Extended Classic: Earth in Human Hands, with David Grinspoon

this is Startalk welcome to Startalk Allstars I'm your host David Grinspoon aka dr. funky spoon on Twitter and I'm here with my co-host Chuck nice hey dr. funky spoon how's it going Chuck it's going very well my friend as usual yeah always always fun to do this with you and we're we're very happy today to have a special guest joining us Andrew Rifkin who is you've probably heard about him or read his stuff and he is an environmental journalist for years he wrote the the earth column the dot earth blog at the New York Times you for that award-winning he's an award-winning award-winning author award-winning a columnist yes and you know actually the way I think of Andy is my sort of internal title for him as I think he's the curator of the Anthropocene we're gonna talk about the Anthropocene but as much as anybody he's chronicled and written about and commented about for years this this weird fact that we humans have started a new age on the planet yes anybody who's sort of attempted to keep tabs on that it's Andrew rev Kim oh and and he's just started a new job actually just in the last couple weeks he is now no longer doing dot earth although dot earth stands as an amazing archive hopefully for for all time and you know to barring nuclear disaster or something yeah exactly yeah even then I think maybe we should have it archived on the moon but now Andy is working for ProPublica and doing investigative journalism and and sort of deep diving climate journalism maybe we'll hear a bit more about that so that's so so he's still around and still gonna be curating the Anthropocene for us and we're very glad to have you on the show Andy it's great to be here it really is it's good to have you you know and before we go any further dr. funky spoon I would be remiss if I did not since you brought up the Anthropocene I have a book as you can see I have taken many notes on it lots of lots of little sticky notes in here and it's called earthen human hands shaping our planets future by dr. Chuck nice wood no of course it's by David Grinspoon which is you hey congratulations on the book man thanks Chuck thanks a lot I couldn't have done it without you though so yeah you know the last time we were together you hmm let me think you were done but this was not in print right it wasn't it was we you were you had finished the book it was still awaiting release so I think it was still with the publisher and we were talking about this and so I I know Andrew is has done so much work with the Anthropocene but to be honest you were the first person who I ever got a deep dive into the Anthropocene and so since I have both of you here the first thing I would like to say or know or ask on behalf of all of those who may be unfamiliar with the term what the hell is the Anthropocene theme yeah it's great having Andy here because he's almost the guy that named the Anthropocene he he came up with the concept I mean it's one of these concepts is in the air a lot of people kind of came up with it maybe around the same time that the notion that yeah we've changed the earth so much that that in terms of the the the ways in which geologists name age is the Jurassic the Pleistocene that maybe we're in a new one that humans are responsible for but Andy actually proposed this many years ago and but he called the the anthracene right yeah answer scenic you know I won I was writing my first global warming book I'd written one on the Amazon rainforest and and I was doing the section on change it's a global change and and I just sort of was it was like one of those like blah blah passages at the end of a chapter where you're just going oh la dee da you know organ music and stuff and and it was like well perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this this geological age of our own making for for its causative element for us and I just thought it answers think you can't think back to 1991 but but it was like this the word that reflects the geological concept but also the human concept at the same time and then like in 2000 Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen and and Eugene Stover kind of had a more technical and formal approach to the idea I don't think they had read my book it was not like a best-seller it was the Museum of Natural History actually though their first exhibition on global warming I wrote there was the companion book for that back in 1992 and and I've been you know so I kind of predicted it more than more than take ownership of it which is kind of nice been involved in the development of the idea oh yeah too bad your phrase didn't didn't stick though because then you would be known as the guy that well yeah but let's see what happens there Neil actually we did a show a while back with Maeve and uh and I mentioned this that he thought answers anthracene has us he'd think he you check back Nielson and he'll said that machine is better simpler is better in a way I think is he's for anthracene is well first of all the ponies that poke that's going to set your temperature you're taking out a syllable surrounded you're making it you're making it better right away but even by writing streamlining yeah but even better Nick caves minute into caves this really dark remarkable rock song guy songwriter from Australia he's a great he has a song out now called anthracene and frosene about this and yeah well maybe in the long run that'll be the word that stings find out after all in geological time well you know the nature of the name like as I wrote in my I wrote this recent long magazine essay for a magazine called Anthropocene magazine believe it or not on this whole thing and I said the word is the word of the debater it's the debate around the word that's thoroughly the most interesting thing absolutely so so now you know that that notwithstanding whether it's anthracene Anthropocene or as a British say Anthropocene and prophecy absolutely quite what I'm interested in is for someone who has been involved in this subject matter for such a long period of time you talk about 1992 two things politically one how have things changed better worse not or or indifferent and two where are we in terms of climate and the climate changing from just 1992 to now well you know back in 92 that era 88 1988 when I first wrote a long piece about climate change back then Jim Hansen and other scientists were saying you know this is happening they point to research going back 100 years the basic physics is what it is you know certain gases make the world habitable warm you know and and the trajectories for emissions wrap up and everyone kind of thought well if we just if the scientists just say well the trajectory needs to be down down down that would just happen like back then was this like simplistic well scientists would just tell the world what to do and the right in the world to do it that was the first treaty 1992 the Rio Earth Summit the first Framework Convention climate change treaty and and the countries of the world basically all raised their hand and pledged allegiance to avoiding dangerous and to stop doing this yeah it was all pledge was like a pledge of allegiance we pledged to avoid dangerous anthropogenic influence on the climate system yeah and then zoom happened here we keep thinking that whatever was the norm was zoom but you know from 1950 until 1992 it was a big zoom for emissions and environmental stuff right but then from 1990 to the you know 2000 is when China said hey it's our turn to zoom okay and boy did they begin burning coal in man huge way and so the trajectories of these emissions are just up up up and the concentration the atmosphere is like bathtubs rising rising rising bright so there's there's no clear sign of a learning curve the last couple years the missions have been flat that's true now that's their reasons for that that are a little complex and it doesn't mean how everything's fine we can all be relaxed now I say this because dr. funky spoon you know I adore you and you and me'll and all of your colleagues who I have and I've said this to all of you your problem is you're too damn pragmatic okay your problem is you actually tell the truth about stuff and you think critically and then you say stuff like well the emissions have been wet now that's very it's very nuanced and it's somewhat complex it doesn't mean that everything's our and you know all I heard cuz I'm a dumbass right you just heard me say everything's fine don't worry that's actually one of things I want to get into today with this discussion is how we talk about these things and there's a lot of paradoxes because if you say something that's that's hopeful and I think Andy and I have both been accused of being too hopeful I think there are genuine reasons for hope they're obviously genuine huge reasons for concern okay but the trick is it's very tricky because sometimes when you say something hopeful then people will willfully misinterpret that or they'll accuse you of not being alarmist enough and therefore you people might misinterpret it I feel like there's a danger in the other direction of being too dismal and sapping hope and getting people to say ah forget it we're screwed why bother to do anything there are interesting questions of balance here you think there's a dismal saturation point where people just get so this disheartened that they then just go oh f it who cares I mean there's nothing that we can do about this so what the hell well you see that you see that on social media you know that once again showing his prophetic capability yeah there you go that's pretty good yeah no I mean I I get this and I'm sure you get it all the time when you know you if you say something that's at all hopeful on online or you write something you get besieged by with social media telling you like that you know the human race is evil and a cancer and you know that like no matter what like people get angry when you say something positive and that's that's an interesting phenomenon yeah I mean I'm sure you've experienced that Andy well yeah and oh yeah I've had everything I also had rush limbaugh telling me to go kill myself by the way when reservation I was gonna say one breast but when Rush Limbaugh does that it could be the highest praise you could receive as a human being actually it's more like a rhetorical question he said if you if mr. Rivkin of the new york times if you think that humans are the worst thing that ever happened to planet earth why don't you just kill yourself and save the planet by dying so so but but I think clever he tried to kind of apologize a little subsequent show of it didn't work out anyway the science that I'd completely neglected to write about in my first 25 years of science writing was psychology and sociology and yeah and that's when this is this is the most depressing science of all if you want to like just sort of brace for impact okay don't forget about the climate science it's like why why humans the science on what why we do respond to some kinds of risks and why we don't respond to others and why - people will look at the same body of data and have completely different views of it that science is way more scary scary yeah but it's kind of like the human way which gets it this meat to me I'm thinking having heard all this you know the happy people and the scared people and the angry people think about our election you know I think part of what is the other the we're not all gonna be happy and we're not all gonna be scared or whatever it's that's like the human way is this weird dynamic that has that tension between people yelling each other for being too happy or saying hey you know you're you're really not being so down about this is not gonna be energizing somewhere in that so it's not like the middle the end result is for everyone to be quiet and happy or quite a neutral it's to be engaged right I agree I think that's in a way if you think of the human cultural the whole whole ball wax all of us in our effect on the planet and the various communications and interactions we have that ultimately lead to some kind of action and it's messy if you think of that as a big consciousness which you can as some sort of global consciousness then all of that all of that disagreement and feeling different ways and arguing back and forth you can look at that is that is us making up our mind and globally and you in mind singular yeah yeah global mind if you think of an individual mind supposedly nobody really knows how the mind works but but Marvin Minsky had this idea society of mind where different parts of your brain are you know sort of competing and communicating with one another and it's not consciousness is a messy thing even inside one person's head saying I think that maybe maybe a collective process of reasoning hashing things out internally like like a mind would do I think that could be and I find that comforting because like you say it's like sometimes it's really disheartening the way people don't agree and everything seems so confusing and yet historically if you you know you look at ultimately we do make progress and move things along even out of this very fragmented fractured society we have so maybe that's just it's sort of a dialect if that's part of the way we deal with these things like you say the human way and that's the theme in your book - I mean this emerging and this goes back to stuff I've been writing about - the the idea of a newest fear this Greek word for planet of planetary mind came from like the early 20th century a French theologian and a Russian geochemist came together on this idea of planetary consciousness being ultimately a an earth perpetuating thing and another sphere I just thought that the way the biosphere came out of the geosphere these guys said the newest fear is this this new part of Earth the the the the sphere of mental activity that's it's a really cool image and that was of course waiting for the Internet man we actually sort of have a new us how very appreciative the fact that we do have that it is we are now all connected how well it's working it's creating problems where you know that we're not really prepared to be this globally interconnected beast but nonetheless you could look at all of this cacophony as maybe this is just what what our global mind looks like when it's trying to figure things out so let me ask both of you and you you'll forgive me for being so candid because I have no other way to be where the stupid people fit into this is crazy well if we go back to the analogy there are parts of the brain that are the primitive reptilian parts right I don't know if that's fair to say that you know people in certain parts of the world are the brainstem and other parts are the you know the cortex maybe that's a little elitist I don't really feel that way but it is true that that going back to the analogy of a mind is not all uniform and coherent right and so that incoherence doesn't necessarily mean that we have no ability to ultimately figure out what we're going to do with this this raw we find ourselves playing on earth nice well and this gets back to that the evolutionary notion that it's our desert it's the diversity of responses that we have to at risk or whatever that may be our most adaptive trait you know and let's not cast it maybe as stupid and smart maybe it's like you know hesitant and adventurous and like the guy who's willing to jump off the cliff to get the bird egg or something and right you know so having that mix where there's summit there's edge pushers and and group huggers and wari warts and and the person who like my wife my wife has been a science educator for a long time and she said when they do field stuff like Pond study there's always the kid who's the note-taker and the kid who's the rock mover right and the kid who's the whatever you know and that's like in any group of kids you end up with like this diverse array of like how do we solve this problem yeah and I often feel that way when there's an extreme view I often think that's not my view but I'm glad somebody's representing that in the conversation and then I'm glad people who are pushing back against it and I and you know you can name any a lot of these technologically fraught questions like you know nuclear power or GMOs or something and I I tend to not have the extreme view but when I hear that my thing I'm glad somebody's warning us about that and that if we do proceed we'll proceed with these people that are pushing against it and that'll force us to do it in a very careful way so I think there's room for those extremes even if you don't hold that extreme view how about the extreme of this the kid who says this pond doesn't exist there's a range of views and then there's just crazy and that's you know that's but we can't deny that but anyways this is great I think we're going to take a break now and we will be back shortly with Chuck nice and Andrew revved c'n I'm David Grinspoon and this is Startalk Allstars welcome back to Startalk Allstars I'm David Grinspoon I'm here with Chuck nice and with Andrew Rifkin and we are talking about the Anthropocene or maybe the Anthropocene depending on your linguistic proclivities the age of humanity on earth and how we are dealing with ourselves as a planetary force don't forget the anthracene and or we can simplify it to just the anthracene at any rate whatever we call it we are going to now do some cosmic queries we're going to take some listener questions that relate hopefully to this theme absolutely yeah of course you know when we do cosmic queries we garner questions from all over the internet wherever an incarnation of Startalk may be found and so people just send them in and as always we start off with a patreon patron question because those people support us online financially and as a result we give them first pick and crack had any questions because quite frankly we can be bought so here we go someone's gotta pay the bill that's okay for these fancy microphone that's right man so here we go let's go with let's go with a patreon patron I believe is Jack rushman sorry Jack if I'm not saying your name correctly is there info from outside of our solar system we can use to help our climate change issue have we already done that in some form hmm great question Jack steam yeah great question Jack you're in my wheelhouse now as an astrobiologist who who thinks about the the the Anthropocene I mean that's basically what what my book earth and human hands is about it's an attempt to apply that extra planetary extra extraterrestrial view looking back at ourselves you said outside the solar system we know now that there are lots of planets outside the solar system and that knowledge in itself certainly gives us amazing perspective because there's just something we suspected for a long time and we've only learned recently we don't really know that much about all those planets yet to get some practical knowledge from them that would help us deal with climate change here on earth that I think that's changing and it will change over the next decade two decades as we develop the tools to really start to understand the atmospheres and climates of those planets however we've done a lot of exploring of the planets of our own solar system and there we've definitely gained some pragmatic insights into our own climate by looking at the somewhat earth-like planets and seeing how for example Mars is frozen because it has a much weaker greenhouse effect and Venus's is sweltering because of its strong greenhouse effect modeling those atmospheres and climates using the same tools we use for Earth gives us a sort of check on whether we really know what we're doing it should our model should work on these other planets if we're doing it right and sometimes they don't quite work and then we we find ways to improve them and that's there's several specific ways in which we've learned practical things from modeling the climates of other planets that have improved our ability to to model climate on earth so I'm going to say yes the answer is yes there there are ways and I'm looking forward to the day when the exoplanets are well enough known to us so that we suddenly have a hundred earth-like planets that we know about the climates of rather than just a few that will be something I think that will lead to another really era of climate understanding when we get to that point sweet all right well let's go to another question from how about heidi campbell coming to us from facebook says i'm thinking about moving my family from Southern California to Maine which region of the country will become more extreme over the next decade to the climate change Southern California's drought and heat or Maine's long cold winters yeah how about that Andy where should people move well I'm sure all the real-estate agents are gonna be hanging on your antenna we have to mention the insurance companies away from the coast is a starting point because of the rising sea level is one of the most basic aspects of the climate reality is that a warming planet has less ice and more more sea rise the pace of that is still highly uncertain but but here's a discouraging part of the answer of your question which is that one of the the hardest things for climate models to do that they're still really bad at is regional forecasting like and precipitation so temperature is easier to understand but when you get specific like you know should what's going to be the snowstorms in Chicago even 30 years from now let alone 100 years from now highly uncertain change is inevitable but complexity of the system means it's gonna be really hard to make those answers clear-cut I will say Southern California if you're living in a zone that's prone to fire yeah you shouldn't probably be there anyway and moving learning how to live with those hazards you know hazards in the climate system are implicit and paleoclimatology looking at past climates reveals a lot about the risks you might be in wherever you are so going forward you can judge make some good judgments on where to live or how to live based on that information even even with the uncertainty around global warming itself yeah I mean there's a few places you could probably imagine say with sea-level rise there are pretty good pretty bad bets for the future there's some some regions but like you say anywhere that you're dependent on really understanding what's going to happen with the regional weather we're just not at that level of predictability so now the seas bought up Southern California this is just my follow-up question Southern California California period believe it's like the fourth but fourth or sixth largest economy in the world and feeds pretty much all of America it's eating food from California not to mention drinking wine from California so when you look at the amount of real estate that this state takes up on the coastline of the how dangerous is climate change to our economy and our survival with respect to agriculture and the amount of GDP that we glean from just California as California goes so goes the country we often hear now is that particularly true with respect to climate projections and the and the glanceable vulnerability of our economy and our our agricultural system what do you think Andy well one thing I try to do in all these cases is look at like what are why is a certain kind of caligra culture where it is and then you look at California to realize that there a lot of things that are being grown there that shouldn't be grown there because it's fundamentally a drought prone state right now you look back at the again they've the ancient climate history there is shows you that the 20th century when California as we know it now got created you know with all those mansions and farms that was anomalous it was it's actually a much drier place so like looking at subsidies why you know why is there why are there rice farmers or alfalfa farmers growing water intensive crops or the almonds everyone heard about the almonds and then there's scientists in the southeast in in in Alabama who were saying hey you know maybe this is a good time to think about bringing the agriculture to where the water is we have lots of Agra we have lots of water down here a little too much water sometimes sometimes flooding down interesting way to look at it that maybe some of the corrections that need to happen or some of the disruption will actually be corrections that make sense as far as what happens where and not a disaster in the long run although in the short run whenever you're having people whose livelihoods are dependent on things being the way they are get displaced but as far as whether it's ultimately a tragedy if there's another place more appropriate that those things can be grown that's maybe a slightly more hopeful way to think and whine and that's the case of wine right now what wine also they've learned that the microclimate like on the side of the hill can be really different from one even and within some California Valley they'll be like you'll find your place to grow some variety of wine grape somewhere and going into the future you know this country's England there are the countries that are saying hey we're gonna have good wine here farmers are like the most adaptable business people on the planet in history you know they always found a way not that doesn't mean that like in sub-saharan Africa that people are going to be able to feed themselves with current knowledge and stuff so finding ways looking around the world where can you reduce vulnerability while we work on this big grand issue of getting the carbon out of our energy system what can we do to make sure we still stay true to that sustainable development goal for ending you know hunger in Africa and places like that with that in mind I'm gonna get right back to the queries from our listeners I'm sorry but I got to ask this question because you guys keep bringing up these awesome things okay so now you talked about the adaptability of farmers and you talked about how you know we have the ability to perhaps move some things around and so forth brings me to a quote made by our soon-to-be Secretary of State at the time that we are recording this so Rex Tillerson said and this is a direct quote this is an engineering problem that's not paraphrasing an engineering problem is what he said is what climate change is so can you is he correct in that well in a certain sense I would say yes he's correct but if we're talking and probably Rex toastin is not gonna be a fan of what I would say next if you're including social engineering and if you consider the fact that education and changing our way of life and changing our patterns of consumption in our conception of how we relate to to the the landscape and the climate and the you know that our sources and sinks of materials in a sense that's a kind of engineering but it's engineering our society in new ways so that's that is yes I would say it's an engineering problem but it's not just a problem I think of geoengineering like yeah let's squirt some stuff into the atmosphere not worry about it that might be what some people would mean when they said it's an engineering problem I think I have a problem with with that conception I don't know what are you thinking oh well an engineering problem well you know one thing I've learned through the nine years of blogging I did on earth and that through everything else is there there's not anything I can think of except that we will all die someday as it being a yes/no question at might not even hold but so but you know we do need one of the most enduring debates in the cold climate question is how much of this is about deploying what we have today solar panels and wind farms and geothermal land and to those who accept it nuclear power and and how much of it is coming up with new advances with and you know new breakthroughs to having to have solar panels that are so cheap that Elon Musk doesn't have to make a big show about making a roof out of them that it just is the roof already like until you don't have to think about it and until your don't have to be as rich as the buyers of his battery packs and cars and stuff right it's not going to be a solved problem so so what's the dynamic there how much of this is just politics meaning there many who will say we just need to shut up those deniers or whatever you want to call them and then all will be well that isn't going to work in a place like India where there's 300 million people right now the population in United States who have no electricity and then there's another few hundred million who don't have any reliable electricity they need engineering they need and some of that will be cool local distributed solar things and some of that will be a power plant like we have even right here in Brooklyn you know and and that is how do you do that without carbon in the mix that's an engineering challenge so right and I don't think there's an easy answer there the politics clearly you know if someone controls if the politics not a fair playing field you'll end up with special interests especially if that's the existing paradigm you know right possum powerplant wire stereo or whatever they have the advantage already of it being the norm yeah I mean you can't just like uninvent suburbia ain't gonna happen sadly so so they're already in power and essentially through both the political inertia and and systemic inertia how do you galvanize things it's an open question how do you move forward with some of the it's like what I said earlier you know they'll be this dynamic tension between Bill Gates on what end and and innovate and solve things and the others were gonna restrain ourselves yeah and solve things and it's gonna be some combination of those two isn't it I think all right let's um we're gonna make you feel better by the end of the show Chuck all right I'm gonna hold you to that let's go to travis sheaves also coming to us from Facebook and Travis says hey it's travis from vancouver here my question is do you think we have reached the point of no return in climate change in other words is it too late to reverse the damage humans have done to our planet now you hear a lot of this this this so-called tipping point i've read a lot about it but you know I really don't the more I read about it the more confused I get about the tipping point to be honest that means you got it that way the advise wisdom young confuse through confusion you will find enlightenment no the fact is there's there really is no simple tipping point in a system with lots of positive and negative feedbacks reinforcing and and dampening things there it's it's too complex to just say there's one tipping point which isn't to say we have to not worry about triggering some positive feedback if the methane starts coming out of the polar ice fields or so forth and then that reinforces warming that could be trouble but when people say all we're off the cliff we've hit the tipping point point of no return that's kind of an oversimplification of the actual very complex system that the the earth system is we'll get back into this this question in in a few minutes but I think we're we're at a time now where we need to take a little break okay so we will come back and we'll talk more about the the complex earth system and and and what we are going to maybe do about it you're listening to Startalk Allstars and we'll be back in a minute welcome back to Startalk Allstars I'm David Grinspoon aka dr. funky spoon on Twitter I'm with Chuck nice hey at Chuck nice comic thank you sir and we've got as our special guests Andrew revved kin who on Twitter is at revved kin bingo that's really that's really catchy mustard like very early I said earlier really really you were an early adapter to be able to get your last name just like that at repkin no numbers no nothing they know it's really funny my older son who's a DJ and works in visual effects he's now a Trev can underscore official so yeah we were talking about are we going off a cliff is the point of no return and that that is something that that one hears but it is kind of an oversimplification but it brings us actually to a topic that I wanted to get into a little bit because we have Andy here and Andy and I are both people that have been at times accused of being too optimistic or maybe not being pessimistic enough on this subject there are certain people including some very distinguished and loud voices out there on the interwebs and in the global discussion about the Anthropocene who get really offended in mad if you say something about how if you say there's others potential to turn this in a good direction ultimately they get they literally get angry if you say that there could ultimately be something good about the Anthropocene and my take on this that you know so I wanted to talk about this question of optimism pessimism what's realistic what's helpful what's not my take on this and this is one of the big themes of Earth and human hands is that the cosmic view the long-term view reinforces a sort of comforting positive view both in terms of the long-term history of looking at climate history and looking at our own history as a species the way we've reinvented ourselves at times in response to existential threats found new ways to cooperate on new scales and invent new social and material technologies in my view that's kind of what we need to do we need to make that next leap and get better at cooperating on a global scale and there are a lot of believe-it-or-not trends that are leading us in the right direction for that and my view is that if we think about the 22nd and the 23rd century there are reasons to think that we may actually get to a good place which is not to diminish the challenges of the 21st century or the you know the horrors that we may be in store for it's to say let's keep a vision of where we really want to get as a global species in our minds as we deal with these struggles and that's both comforting and I think actually pragmatically useful not just to think of the world we want to avoid but what kind of a world do we want to create so that's kind of my take on this and I know you've been involved in this a lot and I've seen you involved in some I don't want to say fights what's a more polite way some disagreements with some some very persistent voices in this community of environmental ethicists and so forth who have taken exception when you said that the Anthropocene doesn't have to be bad well you know so much of it comes down to definitions of stuff dude clive hamilton one of the critics who calls one of the people who called me daily delusional he any anyone who thinks there's a good path than the Anthropocene is delusional them i think but this gets to the question oh good you know and it's simplistic the simplistic ways to say well I'm talking about a good path in a difficult time that's easy you know like world war two people forged good lives even though the world was going coming unglued but you we can get beyond that like I've spent time a year ago at this place near Vienna called the International Institute for applied systems analysis sounds like a party - yes no music they had like classical music performs it's a complex systems analysis place and okay and they they study the human few mean futures by running all kinds of scenarios and computers where they have climate change and biodiversity loss and all these things and they have trajectories there are scenarios they've written this papers on this stuff that have the world in 2300 as basically having like two billion pretty happy people and tons of room for nature and nothing calamitous in between now and then Wow like that's an actual computer simulation or [ __ ] or debt some dudes is going the end state sounds completely believable to me I mean if you look at climate projections most kind of projections show climate peaking later this century and starting to decline and peaking for the right reasons because of fertility debugging because while climate and emissions yeah I'm sorry population yeah that's right I've said climate I meant population that most projections show population peaking and then starting to decline because for the right reasons because fertility is declining because standard of living globally are rising especially in some of some of these places that are the most poor by the way it is a decline in emissions well that's will follow population but not in a simple way because standards of living go up people you want more that's right so so one could see that you know the population is going never the other show with me he's sitting here is this like Chuck is crazy I think he's digging it so so population is possibly going to start to decline and it's an interesting question of what what would we want it to be I mean this is something I always ask people and nobody's a lot of people just haven't really thought about it but then and Energy's clearly going to transform we can't stay in fossil fuels for centuries and centuries because there won't be any so even if we're as stupid as we can be which I know Chuck you're thinking about that we probably will be with we're gonna have to transform it so so we're going to get to a world where the different energy system and a lower population so that's believable to me the avoiding calamity along the way is that's an interesting I'm not totally convinced well just but there's ways to run those numbers intensification of Agriculture like getting more crops out of the same amount of land is already leading to what they call peak farmland Peak farmland is like you know like peak oil whatever it means you don't have to keep chopping down more forests to grow more food and that's already happening we're seeing that happen the the calamity right now is related to the things that could facilitate having a smoother ride the calamity in Nigeria is that you have a very high fertility rate girls are not getting the main reason as girls can't go through high school and the same people at eásá this place in Vienna they focused on the the vital need for something this is how non-technological is this how non engineering is this it's getting girls through high school is the single best way to basically have better outcomes all around you know health lower fertility rates I'm not because someone enforced it not because someone said you can't have more kids and and Nigeria without girls getting through high school there's the difference between well I like 20 70 or so having 300 million people in Nigeria or close to 800 million people just in it's really stark and then going back to this question is it an engineering problem but the tricks to us and said well yeah how do you get girls through high school that that's it's a problem you could you could look at as a kind of engineering from get them through college it's not building gizmos it's different kind of problem write checks yeah ya know so there are their paths and then that says me this things you can work on that and by the way that isn't like the climate campaign community is not clamoring for girls education in Nigeria right when I think a sensible way to look at this problem is to say well by and by the way if you want to reduce vulnerability to climate hazards meaning people in harm's way in sub-saharan Africa the same thing the same process get more education low fertility rates means your family will have a easier time of withstanding a drought or a famine or that kind of thing so it's all like a no-brainer but it requires this broader way of looking at the engineering problem as you were saying wow that's actually fascinating that you know seriously I'm actually feeling a little better I also think that people are constitutionally optimists or pessimists to some degree and I think part of my problem may be if you want to call it a problem is that I am constitutionally an optimist and I think I get that from my mother who it always has something good to say about every person in every situation and so if anything is something I think I need to guard against but yet at the same time I mean I went through this whole process of reading this book and I talked to a lot of people and I read a lot of studies and a lot of what I did was I had this whole section called a brief history of the future where I read predictions about the future written in the past like what people were saying about now 200 years ago and a hundred years ago I read a lot of that there's a section in the book called a brief history of the future and I saw that no I concluded nobody can predict the future hundred years from now not climate modelers not futurists not engineers because it's always the game changers that come along and in this very nonlinear way completely change everything so I mean we've got to act based on the knowledge we have in the past we have and do the best we can so that those you know those smart kids coming up now can take over the world you know more hopeful position but I'm optimistic because my reading of history partly tells me that there's all kinds of room for surprising changes and some of them are going to be good and we're going to take advantage of them now you know what you just sparked in me a very this is just a thought exercise but I'm interested to hear from both of you since you're so extremely knowledgeable on this is it possible I won't forget that's stupid to say is it possible but what is the likelihood that what you just said and you're talking about no one can predict the future because it's really disruptors that come along and change the path of human history someone comes along with a just this monumental epic disruption that causes you know a tectonic change socially politically economically period how how likely is it that the problem itself becomes the womb or the seeds for the solution itself so we get to a place where we to come up with an answer and then someone who is solely dedicated to finding that answer comes along like an Einstein in nineteen you know what here's what here's what we should do or you know what this might be the case you ever think there might be something called gravity waves gravitational waves okay and then BOOM that's so if if it worked for the problem we would never have the answer I think it's extremely likely because I mean right now there's huge economic incentive for some if somebody could invent some process that removes carbon dioxide from the air and also makes stuff we want okay we do have a we do have we know of something that does that it's called a leaf right uses solar energy take co2 out of the air and I make stuff will you want food fuel but if somebody could invent something that does that easily and can be you know used on a massive scale that person would probably be famous and rich there's huge and scent there's no your problem right now that there's big incentive to solve and there's so many smart people around the world that sometime in the next in the coming decades there's going to be some breakthroughs along those lines you know in a larger sense something I write about in the book is that is that the problem is this is the same as the solution in the sense that what our problem is our inventiveness we've we're so clever at cooperating in groups and inventing new technologies and changing our environment that we inadvertently changed the planet and it's those same qualities that we need to now apply on a larger scale our ability to cooperate and be inventive and consciously change our environment on a global scale so in a certain sense we need to do more of what we've done that got us into this mess or do it in a larger way not just stop doing it but building by building on things beyond simple inventiveness the connectedness part depends on who you see as the we and one thing I've learned I've written about this a lot lately is a even though we're all the same species there is no we when it comes to access to energy right now on the planet you know you know there's the the we of the the hundreds of millions of people in India who have a 1.9 tonne per person per year carbon footprint 1.9 where 17 tons per person a year so Wow you know and that's just like one way to measure the differentials you know equity economic inequality so fostering the ability for an idea to be shared and shaped but making sure it's a fair playing field that's open you know so that the sharing and shaping is beneficial not like in an enforced way but so that that dynamic of like the response diversity thing everyone just kind of yeah so that things can flow and then you know we've invented our way into lots of problems too you know nuclear power we've created nuclear weapons and and now we need to invent it so the ethical without some real work on the ethics of this it gets that that's a challenge in the end these are great questions know who is the we that is that could be a whole other episode star talk all-stars and I would love to just keep talking all night it's so great having you on Andy Andrew Rifkin and it's great talking with with the Chuck nice unfortunately we're out of time man and we're gonna have to wrap this up but we meaning and myself and Andy have had a great time talking with all of you the star talk listeners and until next time I'm David Grinspoon and I would like to just tell you to keep it funky and this has been star talk Allstars bill nighy here and I'm here to talk to you about what I think is a very exciting thing the solutions project is started by a bunch of civil engineers who have done an analysis of our wind and solar resources our geothermal and tidal resources and we strongly believe that we can power the whole us and over a hundred countries around the world renewably right now if we just got started now my understanding is this Facebook live is live so you can send us charming and chanting questions and I will do my best to answer them in an enchanting and charming fashion hmm am i right Shawn you are correct sir ice is right here hello Facebook live hey this is James Crumm nail who says hey Bill what did you think of the House Science Committee tweeting a climate denier story about how global temperatures were plunging poor guys yea man have a lot of trouble with the facts so here's what happened it's wintertime that's coming so it's getting cooler what so some surface temperatures in North America are going down what the word plummet a little bit of an exaggerated was generally believed that 2016 would be a cooler year than 2015 because La Nina is supplanting El Nino and so what's what's happening is 2016 is going to be warmer than 2015 2016 will be the hottest year on record now if you're out there whining climate denier up excuse me my fellow citizens yeah I will bet you if you're out there I offered this to two different climate change deniers I offered you 10,000 bucks that 2010 2016 will be the hottest year on record if you think hottest decade on record 2010 2020 I mean excuse me 2010 2020 started people talking me through my earth 2010 2020 will be the hottest decade on record if you think that this one tweet based on senseless interpretation of an oncoming winter season indicates that for some reason all that we know about the earth and planets is not true and you're willing to bet me ten thousand bucks then let me know who 2010 2020 be the hottest decade on record the gauntlet has been thrown I've thrown it down before it none of these clowns cloudlet has been thrown none of these fellow citizens will take it where your money get yeah so it's okay I don't blame you for not taking it because my side of it is what we in the modern world call fact base right now I'm here for you man we want to do is take positive steps to address climate change you can hate me you can hate Al Gore you can hate everything it's fine but what we want to do is take positive steps to address climate change in the energy policy and climate policy are intimately connected we need to change our electrical grid a little bit so instead of relying on centralized power plants only to distribute electricity the grid would be creating electricity everywhere in Iowa a very conservative state had a fabulous time and I would love the Iowa love my popcorn by way of example that you guys get 25 percent of your energy from of your electricity from the wind Texas 10% of your electricity from the wind this is competing directly with fossil fuels without subsidy this is just doing it so you guys check it out it's not magic its science science so let's do this and by the way you know just the climate denier thing you guys just I appreciate how concerned you are you have friends in the fossil fuel industry you may be your coal miner yourself you may work in the oil industry yourself as I once did as a young engineer I understand but you guys we have to get away from fossil fuels and we have the energy in the wind and the Sun the tides in geothermal in the heat of the earth to run the place we have another question Chuck you're leaving in go Abigail brady bill wants to know this how long does the human species have if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the current rate is there a tipping point bill well people talk about the tipping point yes I don't know when it is but here's the thing you guys it's it's lowering the quality of life for hundreds of millions and reasonably billions of people yes here's the deal half of us live on the ocean shores we're not bad people they that's where Commerce is done is on sea Shores now the ocean is getting bigger because it's getting warmer how can that be well the things get warmer they get bigger they expand no it's the ocean is huge and the temperature change is not very big but it's big enough so that as the ocean gets bigger it will encroach on the shorelines places like Norfolk Virginia Pensacola Florida Galveston Texas these are all going to encounter storms and tides that are New York City gonna get tides that are higher and higher and there's gonna be this much water on the floor in Miami Miami Beach is a wealthy community they're throwing money at it for twenty or thirty years to preserve certain neighborhoods by pumping water away but water's coming in through the limestone underneath so people in the lower-income neighborhoods are gonna go somewhere they're not gonna be able to stay where they are with this much water on the floor where are they gonna go who's gonna pay for it so let's get to work on this everybody let's work together this should not be a political problem this should be a citizens problem and by the way we want to have jobs domestically no matter where you are if you're watching in the United States the United Kingdom if you're watching in Australia you want your jobs to be local so wind and solar energy have to be built that those that infrastructure has to be built locally you might make turbine blades in another country and import them to your country but when you go to put up the wind turbine you have to do it there it's all good this is Linc Cullinan link Owen says from Facebook live what is the one thing that a normal everyday person can do the help improve scientific knowledge for their community instead of waiting for the government to lead the way good question here's the thing I I have a house in Southern California and I have four kilowatts of solar panels I've insulated the house with existing technology nothing extraordinary I got the nice windows and my electric bill every 60 days is 10 bucks this is fun this is just cool so what I tell everybody that is your windows if you can do something to make your windows more energy-efficient it's you'll save money and of course it'll be better for the environment and all that stuff all those things writ large and this is this is a thing it's a it's a subtle thing Chuck yes replacing lightbulbs with more efficient light bulbs yes efficient lamps making your windows more efficient it doesn't it doesn't have a centralized industrial all at once kind of solution flavor to it it's the distributive and and then collectively yeah that's right but if everybody's light bulbs use a fifteenth of the energy of old-style lightbulbs then the power company certain times a day has 15 times as much electricity available for other cool stuff like mobile phones in the internet and this Facebook live broadcast oh it's the thing about it it all adds up and the trouble with the trouble with climate change in the big picture is it's in slow motion you know these changes are not happening you like that like both of my parents were veterans of world war ii i talked about this happen often on December 7th 1941 everything changed on 9/11 2001 everything changed catastrophic ly but climate change is inevitable and I remind us that in World War two everybody got together and solve the problem everybody was singing the songs about winning the war everybody was riveting aircraft everybody was working on solving this problem so we can do this humankind has the ability to do this let's go let's go let me just say that there's a ton of love for you here on Facebook live and I can't tell you how many people say Bill Nye please run for president I mean there's no I there are a lot of there's a lot of please run from I would run for president but I just tell you normally nominally you want somebody running for president who has some experience in government someone who knows what it takes to get a bill passed through Congress someone who knows how to make agreements real ones not wave of the arm pie-in-the-sky running a business is very different from running a government well fool you can't just when you have a government you can't just do things because it affects people you can't just move a factory from one place to another because the other place has congressmen and Senators that are expressed concerned can we say concern yes we can it's a different thing running a business is not the same as running a government and I think we're all gonna learn let's go yes Chuck you have another question yeah this is lee joseph who says hi bill politicians don't seem to ever heed scientific warnings about climate change in north america do you think having a scientific leader would help better our planet rather than someone and he goes on and which i think is a good point do we need like a scientific leader like you know someone who's a point person who can yell deGrasse Tyson like maybe we should start just a host of Startalk maybe an all-star guest host me yeah may but just here's what we would like I want you to consider out there if we had a science advisor that was taken seriously and I think the Conservatives know this better than anybody climate change denial is largely age-related there are very few young people who are in denial about climate change okay and everybody who studies this stuff in the United States I don't know where you're watching has seen this map if only millennial people had voted then the recent presidential election would have gone the other way and millennial aged people are younger than are younger yeah then the people than many of the people who vote in the recent elections say yeah anybody in this roaming if it didn't happen this time it'll happen the next time or the time after and everybody can see that so sooner or later we're all gonna be on the same climate change page so why don't we get on that page right now Mara Houston who says I tried to lead by example to my kids but what more can I do to show my kids the importance of environmentalism I love the fact that she said show my kids what's what's rather than tell other than tell Mike watching you kids are always watching you so that I don't know where you live ma but the single biggest decision that we make here in the United States is what car you choose to drive the more efficient vehicle you drive the better and I say to everybody after you have an electric car you never go back I'm not saying everybody needs to get a Tesla that's a lot of money but there are other electric vehicles that you'll be surprised you seldom drive 500 miles at a time 300 miles at a time very seldom so consider that and then the other thing is is just turn off the lights I'm not kidding turn off the lights don't run the thermostat higher in the winter then you need to colder in the summer than you need to and just do more with less you'll find that you can do it this is not that hard but in the big picture everybody I want you to think about creating a new infrastructure in the United States where we use renewably produced electricity to run our society and then we can run over 130 countries around the world check out the solutions project org thank you so much for joining us on Facebook live we can do this people we can change the world thank you chuck nice blow it up you know it this is Startalk [Music]

Channel: StarTalk All-Stars

Views: 2,877

Rating: 4.8095236 out of 5

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Id: 1fzEv_wBScw

Length: 62min 46sec (3766 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 03 2019