don't be distracted when I start saying the word five and one and then at the end I will thank them for their time and at that point I ask that you applaud each speaker but hold your applause until the end of their presentation and feel free to applaud as the other speakers are brought up now going to the event itself I think it's as much important to talk about what this event is not as what it is this event is not a discussion or a debate on the existence of climate change the position that we've asked our panelists to acknowledge and I believe they all do as many people in this room is that climate change Israel it's been real for millions of years as it's been hotter or colder on earth than it is now sea levels have been higher and lower than they are now the question is not does it exist but the question is to what extent is man-made co2 emissions accelerating that process and that is the issue that we've asked each of our speakers here today to address after each of the four panelists present there presentations we will have a 30 to 40 minute Q&A session and the hope is that each speaker will be able to have at least two questions presented to them after that they will each have two minutes to make a closing statement to address any issue that was raised tonight whether it's a comment from another speaker or a comment from one of the presentations in the interests of saving time I'm not going to go into a long introduction of their BIOS they are in the program so without further ado can we give a warm West Virginia welcome to dr. Michael Mann Admiral David titli dr. judith curry [Music] and dr. Patrick Moore [Applause] [Music] dr. Mann the floor is yours and I will start the timer as soon as I'm able to pull the app on my phone okay well thanks very much thanks for doing this event I'm hoping that we will have a robust conversation tonight about climate change what's driving it and indeed it is human activity and more importantly where the debate lies where there's room for a worthy debate is what do we do about it and so let me first start by reviewing what the scientific evidence says the basics behind human caused climate change are not controversial it's physics and chemistry that's been known for nearly two centuries the greenhouse effect certain gases in the atmosphere likes you to warm the planet we are increasing the concentrations of those gases in the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning this curve I constructed more than a little more than a decade ago and it's fundamentally out of date now because if you look at the vertical axis you'll see it ends at 390 you have to add two more vertical tick marks to that scale now here's where we are we just passed 410 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere last week the first time we've crossed that particular threshold we're fairly confident now that you have to go back millions of years to find co2 concentrations that were naturally that high so we are engaged in this unprecedented experiment with the planet and what we wouldn't be able to explain would be if the earth were not warming up but of course it is warming up as these observations tell us 2014-2015 2016 were three consecutive record-breaking years the good news is that 2017 did not yet again break the record it was only the second warmest year on record what's the likelihood you would get three consecutive record-breaking years in the absence of human-caused climate change what we actually published an article a year ago actually calculating those likelihoods using climate models and observations and I could describe the work to you but I think it suffice is to just put up the head that Discoverer ran about our findings the record global warming streak of 2014 through 2016 a snowball's chance in hell that this was natural it cannot be explained by natural variability and indeed when we look at the warming of the planet and we look at the role of natural factors versus human factors we can't explain the warming in fact the globe should have actually cooled in the latter half of the 20th century if we were just natural factors that were at work so it's happening climate change is real and it is human caused it is due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel-burning that is the consensus of the world's scientists now two decades ago as of Earth Day this year two decades ago we first published this curve the hockey stick that depicted our estimate of how temperatures have changed over the past thousand years and what that curve shows is that the warming in fact is fairly unusual this doesn't happen all the time the warming spike of the past century is unprecedented as far back as we were able to go it got a name the hockey stick it was featured in the IPCC summary for policy makers and it has become somewhat of an icon in the climate change debate again on it's a 20th anniversary on Earth Day this year there were articles talking about you know this iconic graph that is now two decades old and because it did become an icon in the climate change debate it has been fiercely attacked by those looking to discredit this iconic curve as a means of trying to discredit the the case for concern about climate change even though this is just one in many independent lines of evidence that tell us that climate change is real and it's human caused well there's now a veritable hockey league which is to say there are dozens of these sorts of reconstructions that have been done using different methods different data and they all come to the same conclusion that the recent warming is unprecedented as far back as we can go in fact there's no some tentative evidence that the warming spike of the past century is unprecedented in tens of thousands of years as far back as even the tentative estimates now go that's the sort of evidence that's led the intergovernmental panel on climate change and thousands of scientists from around the world who assess the consensus of what the science has to say determining that indeed the recent warming is unprecedented in this case at least 1,400 years as I said there's no tentative evidence it's unprecedented over a much longer time scale now as I said the hockey stick has continued to be attacked because it was this iconic graph and the climate change debate and I've written a book about that it's actually for sale out here be happy to sign copies in that book afterwards if you're interested in that I talked about the experiences as a scientist who studied applied math and physics what wasn't really a prescription I thought for putting myself at the center of one of the most contentious societal debates but because of where that my scientific training led me and the publication of the hockey stick I found myself in the center of this very contentious public debate now what about the future what does the future hold well if we were to basically bring our carbon emissions to a halt or ramp them down dramatically we could prevent warming the earth by more than two degrees Celsius three and a half Fahrenheit relative to the pre-industrial what many scientists say constitutes dangerous and irreversible climate change but if we continue with business as usual warming of the planet we're talking about anywhere from four to five degrees Celsius 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit warming of the planet by the end of the century twice that much in the Arctic because of the amplifying effect of melting ice a profound change in our climate now it isn't just the warming of the earth it's the disappearance of the sea ice and you'll see a recurring pattern here the red is the observations it shows how sea ice is decreasing over the years and the shaded region is what the models predict so yes the models were wrong here we're outside of the range of what the models predicted sea ice is disappearing faster than the climate models predicted yes there's uncertainty but uncertainty isn't necessarily our in many respects we are finding that things are happening faster than we expected this is where it is this year it's on course potentially to set yet a new record although we'll have to see how things shape up over the next few months there are other surprises one of the things we're learning and I've done some research in this area is that climate change can impact extreme weather events in ways that we didn't really understand years ago and in some research that I've done there's evidence that climate change and the amplified warming of the Arctic is actually changing the jet stream in a way that favors very persistent very large meanders that's when you get the most extreme weather events the 2003 European heat wave the to 2010 Moscow wildfires and Pakistan floods the 2011 Oklahoma and Texas drought and heat wave the 2016 Alberta wildfires were all examples of extreme summer weather events that were associated with a very specific phenomenon which we show is becoming more common because of global warming so this is an impact that we didn't understand just a few years ago we're now understanding that you know things like these thousand-year floods that you're hearing about and of course West Virginia was one of those states over the past few years that's experienced a thousand-year flood a flood that shouldn't happen more often than once in a thousand years and yet they're happening quite frequently and that's because climate change is impacting these extreme weather events and in ways that actually we didn't even understand a few years ago so there is uncertainty but it's not our friend we're learning about mechanisms that actually amplify the problem and nowhere is that more true than with the ice sheets and this is an example of a tipping point once you start the melting of the ice sheets you can't stop it it sort of gains a momentum that causes it to be irreversible on human timescales and what we're finding now is that we've warmed the planet enough that some of those very substantial feedbacks are setting in the collapse of the ice shelves of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet because of the warming the Southern Oceans which is destabilizing the ice sheet and allowing it to collapse faster than we thought it would so again there was uncertainty and if you had asked you know us five years ago what the best estimate was of the sea level rise we could see by the end of the century we would have told you three feet that's not good but no more than three feet it's not a problem for Charleston West Virginia but it is a problem for Charleston South Carolina well now if you ask us we have to say maybe closer to six to eight feet because when you take some of the processes that we're missing in the climate models and you put them into the models what you find is that ice sheets can collapse more quickly than we thought so we've literally had to double the estimate of what sea level rise might be by the end of the century from 3 feet to 6 to 8 feet just over the past couple years uncertainty is not our friend as we learn more as we understand more we're seeing that the impacts can indeed potentially be worse than we had forecast of course some you know Congress men think that sea level is caused by rocks tumbling into the oceans that was a comment made by a congressman a few weeks ago at a hearing on climate change and then there was an article an op-ed that appeared in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the sea is rising but not because of climate change we wrote a letter to the letter to the editor replying to that pointing out that that's sort of like saying that you know objects are falling but it's not due to gravity it's absurd the science tells us that indeed sea-level rise is being caused by the warming of the planet and we explained that in our letter to the editor and I know that at least one person we got through that at least one person because this was the person sitting next to me on a flight that same day her eating our op-ed our letter to the editor in the Wall Street Journal so we reached at least one person near as I can tell but you still find this sort of denial of the most basic facts in our public discourse as I said before there's a worthy debate to be had about what we do about this problem how we solve this problem but there isn't a worthy debate to be had about whether the problem exists the impacts and I'm running out of time so let me just say that the impacts are no longer subtle we're seeing them play out it isn't just polar bears in the Arctic that used to be the poster child of climate change but it's about us it's about unprecedented droughts and as Dave titli will tell you in some cases these unprecedented droughts are creating stress that may be amplifying national security problems international terrorism there is a linkage there it climate change is what the national security community calls a threat multiplier and David will talk more about that and these record droughts are creating conflict that is potentially leading to national security problems it's obviously impacting our infrastructure unprecedented wildfires like the California wildfire the Thomas fire this last winter and I'm saying wildfire last winter well that's not when wildfires are supposed to happen in California but that's when California had its worst wildfire on record and if you talk to the fire managers if you talk to the folks in California now they'll tell you you know we're starting to question whether or not we can even refer to a fire season in California because what we now have potentially is a perpetual fire season that's the face of climate change not sudden and landslides and there was a connection there as well because you destroy the vegetation then when the winter rains come then suddenly you can have massive landslides like the one that killed more than 20 people in Southern California and of course we all know about the unprecedented tropical storm season we had in the Atlantic last year unprecedented in many respects and just as we start now on our next season as we go into the next season climate change is amplifying some of the characteristics of these storms that's adding the sea level rise representing unprecedented threats to our coastlines and we're all paying the price you know the damage that's being done along our coastlines even for those who live of us who live inland we pay for those damages there's texts you know taxpayers ultimately are paying for the damage that is being inflicted by climate change regardless of where it happens in the country can we adapt well we're gonna have to adapt to some of the changes that are already baked in but we don't have the adaptive capacity to deal with climate change if we allow you know if we continue on this course that we're on business as usual burning of fossil fuels there's no amount of adaptation that can provide the adaptive capacity we would need to deal with the changes that would be in store should we engage in geoengineering massive interference with the climate system in the hope that we might be able to somehow offset climate change I think that such prescriptions are potentially very dangerous and wrongheaded and that only leaves us with one solution yeah there are things that we can do personally to decrease our own personal carbon footprints and you know we should all do those voluntary things in many cases they save us money they make us healthier there because feel better but ultimately if we're gonna solve this problem then we need to fundamentally remake our global energy economy we need to begin a transition we need to accelerate a transition that's already underway away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy economy and we need to take care of the people who are displaced along the way Wailers were displaced in the 19th century when we went from whale oil to fossil fuels something better came along it was fossil fuels guess what something better has come along now its renewable energy and we have to help the people like many of the folks in West Virginia who can be displaced as we undergo this transition towards where we need to go in the future thank you very much well good evening everyone I look forward to our conversation this evening there's a widespread agreement on these basic tenets about climate change surface temperatures have increased since 1880 humans are adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a warming effect on the planet however there's substantial disagreement about the issues of greatest consequence whether the recent warming has been dominated by human causes how much the planet will warm in the 21st century whether warming is dangerous and how we should respond to the warming now there's nothing wrong or bad about scientific disagreement in fact the scientific process thrives in the face of disagreement which motivates research in new directions regarding the disagreement on causes of climate change on the left-hand side is a perspective of a stable climate that changes in response to changes in atmospheric co2 in other words carbon dioxide is the climate control knob it's a simple and seductive idea however some scientists think that this is a misleading oversimplification they regard climate as a complex nonlinear dynamical system with no simple cause and effect climate can ship naturally in unexpected ways owing to natural internal variability associated with large-scale ocean circulations now these two perspectives are not mutually exclusive proponents of the co2 as control knob idea acknowledged the existence of natural variability but dismiss it as noise that averages out proponents of the natural variability arguments acknowledge the impact of co2 but consider it to be a modest wedge that projects onto the natural modes of climate variable the point of this cartoon is that if you only look at one part of the elephant you will miss diagnose you need to look at the entire elephant and the bottom line is that we don't yet have a unified theory of climate variability and change that integrates all this in a predictive sense so does this rather arcane scientific debate actually matter well yes it does if you assume that carbon dioxide is a control knob at four climate then you can control climate by reducing co2 emissions but if you assume that climate change primarily occurs naturally then the Earth's climate is largely uncontrollable and reducing co2 emissions will do little or nothing to change the climate my personal assessment aligns with the right-hand-side emphasizing natural variability however the IPCC in the so called consensus aligns with the left-hand side about up until about ten years ago I also aligned with the left-hand side because I saw the supporting the IPCC consensus was a responsible thing to do here is how and why I changed my mind in 2010 I started digging deeper both into the science itself and the politics that were shaping the science I came to realize that the policy cart was way out in front of the scientific course the 1992 UN climate change treaty was signed by a hundred and ninety countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible human influence on the global climate the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the warming was caused by humans there was tremendous political pressure on the IPCC scientists to present findings that would support these treaties and this resulted in a manufactured consensus here's how the so-called consensus and increasing confidence in human caused global warming became a self-fulfilling prophecy you find what you shine a light on in other words we've only been looking at one part of the element motivated by the UN climate treaty in the IPCC and government funding climate scientists have focused primarily on human caused climate change other factors important for understanding climate variability and change have been relatively neglected I've highlighted long-term ocean oscillations and solar indirect effects since I think these are potentially very important on the Keadle to century timescales one of the most consequential impacts of a warming climate is sea-level rise these two statements by climate scientists typify the alarm over sea level rise the first is a statement by dr. Jim Hansen that's the big thing sea level rise the planet could become uncover Noble the second is a statement by dr. Michael Mann we're talking about literally giving up on our coastal cities of the world and moving inland is this alarm justified by the evidence this figure illustrates the challenge of attributing long-term sea level rise to co2 emissions the blue curve shows sea level change since 1800 measured from tide gauges the red curve shows global emissions of carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels you can see that global sea levels were rising steadily long before fossil fuel emissions became substantial you can also see that the steep increase in emissions following 1950 is associated with very little sea level rise between 1950 and 1990 now an uptick in sea level rise occurred in the 1990s which is circled let's take a closer look to see what's causing this since 1993 global satellite data have provided valuable information about sea level variations in glacier mass balance this figure shows a recent analysis of the budget of sea level rise since 1993 you can see that the overall rate sea-level rise has increased since 1993 well what's causing the increase the turquoise region on the bottom of the diagram relates directly to expansion from warming but you actually see a decrease until about 2009 now this has been attributed to the cooling impact following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1992 what stands out as causing the increase in the rate of sea-level rise is the growing contribution from Greenland which is a dark blue area on top hence the increase in the rate of sea level rise is caused by Greenland melting so it's the Greenland nothing caused by increasing co2 emissions the top figure shows the Greenland mass balance for the 20th century ice sheet mass balance is defined as the increase from snowfall - the decrease from melting you can see the negative mass balance values after 1995 reflecting mass loss that raises sea level but if you look in the record you see even larger negative values particularly in the 1920s and 1930s clearly the high mass loss rates of recent years are not unprecedented even in the 20th century Greenland was anomalously warm in the 1930s and 1940s what caused this the bottom figure shows variations in the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation which is an important mode of natural internal climate variability in general years with positive amo index are associated with a mass loss for Greenland whereas negative amo index is associated with a mass gain from this analysis I can only conclude that co2 emissions are not the main cause of sea level rise since the mid 19th century the scientific evidence that I've shown you on the preceding slides is well known to the IPCC here are some statements that the most recent IPCC report made on sea level change in Greenland recent rates of sea level rise are comparable to those that were observed between 1920 and 1950 recent temperatures and mass loss from Greenland are comparable to what was seen in the 1930s detection of the impact of human-caused warming and observed changes in regional sea level remains challenging now I've been asked to respond to the question to what extent are manmade co2 emissions contributing to climate change the short answer is we don't know and the reason that we don't know is because we don't know how to disentangle natural internal variability from the effects of co2 driven warming even the IPCC doesn't claim to know exactly the most recent IPCC assessment report says it's extremely likely to be more than half more than half is not very precise given the IPCC's neglect of multi dakedo and longer timescales of natural internal variability I regard the extreme competence of their conclusion to be unjustified so here's my personal assessment manmade co2 emissions are as likely as not to contribute less than 50% of the recent warming if you believe a climate model could even if you believe climate model projections are still genuine disagreement regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response one side argues that reducing co2 emissions is critical for preventing future dangerous warming of the climate the other side argues that any reduction in warming would be minimal and at high cost and that the cure could be worse than the disease what makes most sense to me is climate pragmatism which has been formulated by the Heartwell group climate pragmatism as three pillars accelerate energy innovation build resilience extreme weather and no regrets pollution reduction these policies provide near-term socio-economic and environmental benefits and have justifications independent of climate mitigation and adaptation these are no regrets policies that do not require agreement about climate science or the risks of uncontrolled greenhouse gases I would like to make a few comments on the state of the scientific and public debate on climate change here's my take on the madhouse effect the manor house that concerns me is the one that has been created by some climate scientists the madhouse is characterized by rampant overconfidence in an overly simplistic theory of climate change enforcement of a politically motivated manufactured consensus attempts to stifle scientific and policy debates activism and advocacy for their preferred politics and policy self-promotion and cashing in and public attacks on other scientists that do not support the consensus hmm maybe I should write a book in closing I would like to make a personal statement to clarify my motives I regard my job as a scientist to critically evaluate evidence and to continually challenge and reassess conclusions that are drawn from the evidence a year ago I resigned my tenured faculty position because of academic political pressures that interfered with doing my job my resignation was a direct result of the science madhouse effect discussed on the previous slide I'm now working in the private sector as president of climate forecasts applications Network my direct engagement with the public is via my blog climate etc where we discuss a broad range of topics related to climate science and policy all viewpoints and perspectives are welcome I hope that you'll join us at judith curry calm thank you I'm gonna start not with science graphs and all that kind of stuff I want to show you a picture of my hometown this is Schenectady New York I don't know if anybody knows where that is it's an upstate New York used to be known as the city that lights and hauls the world and this is what it looked like when I was a very young child this is what Schenectady looked like when I was leaving the town for the last time going to Penn State I've seen economic dislocation it hurts Schenectady is still trying to figure this out so when we talk about the need to move beyond coal believe me if we don't do it right there is a massive human cost I understand that I know dr. Mann understands that I'm not sure if the natural gas I sell to but that's this is what happens and it's not a lot of fun to live through as I'm sure many in West Virginia understand let me just go through a little bit of my background I'm recovering weather forecaster fundamentally that's not me on the lower right but it could have been me I ended up in the Navy to pay for college and some of my happiest times was basically doing weather forecasting at sea this is me up in the Bering Sea in January think Deadliest Catch and we were we were doing things against the then Soviets back in the 80s went to NOAA I was their chief operating officer and now I'm at Penn State so let me just talk I'm a pretty simple person I've been in the Navy it's a pretty practical organization and and you tend to just try to boil stuff down into things at work so I have this very simple three-legged stool of how I think about scientific understanding and I just want to take a minute or two to to let you know why is there so many people sort of over nine out of ten climate scientists do think that carbon dioxide is a major controller on the on the climate and it's three things do we understand the fundamental theories what do the observations say and can we predict it and if the answer is yes to all three then you would argue you have pretty good understanding so spoiler alert the answer is yes to all three so that's kind of my stool here and let me just walk through it very quickly okay there's not a test dr. Mann would get an A everybody else I'm not quite so sure including myself so this is when I started talking about this in the Pentagon a decade ago some of my fellow Admirals asked me titli have you got religion on this and I said no I just went to the Church of the radiative transfer equation and as dr. Mann kind of pointed out we've known this stuff for a long time so you had Fourier on the far left in the 1820s figured out the atmosphere effects heat you have Tyndall Ascot he actually figured out carbon dioxide was in fact a greenhouse gas and by the time you got to the close of the 19th century had the guy on the right a rain who's a Swede starting to do the first global warming calculations she had a Frenchman a Scot a Swede as far as I know they did not go into a bar but they kind of figured this stuff out so I say that this is the fundamentals of climate scientist it is science it's cutting-edge 19th century science we know this kind of like we know gravity it's it's about at that level of certainty so what do the observations say and I don't think I don't think anybody on this panel is going to disagree that the climate is changing so this is from NASA and this really just shows relative to the 20th century which of this sort of white as the years go by and the years are down at the down at the bottom there how the how the temperature is changing so here comes a dust bowl here's the 30s so you see the US was quite warm but there were a lot of parts of the world that were still below the average even when we think of it very hot in the 30s so here's the 50s I think the 60s 70s the 80s the 90s there's still areas you can find below average but fewer and fewer and you can see how this moves around that's that now variability that we've talked about but you can see the signal that has been put on top of that and that primarily is coming from carbon forcing so the third part can we actually predict this stuff so already this names been mentioned Jim Hanson now this is not the Muppets guy this is the climate guy and if this page kind of looks like a Xerox of a PDF of a Xerox of a PDF it's because it is comes out of a science journal from 1981 and this guy Hanson who at the time was a young buck scientist said hey let's go see if we can calculate this stuff so he knew everything if you can see on that graph it's on the far left where the observations are he knew everything to the left of that the the last inch or so of that all those black lines we didn't know what was gonna happen those were his estimates and he had to figure out how much greenhouse gases they were going to come in so what he basically did is he calculated that and somebody later 30 years later said hey let's see how that guy Hanson did and that's the purple line that's how we verified so it turns out that Hanson who sometimes is thought of as an alarmist in this was actually too conservative on on his predictions so I've gone through in two seconds here kind of we have fundamental understanding for well over a hundred and fifty years we've have dozens we could write we could talk for weeks about the observations and we've been able to predict this stuff at large scales for a long time just so you know if we had two people who weren't really quite sure about this to climate scientists to show where the science community is we would have to put that number of people up here on this stage probably about the same number that's in the audience about 200 okay so when I think of climate again I'm a simple sailor I can only think of three things at one time people and water and change people water change no polar bears I'm sorry I'm sorry if anybody loves polar bears it's it's okay but we will in the interest of time I'm not going to talk too much about the individual impacts on the people the water I do talk about this all about the water but really I want to talk about the change piece of climate and this is actually come up a couple times here's just a slide comes out of some work by John Englander and and others of the variability that we've seen over the last half million years and it doesn't really matter which of these three lines you look at whether it's sea level or temperature carbon dioxide one you can see they're all pretty correlated and yes up down up down up down and people who study climate in the distant past we call them paleo climate astac Lima tala gist actually dr. Mann that's his that's his original field they can actually explain why we have these and again I don't have time right now but we understand why we have these but what we had if you take the very very like just tiny slice on the right hand side the most recent 8,000 years you can see and this is sea level we've had stability and when did we come up with human civilization during those eight thousand years now it's not like the ancient Egyptians sat down and said hey we're gonna have climate stability let's start civilization so we can all carry iPhones around in about 10,000 years I don't think they had that conversation but what was happened is we could start planting crops and they would grow the same place year after year if we built a port we didn't find it 10 miles high and dry you know in a century nor under 40 feet of water so we could set up trade and we basically we've developed a human civilization with over over seven billion seven billion people if we change that and especially if we change that rapidly we have to think of what are the impacts how are we going to do that in a world of seven billion people or can we take some prudent measures to reduce the likelihood of that risk in the military we have a saying if you wait for a hundred percent certainty you'll be a hundred percent dead so this is risk management and if we see that there is a risk this is exactly what Ronald Reagan did oh by the way with the with the ozone he said I don't know if you science guys are totally right but if you're right this is really bad so let's do some things now and thanks to President Reagan and many other trees were actually making progress on the ozone hole so it's risk management and that's how kind of this is this is looked at okay I apologize for the words but but that's what I have again three things so this is something you may or may not have heard or thought about before how does climate change impact national security it changes where our soldiers sailors airmen and Marines have to operate it changes that environment I'm guessing many of us are parents or even grandparents in this room and I'll bet a number of you have sons daughters nephews nieces that are serving in our armed forces today or have served our American Way of wars we do not fight the home game we fight the away game and we want to make sure that our military forces have a home-field advantage on that away game part of that is understanding the natural environment and if it is changing and especially changing rapidly the military needs to make sure they're ready for it second is the threats to our operating or our security infrastructure Norfolk Naval Base is taking on more and more flooding and it's not just the base itself it's the access roads and it's the infrastructure that supports it the people who make Norfolk Naval Base work live off-base they've got to get there they've got to live someplace and finally if we have time in Q&A I'll talk about it climate change can be a link in a change of events that can make bad situations worse and sometimes catastrophic Lee so for those of you of a certain age you may remember the BASF commercial we don't make things we make things better climate change doesn't make things it makes things worse okay so first it's really encouraging to actually listen to the words of our current Secretary of Defense Secretary mattis he recognizes climate change is man-made and it is a risk to national security and he says he's going to manage that like he manages every other risk in the Pentagon I put this up here the IC and I apologize for the acronym that's the intelligence community DNI Director of National Intelligence dan coates president Trump's pointy to that job testified before Congress a couple of months ago on worldwide threats you can look this up you can find it on the internet and nobody has to hack it page 16 a whole series on climate related threats to our national security that is from this administration so and it is very consistent with what the intelligence community said two years ago five years ago seven years ago so this transcends politics and political parties what can one person do well I have a llama here and we can talk more in detail if anybody's curious what a llama is doing in a climate talk although I'm told it's an alpaca somebody came up and it's like I'm sorry but I'm gonna call it a llama learn local action monitor and advocacy and when I say advocacy talk to your elected officials ask them ma'am sir what are you doing to stabilize the climate it's not a yes-or-no question kind of like dating 101 it's an opportunity to start a meaningful conversation so let me just close with a couple words here Admiral Nimitz probably not known to be a huge tree hugger talks about the importance of taking precautions when you are able to nothing is more dangerous than begrudging on your precautions we see the danger signs we see the warning signs maybe we're wrong but do you want to bet your life on it do you want to bet your children's life on it because there's a whole lot of people who have looked to this and believe me all the incentive structure in the science community is to come up with a revolutionary theory that totally disproves greenhouse gases they will name Institute's after you for 500 years thousands of people have looked for those theories they have not withstood the test of time I want to end here I want to end with this picture of NASA this country does incredible things when we are focused you think about Apollo 13 and I think quite a few people in the audience remember that I was just a kid and by all means as I grew up and I read more and learned more about that those astronauts should have died they should have died in space we shouldn't have got him we refuse to let that happen overnight literally overnight we mobilized the strength of American Science and Technology and we achieved basically what people would thought was the impossible okay climate change is not something that happens in 72 hours but our country does amazing things when we get focused we're not focused yet and part of being focused is taking care of people who get dislocated economically like in West Virginia like in western Pennsylvania like in Ohio but that's part of it to get to not just today's life but to a better life and with that I think I'll Linda thank you very much thank you Nick for and Spillman for putting this event on it's quite unique I think in many ways a conversation about climate quickly I was born and raised here on this floating village on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island was sent to boarding school in Vancouver where I as an ecology PhD became radicalized by the threat of all-out nuclear war and the emerging consciousness of the environment and joined a small group of people to voyage to Alaska to stop hydrogen bomb testing which we and many other people we as the kind of spearhead did that was the last hydrogen bomb the United States ever detonated here much later I'm driving a rubber boat into the first encounter with the Soviet factory whaling fleet perhaps dr. Mann doesn't realize that 30,000 whales were still being killed in the early 1970s it had really nothing to do with fossil fuels replacing them and we put ourselves in front of the harpoons and got on TV around the world to protect the fleeing whales and Greenpeace was made famous as a result of this I left Greenpeace for a number of very good reasons in 1986 after 15 years in the leadership this has been shown already mine's a little more up to date it shows that it's up above 400 there and there's no doubt in my mind that human co2 emissions are the primary cause of this ocean warming may have caused a teeny bit of it now you're shown graphs like this with y-axes of only one point four degrees in order to make it look like there's been this huge increase in global temperature when in fact if you put it on a scale that's like between minus 10 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit you can hardly notice that 1 degree rise in temperature this has not been a very significant change in global temperature the last 300 years is when it started at the peak of our the depths of the Little Ice Age we certainly had nothing to do with the fact that it started warming again 300 years ago after many hundred years of cooling coming out of the Medieval Warm Period into the Little Ice Age let's go back 570 million years or 500 million years or so here what I'm showing you here is temperature and co2 to the best of our knowledge going back that far you can see that they are almost never in sync sometimes they are completely out of sync like 146 million years ago their co2 goes up temperature comes down at the same time then see the tooth starts going down and temperature goes up there was an ice age there 290 million years ago or so when co2 was very high then there was another period where they came in sync but then when co2 continued to remain low at that big dip there in the middle temperatures skyrocketed up to a pretty well a modern history high in terms of the 500 years since modern life emerged in the Cambrian explosion so it's ironic to note that this last period that we're in now the Pleistocene Ice Age and the Eocene interglacial period are the coldest since 270 million years that's when the last ice age occurred that's why all that ice is on Antarctica and the Arctic because this is an ice age and periodically quite frequently in fact during the last 250 to 2.5 million years it has descended down to south of the US Canada border on many occasions so you can see very little correlation in the long term history of co2 and temperature and this concludes the act that co2 is not the primary control amount knob of global temperature there's actually far higher correlation between shark attacks and ice cream consumption and that's because correlation is not necessarily causation causation requires correlation but very often strong correlations are the result of a third common factor in this case temperature because when people go swimming in the summer they come back to the beach and eat ice cream and that's when they get attacked by sharks so just remember every anytime anybody shows you a correlation inferring that it's a causation do not accept it at face value here's a correlation that's true life expectancy and co2 emissions the reason life expectancy a large part of it is because of our use of fossil fuels they are 83% of our energy supply in the world today and they play a huge role in our longevity our wealth and our personal freedom this is the last 65 million years since the dinosaur extinction you can see after the dinosaur extinction the temperature skyrocket to what is known as the Eocene thermal maximum this is from a Greenland ice core I'll show you ice cores from Antarctica later which go back much further you can see that we are basically at the tail end of a 50 million year cooling period on this earth just three million years ago the Arctic islands of my country Canada were covered in forests with giant camels roaming in them there was nothing wrong with that climate it was perfectly acceptable for life on Earth as a matter of fact when people say well we couldn't live back there when it was so warm because there weren't any people yet then I think our ancestors came through that or we might not be sitting in the auditorium tonight our ancestors came through more changes over the last 500 million years and you can throw a stick at absolutely nothing compared to anything variable that's happening today as a matter of fact not one single factor of weather or climate happening today is anywhere out of line with the last 10,000 years nothing and I'd like someone to name me one co2 is out of but it's not weather or climate there's co2 going up at the end there we did that notice the temperature isn't following it but what I'm looking at here is the hundred thousand year cycles of glaciation and interglacial periods the high points are the interglacial periods the one on the right is the one we're in now note that it is colder than the three previous interglacial periods the Pleistocene is still cooling note that they are very much in sync with co2 the temperature curve this was the fundamental fraud in Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth he said obviously co2 is causing the change in temperature these are the Milankovitch cycles in sync with a hundred thousand year Milankovitch cycle which is the changes in the Earth's orbit in the shape of it how it changes in the shape of the Earth's orbit affect co2 concentrations in the atmosphere no they would affect temperature and temperature would affect the oceans temperature and the oceans temperature determines how much co2 can be dissolved in it so when it warms co2 comes out and when it cools co2 breathes into the ocean the ocean has 45 times as much co2 in it as the atmosphere does and here is a stretching out the last 50 thousand years you can see that co2 follows temperature as we come out of the glaciation from 20,000 years ago while 18,000 years is where the low point was there co2 fell to 180 parts per million I'll tell you more about that later here is the last 10,000 years the Holocene interglacial period you can see it's divided into two parts the Holocene climate optimum where it was much warmer to degrees Celsius or so what they say is going to kill us all if we allow it to go up two degrees from what it is now and there and it goes into the Neo glacial period this means the new bleh seal period note that co2 the red line was rising while temperature was falling another very convincing indication that co2 is not the control knob of global climate and then we see this is why they call it the Neo glacial period these are charts showing the advance of so when it was warmer in the Holocene climate on very little glacial activity it was a warm enough period to cause the glaciers to retreat as they had been for the last ten thousand years since the peak of the glaciation but the Neo blaze heal period the colder period were in now we see glaciers advancing and the Little Ice Age is shown as the tallest chart there that was the coldest it's been for ten thousand years was only three hundred years ago the Thames river last froze over in 1814 and isn't it a bit odd that the world record temperatures the warmest recorded was in 1913 and the coldest recorded was in 2010 this is these are global records how could that happen if there was such a massive warming going on in the world and this is what it looked like 21,000 years ago at the peak of the last glaciation Montreal where it is now was under 3.3 kilometers of ice this is natural climate change it occurred by itself we don't know why and we don't know why we plunged from the Eocene thermal maximum 50 million years ago into the present Pleistocene Ice Age no idea it wasn't co2 that's for sure because for the first hundred million years of the sorry the first hundred million years of the decline in co2 temperature was rising into the 50 million year co2 co2 you seen maximum you've seen this chart where it levels off at the top there is where the big glaciers were all melted and that's basically where the warm part of the Holocene occurred but it shows it slightly rising from then on for seven thousand years how could this happen if the sea was rising steadily for seven thousand years even slowly this is one of thousands of islands at the equator in Indonesia that have been undercut by the Seas erosion in a calm equatorial climate here is the sea-level rise in Florida there is no acceleration this is expected because we're in the modern warm period here is the showing that even the IPC rejects the idea that extreme weather events are being caused by either natural or human caused climate change first they said it was global warming then it stopped warming so much then they said it was climate change then if you said well last winter was really cold else they said that wasn't climate that's just weather now what do they talk about you saw the presentation it's all about extreme weather events it's changed the goalposts twice since we started with this fantasy co2 is the most important fool food for all life on Earth that's where the carbon and carbon-based life comes from here is where the carbon is the atmosphere has 850 million billion tons that there's a hundred million billion tons in carbonaceous rocks limestone marble and chalk all that carbon came from the atmosphere via the ocean by calcifying marine organisms such as this one that lived when co2 was at 2,000 parts per million not just 400 like it is now and here's an example of many of the calset calcifying marine organisms that caused that hundred million billion tons of carbon to be drawn out of the annual cycle and put into the bottom of the sea so that here you see co2 has been declining steadily for at least 600 million years while temperature has basically got no pattern it goes up and down up and down up and down co2 goes one way down and if co2 had continued to go down at the level it was in the absence of human co2 emissions this is what would have happened it was only 30 parts per million above the death of plants at the height of the last glaciation when it fell to 180 ppm at 150 they died we have inadvertently reversed the decline in carbon dioxide in the global atmosphere so it is a salvation not something to be demonized here's what co2 does when you increase it with trees makes them grow twice as fast at double the level every commercial greenhouse grower in the world pumps co2 into their greenhouses to make them produce more food and here the top science body in Australia CSIRO shows us the greening of the earth by co2 and then Nassau shows us the same thing they know it too and here is the world's energy supply the greens are against coal oil gas nuclear and hydroelectric and only in favor of 1.3 percent of the world's energy supply it reminds me of when they said in Vietnam you have to destroy the village to save it we have to destroy human civilization to save it apparently and that's what would happen if you cut out all those things which are basically 98% of the world's energy here's the coal plants being boat built or planned in the world China is continuing to build them a pace the fact is fossil fuels are 100% organic as in the scientific definition of organic organic chemistry is the chemistry of carbon organic used in food as a marketing term nothing to do with science produced with solar energy 100% they are a product of life fossil fuels they are not some evil demon sent here from hell they produce the two most important foods for life when they're burnt co2 and water and they are the largest storage battery of energy on this planet so I say celebrate co2 it is the most life-giving substance along with water on this planet and it's doing the world a lot of good if it ever does warm up because of co2 it would be a good thing but it doesn't look like it's having much effect there and nobody mentioned water vapor as by far the most important greenhouse gas in the atmosphere it's it's at least 90 percent of the greenhouse effect first because it's 25 to 100 times the concentration of co2 in the atmosphere one to four percent compared to point zero four percent for co2 and to because it absorbs a much wider range of infrared radiation across the spectrum than co2 does and water vapor may actually just pretty well diminish the effect of co2 because it absorbs in the same bands co2 there is no way that it is any more than a few percent of the greenhouse effect on this earth and that I don't know how anybody could argue with that because it is 25 to 100 times as present in the atmosphere and that's why I think we should celebrate co2 and just remember the bubbles and your beer and champagne our co2 thank you very much if you dr. Moore thank you now it's time for the question and answer session and dr. Mann the first question of those pieces we have heard needs to be the longest period of time earlier you said that we need to move away from fossil fuels and my question is why shouldn't we also move towards clean coal technology carbon capture technology that allows us to use the inexpensive fuels such as coal by also reducing co2 emissions to alleviate the problem and still have the benefit of these of those fuels ok well thanks for that question it's a good question there is absolutely nothing wrong with capturing the sequestering of co2 from coal-fired power plants if you can prevent this YouTube from getting into the atmosphere then you know if you can keep the genie in the bottle then you know you're not contributing to the climate change problem here's the problem there is a war against all there's a war that is being waged against a coal by the natural gas industry natural gas now competing goals in the marketplace is just simple economics now if you tell coal producers that they have to capture that carbon they have to Airy it permanently beneath the surface of the earth then that just adds to the expense of producing coal-based electricity so already coal is being priced out of the market by other sources of energy natural gas in particular if you capture this question - carbon if you require the coal-fired power let's do that they're gonna be even more priced out of the market that's the problem right now it's just not economic there's nothing wrong about on the principle but it's not competitive in the marketplace thank you next question is for dr. Perry you've previously discussed how difficult it is to address climate change issues with a specific level of certainty you even point to threaten the uncertainty monster if there is such a level of uncertainty regarding climate change science is it the prudent course of action into err on the side of caution in order to avoid the projected crisis the issue with uncertainty indecision if that you have to match the decision-making framework to the level of uncertainty if you're talking about you know deep uncertainty you know way out there probability to figure out what you should do doesn't make sense and the plugin that was a really complex environmental / socio economic problem the precautionary principle can often save you all on the wrong path where the Cure can be worse than the disease even if you will be employment model simulations they should have and even if we're successful in meeting the Paris commitments for reducing emissions were not going to reduce the warming by more than a few tenths of a degree by the end of the 21st century this is what the climate models say so you know we can't really control the climate by trying to do this and so it's just a mismanagement and the cure can be worse than the disease if you spend all this money on the solution that's really an effective than you you know heard the economy's and were less even to protect ourselves from whatever comes our way so and yeah so you know end up with secure being horses of disease and that's something I hope anyway so it's a very complex problem and that's why ideas of climate pragmatism that I put forward they're what we call you know robust decisions that even if the warming doesn't materialize you've gotten some benefits from whatever you decided to do thank you Admiral Taylor the next question is for you what is the single most significant and reproducible data point that supports the claim that increased co2 emissions are causing an increase in either the number or severity of extreme weather events so there was a report that I chaired is national chemical science attribution and specific extreme weather events to climate change and what we saw in and it's a consensus report anybody can go who will it there is droughts and temperature are the two most components and flow are really the components that are the most attributed specificity attribution so heat waves were usually now the lack of cold flooding and droughts those are those are the components that are most attributable for science when you look at overall like how do we know this think I answered that it's my three-legged stool it's a combination of do you have not just correlation but do you have fundamental understanding which we've had since the mid 19th century do the observations of independent datasets let's say you don't have leaning for whatever reason the Aster temperatures look at the oceans you don't believe the oceans they don't believe the ice look at how the ecosystems are changing etc etc how does that all and then finally can we predict and can we predict it there is many many studies show that the only way you can get the climate the climate models to replicate today's employment is by increasing the carbon dioxide so Sciences are made of evidence if you want proof go to geometry but science is the weight of evidence and the evidence of weight thank you before the United Nations IPCC is warning that there will be severe pervasive and ill reversal irreversible impacts on earth if we do not hold temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius increase by the end of the century what will be the impact to you increase temperature well he's sort of like moving to Florida from here you'd have at least a two degree increase in temperature I don't think it happened he would die if you move to Florida so I think that is a silly projection and a silly number the idea of 2 degrees Celsius damaging half the life on the planet is just crazy you saw what I showed you how warm it was in the past and how I have said very clearly that nothing in the present situation of weather or climate is anywhere near under the ordinary with the past 10,000 years for the fact the Holocene thermal optimum was warmer than it is now we know that for a fact and people lived through that as a matter of fact that's when civilization began to flourish the whole of the Sahara Desert had villages spread across at that time because of its breeding and the cooling that has occurred which usually brings drier conditions has brought drier conditions and if you looked at that graph to the fact it steadily downward from the Minoan Warm Period three thousand years ago to the Roman War period a thousand years ago to the medieval period 500 years ago to the modern period matter which began 300 years ago you will see a steady decline and the peaks of the warming all the way along there we are actually on the slide down which will take about 80,000 years into the peak of the next coal period the next glaciation it's it shows very clearly on the eye first from Antarctica those four peaks I showed you the the peak of the interglacial period is at the beginning and then it goes along and then gradually starts to go down one and four eighty thousand years descends into the next glaciation that's where we are right now by all best apology dr. Mann the weather and hockey stick graphs and subject of significant praise and criticism since it's really release if you could go back prior to its release are there any changes to the methodology that you would make based upon the criticisms you receive well thanks for the question actually for two decades we responded to legitimate issues that were raised our study was the first of its sort to try to take all these disparate Paleo climate data and reconstruct patterns of past surface temperature on a year-by-year basis so it was a seminal piece of work and like any semblance of work there were places computed there was room for improvement what we spent a subsequent decade and a half doing was developing more elaborate methods working with the Paleo climate community to introduce a more diverse group of proxy records that can be used for this sort of work perhaps the best thing that we do here is the study that was public you years ago in the premier journal Nature Geoscience this is the most comprehensive study of this sort of a comprehensive attempt to reach as temperatures using these sorts of data more than 80 co-authors from more than 40 institutions around the world using the most comprehensive database and they produced a reconstruction of temperatures over the past twelve hundred years it's called the pages to 2k project it's an international project if you bought their result on top of a hockey stick it's difficult to distinguish which curve is which remarkably they come up to almost the same identical conclusion that we did 20 years ago and that's how science works if you're wrong weathers they're gonna demonstrate that you're wrong people are going to improve on the methodologies people are going to use even and approaches different data and when it all points in the same direction and let me add by the way that it's important is it to get things of actually right we can't escape untruths when it comes to the science of climate change there's thriller debate about the implications about the policies but let's get something straight if you actually look at the state of the art in the scientific literature when it comes to reconstructing the past temperature patterns farthest back we can go right now global estimates of temperature on century by century timescales to actually reconstruct temperatures on the same time scale that global warming is occurring today the farthest back we can now is about 30 to 40,000 years and if you look at the meeting journals the nature journals the science journals the estimates of temperature over that time frame showed that the recent warming is a precedent it is unprecedented as far back as we can go and putting up for 30 40 year-old graphs based on data that would be laughed out of a scientific conference today who tried to present them that really does a disservice to this discussion because it isn't true that the policy today we now understand was that the changes in Earth's orbit relative to the Sun have as a different influence on temperatures during the summer in the winter and if you wouldn't look at half the year which is sort about scientists we're doing the early looking at the summer they were only looking at the high latitudes if you look at the whole globe if you look at summer and winter you find is that those temperatures were not as warm as today the temperatures today are as warm as we are able to reconstruct as far back as we are able to go of these sorts of reconstructions temperatures today are as warm as they've been thank you dr. Hurley can we even have any scientific predictions on carbon dioxide low carbon out to us really in climate change until the climate sensitivity index is determined is a sort of a metric for how much more maybe what you get if you don't know carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and you allow climate to equilibrate you know some hundreds of years well there's a great deal of uncertainty in that parameter the latest IPCC report it will likely range between one point five and four point five degrees centigrade and that range has been pretty much unchanged for some decades now but there's still a lot of evidence supporting values outside those ranges on both ends okay so there's a great deal about certainty of climate models have an average equilibrium sensitivity of about 3.2 and it's a much narrower range and it's on the higher end of that and so when you project into the 21st century with these climate models you're really getting the high end of things not what it would be if the sensitivity was on the lower end so this is sort of a logical inconsistency you know in the the conclusions in my opinion because there's this great video about certainty about equilibrium climate sensitivity but the climate models are on one end of this no protections or you know on the higher relative to what the lower belly equilibrium climate sensitivity would suggest so it's still a lot of uncertainty Thank You Edna Italy can you read my eminence the strategic threats to homeland security posed by climate change if it will provide a rough timeline and when you believe those threats are likely to materialize so it's always what is it Nilsa more and many others said you know predictions are tough especially when they're about the future so ranking these gets gets into the various time frames so long term the big threat at sea level rise so if we do not really change our way we're putting co2 into the atmosphere of the rest of the century we are most likely locking in roughly 25 to 30 to the Ghiberti about sea level rise that's not going to happen instantly but that's like in a couple of hundred years or so so when the Navy tells me that they're an amazed appears normal by three feet or so I say that's interesting what you really need to be thinking about is alright you're going to build your and a nibble based work down or Williamsburg so I don't know if anybody here owns property in Southport but with that kind of sea level rise the furthest the southernmost point in Florida is Atlanta so there is a threat to our inland structure there's also a threat due to the unplanned and forced migration so probably know here Syria and the refugees coming out of Syria should eat you to its core European Union that was with 1 million refugees if we continue business as usual raisin sees plenty of ice to do so that who put roughly 500 million half a billion people in blender so we've heard tonight how the planets be much much warmer much much colder and we're also clearly Homo sapiens maybe that's a true statement how many people were on the planet that may be a million 1 million you know that's probably what the population of West Virginia or for the whole globe we are dealing in the real world and what the defense is the intelligence communities that is the real world and that is a world of nearly 7 billion people how do we manage these changes with 7 billion people vaccination thank you dr. Moore what is the single most significant reliable and reproducible data point it supports the claim that manmade manmade co2 emissions are not effective I didn't say co2 emissions were not affected climate change I said that it is an insignificant effect co2 is a greenhouse gas but it is in the atmosphere at four one hundredths of a percent how come something in the atmosphere that is invisible tasteless odorless colorless at point zero four percent be the most powerful agent in the universe at this point in time obviously the climate changed dramatically throughout history with nothing to do with co2 those things that caused those changes have not gone away they are still here and co2 did not cause the change in warming that started 300 years ago coming out of the depths of the lighting even the IPCC says mid last century that isn't even essentially that they say we have been the main cause of climate change that the problem with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change they get some things rate they do not attribute extreme weather events to petrify genic to climate change but extremists do the alarmists do they just carry on as if you know is if the IPCC didn't say that but they did say and it's really what they don't tell you that is more important than what they tell you just now dr. Mann has said the coal steam thermal optimum was not warmer than it is today then how come the glaciers are advancing so much more now than they were during that period does a folder type make glaciers events less surely not the neo glacial period is a period advancing glaciers the glaciers advanced most this is these are data points the data point is the Little Ice Age glaciers have advanced more than they have in the last 10,000 years that means it's colder surely the goodness anybody can figure that when they recede its former when they advanced it's colder that's what Blazers made from coal thank you dr. Moreland I'm gonna ask for one last question for the entire panel without much commentary to see if you can if you can use closing statements what is in your opinion the optimum level of co2 in the atmosphere for plant growth without harming climate change I'm sorry dr. Mann so thanks for the question you know this is the question you often hear it is sometimes your statements by contrarian so the climate change debate that it was to say what the optimal co2 level is Oh who's to say that the optimal temperature is and there's a simple answer to that the optimal co2 level or the optimal temperatures are those that persisted that existed as we developed a civilization now of seven and a half billion people who are dependent on the stability of our climate were dependent on the climate and remaining somewhere close to where it was when we developed that civilization so that's the bottom line there is no optimal temperature there's no optimal co2 level other then there is a co2 level and there is a temperature that we developed our civilization around and if temperatures change dramatically away from that we will see that sort of mass unrest increased competition for resources and conflict that David Tiffany was talking about we are dependent on the stability of the environment that we develop civilization I'm trying to pin down just a little bit at what level would you feel comfortable that there was no one with a threat to proposal to choose and issues that are discussed here so right now if we allow sea levels to persist say the level threatened a little over 400 parts per million if you look back in geological history what we find is when co2 was as high as it is now and we allowed the climate simply to adjust over centuries to that co2 level you're talking about sea level rises of 60 80 feet 102 feet so we have to get seen to more or less within the range that doesn't allow that to happen but the best estimates are that's probably somewhere around 350 to 380 parts per billion say - just to say we've got to bring suit to emissions down and ultimately we need to actually bring C YouTube back down out of the atmosphere and there's a technology that potentially be used to do that in the longer term the I've talked at some length about the stability talked about there really is no ideal climate unless anybody here in the audience is from San Diego Honolulu maybe you guys have my feels like I'm not gonna Pennsylvania I don't see the Sun we November in March but it is it has been a stable I think I've kind of oh by the way I want to find these advanced equations because I'd love to see it saw like that once I'd seen a PC that's the probably gets in the mid 300s it's it's it's probably at something under 400 and again it's the sea level rise concerns me because it moves tens people and if you have glue to government governance really think about it you can do this with only moderate disruption but as we send in Syria when things really fall apart even a relatively small number of migrants for whatever reason and there is a London thread it's not possible there is a climate threatened see that that this creates security issues writ large so I would say probably in the mid to upper three hundreds thank you doctor well Lance clearly like more co2 in terms of the climate we really have no idea I always been puzzled by why people think that somehow pre-industrial conditions they mid 18th century was sort of a baseline well that was lower co2 but it was really really cold it wasn't a Valley Forge I mean is that the climate we want dome and climate is not stable that happen independent of co2 higher I think anything there were other causes besides co2 co2 phyto respondents employment fundamentally isn't stable so we just have to learn to live with whatever kind of climate we get to the extent that we can try to control it it's probably very few so that's my comment we're not going to succeed we're not going to end fossil fuel use by 100 percent i mid-to-high 300 ppm would mean that we would not only have to end the use of the fossil fuels entirely tomorrow but we would have to stop making cement because cement manufacturing is 5 percent of the co2 emissions even if we just continued with five percent of the present co2 emissions they would continue to go up much more slowly than they are now but I'm happy with that because that means when the fossil fuels do run out hundreds of years from now but as long as we keep making cement we can keep the co2 from going back down again to the life-threatening stinking reach during the peak of the last glaciation and the one before that and the one before that when upper alpine forests died and I think the general has mixed up the timescale here I didn't say that the glaciers were that's it today then in retreating for two hundred years or so because we're in the modern warm period when they advanced more than they ever have in the last ten thousand years was during the Little Ice Age which peaked in 1700 or sold in conjunction of a quiet Sun by the way the minima which is another whole subject we haven't discusses really very much as the effect of the Sun on the climate and some people say is the Sun stupid but the truth of the matter is co2 in plants is what's important here plants for basis of all of our lives every animal life in every non-photosynthetic life on Earth is based upon plant life and plant life is based upon co2 and plants evolved in a co2 level of thousands of parts per million 30 seconds and even today greenhouse growers double and triple the level of co2 in their greenhouses because that's what plants prefer and if sea level rises you're not going to have to run you have two decisions to make it to sea comes up like it did 420 feet since the last glaciation you can either go higher or protect the coast where it's flat probably makes sense to go higher where it's steep it probably makes sense to go up we can build infrastructure so fast these days and just hire the Dutch 20% of their land is that under sea thank you type closing statements two minutes it thinks so that I began you know it with my presentation making the point that there is is a modest debate to be had about what we do to deal with this challenges with rich challenges we face as a civilization and as David has alluded to there are ways forward that will allow us to prosper economically in deal with his profit the same time now that having been said there really isn't an honest debate to be had about the basics the basics as assessed by the US National Academy of Sciences this was an organization that was created by a Republican President Abraham Lincoln to provide an assessment of policy relevance science and today is sort of the gold standard when it comes to assessing the state of scientific understanding as David said earlier that if you look at what the National Academy of Sciences has had to say about the linkage between climate change and extreme weather there are there linkages in several cases when it comes to extreme rainfall events flooding events droughts and heat waves there is decisive science but despite what some of the other panelists may try to convince you and there's been a lot of mud run on the wall a lot of talking points a lot of claims that have been made that simply don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny I would point out to the audience that there is a wonderful website called skeptical science calm and you can go to that website and you'll see that no of the talking points that are contrarian participants here have sort of introduced tonight are actually among the 150 or so leading contrarian myths and talking points when it comes to climate change and you can go to the site you can see what the MIT has to say and you can see what the science actually has to say and you can see the peer-reviewed scientific literature behind that so as encourage you could do that there's a pretty compelling arguments that been made against the scientific consensus they're all wrong go to skeptical science in appendix thank you thank you dr. Kirk well you've just seen the climate science madhouse in action okay this is a very very complex tissue science and socio-economic impacts the options for policy response my concern that we have oversimplified solution by insisting that there is no debate about the science by insisting that there is only one path to solving this is a recipe for disaster we will be surprised we will make mistakes along the way and fundamentally we just need to learn to live with whatever is going to come this is what human societies has always done this is what ecosystems has have always done and it's the job of scientists to try to understand all this and be as unbiased and objective as I can and to learn through disagreements and to really push the knowledge frontier by trying to enforce this overly simplistic so-called consensus we're not going to get anywhere so we need to open up the debate on both the science and the policy options if we're going to make any progress on this thank you Oh where does the Navy we recall this a target-rich environment let's see if you want something to read that is very very accessible that will give you the facts Google what we know by the American Association of advancement besides it's about eight pages has figures and as citizens you read that you'll know everything you need to know as an informed citizen on climate and it's got the facts and it's very very well so let me start the I would agree with dr. Curie there are surprises unfortunately those surprises it usually on the negative I would argue that now since we have rings and we have supercomputers and we do have some ability to look into the future however imperfectly we don't need to just live with it live with it is what Europe did with the plague 1350 they didn't live with it that's the cost of about thirty to forty percent mortality we don't have to do that it let's be smarter than that we are an energy society nobody here that I heard is advocating giving up energy all the way Hertz have strong benefit what we are is to how to transform the energy so we have abundant affordable energy that does not do long-term harm to our client our defense community and our intelligence community in this administration take this issue very seriously I think we should too and finally I just end with what I close with my TED talk the ice doesn't care what we say on this stage it doesn't care who's running on us doesn't care who's in the White House it's just us thank you thank you two minutes in 1970 there were approximately 6,000 polar bears today there are somewhere between 25,000 and 30,000 that is a fact and they still deliver the goods do the work consensus when used in a sentence with science is false because consensus is a political and social work that is a different arena than science science is about observation and replication interior it is not about how many people are willing to jump off a cliff with you it is not about lemming it is not about sheep it is about individuals like Galileo Darwin and Newton Einstein when Einstein published his theory of relativity as an obscure patent Clerk he was scoffed at by the rest of the physics community to the point where 100 physicists published a paper saying he was wrong when asked what he thought of that he said why 100 one would do because that's how science works with individuals making discoveries it's very seldom during the 17,000 people come to the same brilliant conclusion about the same time that doesn't happen this is to become some kind of religion even the Pope is into right original sin humans our original sin were sending against the world of nature by burning fossil fuels that is a lot and it is not honest to say that this debate should be squelched because in silence if you say that you are an activist not a scientist time thank you well we that is for the fireworks again I'd like the panel the audience and once again around [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: spilmanlaw

Views: 29,189

Rating: 4.5656109 out of 5

Keywords: Climate Change, Michael Mann, Judith Curry, David Titley, Patrick Moore, Hockey Stick Graph, Environmental Forum, Spilman Thomas & Battle

Id: lyNCl7NzjaM

Length: 97min 9sec (5829 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 06 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/silence7]

I really wish that people with a reputation wouldn't appear with folks like Judith Curry. She's got a very long history of promoting nonsense.