Understanding Climate Change with Bill Nye | StarTalk All-Stars

this is Startalk hello hello Bill Nighy here I'm the host of a brand-new seriously it's like nothing you've ever seen it's star talk but this is star talk Allstars that's right and here with our regular comedian insightful man about the world Chuck nice well I was looking around who's he talking about yes that's me yes indeed that's me bill Schmidt is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies I guess that's a NASA Goddard that's the NASA God Institute yes and you are one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change so they keep telling me well you've probably published a few papers you have yes you've looked at thermometers occasional occasional barometer it's great to have you here but this is cosmic queries indeed so these are questions from out there out there this week on all stars with dr. Schmidt it's gonna be all about climate change that's what it is and we have change all the time we've solicited questions from the internet and we have quite a bit people are really interested in climate change and we have from Facebook Twitter and every other place where you will find star talk we have people who are writing in and they are asking us about climate change so I'm going to start off with a question from one of our patreon patrons or patreon is yet another outlet yes patreon is another outlet where you can find us and you can go in and let us know that's the outlet that's right brilliant there's and the great thing about patreon is that they actually support us financially which is why we we take great pride in reading their questions so let's do that okay here we go this is from Dylan halihan who says Sir William ah let's use in my area this year was 70 degrees outside on Christmas not only that but it didn't get cold until mid January and now we seem to have daily changes between 60s and 70s and snow while I know that weather and climate are different do you see this as a sign that everything we're trying to warn everyone about is coming even sooner this reason when we ask where does he live Washington Township New Jersey New Jersey right down the street yeah yeah so we have had some very exceptional weather here over the winter it's been very warm except for that one nil period it was very cold and a lot of that is weather a lot of that is tied to impacts of the the onio that's going on right exactly warmer it does make everything will make over here on average and particularly across the north of the the US all the way across to Alaska you're seeing record warm temperatures but their record warm not because of the El Nino but because we've had this long-term warming that is just going on decade by decade but I say superimposed you can you can say that the El Nino fluctuations and the land near fluctuations are superimposed on that warming trend so a couple of years ago we had very cold winters here in New Jersey New York area but if you'll if you look over the global picture and and you average everything you average the COPE errors and cold areas and the warm areas what you see is that there's this steady march to war Woods warmer temperatures last year was the warmest year on record globally January was the warmest January that's that we have in that record this was 180 years back it goes back to the mid 19th century yeah and we don't think it was warmer just before we started so so in fact these are these are the warmest decades that we're seeing in maybe hundreds maybe even thousands of years Wow so now with specific respect to the question as we see this proliferation does that mean that things are getting worse or are these just anomalies within the occurrence itself so there's no obvious reason why that particular pattern of weather should be associated with the you're seeing so they're mostly just oscillations on top of that long-term trend but that's what you're gonna see you're gonna see winter periods getting shorter you're gonna see more exceptional warm weather in January and December and February you're gonna see earlier Springs and you think oh that's great but actually it's not so great what's happening is that around here you know things are budding very early and then we're still gonna get variability we're still gonna get Frost's in in you know in in in March and in April which is very variable and actually you can do a lot of damage to crops and apples and things like the problem in in farming is the pests the parasites in in voracious insects are showing up sooner and sticking around longer which means more insecticide more just more work right if you can do it at all I mean in the West you've got the issue with with the pine bark beetles where there's there's a six week window well they kind of prepare themselves for winter if it gets cold enough in that six week window then they won't be able to breed again for until the next season but if it doesn't get cold enough they hung themselves to the winter and they're ready to go you know two or three times as fast as they would have done and so part of the the huge mountain pine bark beetle outbreak that they've had in the West all the way up through Colorado up to British Columbia has been tied to the fact that it just hasn't been getting as cold identical so so the warming trend is kind of like a Barry White music to these pine bark beetles it's you know kind of set the mood for them little wine low but he says you're fine but it means you always find to keep warm yeah English but dr. Schmidt haven't you said we don't think it was warmer before let's say the middle of the 19th century we kind of do it what we kind of do no it wasn't we look at ice cores and so on so you can look I schools you can look at tree rings you can look at where the glaciers work we have actually records of those we've inference for Crona yeah so if you if you look at you know the glaciers that are melting now and you can see okay well what's the stuff underneath them how old is that right and that gives you an idea of when that glacier first forward right and so now it's receding but it went forward at some point ago when did that happen right you go back and you date these things and it's a thousand years ago it's four thousand years ago Otzi the Iceman that they dug up in Austria was five thousand years since he'd been covered in snow there are places in bath in Ireland up in the Canadian archipelago where we think that the stuff that's being uncovered is a hundred and twenty thousand years old Wow so it's been cold there for the last hundred twenty-five thousand years now it's full but now it's warm let's take the next question right man talk all stars you know what I like about this conversation it's so terribly uplifting three kids welcome to your future kids all right well we're working on it we're going to change the world here people okay so changing one Carlos release from facebook says dear mr. Nye given that the earth experiences ice ages periodically what will happen to the next one given the current state of our climate so we've had ice ages before yep does this mean that we will not have another Ice Age or will it mean that this will precipitate an even greater ice age so we have other stages before so the the peak of the last ice age was about twenty thousand years ago here in New York City there was pretty much the edge of the of the ice sheet so it actually stopped in Brooklyn I'm not quite sure why it's not in Brooklyn but probably for a latte or something but the those those ice ages yeah the ice age is driven by the wobbles in the Earth's orbit which which are slow but kind of persistent is this small Anchorage Thank You Mitch cycles that's exactly right okay guys I'm sorry please expound because I have been left out malankov it Yankovic I know is Donald Trump's wife so was a Serbian and he did all these calculations while in jail for for political activities in Serbia back in the nineteen back in the 1920s and so what he worked out was that the the orbit of the earth around the Sun as so we all know it's an ellipse but the but the eccentricity of the ellipse moves in time basically because of the influence of Jupiter and Saturn well it does it wobbles and the tilt of the earth that wobble was a little bit and the precession of the earth so kind of where it's spinning around like a wolf record in New York it should be a dreidel okay so these things wobble on twenty thousand forty thousand a hundred thousand years frequencies they interact and they interact and they they change how much sunlight gets to the poles how much them I guess to the tropics and that helps the ice ages grow and recede but the interesting thing is they're they haven't they haven't always happened right they've only been happening for about the last two-and-a-half million years and the reason why we think that they've started happening in that relatively recent period is because the carbon dioxide level dropped to her to a level that allowed places to expand in other words the wobbling was going on in the past but the wobbling has been going I was overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect I didn't it didn't make a difference because the planet was so warming the Cretaceous that that was really really warm and ancient dinosaurs and seas I only increased sea level I was about 80 meters higher than eighty meters yes it's like that would go from we're on the East Coast United States that would go where to Chicago or something oil now so a lot a lot of the Mississippi Basin was it was an in and see at that point the the sea level in the Pliocene which is not quite so far go about three million years ago there's there's a there's a right in the middle of New Jersey there's the old Pliocene cliffs but they're a long long way from the coast now yeah yes yes let's get to this guy's question the answer is no we're not gonna see any more ice ages the next one would have been due in about 30,000 or maybe maybe 50,000 years yeah you are you are gonna miss it but it's not gonna happen it's not gonna happen because the the timescale for the carbon that we put into the system is hundreds of thousands of years and so no more ice ages none where I say that's really a striking thing everybody no more ice ages yeah because we'd make hilarious jokes about the ice ages I went to school in the Finger Lakes which were carved by glaciers movement south that's not going to happen anymore those were the days the glaciers all the glaciers we know gonna go away so almost all the mountain glaciers that we know are receding some of them quite dramatically the only part of the planet where ice is pretty stable is East Antarctica which is the the biggest chunk of ice and that's very cold very stable and so that's the part that's that's gonna stick around the longest but the other bits the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula Greenland is losing mass at about 250 Giga tons of of water a year the abbé the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass so everybody if you want to see Glacier National Park see for its mud slide National Park get going you're watching and listening to Startalk Allstars I'm your guest host Bill Nye here with our beloved Chuck nice man about the world insightful provider of insights and our special guest our all-star this week is dr. Gavin Schmidt from the from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies right here in New York City the town so nice they named it twice and this week on cosmic queries it's all about climate change all the time we'll be back right after this welcome back to Startalk this is not just start talk everybody this is Startalk all-star edition and I'm here with dr. Gavin Schmidt from NASA's Goddard Center for Space Studies right here in New York City New York New York the town so nice we named it twice and Chuck nice who's he's pretty nice about the world seemed so convinced the regular you're my best here you have a family exactly what we're talking this week is cosmic queries your questions from all over the electric social media out there on this planet and this week is all about climate change which as you may know is the subject deeply important to me and simply behind not just because you have a book called unstoppable about climate change not just because of what we're gonna do about it and because also dr. Schmidt is about climate change picturing the science yes yes it's got lots of pictures in it how long have you been compiling pictures having to do with climate change so I talk to actual photographers and it turns out that my pictures really aren't very good so we had to throw out all of those and just use theirs instead but they're great photos and these people have been traveling the world finding interesting stories and their stories that you can't tell in the news and they're not being told in the magazines for example so how do you talk about changes in you know plants as they move north as it gets warmer right you know trying to track the the kudzu which used to be deep south thing but now it's right here it's like it's it's it's on Long Island my father New Jersey was a very good boy scout and the joke that they had this would be in would pick a number 1929 to what's called 1928 the joke was you put your ear to kudzu you could hear it growing yeah and that was a hundred years ago that's not so funny anymore yeah yeah so stuff has taken over everything so there take that they're taking pictures there and they're doing great art and great journalism and we the scientists are kind of helping them put it together give it context and explain you know what the big patterns that you're seeing are not just in ecosystems but on you know and in sea-level rise or in technology changes or you know just how people go about finding out what's going on in the world awesome well Chuck I was just gonna say I'm really this is a very serious topic and we talked about it scientifically but the big thing that I'm always running is what are we going to do about it what are we gonna do so Chuck we have a question yes we do we do hardware and and speaking of what are we gonna do about it John Peak Garrett from facebook wants to know this how effective are the policies for dealing with climate change proposed for the immediate future are we doing anything about this are we really doing it and by not just we I mean but the three of the three of us I mean our government worldwide government what are the policies in place right now that will help this so there's actually a few things that are making a difference so restrictions on coal power plants those are making a difference coal is the worst fuel that we can have for putting for putting out carbon dioxide here's the bad news everybody will never run out of coal there's just it's limitless no way to much all over the world it's just too easy things like the cafe standards in the US things like the renewable standards for FAA is yeah the fuel emission standards but for car seat emissions that's right the increasing amount of electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines the renewable standards at the state level for you know making like five ten fifteen percent B be produced from renewable sources all of those things are actually making difference now the question is are they enough to take us to the way I like to describe it after cop21 in Paris this big conference on climate change in Paris you could say we've taken our foot off the accelerator but we haven't really gotten around to putting our foot on the brake no and we're getting closer and closer to the cliff and we're gonna go rebel without a cause right off it now that why this is obvious to everybody but nobody's do anything about it is this a big philosophical question a deep question why wouldn't why wouldn't humankind get to work on this why wouldn't we look guys it seems to be too big a problem and just to get all conspiratorial on you there's no question that the fossil fuel industry has worked very hard to obfuscate things to make it hard to understand what they're doing into defeat to derail laws like the President of the United States tried to have this restricting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants it was derailed and well but these things are ongoing like anything that EPA does is always litigated and that was true for the mercury regulations it was true for acid rain eventually it will come through but it's a slow process and we're getting closer to the cliff well and Thelma and Louise and holding hands you know with those cop lights flashing in the background is there an actual tipping point where we can say goodnight people that's it well the number you guys like the throne is two degrees Celsius is that right so yeah I'm gonna argue a little bit okay so I don't actually think that there's one tipping point I don't think there's ever gonna be a point where we get to it and we say oh yeah well nothing worth doing we are always going to be making decisions and every time we make a decision we can make a decision that's gonna make the problem worse or make a decision that makes the problem better in the future and we're always gonna have to be making those decisions and if you say oh it doesn't matter suddenly that's not true because you can always make it worse right that's great we can make it worse don't make it worse and and so you know this talk of like you know what the the cliff I like the I like the the metaphor but actually it's a little bit better like we're driving in the fog and perhaps we're taking our foot off the accelerator but we have no idea what's going on we don't know if there's a cliff we don't know if there's a boulder we don't know if it's rough ground we don't know if the roads gonna run out we don't know right we have a pretty good idea that the sooner we come to a stop the better it would be oh yes we know that we know that just driving in the fog like crazy you know probably not it's very curve in the road James Dean event exactly alone a turtle to cross cool alright well there you have it let's get another query cosmos this is from Richard Martin also coming to us from Facebook who says hello mr. Nye and mr. Smith an awesome guy reading this some guy reading this did he really know that I was going to be the the the guest host exactly here's what he says Richard says this I've heard the Sun expands and uses its hydrogen fuel is there any evidence that this has had an effect on climate change or does it happen over too long of a time to measure oh it's very measurable yes it is measurable so so the Sun is is a main-sequence star so over the the last 4 billion years that the earth has been around the Sun has got brighter by about 30% and in another 2 billion years it will get large and brighter still and in fact if the timescales big but the timescales but the timescale is is billions of years and there is evidence that it's affected the climate so if you go back in in time you go back to the oldest rocks the the oldest evidence that we have there is evidence that we went through periods that are called snowball earth where the ice caps expanded pretty much all the way to the equator and they were you know obviously that was not particularly helpful to life but for periods of you know many many millions of years the planet was a snowball now that can't happen now because the Sun is brighter but the but back then it was dimmer and so things are a little bit more fragile and so when you had wobbles that would put you into an ice age those ice ages could potentially cover the whole planet but that's not happening now that is not happening and so the I the Sun is getting is still bruh getting brighter or not it's going it's getting brighter on a very very long time scale but actually there are other things going on you have sunspot cycles there's activity in the Sun that kind of waxes and wanes over about eleven years right now we're just kind of coming off a solar maximum but in fact this was a smaller solar maximum than more than many of the previous ones so in fact how do we determine what happened in the past on the Sun with respect to the Sun and it's maxima and minima physics oh my god is it in the rocks so there are so this the solar activity also modulates the the cosmic rays that come in from all around the cosmos those cosmic rays very high-energy to come into the atmosphere and they create isotopes carbon-14 beryllium ten chlorine thirty six that don't occur any other place in in the system and they will just keep creating it and so when you have something that's that's made of air made of carbon that's how you can do carbon dating right so so you're not part of that but if you go back you can actually see that those those who are listening on the podcast he's his hands going up and down hands guy yeah man that wave is really showing us the open flow laughs and down these cosmic rays will make some protons become neutrons some neutrons become protists right so so they'll hit a nitrogen and they'll make a carbon-14 yeah oh they'll hear it from seven will become a carbon six plus an extra Neutron is represented well it's science science but here's the thing when I say to everybody because I deal with a lot of climate denial people ok these isotopes are created in this special way there's no other way to make these isotopes so there's nobody running around with a hypodermic needle making isotopes for kicks to fool people so this evidence when you have this evidence is incontrovertible it's like let's go people let's get this done let's get to work Chuck all right that's another query ok so this is Russ Ismail off oh yes Ismail off thank you yes Ismail off no it's not [Laughter] right now Russell hates us I included us but you know it's me okay so Russ wants to know this and he's coming to us from Facebook does oil production affect the climate changed directly or indirectly kind regards from Kazan Russia well if you're in the I can tell you this if you're producing oil what they call synthetic crude oil in in the tar sand region of Alberta the province of Canada in Western Canada you are just a process to produce this synthetic crude it takes a tremendous amount of energy 30% of the energy in the crude oil was used to produce the synthetic crude oil this is pumping carbon dioxide in the air and then when you burn the crude oil pathetic you pump even more 30% it's extraordinary and what they've done just a whine and complain in Calgary I was there in end of August beginning of September they've created this boom and bust cycle and in the economy put all their eggs in the synthetic crude basket if I may and the place was not deserted but there was very there were very few people working yeah and it's just it's no and it couldn't be worse that is fascinating what you just I can't believe I've never heard that before 30% oh man so you it was discovered in 1884 geologists run around the Athabasca River Athabasca River runs through there and cuts a swath through the layers of soil and you can see this layer of tar and it's sandy tar sands and the oil companies have had a campaign to call it oil sand whether you pick up a handful of it it is it's gone it's talk and you know this guy said boy if you could exploit this to be fantastic so in the 1970s some chemical engineers came up with a process to make it into very usable crude oil Wow so you're creating a crapload of pollution so that you can create a crap solution and accidentally just mess with the economy of this otherwise lovely province Wow fantastic hey Gavin you're gonna chime in uh so just answers question its indirect like it's not you know the the it's the burning of the oil that causes the carbon dioxide and all the other pollutants which which have right now I can tell you an oilfield production you burn a lot of oil running pumps and generators and compressors yes yeah okay I was looking forward to the argument but I guess we won't alright let us let's move on and this is from from Pete and Agee from Facebook Pete wants to know this hey Pete here from California the Sun is lauded being near limitless as a source of energy but it isn't technically limited by solar collectors after all the Sun isn't always shining down here on the ground what are some of the possible solutions to this dilemma Wow could we not tell these people and could you guys just write it down for me so I can go you know make a fortune and retire no you can make a fortune I tell all the y'all right everybody this good then let's do that a batter if you had we had better batteries yeah we have very good batteries but they could be better and better energy storage systems whatever that might be could be these great gravity these giant Pistons that go up and down both insults is very just salt we love that okay sorry guys as as the non scientists in the room can we please have a little lesson on molten salt because I know Morton Salt giant mirrors and you can see them from airplanes here in the US giant mirrors concentrate solar power beam it up to a big black ball full of it's largely sodium chloride table salt right with a little calcium chloride this other assault you melt snow in front of your right on your sidewalk mixture and it gets liquid so freakin hot it gets liquid and so when the sun's not shining overnight the stuff stays hot it's so massively it's a hold so much heat its thermal capacity so high so you can continue to run a steam turbine all night long yeah that's it if you have it worked out all right we're just scratching the solar constant concentrated solar power surface on this unbeliev Incheon where this is enormous and the place that also ironically has huge potential for it is in the Middle East where all this oil is produced they'd have these concentrated solar power collectors here it gets hot there that's right so you are watching Startalk all-stars we're here with Chuck nice and me Bill Nye your host and this week our all-stars dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City we'll be back right after this welcome back welcome back to Startalk all-star edition I'm your host bill and I here with our beloved Chuck nice man about the earth yes and speaking of the earth our all-star this week is dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Center for Space Studies the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City which is part of NASA right is you're a NASA employee ultimately I am and this week on cosmic queries your queries from the cosmos are all about climate change and here to read the next query or do you want to talk about salt some more molten salt well no I just found that to be a completely fantastic idea and wideboys hot yeah it's hot very hot that's hot you know I just don't understand why these type of alternatives are not put forward in it's such a manner where there's a public awareness well if you live in Las Vegas there are three so our compute solar plants out there and in it ends with a pause sound in California there's a big even pop thank you yes even par Ivanpah Ivan Ivan Paulo California there thank you is a huge concentrates or collector system CSP concentrated solar power and this is the thing we're just getting started on this Chuck now just speaking as a political commentator and guy who's thought about this a little bit when you have a standing army on the other side of the world to protect oil fields yes that is effectively a subsidy for that form of energy costs billions of dollars to maintain a military on the other side of the world if we were to encourage concentrated solar power photovoltaics wind energy at that same a tenth of that scale we would have all of these systems in place in 30 years yes but then how would we destabilize the Middle East great question I think the Bible absolutely help is what you say no they actually do need it's gonna say I mean to destabilize we're all being hilarious all right here we go cosmic query here we go this is from Benjamin who is at been odd 3 on Twitter Gavin said I wasn't given Twitter any love so let's go to Twitter here's what he says people emphasize negative aspects of climate change but are there any foreseeable positives hmm well let me give you one please so so I'm English and do you know yes yes yes where where we hang out all the time at the palace and and for many years many years you know there were there was such a thing as English wine and there was an old joke in Victorian Jewish wine in the Victorian period that it would take four people to drink English wine one to drink the wine two people to hold the person down and another person to pour it into the funny very troubling yes okay but now it turns out that there are more vineyards in in England than there are ever been in history and in fact that the yes that we have we have records of vineyards in England going back to the Doomsday Book over a thousand years ago but there's more now and the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins so so wine quality in England is actually now on a par with the best that the French can produce why they're good French people are gonna be unglued about that absolutely so the champagne come bees are buying up swathes of what are called the South Downs in in the UK because they know that the temperatures in champagne are now at the limit so if it gets much warmer in Champagne region they won't be able to make as good champagne there and they're thinking about moving their production to the UK so there will be a foreseeable benefit for English wine during news K is a little cool yes it's a little bit further north but it's very similar soils very similar terroir and now it's it's actually happening so there's your answer Benjamin the positive will be you get to piss off French winemakers what it means but it writ large is agriculture is gonna change that's exactly right so you're seeing the same thing in the US right so Napa Valley where we're producing a lot of great wine now is the limit of how hard it needs to be if it gets much harder it's going to be harder so production is moving to Oregon or Washington State there's some excellent excellent wines that are really emerging there and that's brought of and British Columbia even yes so I mean I tasted wines in British Columbia maybe 20 years ago and the same joke would have been true there but now they're actually they're actually so agriculture is going to change the whole problem everybody the way I see it is it's how fast it's changing we have an interstate highway system we have trains in Britain for carrying produce to market or carrying produce to the the winery where you're gonna make the grapes into wine for example or the oats into opening or what-have-you but we're not set up to have that's all that production move farther and farther north or farther and farther from the equator and rain patterns are changing I mean nice things like vineyards you know they're pretty much on the ball and so there they they pay attention to these things and move things along quite quickly but your bigger problem is is the staples not not the luxury goods you know wheat corn barley soybeans all of those things are affected by food most of the world straight-up food let's try another one okay here we go let's let's just very quickly on that same in that same vein Tobias who is at Miko on Twitter on Twitter wants to know this does animal agriculture have any impact on climate change so the way we grow and raise our food you know our livestock does that hurt or help climate change in any way so you know if you run a farm you can integrate the the animals in the farm so that they eat a lot of the waste and you know so that's that's that's okay the waste you mean silage exactly will eat anything and so you know that's a good way of recycling store would otherwise be be wasted but you know your your big climate impacts come from cows and sheep and they have this second stomach which has what's called enter attic fermentation where you produce a ton of methane and that's a very powerful greenhouse gas it's natural yeah it's it's basically the same stuff as natural gas and since we believe me I know you have three kids [Laughter] okay well that's too much information comes out they're burping this is a myth it's not coming out their tales mostly mostly cow burps yes and and we've increased the number of cows and sheep enormous ly in the last century and that's certainly contributed to the fact that levels of methane and more than double what they were 150 in methane or methane is more powerful about me bill you know you Thames is much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide even but there's much less of it the common oxide is much more powerful thinkers there's more of it but so raising livestock has a huge effect Chuck or Tobias to answer your question and the other thing just writ large when I was young there were 3 billion people in the world mutton when my grandfather was young there were one and a half billion people now there are over seven 7.3 billion people and everybody wants protein everybody wants to eat and here we are yes going through this stuff and the the farming and the agriculture and the animals and we're adding methane did a guide to the atmosphere when they say gasoline on fire when they say one day vegetarian actually helps the world ecology yeah that's actually true then yeah that's actually true so so if you take a diet that's a vegetarian diet compared it to a diet that's that's got a lot of meat in it your environmental footprint not just in in methane but also in the fuel that's that's used to transport and create these things the amount of fertilizer that's being used the amount of nitrate runoff that's going into the rivers which is creating the dead zone you know in the Gulf of Mexico Olo adds up so it's our number you felt like you're building to a number I may I could have made up a number but I didn't actually have this big yes it's a big big number so as we like to say Chuck yes if you don't like regulation now just wait till it gets to the point where they we somebody has to regulate the amount of protein rather animal protein you take in right we're actually regulating farmers and to produce less of livestock protein that says it could be a big deal everybody so if you like to worry about things you're living at a great time there you go take a yes and believe me that's gonna be a tough fight just as Oprah so paul bunyan wants to know this and this is Kiko that's what he says his name is and he is at Matthew birch with the rising ocean levels due to polar melt how soon before the Hudson River becomes the gulf of the Hudson and and let me just add an addendum you know today how soon will this have a verifiable and measurable effect on our coastal regions because when you look at all of the world most people live on the coast of wherever that's right so so already already we're seeing the number of coastal flooding days is increasing all up and down the East Coast from Miami to Newport to to Boston the storm surges that we're seeing when you have a storm wherever the storm is it's it has more damage because the sea level was risen about a foot in the last hundred years and it's increasing faster now then perhaps anytime in the last 3,000 years and that's because of polar melts it's because the water itself is getting warmer and so it's expanding and that's it's happening right now so they have an expression in Florida nuisance flooding nuisance flooding nuisance flooding now everybody when you think of floods you might get into some biblical thing where everybody's underwater and enormous hundreds of feet underwater 100 meters underwater but the nuisance flooding which is inducing insurance companies not to provide insurance to where you park your car because salt water is getting in your wheel it's just a few centimeters a few inches deep but if you put a few inches of water on the floor of your house you ruin almost everything that's ruined the stove you ruin all your furniture you ruin your carpets you ruin your bedding you ruin everything and so this expression nuisance is kind of shorthand for you're not just hands you're on your own yeah so I said to this guy mr. Hill who was a legislator in Florida I I said what are you gonna do Cola Florida and they have nuisance flooding continually I said were you gonna do and everybody moves you know they're gonna move he says they're gonna are what are they gonna move to how are they gonna displace themselves if you're a middle income or lower income person how do you pick up everything and where do you go to get a job and so on and that's in the US which is civilization waiter you're in the developing world where you just don't have resources seize God man let's get to let's raise awareness Chuck read another query I'm gonna raise awareness I'm gonna god this is this is really serious stuff well man yeah yeah I guess all right um here's something that he's given us he's given it to rise miles up beat take it here's a little something that I wanted to get and you know since you have unstoppable and since you are a I just got to climate change picturing the science yeah it's good how many books in a carton 20 they make great gifts everybody 60 they make great gifts equinoxes coming up so can we have three just major points of three major talking points three tips that we can put out to kind of silence the climate denying arguments well my big thing is why do you really think that your intuition about weather and about your whole life is more accurate at predicting the future than the world's climate scientists and then follow that up with do you think the world's climate scientists are in a conspiracy Gavin yuuna conspiracy right you guys text each other yes well we get we get signals from the vegetarian overlords really when he says you know I'm sorry [Laughter] unexpected but are there three tips we have just a few seconds left before break Gavin you got any ideas look at the evidence the planet is warming one we understand why - we're not stopping our emissions so it's gonna get worse there you go it's that simple so Chuck Gavin the answers to this problem is the evidence is overwhelming let's get to work I like that this is Startalk all-star edition I'm here with Chuck nice a regular man about the universe and dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Center Goddard Institute for Space Studies part of NASA right here in New York City and this show has been about climate change I've been your guest host Bill Nye tune in to Startalk every week and turn it up loud we'll see you next time this is Startalk [Music] you

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Views: 9,237

Rating: 4.8227849 out of 5

Keywords: encviornment, cosmic queries, science podcast, startalk, star talk, bill nye the science guy, chuck nice, gavin a. schmidt, climate change, climate change deniers, glacial melting, costal flooding, rising ocean levels, methane, co2, greenhouse gas, solar energy, agriculture, vegeterian diet

Id: wuixszYEeCc

Length: 43min 57sec (2637 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 18 2019