What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters (Steven Koonin)

welcome to the michael shermer show i'm your host michael shermer my guest today is stephen coonan his new book is called unsettled what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters i knew stephen when he was a provost at caltech when we had our celtic science lecture series through the skeptics and um and i i know of his work as a theoretical physicist and so on this book i was a little apprehensive about having him on because i've already had bjorn lomborg and michael schallenberg on and he got some flack for that even though they're not really climate deniers in the traditional sense and neither is stephen so we get into that we go through the um the big five questions as i always phrase this this whole subject is the earth getting warmer is human activity the primary driver of the warming how much warmer is it going to get what are the effects of the warming and what we should do about it so he agrees the earth is definitely getting warmer and human activity is really probably the primary driver of that although he points out the natural cycles of of of heating and cooling and storms and droughts and so on but still nevertheless the there there is some effect going on there but what he focuses on in the book and in our conversation is the levels of uncertainty in the ipcc reports themselves and other government agencies and he's been part of all that i give him a proper introduction here for his bio he's a leader in science policy in the united states he served as the under secretary for science in the u.s department of energy under president obama trump where he was lead author of the department strategic plan in the inaugural quadrennial technology review with more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the field of physics and astrophysics scientific computation energy technology and policy and climate science dr coonan was the a professor of theoretical physics at caltech also serving as caltech's vice president and provost for almost a decade he's currently a university professor at new york university with appointments in the stern school of business the tandon school of engineering and the department of physics and this bio goes on and on in other words he's the real deal he's a world-class scientist he's not a climate denier um and i think our conversation uh well addresses the levels of uncertainty i i did take the um the host prerogative to look up uh all the critical reviews of his book and i read them that sentence by sentence but i read the central critical points of the book and then he responded he was familiar with all of them he knew he knows these other scientists that critique him he has responses to their critiques which he respects and acknowledges and then but has a rebuttal and i think that's the way science is supposed to work i will include those in the show notes that go along with the show and um and to me the most interesting part is well what do we do about all this because there are no as tom seoul says there are no solutions they're just trade-offs so what are the trade-offs if we do x y or z depending on the problem and what's the time horizon and so on so i thought it was a very interesting and constructive conversation about getting our minds around the central points of the debate and the topic of climate science so i hope you appreciate this conversation if you uh like the show give us some support at skeptic.com donate that's our primary source of supporting the podcast through the skeptic society we are a 501c3 nonprofit so if you like the podcast and our work in combating pseudoscience and irrationality and teaching promoting science and critical thinking then do give us a little love there skeptic.com donate thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation unsettled what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters well one thing that matters in this conversation is politics unfortunately ever since uh climate science got bundled with al gore and the democratic party it's become kind of politicized such that i think people on the right the moment they hear global warming or climate science they think oh that's one of those libtard causes and i have to be against that so uh you know unfortunately we have to we have to talk about what your own publisher put below your name which is to say former under secretary for science u.s department of energy under the obama administration because of course if it had said the trump administration or bush administration people would go oh one of those so give us a little bit of background i i remember you from caltech and you have a lifelong career as a theoretical physicist and uh and so on how did you get interested in in this particular topic kind of give us the a brief bio yeah so so um i was educated at in new york city public schools grew up in a middle class household uh went to caltech as an undergrad because it was the late 60s and california looked much more interesting than new york at that time uh back at mit for a phd and then back at caltech where i was on the faculty for 30 years and was the provost for the last nine of those years uh trained in nuclear physics apart quantum mechanics did a lot of wonderful research in the late 80s i joined a group called jason which is a group of mostly academic scientists and engineers who work on the most important problems for the us government many of them classified and in the late 80s and early 90s i got exposed to climate science because the department of energy came to jason and said well what about applying then new multiple processor computers to climate modeling and small satellites to climate observations and i got intrigued with that and learned a bit about climate science climate observations climate modeling um along in the uh late 90s early 2000s i started to get interested in energy through conversations with colleagues and the opportunity came along in 2004 after i had been provosting for nine years to go be the chief scientist at bp john brown who was the ceo called me up and said steve come help out figure out what beyond petroleum really means they didn't need me to find oil and gas they were pretty good at that and so i picked up the family in 2004 and moved to london uh shifted from academia to the private sector um and for about a year and a half i'd like to joke i was the world's highest paid graduate student uh as i learned energy you know i mean i know energy is conserved but this is practical energy and it was wonderful experience and i helped them quite a bit i think part out their initial foray into renewables particularly biofuels but also wind and solar um after living in london for five years my wife was getting kind of tired of that as i was um and my friend steve chu uh nobel prize winning physicist now at stanford uh became the secretary of energy and he said come help out and so i spent two and a half for obama uh this was in early 09 as the obama administration was forming up um and uh i wound up doing pretty much what i did for bp in the department of energy namely figuring out technology strategies what technology should the government be investing in in order to reduce emissions to improve energy security how should it go about the process from basic research to development to demonstration to deployment which technologies really mattered could make a difference and so on and i did that for uh two and a half years the average time for a senate confirmed appointee is 18 months or so so i stuck it out and felt i i made a lasting impact and and then i i left the administration and went to new york university to start a center about big data for big cities that seemed like a very interesting thing to do at the time and new york was a great place to do it did do that for six years and early on in that period about 2014 i was asked by the american physical society the society that represents 50 000 physicists worldwide to have a look at their climate statement the statement that they had issued in 2007 about climate change it was already seven years old it was time to refresh it and the ipcc had just come out with their fifth assessment report at that time so it was a ripe time to have a look at climate science again i didn't want to just rubber stamp what the ipcc was saying or the media or the politicians we were physicists after all we're capable of understanding these things and we can't form an independent opinion about the data the quality of the modeling uh the projections and so on and so with a little bit of um effort i convened a workshop in brooklyn in early 2014 with three consensus expert climate scientists and three people who were not fully on board with the consensus and my committee from the aps which was five or six physicists and a number of other people in attendance and we sat and talked for a day about what did we know what didn't we know how good were the models what might happen in the future and so on all of that is was recorded on a transcript which is available on the web so people can read it and i came away a little bit shaken or unsettled if you like from that discussion realizing that the science was not as solid as i had been led to believe i hadn't really looked deeply at the science until that time it was focused mostly on the technology and um one thing led to another and i wound up writing an op-ed in the wall street journal in the fall of 2014 outlining some of the really significant problems that we have in the models and in our ability to reliably project the future in the subsequent years i watched the gap between what the politicians the media were saying and what the scientific literature and the assessment reports actually said these days you hear the word climate crisis climate catastrophe emergency etc and that's not at all what the science says i'd like to quote or paraphrase a line from the princess bride you keep invoking the science i don't think the science says what you think it says um and i eventually got to the point where i decided to put it all down in a book it would the op-eds and the talks would just not allow me to go into enough detail uh present enough graphs and so on and so i wrote this book to try to give people a direct sense of what's in the official science as opposed to getting it filtered through the assessment reports and then the summaries for policy makers and the media and the politicians and so on give us a sense of what it's like to deal with a question like climate science from inside a place like a caltech versus a place like a bp and ngo and then inside a government agency how do people think about problems like that differently in those different environments yeah so in the academic environment it used to be and i'm not sure it is now you could discuss debate raise questions and all of that was in the process of refining the science that's how we do the science in the private sector it's much more goal focused and the goal ultimately is to make money in my case it was to try to skate to where the puck was thought to be namely how do we uh make bp into a company that is more respectful of the environment particularly in in climate uh and so they weren't so much interested in the science that was taken as gospel from the ipcc and in fact it was what technologies can we develop what businesses can we get into in order to try to make money which is after all what the purpose of the private sector is uh in by providing services and goods that people want um and there weren't many other people who could push back on the science even if i had raised the issue then um in terms of uh the government um you know the administration has a line and uh there's a saying if you're in the government if you take the king's shilling you've got to do the king's bidding or something like that and i could quietly discuss some of these things but anything outside of the administration was verboten you just couldn't do it and you know i got by dealing with the economic side of this or the demographics and economics simply by showing people the data and showing that there would be a massive energy growth in the next 40 to 50 years and that fossil fuels were and remain the primary source of the world's energy eighty percent come from fossil fuels these days still so those are the differences these days in academia i've got to say it's become a much more claustrophobic environment as i've discovered in going public with the book i actually knew it was going to happen you immediately get dumped upon in many most instances for non-scientific reasons um but some people raise good legitimate objections to what i wrote and i've been trying to respond to those uh as they arise yeah i have those teed up here we can get to those specific points later but use the term energy security what what does that mean from a government's perspective like it's our job as the government to make sure that our people citizens have enough energy to lead a a decent life not not not only uh have enough energy but that it is delivered reliably uh so let me make a distinction between security and reliability security uh is about the physical provision of energy fossil fuels uranium perhaps even some of the fancy hardware that goes into the electrical grid which is manufactured abroad and we saw a dramatic example of energy security in the arab oil embargo in the 70s when it was very difficult to get enough oil fortunately up until recently the u.s has been producing more oil than it actually consumes and so we become in that sense energy self-sufficient certainly true for natural gas uh these days largely because of of fracking uh a real world current instance of energy insecurity is what's going on in europe where they don't produce enough natural gas they need natural gas for heating for industry and for electricity generation and they're having to rely on imports mostly and increasingly from russia and that's not a very comfortable place to be geopolitically and so that's what we mean about energy security energy reliability is a different story and that is mostly is the fuel uh capable of being delivered continuously um you know the refining supply chain uh but more importantly is the electrical grid able to deliver 99.9 something percent of the time and we have dramatic instances recently of when the electricity fails all kinds of chaos that can happen so that's a little bit about energy security and reliability i live in the santa barbara area here now but and grew up in southern california and yes because of all the fires uh you know pg e pacific gas and electric was sued into oblivion because of their um non-upgraded equipment that was causing these fires and we're still having massive fires and i mean there are telephone poles outside of my house here that are being replaced slowly by southern california edison that are from like the 1940s and you know my wife's from germany and she's like my god you guys are so behind and it's like well you got bombed into oblivion so you got to just you got to start over fresh so we don't want to do that there's another there's another aspect of the electrical utility business and that these are regulated utilities and they cannot freely tend to the problems that they see but have to navigate carefully with the puc in the case of california the public utility commission and if the public utility commission says you've got to put in a lot of renewables and we're not going to give you money to trim those trees back then you've got a problem all right so a lot of the fire situation in california is a mix of forestry practices which have uh allowed the forest to grow development practices which places towns like paradise in the middle of a a tinderbox uh and changing climate some of which is certainly anthropogenic right smokey the bear has done such a good job at preventing forest fires that now there's a lot of fuel to burn absolutely you know fires in in the west if you go back to 1920 there were probably five times as many acres burned each year as there are currently and that happened even as the globe warmed right so it's a lot more complicated than just you know a warming planet yeah i drive an electric car i like to think that you know someday there'll be no more fossil fuel driven cars and that seems like a good thing to me but i don't see how that can happen without nuclear energy uh what is the current status of renewables solar wind geo engineering geothermal and so on without nuclear versus with nuclear yeah yeah so right so um a bigger picture on the grid for a minute okay we'd like the grid the electrical grid to have three things we'd like it to be affordable we would like it to be reliable and we would like it to be low emissions okay and you know there was an old statement in the cold war smart honest and communist choose two out of three right um so for the grid it's affordable it's reliable and it's clean choose two out of three if you want a grid that is affordable and low emissions wind and solar are the way to go all right the problem is first of all they're not very reliable that the wind blows when it blows and okay if you want it to be affordable and reliable then you've got gas coal nuclear but if you want to make that clean you need to get rid of the fossil fuels you need to have wind and solar but then you need some what's called firm or dispatchable power ways in which you can fill in the shortfall when the wind and solar don't generate and it's far back well batteries are certainly one possibility pumped hydro is another where you pump water up a hill and then let it come down when you need the electricity um converting electricity into some chemical uh hydrogen for example by electron electrolyzing water and then burning that chemical when you need the electricity again so there are a number of ways not only nuclear but i would say right now the only way of squaring that or triangulating that those three uh decederata uh is nuclear power and um it right now nuclear produces i don't remember what the exact number is 18 19 percent of the u.s electricity we know how to do it the problem is it's too capital intensive and too expensive when i was in the government and the government has since continued to try to build much smaller nuclear reactors in a standardized way right now our reactors are custom built and are typically 1.1 gigawatts of electricity if we can build a 50 or 100 megawatt one we can install them successively in a site you build them in a factory truck them are there or put them on rail and store on one after the other the problem is to get the cost down but first you got to get it licensed and that's undergoing at the moment so as you know i'm a nuclear physicist by training and i've great love for fission um but we'll see whether we can get it cheap enough to do that the thing that costs in a clean grid is not degeneration wind and solar are the cheapest ways of generating electricity but the grid is much more than generation and the most expensive part is ensuring reliability not insuring the electricity is the problem with nuclear in part psychological or social in the sense that um people fear it they fear what they can't see smell taste and touch and then you throw in some availability heuristic of of uh things like chernobyl and maybe a few movies like uh like the china syndrome which came out the same week as three mile island so people have conflated all this in their mind and you know the major cause of deaths in fukushima was not the nuclear power plant it was the the the the tidal waves right and the breaching of the wall and so on right right and so naturally trying to fix the plant yep yes right you know so the government then feels like well we gotta regulate this we can't have we can't have a chernobyl in our on our turf and then you end up getting a restriction of innovation because they're not allowed to have a period of failure trial and error and failure because the consequences are so high yeah i think it is largely a perception issue i would add uh to your list of reasons people uh don't like it uh is the association with nuclear weapons which are of course a terrible thing when they're used but they're useful when they're not used in deterrence um and then there's the waste issue all of that is technically soluble but there is the perception issue way back maybe 20 some odd years or maybe more 30 years spencer weird who's a great historian of science wrote a book called nuclear fear and he went through all the psychological reasons why people were not fans of of nuclear power but i think it's going to be absolutely essential if the world is going to get to zero emissions on the time scale it need thinks it needs to do yeah so what about nuclear fusion you remember cold fusion and that what a debacle that was even a gary tobbs wrote a book about that bad science it was you know one of the classic examples of that uh and you know every five years or so you hear little rumors like oh it's about to happen it's gonna happen in this experiment then it wasn't rip then they're not replicable and then it fades away for a while yeah yeah so so um you know fusion has gotten closer uh with advances which i'll discuss in a moment um but you know if you believe we need to solve our energy problems in the next 30 years given the time scale to develop demonstrate and then deploy i don't think it's going to be a very big part of the near to mid-term solution let me describe what the advances have been and then the world's mainline approach uh has been uh eater it's a big tokamak where you can find the plasma magnetically with magnetic fields uh it's being constructed in the south of france it involves i think seven national partners us uk or eu um or maybe uk these days as well i don't know uh russia china um japan um and it's two to three times over budget and a decade or more delayed the first plasma happens in a few years and the first introduction of fusible material uh sometime in the 2030s uh and then we get to build a demonstration plant all right um there have been two other developments that suggest maybe there are other ways of doing this uh one is the rise of private sector magnetic efforts um a company i've been consulting with in full disclosure for about 16 or 17 years except when i was in the government it's called tri-alpha and they've got a significant hundreds of millions of dollars capitalization and have been making good progress on demonstrating a different kind of magnetic confinement basically in a tube rather than in a doughnut we'll see again making good progress they're going to build their next machine in the next few years that will get closer to conditions where you could start to believe making energy another year and then there's another dude sorry go ahead oh it's going to say this may be too much detail but i don't know no no no this is all really this is gold and we have no heart out so we can get as detailed as you want so but i'm gathering from this that the idea of of a world uh operating on complete renewables which includes the whole basket of everything you just said is probably not going to happen until the 22nd century maybe i think that's a fair statement yeah yeah so in the meantime you have all these uh developing countries that that want to come online and join the developed world and they need energy and at the moment right um fossil fuels are still the way to go uh to get two or year three uh of the of that three-legged stool uh and and it's hardly fair it seems for us and uh europe the u.n the eu to say no no you can't do that well you know what are we supposed to do then well can we go nuclear no no you can't go nuclear okay so you know it it seems like uh we're kind of bumping up against a political issue there as well right yeah so and a moral issue i would say so to put some numbers on your statements which are perfectly correct and i agree with them 40 of the world's people right now that's 3 billion people don't have adequate energy and as they develop and improve their lives they need energy to do that and eighty percent of the world's energy right now is fossil fuels it is the most convenient and reliable way of getting them energy and people have used the term echo colonialism or echo imperialism for um what you described as the developed world telling the undeveloped world no no you need to use more uh expensive sources of energy i summarized it in the book with the line that i actually have been asking people for 17 or 18 years who is going to pay the developing world not to emit and i don't have an answer to that and i haven't heard a good answer from anybody else either so the dream of an emissions-free world by 2050 is completely ridiculous right right right that's not going to happen and the protocols and agreements that we uh go in and out of uh even if we met those even if all the uh un countries met them it still wouldn't have the kind of effect we like to think it would by say twenty two hundred um no and that seems another aspect right another aspect of that is your risk calculus how seriously do you rate the climate risk compared to all the other things you've got to worry about it's very different for those of us in the developed world versus somebody sitting in bangladesh or sub-saharan africa or even india i think they would say well you know the time at risk is a couple of generations away and it's pretty vague and my immediate needs are energy for a refrigerator or for lighting so i can study at night or whatever it is or mobility uh so uh let's get that first and then we can worry about reducing yeah one more emissions on that on the comparison of fossil fuels to nuclear uh you know no one died at three mile island or as some wags said more people died in the back seat of senator kennedy's car at chappaquiddick than died at three mile island it's true i mean if you look at the statistics nuclear is by far you know the lowest in deaths per megawatt hour produced by far by orders of magnitude i mean with coal you've got local pollution gas you've got the mining issues and so on so the safest is by far by experienced nuclear even with chernobyl three mile island these forty percent of the world that have uh energy in security i guess you'd call it what where are they getting their energy from are they still burning you know cow pies and and and wood and yeah so 80 conventional fossil fuels another 10 uh traditional biomass as it's called so yes cow pies or maybe a bit more brightly dung and wood and that's used mainly for heating and cooking and the local air pollution associated with that in the homes is just terrible and if you've ever been to a city in the undeveloped or underdeveloped world you smell the wood and dung burning uh just in the air walking around in the city that kills millions of people a year through local air pollution and so you know even though propane or lpg might emit carbon if you bring those fuels to such people uh clean burning uh then you've improved their health situation dramatically right but it's gradual enough those deaths that they don't make the news much like hans roseling used to point out that you know every single day 137 000 people are lifted out of poverty but it doesn't happen on a tuesday afternoon with a film crew at two o'clock and here they are they're no longer in poverty you know so it just happens over years and decades and no one notices and in the opposite direction would be these fossil fuel deaths related deaths you just don't see it but a three-mile island or a fukushima or a chernobyl that's you know a massive story of course of course and people i mean you know some people would say it sounds heartless every death matters but in fact uh what what we're really talking about are the large trends and the statistics uh in trying to deal with the climate problem and provide adequate energy at the same time so let's talk about um the core of your book here that you know what we know and what we don't know i i break it down into five different questions one is the earth getting warmer two is human activity the primary driver of the warming three how much warmer is it going to get and on what time scale now four what are the effects of this warming going to be depending on that time scale and five what should we do about it so um i i trust from uh read your book so i know you you agree yes the earth is definitely getting warmer and humans have some role from there i take it you diverge from some of your colleagues uh hell we actually held a conference at caltech the skeptics did and i had tapio schneider your colleague um you know kind of give us the overview i helped yeah i helped hire him he's a he's a feinstein oh oh nice right okay and uh but at this point i suspect you and he might diverge a little bit from the you know how much warmer is it going to get then to what role yeah do non-human activities play a role and so on so so let's let's talk about how much warmer is so let's back up a minute uh you know the climate changes for a number of reasons not just uh co2 there are other greenhouse gases methane nitrous oxide being the most important ones they're not as problematic as co2 um of course water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas but none of that very little of that is human caused um and then there's the aerosols the particulates that are put up when we burn dirty fuels and and also natural aerosols and these exert a cooling influence and it's about a third of what the greenhouse gases do so the net is two-thirds um and you've got to if you say what is it going to do in the future you've got to make some assumptions about what the future looks like for all those emissions and then you've got the model uncertainties even for a given amount of greenhouse gases and aerosols the models respond in very different ways some warm by only one degree when you double carbon dioxide one and a half and others warm by five or six degrees ah and so you've got to fold that model uncertainty together with the uncertainty about future emissions and also natural variability the climate does vary on its own um and you've got to somehow take that into account so it's a difficult problem scientifically we do know some things okay so the most recent u.n report said that the sensitivity of the climate has got a range and that range is a little bit less at the high end so it's not quite as sensitive uh it may not be quite as sensitive as we thought but also a little bit more raised on the low end it used to be one and a half to four and a half degrees if you doubled co2 and the latest estimates now are two and a half to four and so the community is narrowing down the sensitivity although there are i think there are still credible people who would say it's outside that range so you've got the basal sensitivity yep sorry good i'm not sure i know what climate sensitivity means you mean how variable it could be depending on what what factors no no no if if i took if i held all factors the same except raise the co2 to twice its pre-industrial value so went from 280 parts per million to 560 and let it all come to equilibrium which takes some time centuries by how much would the temperature the average surface temperature go up so it's a measure of how sensitive the model is i think and as i said there's still a fair bit of uncertainty about that right so it's two to three degrees um or maybe four your next question is of course what's it going to do uh what are emissions going to do over the next century say and of course we don't know it's a complicated combination of demographics of development of what technologies we deploy um regulation economics and so the the ipcc or the community generally doesn't try to predict but writes down a set of scenarios that have so much development so much population so much emissions of all these components uh changes in land use are important as well and it used to say up until the most recent report we can't decide among the future whether it's going to be a very low emission scenario or very high emission scenario we're just going to calculate them all to give a sense of the range and the human influences in those scenarios by 2100 differ by a factor of about three and a half or four so there's one at 2.5 2.4 and another one at 8.5 and and that grades how much uh co2 basically there is or forcing there is to the climate in the recent report that came out on august 9th so a couple months ago they broke with that tradition and said the two highest emission scenarios are unlikely and that has been actually in the literature now for quite a while which is a little bit ironic because you know there had been a promotion of those higher mission scenarios as business as usual and of course when you feed them into the climate models particularly more sensitive climate models they can predict dramatically bad stuff all right so they're now backed off and if you take what they believe to be a reasonable or plausible scenario it's got a number four and a half instead of the eight and a half um you get it temperature rise to 2100 of another 1.5 degrees on top of the one degree that we've already seen since 1900 1.1 degrees since 1900 so the warming relative to pre-industrial to 1900 or even a bit further back will be about two and a half 2.7 degrees which is a lot less than the dire predictions that we have seen in previous reports or at least the dire scenarios so what the impacts are going to be well we can talk about that after i take a drink of water okay yeah please um let me just comment was that is that enough by the way um that's happy new year that's perfect got a comment about uh i mean you mentioned you know we don't know for sure well of course we don't know anything for sure we're not we're not laplace's demon or or the omniscient deity so everything is operating under certainty but we have you know in a bayesian way kind of degrees of credence in a hypothesis based on the evidence and so on which changes yeah so this idea of like a climate consensus and you mentioned the 97 percent versus three percent so here's what i wrote in scientific american about wrote one of my columns on this a 2013 study published in environmental research letters by john cook dana nucelli new to nuccitelli and their colleagues examined 11 944 climate paper abstracts published from 1991 to 2011. of those papers that stated a position on anthropogenic global warming 97.1 percent concluded that climate change is real and human caused what about the three percent what if they're right in a 2015 paper published in the journal of theoretical and applied climatology rasmus benestad dana nutelli and their colleagues examined the three percent and found quote a number of methodological flaws and a pattern of common mistakes that is instead of the three percent converging to a better explanation than that provided by the 97 percent they failed to converge to anything quote there is no cohesive consistent alternative theory to human-caused global warming they concluded in a commentary in the guardian some blame global warming on the sun others on orbital cycles of other planets others on ocean cycles and so on there's a 97 expert consensus on a cohesive theory that's overwhelmingly supported by the scientific evidence but the two to three percent of papers that reject that consensus are all over the map even contradicting each other one thing they seem to have in common is methodological flaws like cherry picking curve fitting ignoring inconvenient data and disregarding known physics for example one skeptical paper attributed climate change to lunar or solar cycles but to make these models work for the four thousand year period that the authors considered they had to throw out six thousand years of earlier data anyway your comments um first of all there is no such thing as a consensus in science as you know what really matters with the data and your ability to explain it and to make what uh papa called risky predictions okay that's the gold standard the coin of the realm in science as far as the 97 study i think you will find and people have thoroughly examined the methodology and have concluded that it was pretty flawed and in fact people have spoken up whose papers were counted in the 97 consensus and said i don't believe that at all and then there's the issue of well what exactly are we saying people believe in do i believe that the globe is warming absolutely do i believe that co2 is going up because of human activity absolutely do i believe that that's exerting a warming influence on the globe absolutely do i believe that that's going to be catastrophic well no because i read the reports everything i've written in the book is right out of the consensus and so you know to call me a denier or a skeptic no i support the consensus it's just that the science doesn't say what everybody thinks it says yeah that word consensus it's a little misleading in science although maybe there's a better word just um you know convergence of evidence a consilience of inductions william ewell called it in the 19th century for example that's good for example you know the big bang theory has a consensus that that that's probably more likely than the steady state theory and that was resolved by the in the 1960s and by the 70s it was pretty clear what the correct answer is now it doesn't mean steady state theory is 100 wrong and the big bang's 100 right but it's you know pretty probable high probability you know and and so when someone like me an outsider i'm not a climate scientist i'm not a physicist you know i'm a social scientist so uh because i publish this magazine skeptic people send me these you must have gotten these at caltech these theories of everything you know einstein was wrong newton was wrong stephen hawking was wrong and i've worked it all out in the in my basement and if you help me uh with the math i'll share the nobel prize with you right so people like you were probably too busy to respond but uh but i would often write them just to just to see what their thinking is and and and you know but i don't really need to study physics to know whether i can just ask someone like kip thorne hey what's the story with this on quantum physics thing or something cosmology and you go no no no here's the flaw oh okay now i'm not arguing from an argument of authority like kip thorne is my guru and i know he's always right so i'm going to ask him i just trust that people like you have challenged kip and you guys have had debates and you publish it in journals and you go to conferences and you argue amongst each other such that other time it trickles down to me i can be reasonably confident that when you guys say the big bang probably happened the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate and here's how we know because of these type 2 supernovas and blah blah and i can go okay i i you know i accept that why do i accept it well it's not it's not faith it's not argument from authority it's that i have confidence the system works pretty well so when someone like you writes a book that says well i am i'm skeptical about parts of climate science and then i run into the 97 percent they go no no no this is we're very confident in that i can't tell if you've you've uncovered some inconsistencies there that the 97 percent missed or if i'm not even configuring that the correct way right so so people have you know most of the criticism i've gotten uh has been you know guilt by association and ad hominem attacks um but there have been some substantive scientific criticisms um i don't know if you've seen the responses i've been responding to them i believe i've effectively countered most of them they mostly they attribute things to me that i never said um or um they bash me for not providing detail which actually is in the book many of the critics have not read the book all right so you know this gets to the tenor of the debate let me give you an example so carrie emanuel is a prominent climate scientist at mit he's one of the world's experts on hurricanes and he was one of the fact checkers that weighed in on some number of points i made in the book and i asked carrie afterward when he i can tell you what he wrote and what he criticized which i think most of it is nonsense um i said carrie did you even read the book and he said no so this is the tenor of the debate among senior academics on this stuff it's it's just you know it's very disheartening all right let me tell you what kerry said which is kind of amusing so he writes you can find it these things are up on my medium website and you can find my response uh kerry says in his you know he puts on his cambridge professor voice and you can just imagine the boat die and says anyone who has any familiarity with the record of hurricanes would not talk about trends over a century it's only the last 40 years we got data and okay i'm no hurricane expert but i can read the papers and i read the assessment reports and right there in the ipcc fifth assessment report and the more recent one it says there are no trends over centennial time scales and my dictionary says centennial all right is century so kerry i think was being a bit prissy shall we say um i i will have a chance to chat with him in about a week at mit and we'll see how that discussion goes what i take most beef with is not the science itself but the way in which it's presented to the public with absolute certainty let me give you one example another example when the most recent ipcc report came out on august 9th the secretary general of the u.n gutierrez issued a statement that said this report is code red for humanity unless we stop emissions promptly we're going to put billions of people at immediate risk well i doubt that he's actually read the report you can find the word climate crisis or the phrase climate crisis in the report so the report does contain that word but it contains it in the context of describing how the u.s and eu media misrepresent the subtle nature of the science it's got nothing to do with the scientific substance of the report itself so you know it's stuff like that from the u.s administration from the un from the eu from the ipcc itself that really gives a distorted picture of the certainties uncertainties risks that we face from a changing climate and that's what annoys me so just to put a point on that you're saying that the let's let's use another scientific term the error bars are too wide the further out you go such that we really can't say with high degree of certainty what's going to happen in 2100 because there's too many factors and the sensitivity of the models is not high enough to make a prediction like that that that's part of it um as and as you get to regional predictions which are what are important uh for people's response uh the experts even say that the models are almost worthless but nevertheless they're promulgated out i can give you references where people publish this in peer-reviewed journals um but nevertheless people somehow take this as gospel the other aspect is not only the airbus large but in some cases the reports themselves say the impact will be minimal and i go through that in um the case of agriculture and crop production uh and also to me most surprisingly aggregate economic activity the reports say that the impact of a warming of even six degrees by 2100 remember paris is all about one and a half or two degrees will be a few percent five percent of the either u.s or uh global gdp uh impact and so you know you might not believe that and i don't but it's right there in the report and uh i should probably give that as much credence as people give to the climate models so if it's only a few percent why are we talking about a climate crisis well in part that's what um sells books and makes good tv shows and and films and and news stories but i think well more than that it's what frightens voters it's what frightens voters that's right yes that's right you have a great quote for me yeah let's leave out the uh credit uh bretta thunbergs of the world that you know the world's not going to come to an end in 12 years and all that let's just leave that out and just kind of just admit that there's a lot of uncertainties it's probably not an existential threat like nuclear weapons still are to certainly i would love you know if the scientific institutions the national academies uh the ipcc stood up and said the world is not going to come to end in 12 years this is perhaps a serious problem it's not existential that would be scientific integrity and you don't see anybody doing that yeah well and it might make people feel like they can actually do something about it i mean at the when you when you present like an apocalyptic scenario like that it makes the average person like me thinking well what can i do nothing and and then you have a game theory problem where no one of us can make any difference at all all of us have to do something simultaneously but who's going to be first and right you know and again back to the developing countries are saying well you know you go first because we want to get uh to to be a developed country and so on okay just some specific things like climate scientist gary yohi professor of economics environmental science wesleyan reviewed your book he quotes you quote heat waves in the u.s are now no more common than they were in 1900 and that the warmest temperature in the united states has not risen in the past 50 years close quote from you and he says this is a questionable statement depending on the definition of heat wave and so it is really uninformative heat waves are a poor indicator of heat stress whether or not they are becoming more frequent they have clearly become hotter and longer over the past few decades while populations have grown more vulnerable in large measure because they are on average older final sentence that moreover during these long longer extreme heat events it is nighttime temperatures that are increasing most as a result people never get relief from insufferable heat and more of them are at risk of dying your response to that so lots of layers to what he wrote um let me first say that i'm surprised that professor yo doesn't know the official assessment reports because the statements about heat waves and warmer temperatures are directly shown in two or three key figures in the 2017 climate science special report cssr issued by the us government um i can point you exactly to those references where that show most people are surprised by that exactly what the definition of a heat wave is and warmest temperature it's all explained in the report not mine this is not my science this is some this is the official allegedly official science of the us government now what the impacts are and so on i don't talk about that it was not the my point to be made the point i was making when i wrote all that in the book was that these are surprising things that are there that people don't know and moreover that particular report has a gross misrepresentation of how the record temperatures are changing in the u.s my chapter 5 spends some pages on that again this is an official u.s government report allegedly the best advice that the government can give to decision makers and it's got these errors and misrepresentations in it and i think that really means that we need a much more rigorous review of these reports as they're prepared he writes quoting you that the warmest temperatures in the us have not risen in the past 50 years close quote from you he writes according to what measure highest annual global averages absolutely not but the planet is as warmed as it has warmed since the industrial revolution is unequivocal with more than 30 percent of that warming having occurred in the last 25 years and the hottest annual temperatures in that history have followed suit you do you do usually see at the end of every year saying well this was the hottest year ever and last year was the record the year before that was right eight of the last 10 years of the hottest ever recorded and so on that looks like it's getting warmer well you know he's responding to not the point i made okay the point i made was about warmest temperatures in the u.s over the last century um the definition of that is clearly explained in the u.s government report again it's chapter six of the climate science special report anybody can look those figures up and see them and i'm surprised that professor yo didn't do that say kunin is right but there are these other factors that would have been an acceptable response from professor you by the way a third party was trying to arrange an in-person debate between me and professor yo in the next few months uh he declined really yes wonder why i don't know i never had any communication with him um uh he addresses greenland's ice sheet isn't drinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago your claim from the book he says for then he writes for a risk-based approach to climate discussions about what we should do this statement is irrelevant it is the future that worries us observations from 11 satellite missions monitoring the arctic and antarctic show that the ice sheets are losing mass six times faster than they were in 1990s is this the beginning of a new trend perhaps settled state of the science for those who have adopted a risk management approach is that this is a high risk probability high consequences that should be taken seriously and examined more completely this is even more important because even without those contributions to the historical trend that is accelerating rising sea levels will continue to exaggerate coastal exposure by dramatically shrinking the return times of all variety of storms well again professor yo doesn't address the point first of all my claim that greenland was contributing to sea level rise melting uh as rapidly 80 years ago as today is not my claim it's right there in the published peer-reviewed literature and he doesn't deny that if i could use that verb um the fact that it was doing that and then went down and is now going up again suggests that there's a lot of natural variability in the system since human influences were much smaller 80 years ago than they are today and unless you take that natural variability into account to allow you to isolate the response to human influences your projections of the future are likely to be way off one way or the other so i raise it not to dismiss the recent rise but just to say it may not be what you think it is and until you understand the historical record which is relevant to the future you're not going to be able to do a reasonable projection of the future that's all right by the way do you know that sea level shows the same thing it was going up rapidly in the uh 1920s 1930s 1930s and 40s uh then it went down and then it went up again so and even today the rate is all of one foot per century right one foot per century i think we can manage that when you look at the ipcc projections even for the next decade of local sea level let's say here in new york which is of course i looked that up it's so far out of what we have experienced that we're going to know pretty soon whether they're right or not and my bet is that it's going to be a lot more moderate than anybody thinks it's going to be again i've got graphs in the book that go through that discussion so what you're arguing is that um we have to have a base rate by which to compare any current changes uh daniel kahneman calls this the base rate neglect which is a huge problem in estimating any kind of um thing you're trying to measure he used in a different context of medical diagnoses uh you know you got to know what the base rate is yes and um so i i but as i understand it it's like a millimeter a year over the course of the century i guess yeah it's three three millimeters a year globally but the local rates are different so three millimeters a year is a foot of century let me tell you a story about denial all right and i don't mean climate denial i mean the river nile okay and this is relevant to you so bear with me for a minute okay all right the the river nile was of course very important to the ancient egyptians and so they were measuring it in particular they measured the height of the maximum every year which was the flooding very important for agriculture and the height of the minimum and we have data of those annual values starting from about 640 a.d and going for 900 years these were taken at rhoda island in cairo where they built a special structure to measure in qubits the height of the nile and when you look at that data i have a graph of it in the book but not this particular interpretation it was measured in qubits did i say that not meters but we know how to convert you start in about 650 a.d and you look at the year-to-year fluctuations and they are enormous one year it's five meters and the next year it's down to one meter oh it fluctuates a lot it's largely due to the level of water in lake victoria which feeds the nile drains about 10 of the african continent about a third the area of the u.s so this is a good regional climate measure but if you take a running average a smooth trend what you see is it starts in about 670 or so at about three meters and then it takes about almost 100 years to go down to one meter and you can just imagine some medieval egyptian ipcc saying new normal new normal we've got to pray and do some sacrifices and so on and sure enough you wait another century and it goes back up higher than what it was so there are enormous at least at the regional level enormous long-term fluctuations in the climate that can mask anything having to do with human influences that's in part why i'm i take the predictions or the attributions with more than a grain of salt but as i understand it it's the accelerating rate of change that's different from historical trends that go up and down that since the industrial revolution the speed at which the earth has gotten warmer say compared to 100 million years ago or some you know some paleo data sets where it does go up and down quite a bit and you can say well the earth was warmer 600 million years ago or whatever their point is that yeah but but but it it's kind of slowly versus the you know the hockey stick and the most recent right the most temperature rise we're concerned with from 1970 is 50 years right when you look at these paleo methods there are essentially none of them that have a resolution of 50 years if you're lucky you got 50 years as one point in the time series and so we really don't know about the rapidity of warming and how unusual it is here you're talking about these ice core uh drills that they make and they pull these long one one they drill in and pull suck out a little bit of the air from 100 million years ago or whatever and they can see the parts per million so on yeah yeah yep okay absolutely and many other things as well from the ice cores so a wonderful chronology of of stuff that went on in the greenland or the antarctic yeah yeah it's amazing but the this idea that the sea levels rise about a foot per century but your entire data set is only a century so how do we know how much it going to go up and down well we we don't okay and you know geologically we know let's say over the last 20 000 years since the glaciers started melting the last maximum of the pressures that it's gone up 120 meters okay 120 meters 400 feet okay and now yes it took 100 centuries or 200 centuries for that to happen but nevertheless uh that's a tremendous rise the rises we're talking about today are millimeters per year two millimeters a year so um but we'll see the causal mechanism as i said the ipcc predictions are so dramatic that we'll know within a decade whether um something bad is going to happen so the graphics you see in films like inconvenient truth where manhattan is swamped in in water even the ipcc wouldn't go along with that um no no and not for many centuries certainly okay it is true that the last time the earth was in an interglacial namely it was not fully covered or partially covered with ice that the ice sheets were small was 124 million 124 000 years ago it's called the eemian we believe the temperature was about two degrees warmer and sea level was six to nine meters higher okay 20 some odd feet higher than it is now that's of course an entirely natural process um so we have seen high sea levels before it changes a lot whether what we're seeing is natural or anthropogenic or some combination yet to be determined i think is up for grabs yeah it's good to remember that just parenthetically there was that discovery made last week of of uh fossilized footprints in new mexico dated at 23 000 years ago well what were people doing here 23 000 years ago when we thought it was more like 13 to 16 000 years ago and how they get here because it was all under ice well my my theory just the theory that i like is that they they came down the coast in boats well where's the archaeological evidence for that it's 300 feet under water because the so it's gone we should go look we should go look all right well there is a field of underwater archaeology okay there was something about um on greenland that that you were talking about um glaciers inside uh deep inside uh greenland that did not trickle down to the sea versus the glaciers on the margins that are melting i don't know i said i don't think i know yeah i didn't say anything about that oh okay i'm misreading the never mind um yeah okay uh let's continue here um uh what was i gonna ask you on this oh here's some five points that i found this is from a climate journalist marianne lavelle inside climate news probably in this one here are five statements kunin makes and unsettled that mainstream climate scientists say are misleading incorrect or undercut by current research one the warmest temperature okay we went through that already warmest temperatures so she writes the average annual temperature in the contiguous u.s has increased from 0.7 degrees to 1 degrees celsius 1.2 to 1.8 fahrenheit since the start of the 20th century the year 2020 was the fifth warmest year in the 126th year of the contiguous u.s recordings in the five warmest years on record have occurred since 2012 noaa reports right right so all true okay i wouldn't dispute that those are about averages um and you know i think i acknowledge that in the book uh the discussion of temperatures in the book is about record-breaking temperatures it is the explain the theory behind the idea of more extreme weather events because of increased warming is it that if you put more energy into a system the winds go faster there's more rain the droughts are worse the snowstorms are worse yeah basically that that that's you know at some level that's a pretty good discussion you know even though so you look at the expert predictions for hurricanes um and while we've seen no trend in hurricane properties we can get into that a little bit if you want in a while um the predictions for how the hurricanes are going to change show only a 10 or 20 percent increase in some of the metrics for uh two degree warming so this is by no means a catastrophic thing at all even according to their predictions um similarly you know the predictions of agricultural impacts to remind you that crop yields have gone up spectacularly since 1960 the world produces more than enough food to feed itself now but that's for other reasons because we're better at farming well well actually the sea level has helped yeah but but also the co2 has helped and the longer growing seasons have helped um the predictions in ipcc or projections show a minuscule change in food prices by the middle of the century lots of uncertainty of course but small compared to the market fluctuations that we see every day so again you know it's a nothing burger in forest agricultural impact school right here's the thing this is not steve saying that that that's not you saying it and it is is what's in the reports right um right yeah yeah greenland so scientific findings indicate with a high confidence that the greenland ice sheet the world's second largest land by based ice reservoir has lost ice contributing to sea level rise over the last two decades and greenland is on track to lose more ice this century than at any other time in the last 12 000 year holocene um let's see scientists reported in 2020 that's in nature the rate of ice melt in greenland has varied widely over the decades which you point out and there is evidence of a period of rapid melting in the 1930s that you talked about that exceeded the rate of today but she writes the 1930s era melt affected fewer glaciers mostly those located entirely on land today's melting involves more glaciers most of them connected to the sea with average ice loss more than double that of the earlier period well you know my statement still remains true if we can start to understand what caused the earlier melting then we can say with confidence that it's not operating today but that's not true so again you need to explain past natural variability if you're going to attribute with confidence and i don't think we have that yeah well that's kind of the central point of your book is not so much that yeah it's denying anything it's just saying we don't know what the degree of certainty that you hear about in pop culture media and and so forth uh i mean every hurricane tornado heat wave in the news is now attributed to climate change and and and you simply can't always say that uh it takes a little bit of rigorous science to determine let me give you another recent example we had a you know a great downpour a couple months ago here in new york city from the remnants of hurricane ida and you know they said at the rainiest one hour a couple of inches of rain fell in central park in one hour which was a record um so i tried to look up the historical record of rainfall in central park and i couldn't find a long record of one hour rates but i could find a long record of one day rates going back to about 1860 or so all right and it turns out that that recent day was only the fifth rainiest day on record it was seven and a half inches and the rainiest day on record was about eight point something inches and happened in 1879 all right so 150 40 years ago all right and there are four other days that are rainier and they're spread out over the time between 1879 and the current all right so people forget weather and if you're going to do climate you need to remember weather over centuries or at least a century um so and the media play that up as you noted every hurricane every tornado every weird event uh and there are many of them around the world there's always weird events around the world the question is are they becoming more common right you probably know uh nadir javanji science advisor for change conversations right right so he praises your book he likes parts of it and then i just pulled out the one but because of course that's always coming in a review but our confidence in these climate changes doesn't stem solely from the observational record in large part it stems from our understanding of basic physics and climate model projections which show that increased co2 leads inexorably to a warmer planet and a warmer planet leads inexorably to melting ice higher seas and more extreme weather unsettled your book ignore such projections entirely arguing that because climate models require empirical adjustments known as tuning and because their quantitative predictions often spat out span a wide range they cannot be trusted to tell us anything at all but these models despite their shortcomings are skillful in many respects indeed they have long predicted many aspects of today's warmer climate including enhanced warming oversea in the arctic so when these models tell us uh unanimously that heat waves will increase sea level rise will accelerate and hurricanes will intensify we tend to believe them even if we can't prove yet he says parenthetically that the changes we're currently seeing are definitely due to climate change yeah um so i need here's a great friend well he's an acquaintance uh he's good scientist i know him um you've got the climate monitors themselves saying that at least for regional projections the models are not fit for purpose and the confidence in them in these projections the confidence that non-experts have is often very overstated there's a paper but in a peer-reviewed journal you've got people saying you know just don't believe the regional projections similarly you've got another paper again peer-reviewed by tim palmer and graham stevens saying while they give us some hazy picture of what's going on globally they're not at all fit for purpose uh to do regional projections so uh again i'd like to have a conversation with the dear about those points and we should remember the models are adjusted all right so to say you know i reproduce the past many of them actually don't reproduce the past with enough fidelity uh to say i reproduce events is past performance is no guarantee of future uh performance or whatever the stock guys say right um so i you know it it's a worthy enterprise uh the ipcc devotes so many chapters to it in the last report 40 percent to model projections but um as i say in the book i sure wish they were better than they are and then the final uh i guess criticism here i think i'm on board with you on this is that global warming climate change is leading to inequalities between nations or peoples or races or whatever uh criteria people are making comparisons of and and i'm not sure at all that um climate uh washes over all the other economic and political factors that go into inequalities how do you think about the kind of human consequences of course yeah so so let me turn to the economic impacts i've mentioned that a bit already the last ipcc report or the most recent one that weighed in on this issue it was already some years ago six or seven years ago said that climate change is only one factor that weighs in on economic well-being and it is other factors demographics development technology regulation so on uh are relatively larger and more important and in fact when you look at what they said quantitatively uh significant warming of well i mean what you take away is a few degrees of warming is a few percent impact at the end of the century and if the economy is growing at two percent as people expect for both the us and the world then four percent impact is two years of growth in other words instead of the u.s economy quadrupling 70 years from now going from the present 20 million to 80 million it would be instead something like 76 sorry billion 76 billion instead of 80 billion and 70 years from now you can't project with that kind of confidence so it's in the noise now whether you believe that or not we can have a discussion but that's what's in the report yeah i think the analogy you used is that whatever wealth we will have accumulated in 2100 it will be delayed by two years because of climate change which would be not even noticeable really right so let me let me make the following point which is i think another important one the globe warmed by 1.1 degrees from 1900 to now during that time despite hiccups world wars so on during that time the population quadrupled and we saw the greatest advance in human well-being in recorded history um health longevity education nutrition uh you can go on and on do we really think that another one and a half degrees of warming over the next century is going to significantly derail that no i don't no all right good good so the next time president biden or ambassador kerry or secretary gutierrez or even people like bill gates start talking about a climate emergency and climate catastrophe let's ask that question why do you think it's going to be a catastrophe or crisis or emergency yeah very few people give an actual causal sequence of events that would give the mechanism how you would get from here to there that is to catastrophe um but let's say they're at least partially right or let's err on the side of leaning more toward the worst case scenario you know thomas soul famously said there are no solutions they're just trade-offs so even if we start ramping up uh the restrictions of fossil fuel use and consumption and and what not do the whole thing uh what does it what does that cost and and how is that going to affect the economy in 2100 so um i again i won't give a precise number for how it's going to affect the economy but a couple of general principles are useful one is that um william nordhaus won the nobel prize in economics in 2018 for the following realization that if you try to decarbonize the economy too rapidly you incur increasing costs energy is so interwoven into everyday life and into the economy that making big changes in it we can get to the biden plans in a while if you want but making big changes in it is going to be disruptive unless you do it with some deliberation on the other hand if you decarbonize too slowly you load up the atmosphere with more co2 and the climate risk goes up and so there's an optimal pace of decarbonization which lets the temperature rise to some value at let's say 2100 and then starts to bring it down if you do it too fast you're disruptive and you also deploy mature technologies so that incurs of course so when you look at what lordhouse wrote in his nobel lecture he would say that the economic optimum is to let the temperature go up to three degrees by 2100 or even three and a half of course the lots of uncertainty the politicians are trying to rain things in at one and a half or two degrees and so you know to say it politely they've gotten ahead of their skis um and are pushing to do too much too fast and if they push too much too fast there's going to be popular pushback because energy will become more expensive it will become unreliable consumer choice will be reduced energy and security will be increased and we're seeing that already you know biden's trying to cut back on fossil fuels at the same time as he's begging opec to ramp up production of oil so if you go to decarbonize it needs to be done thoughtfully and taking into account all of the relevant elements not only the energy supply itself but the economics the technology people's perceptions of what's going on we talked about nuclear perceptions before nobody has written down a comprehensive plan like that and i would think that that's the first thing anybody would want to see if they said let's decarbonize right yes what are the consequences of that what is since you wrote about this a little bit tell us about your opinion of uh some of these engineering solutions like we're gonna spew particles through uh commercial airliners to uh have little particulate matter in the upper atmosphere that'll block the sunlight what could go wrong there oh nothing of course you know so my attitude about that is that if it were feasible it would be a last ditch uh solution and i'm in no way advocating for the deployment of that which would of course require a great international consensus to do that getting harder ready to get a consensus to reduce emissions um but i am advocating for a better understanding of whether we have that tool in our pocket to use uh as might be required and i'm not alone in that um david keith at harvard uh a i would say you know mainstream climate scientist has been pursuing a vigorous research program in that over the last few years funded by bill gates among other people so i think it's an interesting hedge we can get into what you need to know to have more or less confidence in whether it's a good thing or not but i think you know if you believe that the world is headed for a climate catastrophe then you had better support that because we need to know whether there is a life preserver or not and let me just finally ask you about economics i know this is not your field but you certainly have dealt with a lot of economists and policy makers you know we just spent about two trillion dollars on the afghan and iraqi wars trump himself every conservative republican president they grow the government just as much as the dems do we just printed a trillion dollars in in coveted relief and sent checks out to everybody seems like a great thing to do how nice uh and now the green new deal you know maybe we don't even go that far what is that 2 trillion maybe we only spend a trillion dollars on the on the environment at some point i mean isn't the other shoe going to fall we're going to have massive inflation or something's going to happen and what are your thoughts on that yeah i'm so i'm not an economist as you point out particularly about those matters uh but i do know that whatever spending we do should be and maybe this is you know idealistic and pie in the sky should be a thoughtful consideration of the priorities that we have and the efficacy with which particular solutions will or will not work and the u.s is only 13 of global emissions and if we went to zero tomorrow it would be wiped out by less than a decade's worth of growth of emissions in the rest of the world and so even if the current plans to decarbonize come to pass you're going to get all this turmoil that we talked about people are going to start to ask tell me again why we're doing this we have many more immediate needs that are far more certain and far more short-term than worrying about some change in climate several generations hence and a half a world away and so again i think time to take a thoughtful prudent approach to the climate issues develop the technologies better understand what might happen in the future uh again remembering mr nordhaus who said you've got time i think that's much more sensible and let's spend the money on obviously public health uh education uh u.s competitiveness uh etcetera etcetera okay we're gonna face i think serious challenges from china both geopolitically and economically and i would be focused on that and not distracted by trying to reduce our emissions and that would be a response to the precautionary principle that however much uncertainty there is we should do something just in case and that and the problem is which thing are we worried about well climate gets all the attention but what about china whatever else yeah and is the thing you're going to do really going to have an impact on the something you're worried about and what is that i mean it's often you know loss of lives but you know someone like bjorn lomborg presents that you know if it's warmer we'll actually fewer people die because there'll be fewer people dying of cold then then more people die of cold than of heat and you can kind of crunch those numbers and it's not clear what the metric is if you want to save lives as he points out just spend the money on mosquito nets for malaria or something like that much cheaper right right and if you really wanted to reduce global emissions the u.s should be spending its money helping china reduce its emissions rather than squeezing out of the u.s economy right or california should spend its money in ohio where all the coal plants are rather than uh in california where you're pretty emissions right i know what i wanted to ask you so this is a crazy question but a couple weeks ago bill maher had a little riff in his new rules at the end of his show about uh the problem of drought in the west coast and the problem of too much rain on the east coast why can't we just build a pipeline from one end of the country and just ship the water to the west and of course everybody laughs like that's ridiculous and then he points out well we do that with oil we have these massive thousands of miles long pipelines why can't we do that with water the problem is that the amount of oil that we ship and i can't do the calculation in my head but it's probably one ten thousandth or so of the amount of water we'd have to ship to make a difference okay if you want to solve the california problem you cut back on the water for agriculture 90 to california's water goes to agriculture growing almonds and cotton which completely ridiculous in a water starved environment but that isn't going to happen because of regulations and you know rights to water that were acquired decades ago and and so on so um i you know mr mars no friend of mine uh as soon as the book was released or even before it was released uh he went off on a five-minute tirade against this idiot kunin and i yeah i didn't watch it my family watched it and they just said that's absurd so i think mr maher should appreciate that a lot of the climate discussion is like religion and he doesn't like religion so you would think he'd understand that but uh maybe someday i'll get a chance to go on the show and and uh we can talk about this yeah i suspect that's not gonna happen yeah well um yeah you know i was speaking of religion i was at the caltech talk that michael crichton gave i think the early 90s i think it was like an auditorium and uh right and then and then when i held my conference with tapio schneider i invited michael crichton to come and give his you know climate sciences a religion speech and he did he showed up and uh you know he's quite the intimidating figure he's like six he was like six six and that's about a year before he died he's a big guy yeah he's a big guy and he came in a limo with security and it was really quite that quite the happening but he kind of begged off a little bit i mean he was not uh as extreme as he was i think he might have been intimidated with having tapio schneider there who really knows the science i don't know right so it'd be great you know i may get a chance i i will uh next week as i said be at mit and we'll have a chance to talk with people who criticize me uh maybe i can get to do that at caltech as well um yeah that would be great i will be uh next week at purdue and uh talking to people there in public uh so you know i i think i might be a little bit different than quiten because i you know well you know what you're talking about science yeah yeah right i know 100 on i'm not 100 on board with your your skepticism i but i do get a sense in reading your book and talking to you that you're a man of integrity you do care what's actually true and you're willing to assign probabilities in a bayesian reasoning way of like you know how do we know this is true and and you you strike me as somebody who would adjust your priors up or down uh based on new evidence that that came in uh so i wish there were uh it was more openness to talking to people like you i don't feel like you're out of the overton window uh you should be part of the conversation yeah i mean you are and uh but more so i i think uh because it's not clear that this is to me it's not at all clear this is an existential threat but it feels like it some feels it seems to me it's something we should pay attention to maybe do something about it in the long run yeah i'm optimistic yeah like that that humans are highly uh adaptable you know matt really points out we didn't leave the stone age because we ran out of stones you know we we are a creative inventory species and uh i think we can get our work our way out of this whatever happens um i think we and i think we have the time that that was the north house conclusion right we have the time yeah we do have the time what i would say you know if you want a summary statement the the greatest threat is in precipitate climate action rather than in climate change and let us take the time to think it through and do it in an optimal way that's perfectly put stephen coonan thank you for your book and your work and what's next on your well besides debating people on this uh what's next on your research and our writing agenda yeah so you know i mean many people have said i should write an energy book but i think the world has got a number of those already i'm more interested in trying to educate people about the systems that make modern society work not only energy but water refuse finance uh these are mysteries to most ordinary people i mean i didn't really know about energy until i got into bp and started studying it and when you understand it it's a very different picture than what you get by you know people just say well let's put up a lot of wind turbines um and i see that in the classes i teach i teach climate science in the fall and energy in the spring and to graduate students and it's great to see their eyes open up when you show them the data about energy technologies or climate and so on so i'm thinking about maybe trying to do a book about society systems at the again popular level so that i can yeah you have a nice number and all of this is to yeah you have a nice blur from uh vaclav's meal who i never heard of until bill gates kind of put him on the map i read a few of his books he's pretty technical you know he's not a pop writer but he seems to know his stuff but stuff i've never thought about like you know energy consumption and i i know i've been reading him for 16 17 years and he's one of my favorite authors on these subjects my goal in all of this like i think smils is is not to persuade people of one thing or another but just inform them and then let them fold in values risk tolerance uh etc uh into what kind of decisions they would like to support right i'm an educator at heart and i just want to inform people well thanks for coming on the show to inform my listeners and thanks for your patience while i uh ground through all the critics uh of your book no no author likes to read that but you know that's how science works right so you have conjecture and refutation as carl popper put it all right so we have a conversation that's how we figure it out right so is that all right stevens for 40 years and and also as a provost for nine years i'm used to being criticized so that's right yeah especially at a place like caltech very good yeah right absolutely all right

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 25,493

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, anthropogenic global warming, climate change, climate consensus, climate science, global warming, misinformation, Science Salon, scientific consensus, The Michael Shermer Show

Id: Fy3EiaP4Y3Y

Length: 96min 41sec (5801 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 20 2021