Hi, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the Marian Minor Cook
Athenaeum. My name is Rukmini Banerjee and I'm one of your three
Athenaeum fellows for the year. Every day
we are constantly barraged with information
about climate change. Many people feel
as if it is confusing and complex to pass through. We know that
climate change is real and we know that
it is a scientific fact. But for some, it's hard to understand
exactly what those facts are and what the evidence is saying
to talk us through his interpretation
of some of these numbers. We have with us today
Professor Steven Koonin. Professor Koonin is a professor
at the New York University. He is appointment
in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering
and the Department of Physics. He is also the founding director of NYU Center
for Urban Science and Progress. The center works
with academic, corporate and government partners to demonstrate and develop
informatics technology for urban problems in the living
laboratory of New York City. Professor Koonin led the center
from 2012 to 2018. Prior to his appointment, Professor Koonin served
as the second undersecretary for science at the unit
at the U.S. Department of Energy
from May 2000 9 to 2011. In that role, he oversaw
technical activities across the department's science, energy
and security efforts and led the department's first Quadrennial Technology
Review for Energy. Before joining the government, Professor Koonin
spent five years as the chief scientist
for BP PLC, where he played a central role
in establishing the Energy Biosciences
Institute. Previously, Professor
Koonin was also a professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute
of Technology from 1975 to 2006 and was an institute provost
provost for almost a decade. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
and the Jason Advisory Group. Today, Professor
Koonin will tell us more about his findings
in his recent book, Unsettled
What Climate Science Tells US and What It Doesn't
and Why It Matters. The book was published in 2021. In the book, Professor Koonin
advocates for a more accurate, complete and transparent public representation
of climate and energy matters. Today's Atheneum
program will be different. The talk will occur first and then the dinner,
where select students will facilitate conversation
while we eat. Afterwards, the Q&A will occur. The idea of the flipped app
is an open academy principle that hopes to reinforce
the principles of constructive dialog
in the context of exploring different views
and perspectives. During the small group
dinner discussions, we hope you think about what our other perspectives
on climate science. What is the potential social and economic impact
of these different perspectives? Because dinner will be served
at the conclusion of the talk. Everyone should return to the
seat at which they are seated to start the discussion. Before we get started,
a few quick reminders. Please take this time to silence
and put away your cell phones. We have a very interesting
lecture for you today. Be present
and get ready to engage in dialog and ask
thoughtful questions as usual. Video. Audio recording by the artists by the audience
is strictly prohibited. Thank you so much. Okay. It is great to be here. This talk has been 18 months
in the making. Just given scheduling issues, it's also great to just be back
in Southern California and at a set of colleges
that I knew well by reputation
from my days in Pasadena. So my title tonight
is really a triple entendre. It refers to parts
of climate science, important parts
that remain unsettled. It refers to how I felt
and perhaps you will feel, as I tell you some of the things that are
actually in the science. And it also referred to
what are we going to do about this important intersection
between climate and energy? If I could paraphrase
a lot of the popular and political discussion, it's that climate science
compels us to make large and rapid reductions
in greenhouse gas emissions. And it's good, by the way,
this will be a very data driven talk. And all of the data and conclusions I'll show
you come from official sources. So I'm not making
any of this up. This is greenhouse
gas emissions from 1970 up to 2020 for the globe
as a whole. And the main lesson to take away
is that this curve is going up and up as the world uses
more and more energy derived from fossil fuels. And what large and rapid reductions
mean, at least in U.N. language,
is that we need to drive that curve on the left down to zero by 2050 if we want to
hold the global temperature rise to one and a half degrees
above pre-industrial or to zero
by the end of the century, if we want to hold the rise
to two degrees as shown on the right
representative trajectories. Well, you know, doing that will entail
a major shift in society. As I'll get into. But whatever we do,
they have to strike a balance. On the one side,
we have the certainties and uncertainties
of climate science. The hazards and risks
and benefits, actually, as you will see,
of a changing climate. On the other side, we've
got the world's growing demand for affordable,
reliable and clean energy. And in the middle, as we weigh these two,
frankly, contradictory factors, we've got to impose values
and priorities. Our tolerance for risk
equity is between generations and between the northern
and southern hemispheres and the efficacies and costs of
whatever it is we decide to do. Would
it really make a difference? And so
one is good to ask the question Are large and rapid reductions
in emissions warranted? Are they desirable and are they even possible? Let's start a little bit about
the desirability or the driver. How serious is the threat here? Is the global temperature
record. It is some average of the
temperature over the globe. And what you can see
is that since 1900, up until the present,
the globe has warmed about 1.3 degrees
centigrade Celsius. There is no dispute about that. The globe is getting warmer. It's been getting warmer
since the 1700s. As we came out of the ice age, 1.3 degrees in about the last hundred, 120 years. If you listen to the U.N. and read the reports, a comparable warming,
another 1.3 or 1.4 degrees is expected
over the next 80 or 100 years. And the question
everybody is concerned with is what will be the impacts of that warming, both on
ecosystems and on societies. That's a highly unsettled issue. But we can get some guidance
by looking back to 1900. And what you discover
is that humanity has prospered since 1900, even as the globe
warmed by 1.3 degrees. The population grew
by a factor of five. There were five times more people on the globe
now than they were in 1900. The life expectancy
went from 32 years to 72 years. Today, globally,
the fraction of people who are literate
went up by a factor of four. The GDP per capita
went up by a factor of seven. You can go on and on. And maybe most relevant
to the climate discussion. The death rate from extreme
weather events went down by a factor of 50. It is hard to believe that another 1.3 degrees of warming
is going to significantly retard or even reverse
this kind of progress. Some people say we have broken the weather already
and we're seeing the effects of climate change. Well, maybe. But if you look at the data on economic impacts,
that's not so obvious. This is the rate of weather related losses
as a percent of GDP for the globe
over the last 30 years. And what you can see
is that the vertical scale is in tenths of a percent
per year. There are big fluctuations
from year to year again, but the overall trend
is downward. And so we're actually losing
less economic activity to extreme weather than we were 30 years ago. If you read the IPCC reports, not the summaries
for policymakers, which are a pale reflection of
what's actually in the report, what you find is that it is toug extreme
weather events showing a trend. And here are some direct quotes. There's no confidence in long
term trends in tropical cyclones, hurricanes,
frequency or intensity. Low confidence in mid-latitude
storms, trends in tornadoes, hail,
lightning are not really robust. We detected
you can go on and on. There are some trends
that we see. For example, precipitation over most of the land
has gotten lumpia. And of course, as temperatures
go up, the incidence of higher temperatures
has gone up as well. Nevertheless,
we are bombarded in the media with phenomena
that are purported to do to climate change
that portend disaster. One of my favorites here
is about Greenland losing ice. And here's the headline from The Guardian,
which is a paper in the U.K. a couple years ago, also a
national press release in March. Greenland's ice sheet is melting
seven times faster in than it was in the 1990s. They've got this great picture. And then the Texas glaciers, the rate of ice
loss has risen from 33 billion tons
a year in the nineties to 254 billion tons a year in the past
decade. Wow. It sounds like
it's getting worse and worse. This contributes to sea level
rise as the ice melts and so on. Well, you know, as a scientist, I've learned not
to trust anything in the media. But to go back to the data
or the scientific reports. And so I did and I actually published
in The Wall Street Journal just about a year ago. The data, not my data. The official data from the
Danish Meteorological Institute. And this is the amount of ice
that Greenland loses every year
averaged over ten years. And sure enough,
if you go from 1990 up to the mid teens,
it went up a lot. But looking at this,
you say, ha, it also went up in 1920 a lot. And in 1930,
it was almost losing as much ice every year as it was recently. And in fact, it's been going
down for the last couple years, even as human influences grew
steadily during the century. So this has got very little, if anything, to do
with global warming. In fact, it's got to do
with variations in the North Atlantic. Nevertheless, the newspaper, if you did know anything,
you read the newspaper, you'd say, Oh, my God. Right. So digging a little bit
deeper is really important economic impact. All right. Here is the IPCC writing
about seven or eight years ago, direct quote
out of one of their reports. For most economic sectors,
the impact of climate change will be small relative
to the impacts of other drivers. Changes in population
age, income, technology, lifestyle will have an impact
that is much larger than climate change. Here's a recent review paper. It shows
if the Globe were to warm by 4.3 degrees. Remember, the U.N. is talking about two degrees
or less in 2100. How much of a hit would you have
on the global economy? And leaving apart
all of the detail? What you can see is that the vertical scale
is measured in percent. That means that the economy in 2100
would be a few percent smaller than it might have been otherwis You don't
hear that in the papers. I'm not going to go through
that, too. All right. So let's now turn to the question that gives a little bit of sense
of just how strong the justification is for large
and rapid reductions. Let's talk about whether they're
desirable or not. And in order to do that,
I want to take a look at global demographics and development. This is the global population,
both historically and then projected out
to mid-century. And what you can see is that would just cost
8 billion people this last year. And this projection says
will get to a bit more than 9 billion people
by the middle of the century. As you can see,
most of that growth is in Asia. In the OECD countries, North
America and Europe, population is very
slowly growing, if at all. As people develop economically,
they use more energy. This graph is one of my favorite
graphs in the subject. And what it shows is the annual energy
consumed per person per year plotted against the GDP
per capita per year
for different countries, U.S. going on down the list. And what you can see
is that there are some countries like the U.S. and Canada up here
that use a lot of energy per capita, but
also have a pretty high income. There's a whole other
swath of countries down here in the middle,
including the EU, Japan, that have slightly lower energy
consumption. But comparable
standards of living. And then what is sobering,
though, is that there are only about a billion
and a half people in the upper part of this graph. The other six and a half billion
people are down here somewhere. And you can be sure
that their energy use is going to grow
as they develop. The inequalities are astounding
when you look at them. This is what energy poverty
looks like when you're doing your cooking
or heating what's called
traditional biomass, wood and dung being burned
for cooking and heating. The indoor air pollution kills 2
billion sorry, 2 million people a year. Dining by candlelight is romantic,
but not studying by candlelight. And if you don't have energy,
modern electricity,
this is what you do. Quantitatively, the U.S. per capita energy consumption
is 30 times that of Nigeria. And there are 3 billion people
in the world who use less electricity
every year than the average U.S. refrigerator. We should hope that these folks develop, that
they get more energy to do that. When when you combine
the demographics and the development, you can see that
global energy concern option is going to go up by about 50% over the next 30 years. Most of that growth again
coming from Asia and a bit from Africa. If you take current policies,
no changes in government policies, that additional energy
is going to come largely from fossil fuels. Yes, renewables will grow wind and solar, but in fact it's
going to be coal, oil and gas. Unless something unexpected
happens. Fossil fuels have surprised
about 80% of the world's energy
for the last 30 years. You can see here fossil fuel line
over here again, about 30 years. Coal, oil and gas over here, little bit of nuclear wind
and solar down over there. Yes, they're growing rapidly,
those renewables, but they're still a small fraction
of the world's total. And as those countries grow, the fossil
fuels are the most reliable and convenient way
for them to get their energy. Here is what the EIA, the U.S. Energy Information Agency projects
is going to happen to emissions or out to 2050. Here we are today. This is historical data. The OECD, the developed world, 30 some odd countries
in the developed world emissions will be flat
if not slightly declining, whereas the non OECD countries,
the developing world will see a strong growth
in their emissions. And remember, you got to drive
this curve to zero if you want to stabilize
human influences and allegedly stop the temperature
from increasing. One of my favorite social scientists,
I don't have many favorite social scientists,
but Anthony Downes is one I've been reading quite a bit
and a very interesting guy. He was working at UCLA
in the sixties and he was watching the smog
in the basin get worse and worse as more and more people
acquired automobiles. And he wrote this
really interesting paper in 1972 in which he said the elites
environmental deterioration is often the common man's
improved standard of living. And so when people say the science compels
us to make rapid reductions, the appropriate response from the developing world
is, what do you mean us? So here's the Indian Prime
Minister Modi, a year ago saying the colonial mindset
hasn't gone. We are seeing
from developed nations that the path that made them
develop is being closed to developing nations. And then the Nigerian
president said Africa is being punished by the
decisions of Western countries to end public financing for
foreign fossil fuel projects. By the end of 2022, we are going
to continue to fight. We have fossil fuels
that should be exploited. So I think a central question
that should be asked of anybody who advocates for rapid reductions
in global emissions is what are you telling
the Third World? Another dimension of the moralit at least in the West, I think we have robbed your generation
of optimism. Here are people
demonstrating in London that believe that the Earth
is going to be uninhabitable in a decade or so. And I always wanted
to put a picture of Miley Cyrus in one of my talks. I found the appropriate quote. She said a couple of years ago,
We're getting handed a piece of shit planet. And I refuse
to hand that down to my child until I feel like my kid
would live on an earth with fish in the water.
I'm not going to bring in another person
to deal with that. Entirely unjustified pessimism
and just not very healthy. Mentally. And I think the third question we need to ask is can we make
large and rapid reductions? I think one of the things to understand is that
energy is provided by a system, whether it's fuel for vehicles
or electricity. And those systems evolve
only over decades. This shows sources of U.S. energy for over almost 70 years. And what you can see is that the shifts
in how the country gets its energy evolve
only over decades. We started with wood, and then we got coal, and then
we got oil and gas and so on. And interestingly,
each news source piled on top of the other. It didn't displace it, except
in the last couple of decades, natural gas has been displacing
coal, and renewables are starting
to displace coal as well. You work tricity generation, so you don't want to change
energy systems very rapidly. They change slowly
because the facilities last a long time, power plants
last 50 years, and the system
needs to be highly reliable. So you don't tinker with it
without thinking it through. So the world is headed,
or at least the developed world is headed to this all renewable,
all electric world. And like Wiley Coyote here,
we have realized that there are some fundamentals
that are not going to spell a good outcome for this. Let me take
you through some of those. The electrical grid is central
to plans to decarbonize the U.S. and Europe. We would like our electricity
to be clean, no local pollution, but in this context,
no CO2 emissions as well. We would like it
to be affordable and we would like
our electricity to be reliable. That triangle is very difficult
to satisfy if you want to be affordable
and reliable. We have coal, we have gas, not very friendly
in terms of CO2 emissions. If you want to be affordable and
clean, you got wind and solar. But terribly unreliable,
as I will show you in a moment. And if you want to be clean
and reliable, you've got nuclear power. Carbon capture and storage. We do not know. Currently how to square
this triangle, so to speak. If you want to build a grid
with wind and solar only, which seems to be the current
fashion, the most expensive part
is reliability, as I'm about to show you. So again, real data. This is
the amount of electricity, the fraction of electricity
generated by wind in the UK for six months
that span the end of 2022 2021. And what should impress you
is the variability of this due
entirely to the weather, the wind patterns
that afflict the UK. And what you can see
is that there are sometimes long periods, 11 days in which the wind doesn't
produce much electricity at all. This is a pretty common
phenomenon. It happens in Texas. It happens in Germany. The Germans gave a name to it. It's called
Don't go Out in German. You'll forgive my pronunciation. And what that means is
dark stillness. So neither the wind is producing
electricity, nor is the solar. And those periods
are pretty significant. And what that means is that you
had better have a backup system that's at least as capable as the wind. And therefore, electricity
is going to be at least twice as expensive as what you thought it would be
for just wind and solar. Here's a study
that was done by my good friend Nate Lewis,
who's a professor at Caltech. And Ken Caldeira, who's a professor up at
was a professor up at Stanford. How much does
electricity cost in the US? If you want to be reliable
at 99.99%, that means the electricity
should be there except for one day
out of a decade. That's the current U.S.
standard. And you can see natural gas,
natural gas with carbon capture and storage,
natural gas with solar wind. When you're down about a 10th of a dollar $0.10
a kilowatt hour. If you want to run with nuclear
costs, go up a little bit. But if you want to run wind
only or wind and solar, the costs
are significantly greater. So anybody who tells you
that renewables will be cheap is just not paying attention
to the data. Wind and solar also have issues
with how much land they use. They're diffuse energy sources, so you need a lot of land
to capture enough of it. This shows
how much land gets used by various ways
of producing electricity. There just look wind uses
72 square kilometers terawatt hours per year. You get down to some of these
other technologies, it's much less. Another problem that has gotten
a lot of attention recently is that these modern technologies
use a lot more fancy materials than do the conventional energy
technologies. So for example, an electric car
compared to a conventional car uses about seven times
more fancy stuff copper, lithium,
nickel, manganese, cobalt, graphite
than does a conventional car. For power generation,
electricity, wind uses about nine times more fancy stuff
than does natural gas. And the question is, can the world provide
enough of these exotic materials in order to scale up
the technologies at the pace
that many people envision? Even worse, currently,
a lot of that material comes from not very friendly places. A lot of somebody has just
written a book about cobalt. You can see that
60 or 70% of the world's cobalt comes from the Democratic
Republic of the Congo. Not a very friendly place
in terms of human rights or environmental friendliness. Similarly,
a lot of the processing of the variants of nickel,
cobalt, lithium, so on comes from China. Not so good either for the U.S.. Okay. Let me close with some specifics
about energy. It's kind of hard
to make predictions, but you can see some broad
trends. What I think will happen,
coal use is going to rise. It's already rising. India, I think, is projecting
8% rise in coal next year. They need the electricity. Eventually it will be
it will decline as the developing world moves on
and other sources become more economic. Natural gas. We're going to see more
and more natural gas both in the developed world
and the developing world. What's not to like? It's clean, no particulates. It's got half the greenhouse
gas emissions of coal per unit energy. And in some countries
like the US, it's abundant. Even Europe has 100 years worth
of natural gas in the ground. If they chose to get it out. Hydrogen, another current fad. I think it's
unlikely for passenger cars. There are just too many problems
with it. Technically. You might see it
for heavy transportation and it might be possible
as a way to store energy for the grid. When you have wind
and solar producing and then using it at night
or when the wind is calm. We're going to see in
growing electrification, it's already underway for light duty
vehicles, for passenger cars. But you worry about the grid
capability. Can you provide all that
electricity and all that power, the charging infrastructure
and critical materials? Again, as I mentioned, for building heat, we're going to see heat pumps
in temperate climate, but I can tell you
it's got drawbacks. So this past week, I was up in
Palo Alto at Stanford and staying in an apartment near
campus that was all electric. Okay, so heat
pumps in the rooms, induction stove, top and cooktop,
electric stove and so on. And unfortunately,
Tuesday afternoon we had terrible winds,
knocked out the electricity for large areas of Palo Alto,
Menlo Park, and in general, the peninsula. And I can tell you,
I had no heat. I had no light in this all
electric modern apartment. Whereas places
I live in in the East Coast used to have natural gas
for heating and cooking. So, you know,
relying on a single source, namely the grid for everything
is not necessarily a very resilient alternative. Wind and solar. We're going to grow,
but we're going to have to have that backup
nuclear power efficient, I think will be
an important part of the grid if we really
want to go to zero emissions. I can say something about fusion in the questions of people
are interested in supply chains. Also critical matters to us
through the Inflation Reduction Act is starting to try
to bring supply chains back domestically, or at least
to friendly countries. And we're going to see
a lot of recycling, also batteries
and other material. All right. You know, if you ask me,
what do I think the world is going to do rather
than what it should do, I think the dominant response
to a changing climate is going to be adaptation. Adaptation is agnostic,
which is good. It doesn't matter
whether the climate is changing for human causes
or natural causes. It's proportional
to climate changes or, you know, you adapt a little bit,
changes a lot, you adapt a lot. It's local adaptation,
it's a local phenomena. It doesn't require
global action, which we're having
a very difficult time getting. And it's a lot easier
to sell politically when it's
here and now. For people. It's also autonomous. It's what society does. Maybe one of the defining
characteristics of humans and it's effective, as I showed you,
as the world has managed 1.3 degrees over the last hundred
and 20 years and people live everywhere from Hudson
Bay down to the equator, we change society
appropriately to manage. All couple of final thoughts and
then we can get on to dinner. One of the reasons I started
speaking out already about six or seven years ago is we must not Gruber
ize climate science or energy. What do I mean by Google Ice? Well, Jonathan Gruber is still a professor of economics at MIT. He was one of the principal
architects of the Affordable Care Act when he was working
with the government back about a decade ago. And Professor Gruber, at one point
after the Affordable Care Act was passed,
said at a conference, lack of transparency was a huge is a huge political advantage. It was really, really critical
to getting the Affordable Care Act passed Obamacare. At least one key provision
was a very clever basic exploitation of the lack
of economic understanding of the American voter. Now, whatever
you think about the Affordable Care Act, and I actually think it's a good thing
for an academic to say this and to believe
this is just so wrong. And I would assert
that the same thing is going on with climate and energy
right now. When you misrepresent things
in order to persuade people rather than to inform them, you take away
the right of the public to make fully informed
decisions. You distract from more urgent
needs. And boy,
do we have many of them. You tarnish scientific inputs to other important
policy matters like pandemics, and you depress young people. And that's really why I decided
to speak out and publish the book
just about two years ago. All right. That's enough of throwing
tomatoes at everybody. What do I think we should do? The first thing is we've got
to cancel the climate crisis. This is not a crisis. We have the time to deal
with it. Acknowledge that there is a task
and a challenge here. I think we need better representations
of the situation to non-experts and we need to improve
climate and energy literacy. You know, I teach at NYU
still at the master's level climate in the fall, and energy
now do weekly lectures. And what I find is that
the students eyes are opened up in both classes, both about what
the climate science really says and what the possibilities are
for changing the energy system. We need
to keep studying the climate. You know, climate is a 30 year. We have not very good data
going back about 100 years. We need to do a better
job of that. I think we must not constrain
the developing world's energy supply. Right now
they need the energy and fossil fuels are the best way
for them to get that. You know, telling them
that they can't emit is like telling the starving person you've got to worry
about your cholesterol. There are more immediate
needs that they have, and it's immoral
not to let them do that. I think we need a greater focus
on adaptation. There's no framework yet,
no estimate of costs, and we need to promote
the resilience of developing
countries in order to adapt technology. Or more generally, innovation is going to be really important
to reducing emissions. I think now today, vision storing electricity
for the grid, managing the grid batteries, non carbon,
chemical fuels are all things
that I would be pushing hard on doing research demonstration on. And then lastly, you know, energy touches just
about everything in society. It's complicated. Nobody has written down graceful decarbonization
strategies that respect technology,
development, economics, regulation and behavior. That's a task
that needs to be done if we're going to tackle
this problem at all. And with that,
thanks for your attention and I hope I'm stimulate
some good dinner table conversation
and we'll look forward to comments
and questions over dessert. Thank you. I transition to the Q&A portion
of the evening. So what we're going to do
is that we're going to ask each of you
to line up at these two mikes. We're going to be alternating
between the two, come up and ask your question
to the speaker. And when you do, please
make sure to introduce yourself. So your name, your year, as well as your major
and the school you're from. And please
only ask one question at a time and then keep it brief. Thank you so much. Hi. So I have a question. Well, first of all,
let me say that I definitely agree
with a lot of the facts that you presented
in the second part of talk about just how difficult and complicated and in some ways seemingly impossible
it is to combat climate change. I think definitely I strongly
disagree about your means. And the thing I disagree
with most is it just seems that your means
are to not do anything. And so I am
I'm stealing this metaphor from my friend Ryan,
who I don't think is here, but I guess I'm just wondering what
you think about this metaphor. You know, if you have a rock and you've had this rock
for your whole life and it's helped you through
so many things and it got you a great job and
it got you a great relationship and you have a whole bunch of money and you
attribute it all to this. And then one day you learn that
it's actually a hand grenade. Like,
why would you keep the rock? So I'm curious your opinion on that. Okay. Well, let me correct
a misperception first. I mean, that's
what I was saying. Right. I don't think
is do nothing there. But I think it's do things
that are effective and do things that aren't worse
than the climate change itself. Okay. So do things thoughtfully. Do things in an appropriate
pace. Right. The story about the rock. The problem is you're still going
to need something that the rock does for you. And I just have to restate
the rock as a hand grenade. Yeah. Okay. But the rock is giving you
a lot of benefit and continues
to give a lot of benefit. All right. So you're going to replace it
with something that is going to blow up, right? The problem is we do not have in various dimensions
good replacements. The dimensions are economics, reliability, scalability,
and so on. So you would maintain
your position that you should keep the hand grenade? No, I think that's
that's a silly analogy. Right. Okay. Because we're not facing
an existential threat. It's not a hand grenade. At least according the IPCC. All right. Thank you. Okay. Hi. This. Yeah. Is it working? Yep. All right, cool. I can hear. Huh? Oh, that works. All right. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for your talk. It's really interesting. I'm ro in my first year here,
so my question is about. I know you, like, spent. You spent, like, forever
in climate science, so you're probably super familiar with, like,
the planetary boundaries model because it's a big deal nowadays
and people should Google it because it's cool. But one thing that's really interesting, I think in
that model is how it points out so many different crises
or not crises, but like problems
that we're dealing with aside from like carbon emissions. So stuff like the disruptions
to the nitrogen cycle and like problems
with biodiversity and like things
that the phosphorus cycle that are getting messed up in like emissions of all sorts
of other various chemicals that we're putting out
into the world that we don't know
what they're doing. So if you could like touch
on what you think the scale of
those problems is like, how immediate, how pressing
do you think they are? And then like,
what should we do about them? Yeah,
you raise a very good point that there
are a host of problems. Some of them
are more urgent than others, and some of them have a greater benefit to cost ratio. And there was a guy I just heard
him talk at Stanford last week named Bjorn Lomborg, who started already
20 years ago, seriously asking about benefit cost ratios
for many different things. And it's worth
looking at his research. There are papers he's written,
he's written a couple of books, and it turns out if you try to
do a sensible analysis, climate itself
is not a particularly cost effective thing
to be dealing with. There are other,
many more urgent problems public health being most obvious
literacy, energy and so on, that when you're
trying to do a rigorous, however imprecise, rigorous
analysis are much better ways to be spending
the world's resources right now. Doesn't say that. And he wouldn't say that
the climate is not an issue and it's something
we need to deal with. But when you make a priority
list, as he does and other people have done
similarly, it doesn't come up real high. Thank you. Lomborg Ello. OMB Oh. RG First name is Bjorn Borg or in. Hi, my name is Simran. I'm a junior studying
economics and data science. Thank you for your talk. I really enjoyed all the graphs
that you provided. And my question is about
the developing world and how, you know, some people think that
they shouldn't use fossil fuels and then some people,
like the Nigerian president, think they should because the developing are
developed countries use them. So I'm wondering how you think
overpopulation factors into it since a lot of these developing countries
populations are just exploding and they don't have
the resources to support people? I'll let me
put up my graph again so I can find that. So no, I want to go to this one. So you look at global energy,
right? And it's going up and it's
really going up for two reasons. One is the population goes up. But, you know, if we go from 8 billion
to 9 billion, that's a 12%
increase in the population. But you see
the energy goes up by 50%. So the dominant driver of energy
is development, not so much population. Yeah, there were problems in individual countries,
I'm sure, but overall it is the development
that is going to make a problem for us
and not so much the population. Okay.
And you can see that quantitate. I actually show a chart. My class, you look at the decade
by decade increases, population goes up not very much, but
the energy use goes up a lot. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Good. All right. Thank you very much again
for your talk. I'm Dean. I'm
a senior at Pomona. We talked a little bit before. I think that was like like grade analysis does enter
the economy at the at the heart of your talk.
I'm sorry. So I guess the center
of the economy at the heart of your
talk to say that, you know, humans will be find
obviously no dip in the economy does affect human lives,
um, human lives, but um, taking a slightly stance, we're going through like a mass
extinction event right now and relying on the economy
to relying on human, human adaptation
to save humans is one thing, but relying on economic
incentives and like, you know, but I'm at my end of the
of the market to save,
you know, animal lives might not necessarily work out. So I was wondering
like just generally about that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, I like animals
as much as the next person. Of course, the problem is, you know, if you're faced with a choice
one or the other, how do you strike that balance? Right? And I think, you know, the humans
win hands down. Okay. Um, at least for us
as a species, that doesn't mean you want to see the whale population decimated
to take a current example. And but you need to tend to
humans first. I think it's the Western
ethos, right? You want to tell people and I don't know where Bangladesh that
you can't have refrigeration as abundantly and as chiefly
as as people in the West because we need to save sea lions or something. That doesn't work. Okay, That doesn't work. So thank you for. All right. Hi. Um, I'm in a
thank you so much for your talk. I really enjoyed it. Um, my question has to do
with the dynamic effects renewable costs,
I think, especially solar. Over the past several decades,
we've seen some pretty impressive cost reductions. And I'm just wondering if you
think that will kind of affect and sorry, I also want to add
that we get more efficient, for example, at using some of the minerals and
etc., that you're mentioning. And so I'm wondering
if you think that might complicate your diagnosis. I do. I did note that you noted
batteries as a as an aspect of. Yeah. Okay. So there's several
different issues, though. Let me try first. Solar costs have come down and right now the most expensive
part of a utility scale solar array is not the modules,
but it's the frames and all of the
what's called balance a system that you have to put in. It's more than half the cost
right now. So you've got to work on
those more conventional things like paying people
to go up on the roofs if it's residential or aluminum
frames or tracking systems and so on, you can have too much
of a good thing. As you probably know, in
California, solar is overbuilt and the utilities are cutting
back on the incentives because solar produces
during the day and you can only take
so much of it, it doesn't produce it naturally. You got to put in storage that's got its own issues and
you can try to incentivize that. So again, it's a system issue
and trying to just put one technology
is not going to result in a balanced outcome. Um, I forgot there was
another part of your question. And just about
um, increasing efficiency and the kinds of minerals
we use to produce batteries. Oh yeah, right. So the minerals issue
was a real one. I said at the table,
and I'll repeat for everybody, we're projecting about a 50 30% shortfall in copper
demand ten years from now because you need copper to make
batteries and other things. The world only has a limited
amount of primo copper ore and if you want to go to lower
grade ores, it takes 15 years
to start a copper mine. All right. So nobody's thought about this. Well, people have. But for people
in their enthusiasm to deploy the new technologies,
it was like one of those worthy coyote moments. Oh, that's a problem, right? So I think for the critical
minerals, you can try to use them more efficiently. You can recycle, although if the demand
is growing, the recycling doesn't
help too much. And then you can look
for alternatives, substitution, people
trying to do all of that. So it's an issue. Thank you. Okay. Hello, My name's
Johansson Brown. I'm a I'm a first year here. I'm sorry. I didn't
I didn't catch your name. Hello. My name's Joe Holland Brown. I'm my first year here at CMC. You go to Slide
31 really quickly. 3131. I think the one with your book
on it. Oh, yeah, right. Yeah. Uh, let me find out first. That one. Yeah, that one right there. Okay, let's see. Um, doesn't have the best mouse. Totally. Fine. All right, there we go. Yeah. I think this slide right here
is something like, I really, like, took away with the that line
about the lack of transparency and then how this whole
presentation is really like trying to be transparent with people and, like,
give them information that, like other people
don't usually see. And I think in some ways
this almost detracts from our understanding
of climate change. And I think the United States
government as a whole and companies
that deal with fossil fuels need to be more transparent
with the people about the real issues
that are going on. And I really want to ask you about the ways
in which you feel. I, I think I know what I mean.
I know what I feel. But what you feel about the ways
in which companies, fossil fuel companies in specific have been detracting
against research into climate change. Like it doesn't make sense
for a company to research their own demise. So in what ways do you think
these companies have led the American public astray
dealing with climate change? Um, I don't know anything about the Exxon situation,
which is maybe the most famous, right? There are people who
claim Exxon knew. All right, So I don't
know anything about that other than what I read
in the papers. I do know when I was in BP, John Brown,
who was the CEO at the time, was one of the first fossil
fuel companies to stand up and say we need to deal
with reducing emissions. And that's one of the reasons
I was hired not to help them find oil,
but in fact to figure out alternative and renewable
energy technologies. That said,
you may have read in the papers last week BP is scaling back on its renewable investments because you can't make any money
at them. Right.
And that's true generally. So there are people in fossil
fuel companies who are unabashedly saying, and
I more or less agree with them, we provide a valuable product
for consumers. We're not going to make
any apologies for it. Chris Wright
is a guy to look up w our t. He's the CEO of something
called Liberty Energy and he wrote a remarkable
environmental statement a year or two ago. It's
worth reading. Okay. Thank you. I can tell
one story about Chris, which is good. I think it was one of the outdoor companies, RDR or Patagonia or something,
who was pushing a we've got to get off of fossil
fuels. We're going to divest ourselves
from fossil fuels. And Chris Wright, he actually
wrote a public letter and said, Where do you think the material
from which you make your products comes from? All the polymers and nylon
and so on? That made them a little bit
embarrassed. I think. Yeah. Hi, my name is Alecia. I'm a senior here at CMC. I'm a biology major. I have a clarifying question
for you. So am I understanding
you believe that climate change is happening
but that it's not? It shouldn't be cause for alarm
and that it's not a crisis? I am curious if you could define what would make climate change
a crisis. I know the World Health
Organization and many other scientific
journals have predicted hundreds of thousands of deaths by 2050. I know it's pretty
much it's pretty hard to predict the exact amount of harm
that's going to happen. But just going off that number,
you consider that number of deaths a crisis
and if not, how many people
would have to die for climate
change to be a crisis? Or are there
other measures you're going off saying that we shouldn't
be alarmed by this? Well, let's talk about deaths,
shall we do that? Sure. Okay. Here's one temperature
related deaths, right? This is from a study
in The Lancet, a pretty reputable journal,
medical journal. We found this paper
says we found 5 million deaths per year associated with non
optimal temperatures, accounting
for 9.4% of global deaths and equating to 74 temperature
related deaths per 100,000. Most excess deaths were linked
to cold temperatures, whereas fewer were linked
to hot temperatures by about a factor of ten. The global mean daily
temperature increased by 0.26 degrees per decade
during the early part of the 21st century, paralleled
with a large decrease of cold related deaths and a moderate
increase in heat related deaths. Okay. Well, what year is this? This is well,
I think this was for 20 years. In the first 20 years
of the century. Oh, I was talking about
in the future. Oh, like by 2050. All right. So I, I, I don't know
if I have the chart here. Michael Greenstone, economist
at Chicago, led a large team that did a study of temperature
related deaths for a moderate emissions scenario,
which is more or less what the IPCC expects now
somewhere between RCP, if you know
the language. RCP 4.5 and six. Yeah, the amount of excess deaths are consistent
with zero. There's a big uncertainty,
of course, but it goes both plus and minus. You take an extreme scenario,
RCP eight, then you get more deaths, then more than zero. All right. I think I have the graph
somewhere. If you write me an email,
I will send you a reference to the paper
and some of the charts. Okay? Okay. All right. I guess could you follow up on
the second part of my question, which was what would make
climate change a crisis? Do you like what data
I guess would have to. Sea level rising at a centimeter
a year? It's currently
three millimeters. Okay. What else temperature going up
That half a degree? A decade. Okay. Greenland
really starting to melt as opposed to the ups and downs. Okay. I don't see it. There's no long term
trend in hurricanes. No long term
trend in mid-latitude storms. The droughts that we see in California
are not very much different as far as we can tell from what we've seen 500
or a thousand years ago. So I would say something
really out of line to the historical record. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Hi, I'm Gabriel. I'm a senior at Pomona. I was going to ask
a different question, but I'll I'll follow up
on that one. Could we go to your
your sea level slide towards the beginning with the
the graph in Greenland. Oh, you want to Greenland
or a sea level graph. The one you showed in your
of the Greenland scarred. Yeah. I could find that very. Yeah. So regardless of
what's happening on that graph and it does actually look to me like there is a long positive
trend on there if you if you put a line of best
fit on there. The IPCC concludes that there's median confidence
that with two degrees of warming sea level rise between three
and one meters by 2100 and it has high confidence
that the sea level will continue to rise. Well, after that. So do you either disagree
with this finding now? I think it's a huge problem
or you do think it's a problem, but it's outweighed
by the negatives. Of avoiding it. If you're okay with it. I want to go through three
charts about sea level rise. Sure.
And which is a bit different than Greenland melting.
All right. Okay. So let's start
with historical context. All right? That's sea level,
as near as we can tell. Starting
when the last great glaciers started to melt
20,000 years ago. Okay. And you see it's gone up by 120
meters. 400 feet. Okay. It went up pretty rapidly over
here and then much, much rapidly starting about 8000 years ago. So the issue is not
whether sea level is rising. It's been doing that
for 20,000 years, having nothing to do with human influences. The real question
is whether it's accelerating or not, Right,
due to human influences. Good. So let's go to the next chart. This is the rate of sea
level rise in millimeters per year from a recent paper
cited by the IPCC. All right. And what you see,
it goes up and down a lot of natural variability. And you can get excited
about the fact that it's going up
for the last two decades. But it was going up before the rate was accelerating. I live in New York City. All right. This is not global sea level,
but this is sea level as measured at the battery,
the southern tip of Manhattan. There's been a tide gauge
measuring there for 160 years. This is the 30 year sorry, the 30 year
rate in millimeters a year. Surprisingly, it goes up
and down like that, averaging about three millimeters
a year over the last century. That's a foot a century. Manhattan has done
just fine under that. If you look at what
a Noah report in February said is locked
in, going to happen no matter what is that that graph is going to go up
to where the Red Star is. All right. We'll know soon enough
whether that's true or not. Okay. So are you are you are
you disagreeing with Noah's conclusion
that that's likely? I would say I bet my house
that that's not going to happen. And you're
and you're disagreeing with IPCC conclusion
that it's likely to see 0.3 between 0.3
and one meters by 2100. So point three, that's a pretty big range, 0.3
to 1, right? Yes. But so point three is consistent
with the three millimeters a year that the sea level
is going to go up, that it might go up
a little faster. Fine. I won't disagree with that,
but it's not obvious, right? I don't know if it's obvious. I just know that the conclusion
by the IPCC is that it's got medium
confidence of happening. So what I would say is IPCC,
if you can explain that the historical data
with variations of the scale that you're predicting,
then I'll start to believe you. And they can't. Thank you. Okay, I Professor Kunin,
my name is Jenny Kim, and I'm a senior at Claremont
McKenna studying environment,
economics and politics. Coming from a quote unquote developing country myself,
I think your presentation did not really address the fact
that, you know, I know you mentioned
the case of Nigeria, but some developing countries are actually very excited
about renewable energy and have taken a lot of projects
and they have also created their goals to, you know, become carbon
neutral or whatever term
you want to decide to use. And I'm wondering what your
thoughts are on that, because, you know, developing countries
have their agency, too. And like if you're going by that Modi
quote that you used, you know, we shouldn't be imposing
like these models on them. But at the same time, this also posit
that they are only going to use, you know, fossil fuel energy. And I would one, I would love to pick your brain
on like your thoughts on developing countries
actively choosing to use renewable energy. If a country decides to go
that way, more power to them. I think the problem I have is
that when we sit in our rather comfortable surroundings and tell them how to make choices, that's
where I have a problem. Okay. And if I could ask a quick
follow up question. You know, the US is considered
a very developed country, but there are people within the United States who feel the effects of climate change
very, very differently. And so
what do you do about that? And your comment
that maybe perhaps it's not the most urgent issue? I think there are urgent issues
in the US associated with energy costs that you can read in the paper
about people's electricity bills going up by factors of three
or more about gasoline prices
people are quite upset about. People cannot afford the capital
investment to buy an EV. Right now the government is handing out
70 $500 incentives sometimes. So it's not just climate change that people are feeling
the effects of. People also often confuse
climate with weather. Okay,
Most of the weather we're seeing is not unusual,
not unprecedented. Right. The atmospheric rivers, you know, the Bay Area
got clobbered in 1861 by an atmospheric river much greater than anything
we've seen subsequently. A lot of it is weather. Right. So we should respect zoning rules. People maybe shouldn't
be living in Miami Beach because it's low,
but it's been low all the time, etc.. All right. Thank you so much. I'm trying to find a graph. I can find them. Sorry. Go ahead. Oh, hello, I'm Maya. I'm a freshman from Harvey Mudd. And thank you
so much for your talk. Um, there were a lot of things
that I wouldn't have considered. I was just wondering. Just like, you know,
taking intro biology right now, a lot of the arguments
that they seem to be telling us in class
is that a lot of it is positive feedback loops in terms of there
being more greenhouse gases. And so I think the worry is that
we'll go beyond a point where everything will
just keep accelerating. And I think also that you did a really good job
of showing us that there are so many different graphs that
show so many different things. And obviously, you know,
I've seen a lot of graphs that show
opposite things as well. And so I think a lot of it
is that we really don't know. And I think that because it is something
so important as, you know, the Earth and that arise
might end up being permanent and, you know, forever
changing ecosystems and living conditions
and things like that. Basically the worry that
it's irreversible. And so what what
do you think, too, in terms of like what we know versus
what we know in terms. We don't know how warm the globe is going to get even
for a given amount of emissions, We don't know how much
it would cost to reduce the emissions. We don't know
what the benefits would be if we reduce the emissions because the climate
keeps changing even without human influences.
Right. Somebody said, what about
we confuse climate change, which means human induced
with a changing climate. The climate has changed forever. Yeah. And so when people say we're
going to stop climate change, they should be very precise
about what they say. So we don't know how the climate is going to change
in the future. No knowledge is going to cost. And so we're supposed to spend
in trillion dollars on this when there are many more real,
immediate and soluble problems
that we could be addressing. I see. Thank you. I want to put up next, please. Oh, hello. My name's Hello, My name is Aidan
and I'm a sophomore professor. And I was just curious,
you mentioned in your graphs a lot of measuring of like GDP
and GDP per capita. And I was just curious, like, is that should that be the way
we, like, measure the, like, quality of, like a nation
or for GDP per capita, the quality of a life
for a person? Like sometimes
if I do the two statistics, I don't really know
that affects me. Should
there be a different measurement we should use that's
more comprehensive? Yeah. So so there is there are such other measurements,
something called the Human Development index. I think that the
UN promulgates which has got income does figure into that, but it's logarithmic
rather than linear. Okay. And maybe there should be
a different measure. But I think
as a general principle, people
with more money are happier. And I think you see that
nobody voting to be poor, but particularly down
in the lower part of that graph, I mean, those people who would
want to trade positions with those folks right now. So, yes, you can have a
different measure on the margin. But I think the general trend
that you want to be moving up that scale is unimpeachable. I want to show you
this one graph before we go on or this is,
I think, another powerful graph about confusing weather climate. Did I answer your question?
Okay. Do you want. Oh, thank you. Okay, good. So in Egypt, there is a device that measures
the height of the Nile River all the time. And that device
called the water. Nile Ometer has been in
existence since 830 or 40 A.D. and we've got pretty good
records of the height of the Nile
every year from, well, actually, I'm sorry, 640
the time of Mohammed, all the way
up to about 1500. Okay. So what this data shows is
the minimum height of the Nile every year
for the roughly 900 years. And there's lots to learn from
this one is there were big fluctuations
from one year to the next. This one is down over here
at less than one meter. And the year before, it was up
at four and a half or something. Right. So what fluctuations? The second is that
even when you take a 30 year average time, it is defined
as a 30 year average of weather. You get this red
curve and remarkably, it goes up and down as well. There are long term, it's
what's called red noise, long term fluctuations
in the climate. And you can just imagine
as the river became drier and drier
over that hundred years, there was some medieval
Egyptian climate panel that was saying new normal,
new normal, Right. No human influences here at all. And then if you just wait another 100 years,
it comes back again so you can be fooled. Right. And when you ask the IPCC,
do your models have this kind of long term behavior in it,
they say, we don't know. So that's
why a little bit of caution in saying, oh,
my God, is warranted. Right. Okay. Thank you. I'll try to get as fast
as I know. We're running out of time. Thank you so much
for your time tonight. I feel like one of the main
conclusions of your presentation was that we need to cancel
the climate crisis. And correct me, I'm wrong, but I feel like you had two
main arguments here. One, the resources
could be better spent in a different place. And two,
we don't want to inhibit the access to energy
in developing countries. Yep. And so I had a couple
of quick questions about this. I feel like in terms of these actual protests,
I think they're mostly focused on reducing, you know, fossil
fuel use in developed countries and on top of that,
I think countries like climate, countries like
China have been pretty clearly, you know, willing to fund
and invest in fossil fuel extraction programs
in developing countries. And I don't think that's going
to change with these protests. And secondly, I think that it's also been pretty clear
that governments don't always just because
we're not spending on one thing doesn't we're going to find else
that's important. And you seem to agree
that this is a problem we're gonna have to address
at some point. Right. And it does
have certain bad effects. And so in terms of protests that are mostly just
pushing for developed countries to try to reduce
fossil fuel use. Do you think there's any harm
to that, aside from depressing young people,
which, you know, I like at some point,
that's more of a personal thing. Oh, you know,
they're kind of micro effects. And then there are global
effects at the micro level. If we were to stop burning coal, that's got a pretty small impact
on economies. West Virginia
would certainly have an issue. There may be good economic reasons
to stop burning coal, and we're probably on the way
to doing that anyway because we're burning gas
instead of coal. I at the global level, it is a global emissions
problem. And even if the developed world went to zero emissions tomorrow at great disruption
and significant cost, it would not stop
the developing world from emitting and remember, if emissions stop,
all you've done is stabilized human influences
or the concentration you haven't reduced it. So it's a pretty thin lever
on which to balance things. The other,
you know, is the big movement about divestment, right? And endowment and so on. That's entirely misguided. If the climate
colleges were to sell the fossil
fuel stocks in their endowments, somebody else
would just buy them. And so what good have you done so much? Please join me in thanking Dr. Koonin
for joining us this evening. Thank you all for your lovely engagement
with the program and for asking
such amazing questions. We hope to see you all here
back at Vietnam soon. Thank you
so much. Have a great night.
