Video: Climate Change: What to Know/What to Do with Climate Scientist JAMES HANSEN (DocDrop)

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let's see if it goes um got it Dan can you check the summary the AI summary I was clicking off the and I I hadn't seen that one before I think we're um can you just hold on I think I did it said yes

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to me here we are we are live okay so here we are and let me do a well we don't even have to do the the slide let me get back to zoom

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um and okay everyone oh the AI is on it says okay there we go hello everyone and welcome to climate chat I am your host Dan Miller and today

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we have a very very special show for you we have the one and the only James Hansen uh renowned climate scientist who's been telling us for a very long

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time about the dangers ahead and what we should do and somehow people haven't listened enough and we're going to talk about that and many many other subjects today but uh first of all welcome Jim I

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have a very very brief uh bio for those who don't know Jim uh Dr James Hansen studied at the University of Iowa under Dr James Van Allen of the Van Allen radiation belt Fame I don't know how

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many people know about that but I certainly knew that name for a very very long time he started studying the atmosphere and climate of Venus but then switched to studying the Earth because he realized that the climate of the

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Earth was changing before our eyes and that would be something really interesting to do and uh he then became the director of the NASA Godard Institute of Space Science uh he retired from that and is now an Adjunct

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professor at Colombia at the Columbia Earth Institute where he directs the program on climate science awareness and solutions besides studying climate science Dr Hansen has been of advocating

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and protesting for climate action and as a result has been arrested multiple times you told me once how many I was kind of amazed and Dr Hansen has an amazing background that we're not going

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to have a chance to cover here so I if you are interested in that I recommend that you read his book storms of my grandchildren and that has some

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great incredible stories actually of his uh time at Nasa advocating for climate change resistance that you that you ran into and what you did about it and maybe

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we'll cover a few of those tidbits uh today but with that first of all welcome Jim it's great to have you here and to start off I have just a really basic

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question for you what message would you like to send to young people about climate change oh your Audio Oh all of a sudden Jim wait wait

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wait check your audio not working no no there you go okay oh I see I think I I cut it off by putting my notepad on my computer let me ask you that let me ask

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you that again Jim uh what message would you like to send to young people about climate change yeah yeah thanks Dan so I I requested that you let me start with the bottom line because you know what

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always happens I give a talk we get into all this stuff that's going on with Cent and it sounds not too good and so people get depressed but actually I don't think

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that young people should feel depressed I think they should recognize there's a challenge and I think they should be invigorated to do something about it and

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they can and that's what I I hope to get them to understand now I I recognize my audience is seldom young people you know even if I give a talk at a

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university it is often I look out at the audience and it's a lot of older people students come if they have to come for course credit and and I you know I understand I

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was a student once too and you're you're kind of overwhelmed just by doing a good job as a student but let me let let me uh let me give you the bad news

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first the bad news is that our climate system is characterized by a delayed response and amplifying

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feedbacks which makes it a very dangerous system and this has been understood for a long time because at in in the paper pipeline global warming in the

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pipeline I start out with describing this conference Symposium in 1982 where the president of Exxon research and Engineering correctly

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described the situation um because of the ocean's thermal inertia you get a delayed response when you change the forcings the composition

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of the atmosphere and you get amplifying feedbacks so his inclusion was with such a system you need

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anticipation you have to take action before you get the full responses or you're in trouble and what so what uh but but this

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delayed response is good news and bad news because the delay does give you an opportunity to make changes before you get the full

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response and in particular although juel Charney estimated in his um famous report in 1979 he said well the response may be delayed a few

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decades by the inertia of the upper layers of the ocean well now we know the delay is longer than that and and furthermore the delay depends upon climate

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sensitivity if the sensitivity is higher the delay is longer and the reason is that the feedbacks don't come into play in response to the

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forcing they come into play in response to the global temperature and therefore the response time actually showed this in a 1985

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paper analytically that if the mixing into the ocean is approximately diffusive then the response time goes like the square of

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the sensitivity okay that's I that's we're trying to avoid the uh yeah I the geeky stuff today I want to maybe just talk a little bit but when you say delay and inertia what does what does that

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mean uh like just for for the average person doesn't know about climate science in terms of like are you you're I think you're saying when we put some CO2 emissions in the air we don't

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actually see the impact of that for quite a while so we have to really be careful because the full impact comes decades later and yet you're committed to it by that time is that what you're saying well if you leave the foring

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there if you leave the change in the atmosphere's composition in place then uh our estimates are that in it takes a hundred years just to get

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60% of the response and it takes a thousand years to get 9 90% so and and that's for what we call the fast

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feedbacks uh I kind of feel some I may have introduced that terminology but they actually the slow feedbacks are things like the chains of the ice sheet

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size well some of that can actually occur faster than than some of the fast feedback response so it's a little confus yeah okay but uh but the point is

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that we have only experienced a fraction of the warming due to the gases that are already in the atmosphere okay and uh some of that

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response is coming pretty soon so therefore when the Secretary General of the United Nations tells us that we can still keep

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global warming below 1 and a half degrees or below two degrees that's that's not correct you know so I said they're lying well maybe they're not

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lying maybe they're just ignorant they haven't been informed but they've got this huge scientific organization intergovernmental panel on climate change somebody should be

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telling these policy makers the truth and the truth is we we can no longer avoid 1 and a half degrees in fact we're going to experience one and a half degrees within

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a year or so it's the average temperature over the last 12 months is 1.39 1.4 degrees and it's going to go up above 1.5 degrees in over the next

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several months because we're still in this elal um and furthermore it's going to go to two degrees

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Celsius uh that's that's going to happen unless we take purposeful action to affect the planet's energy balance we

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cannot do it by reducing emissions fast enough we cannot reduce emissions fast enough if if we if we reduced emissions to zero

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today then okay we wouldn't go to two degrees but we're not going to do that you know 80% of our energy is still coming from fossil fuels you're not going to instantly reduce that to

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zero uh so that's a problem so this is the this is the bad news where well let's keep going on the bad news for just a moment because um you as you just said we're gonna uh unless we change

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plans and we're going to talk about like what things we can do but for now on the path we're on on we're going to go over two degrees and you mentioned in your most recent letter that that could happen in the 2030s which is much sooner

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than most peop are saying but the goal of the Paris Accord and and generally in ipcc is to hey let's set this target of two degrees and we we'll try and even

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though you're saying they're wrong let's say we even hit two degrees tell us a little bit about two degrees because they make it sound like it's a it's a holy land you know it's like a good thing to be able to stay at two degrees

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but isn't two degrees pretty bad yeah well we published a paper in 2016 which was titled Ice Melt sea level rise and super

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storms evidence that global warming of two degrees celsus is extremely dangerous That was supposed to be the title the paper was

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reviewed by four referees three three of them one of them an ipcc lead author didn't want the paper to be published but the other three uh all said it should be published

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but the editorial board got involved and insisted we changed the title um and I I wrote a letter they

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said I could not say that it is extremely dangerous and so I uh proposed as a compromise that 2°

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c is dangerous you remove the adjective uh adverb extremely uh but they would not accept that and I said

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well public understands the word dangerous if you look down a street if uh a the new newspapers have told you

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that this street has had a lot of crime and uh and you look down that street and you see a gang of

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of people uh and look like they're holding a blackjack you you would decide to take a different street home because that you would say that street looks dangerous and

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and strangest thing they the editor told me if I wrote included that explanation in my letter I wouldn't be able to publish the paper but this is supposed to be a

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journal in which you're you're even your discussions with the editors are publicly available so I don't understand that but in any what what does two degrees I think for like a person who doesn't know anything about climate

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science What will what will the world of two degrees look like well what we concluded in that paper is that that's enough to shut down the overturning

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ocean circulations the North Atlantic meridianal overturning circulation amach and the similar circulation in the Southern

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Hemisphere and um within on a time scale of 50 to 150 years you would get sea level rise of several meters which you're would mean you're several meters so like we're talking about 10 feet kind of order of magn more yeah or more than

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that because if you if you lose West Antarctic ice sheet see our our basis for that we were looking not just at the model but also at the history of the

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earth and the last time it was more than one degree warmer during the Eman there was sea level did go up several meters in less than a 100 years

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which indicates the West Antarctic ice sheet collapse MH and that was at a temperature less than 2° warming and we can see what's happening the the other

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the other thing is our our science is is um combination of looking at paleoclimate looking at Global models and looking at what's happening in the real world right now and what's

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happening in West Antarctica is that the ice shelves are melting the grounding lines are moving Inland and uh in particular the Thwaites

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Glacier has been the grounding Line's been moving about a kilometer for a year and if it goes another 20 kilometers it hits this Canyon where it you would

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suddenly get very rapid change you would get collapse of that portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the whole thing would go you can't you're saying you're saying 10 feet plus several meters would

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happen this Century by the way as I say on a time scale it you know we looked at doubling times of 10 years 20 years 40 years if it were 10 years you'd be

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talking close to 50 year time scale uh but from now from now yeah from now wow so that'd be this Century if it's 20 years it would be into the next Century but you would be locked in once once we

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push this grounding line beyond the canyon then is kind of out of our control so we don't want to do that that's why it's really important to get these things understood and to get

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actions on the time scale of the next several years you know okay and but besides besides sea level rise which certainly a huge huge thing what other kind we've seen lots of floods and droughts and that kind of thing extreme

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weather is it linear it's like we're at like at one degree or war is two degrees twice as bad or is there or is it much much worse than at one degree or two degrees of warming in terms of all those other

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impacts all those other impacts the increases in the extreme events that that was that was understood

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also decades ago that um as the planet gets warmer and the atmosphere holds more water vapor you know you get more extreme events um and

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I I don't know I don't think that's terribly nonl it's nonlinear in the sense that you for each degree you get I think a 7% more

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water vapor on average um and so that's not quite linear but um but the point is we've already at a point where those effects are non-negligible and so you don't want to

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double this and that's at a global warming of 1.2 degrees which is what we had up until this year so you don't want to go to two de you don't want to double

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those effects so so the goal this goal the ipcc or Paris Accord goal of hitting two degrees but not going over that's not really a good thing it's not it's not a goodal it's kind of a bad goal we

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should not go there is what you're saying that's right and for the sake of maintaining our coastal cities maintaining our shorelines approximately

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where they are we need to go back to a temperature that we've had for the last 10,000 years we really should

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uh if we want to keep our shorelines two degrees is not a good Target now in your your 2012 Ted Talk you also said that the last time CO2 was today's value which back then was I think less than

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400 parts per million it's now 420 but even back then uh that last time it was that high sea levels many millions of years ago were 75 feet higher than today or scene yeah we're we're warm enough

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now for the plyo scene and and yeah so that's the long term that's not a 100 years but that's the longterm sea level rise we're shooting for is like 75 fet or so yeah 15 to 25 meters was the p was

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the early pene so we okay we don't want to go there and we we're now getting a taste of where we're headed and we're going to need to understand this so it's

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it's going to take a while to educate the public about what the situation is but we had better be ready to take actions within within several years within less than a decade well what what

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are the things I think that people don't fully understand I I I sorry Dan I made a mistake oh okay I shouldn't have let you take me down this let me let me finish my introduction okay we going

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keep going sorry okay so um so uh yeah so I was uh headed to U cop 28 and I got as far as Amsterdam and I decided why am

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I going there because my ex student in posto serby Menan was one of the main people making the agenda and uh she had was putting me on

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the agenda but she was overruled so okay I was not going to be able to present anything anyhow so why

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so I I I I got it I stopped at Amsterdam and I got a new hat from the hatter which is my which is my Hatter in Amsterdam uh but that was all and then I

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I decided to go back and and work on Sophie's planet um your next book that's what I'm doing now yeah my next book but now but now let me give you the good

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news we still live on a spectacular Planet it's it's unbelievable just think I always like to give as an example uh the monarch butterfly so amazing

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um but it's just one of the thousands of amazing things on our planet so we've got this great planet that we want to preserve and we still can do

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it and another good thing is young people have enormous political power you know I when I was speaking on campuses in

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2008 young people were coming out in support of Barack Obama uh while Hillary Clinton was the expected Democratic nominate but because

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of this enthusiasm for Obama he actually overtook her and and he you know he spoke about a planet in Peril and um they just assumed that he would

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address this issue um but what did did he actually do he went to the big Banks and the Big

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Green big banks for solving the financial crisis and big green for advising him on climate policies I tried to send him I I mean I

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sent him a letter well after he was elected before he took office but he had selected um a science advisor from

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Harvard uh who would not deliver my letter because he thought he knew everything that Obama would need to know but he he was basically following the big

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green um policy uh goals and and uh so my my my first uh uh advice was you

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have to put a price on carbon and you can do it in a way that that uh the public would like would with this carbon fee and dividend but anyway that was

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never that could have been part of this bill which Congress had to pass to avoid uh Financial Calamity uh but anyway that didn't

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happen but uh so what is the fundamental problem the fundamental problem is the role of money in our government you know Benjamin Franklin

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said that uh well every 200 years you're going to need a revolution because by that time graft will have taken over corruption will have taken over well that was a

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remarkable prediction because that the time scale was about right in fact uh president eisenh in his farewell address warned about the military

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industrial complex and after his speech his brother asked him why did you leave out the the draft of

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the speech spoke about the military industrial Congressional complex uh Eisenhower said well there was too much to take on all three of

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them I couldn't take on Congress also but that's the basic problem that Congress is now takes money from special interests and both parties do

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this so if you think about it first of all there was the there's the militarism where we are the defense industry advocates for a big military

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budget and we have military people in something like 70 countries and we periodically overthrow governments that we don't like uh but

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that's one problem another the pharmaceutical industry they keep the price of uh drugs and uh

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Medical Health uh artificially High uh and then there's the unfair tax laws wealthy people Lobby they bribe Congress to keep the

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tax structure very unfair um gun laws we we what why do we allow machine guns to be available or

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assault weapons to be available to just about anybody it doesn't make sense climate policy fee and dividend is with all economists now have signed on

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to a statement that we should do that but we don't get it because the fossil fuel industry doesn't doesn't like that idea it would cause phase out of fossil fuels should tell people what that means

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because I think a lot of people listening so with carbon fee and dividend you put a rising fee on the extraction of fossil fuels at the well mine or Port of Entry and it goes up every year and it's a tax essentially on

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fossil fuels and you take 100% of the the money collected and give it back to every legal resident on an equal basis so the bottom 70% of households actually make more money on the money they get than what they pay in higher prices so

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they support a very high fee which helps phase out fossil fuels did I get that get that right yeah and there's a link in the description by the way for YouTube of a paper that Jim and I wrote on fee and dividend and why it's the

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best policy so you can click on that and read that report that we sent to Congress so well my my conclusion is that um we're not going to you know so so

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young people have done things like oh trying to Lobby Congress to get a reasonable gun loss and they get very very little progress you I I don't I don't see how we solve these problems

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and the climate one in particular without having a political party that takes no money from any special interests and look at how it wasn't just

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this Barack Obama thing but Bernie Sanders almost overtook Hillary simply because in all the college campuses all these young people were coming out in support of Bernie Sanders so you said we

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have a few years to act are you suggesting that to fight climate change in the next few years step one is to come up with a new political party I don't think that's going to happen in few I think I think but by 2028 we had

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better have well look how fast those political actions that I talked about how fast they occurred you do have to have uh you have to get the third party

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on the ballot and you need to have ranked voting so there is there is this homework that needs to be done and and you we you don't want to be a spoiler in

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the 2024 election uh we have to preserve our democracy so that we can have a party that takes no money uh but

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uh but we need Benjamin Franklin said we need a revolution every 200 years and that and I don't mean a revolution with guns blazing but it needs to be a maybe

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a voting Revolution a voting Revolution a party that takes no money from special interests the center would flock to such a party that's the reason that we oscillate

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between these political extremes because the public doesn't like results from one party so they then they go to The Other Extreme but most a lot of people are in the center

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and we they would support a good uh third party if you need to have a JFK type a political candidate well Jim are you ready to run are you uh I'm 82 years

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old well you're close to Biden Biden 82 or 81 anyway I'm older than Biden let let's get back we're gonna keep talking about what to do and and this is a very big picture of what to do we're going to

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get hopefully a little more specific on technically what we should do just one one more thing on that just okay I I young people should not be depressed

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yeah this is a job but it's it's a uh it's it's great uh Challenge and compare it you know when I when I was college student I had to

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check very with great interest every year the letter from the draft board I didn't want to go to Vietnam but I but and fortunately I got good grades and so then I didn't they

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didn't uh draft me but in my the generation before me they went to uh fight in Europe where in in the Pacific during World War II many of

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them didn't come back you know so this is not harder your your young people's job is not harder than prior Generations um and so uh yeah but so let let's spend a

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little time trying to understand the challenge and then let's get back to what needs to be done but I want start off because you came up with what I consider a landmark paper recently global warming and the pipeline and one

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of the things you said in there is that the uh the warming we get and you talked about this with delay and inertia but the warming we get with the fast feedbacks from a doubling of CO2 is 4.8

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degrees Celsius where the ipcc uses a value of three degrees so that's a big difference so what uh just very quickly you know how did you come up with that you know very briefly and why why

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doesn't the ipcc agree with you even though you Pro provided the scientific evidence yeah it's um it's a pretty simple story uh there there was a

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mystery 40 years ago when we first got the ice core data and realized uh that greenhouse

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gases had changed we very accurate data for how they had changed between the glacial periods and the inter glacials like the present Holocene that we live

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in which we're now leaving but um so that if you compare the last ice age with the current warm period you can infer empirically how sensitive the

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climate system is because we know how the atmospheric composition change and we know how the albo the reflectivity of the surface changed because we know how big the ice

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sheets were during the Ice Age but we in order to infer that you need to know what was the temperature during the Ice Age and there was this big project

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climat funded by the National Science Foundation which concluded that the sea surface temperatures were such and such leading

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if you put those in a model you get the world was three and a half degrees colder during the last ice age that would imply a climate

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sensitivity of only about 2.4 degrees or doubled CO2 but we were very suspicious that that was not right

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because the paleoclimate evidence on land implied it was actually a lot colder than that and the the uh ice snow line on the

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mountains uh had descended a kilometer which was it should have only gone a half a kilometer if the world was only three and a half degrees older well finally that

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um but the way that this NSF Pro project got the sea surface temperatures was to assume that the microscopic biology in the ocean surface would migrate to stay

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within the same temperatures that they prefer today but what if on the millennial time scales this biology can partially adapt to the temperature change rather than

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migrate it just adapts to it well uh so about three years ago Jessica tyy uh omitted the biology data because there's now enough chemical data for

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proxy temperature change and she found that the Ice Age was 6 to S degrees colder not three and a half degrees colder and if you

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isolate it to just the lgm the last glacial maximum 18 to 21,000 years ago it was 7 degrees so it's twice as cold as what we had estimated 40 years ago and that's what

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changed it from 2.4 to 4.8 and 4.8 is within the total range that ipcc estimates they always give a very big range their best estimate was

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three degrees right and most of the models tend to give three degrees because most of the models have little Cloud feedback

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the 2.4 degrees is consistent with fixed clouds or very little Cloud change but now some of the more sophisticated Cloud modeling are actually coming up with

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four or five or six degree doubl CO2 warming that is pro and that's consistent with what we now infer so so to to summarize what you just said

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we we thought we we know how much the CO2 dropped in the Ice Age but and we had data on the temperature but we didn't think it was a big change which would mean that the climate's not too

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sensitive to a drop or increase in CO2 but now we've learned it was actually much colder twice as cold in the Ice Age than we previously thought so that little that that 100 parts per million drop was very sensitive in getting

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colder and therefore our 140 increase so far will be very sensitive or increase more warming than we thought right yeah but the other thing you found in your paper was that cooling from aerosols or

00:37:05

things like coal plant smoke smoke from ships and other industrial processes that you put particles in the air that the cooling we get from that partially because the clouds is much higher than

00:37:19

what the ipcc also assumes is that is that correct yeah so the the thing was how did if the typical ipcc

00:37:32

model had too low sensitivity how how does that how can we

00:37:44

reconcile how can both an ipcc model and our model which is more sensitive both agree with observed temperature change over the last century

00:37:57

well there's an independent variable and that's the amount of of uh aerosols in the atmosphere because there are two important forcings one of them is greenhouse gases and the other is the

00:38:11

small particles which reflect sun and they cause a cooling and uh of course the modelers tended to choose the amount of aerosol since it's

00:38:25

unmeasured that's a whole another story uh but it should be measured but it's not uh and uh they used a relatively

00:38:36

small aerosol amount but in fact uh we present evidence in a number of ways but for example again going back to the Paleo climate we know that over the last 6,000

00:38:51

years the um greenhouse gas gases increase uh probably because of

00:39:04

deforestation and rice agriculture which produced methane deforestation produ CO2 but the temperature did not go up it just stayed about the same and that's

00:39:19

presumably because in addition to producing greenhouse gases we're producing aerosols because humans 6,000 years ago began to Deforest

00:39:31

and their fuel was wood and burning wood produces a lot of aerosols as well as producing CO2 which reflects the Sun and and cools cools yeah and so so but this

00:39:45

uh these aerosols are very harmful for human health they killed six to8 th million people per year so we're trying to reduce educe them and U there's this

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very specific very uh welldefined inadvertent experiment caused by the international Maritime organization when

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it uh made new rules for the sulfur content of fuels on ships with the in with the rules introduced in 2015

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and then strengthened in 2020 and that uh that has a noticeable we can see from the satellites that the the contrails that you usually see

00:40:41

behind the ships in certain parts of the ocean are not there anymore because those clouds Cloud trails are produced by these aerosols serving as condensation nuclei for cloud

00:40:55

drugs mhm so that's that has reduced the albo the reflectivity of the Earth by about 4/10 of a percent which is a big change

00:41:08

it's as if as if the alido changed from 29% 29% of the sunlight getting reflected by the planet has now become 28.6 that additional 410 is being

00:41:22

absorbed by the Earth instead and that's equivalent to a CO2 increase of about 100 PPM wow it's it's a big deal so so what you were saying then is and I just to summarize

00:41:37

it what your your data says the the warming from greenhouse gases is much more than what the IPC says but the cooling is also much more so the actual temperature we have today you both show

00:41:50

the same thing because I'll pick I'll pick an example let's say we hit 1.5 next year and then it's the IPC saying well that's two degrees of warming from greenhouse gases and and minus half a degree from aerosol that gives you 1.5

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but you might be saying well we really have three degrees of warming from uh picking these numers three three degrees of warming from greenhouse gases and minus 1.5 from aerosols also 1.5 so if

00:42:16

they cancel quote cancel each other out why should people care about that what what what impact will your new data have on their lives over the next 10 or 20 years

00:42:27

years well what is going to happen um you know it's a different way to to analyze it is in terms of what is

00:42:40

the forcing caused by the greenhouse gases and the aerosol the greenhouse gases we can calculate very accurately that it's four Watts approximately four watts per meter

00:42:52

squared of forcing and we would say that the aerosol forcing is probably about minus two so it's reduced it's cut the net

00:43:04

forcing in half while the ipcc's number is more like minus one watt for the aerosols so their net forcing is is

00:43:17

three watts and and um now so if the real world is uh that the aerosols are minus two Watts

00:43:29

then we have now reduced that to more like minus one and a half so we're going to get warming due

00:43:42

to the aerosol reduction as well as the warming from the greenhouse gas increase and so we're going to get an acceleration of warming over the next um

00:43:55

10 or 20 years um and we we will see it even in the next couple of years we're beginning to see it already so I the so I argue that you know there's a

00:44:10

huge natural variation of temperature and that's what makes it difficult to see the impact of uh a forcing change but because the aerosol amount peaked in

00:44:24

about 2010 we we predict that the rate of global warming is going to increase by 50 to 100% post

00:44:36

2010 and within a few years that will be clear whether in fact that is happening okay um all right um well I got so many question test so

00:44:50

basically by the way you predicted in your recent paper that the this acceleration is happening now and that the I forget 2000 what was 2005 to 2 2015 number was 0.18 degrees per decade

00:45:04

of warming and now we're going up by 50 to 100% of that even I think you were kind of implying in your very last writing 0. 49 half a degree per decade of warming almost

00:45:19

which would be a huge amount more which means we would reach two degrees far far sooner than what the IPC C is saying which and I assume they're continuing assuming .18 degrees per the number the

00:45:33

number that you referred to is not a prediction that's the reality we just compared the uh temperature now to the temperature during the prior elal and

00:45:46

the rate of change between those two elal is uh 049 degrees per decade which is much faster crazy

00:45:59

high yeah okay um so let's talk about another thing you mentioned in your Global pipeline paper which worries a lot of people so I want to get your clarification on it you talked about the fast feedbacks but then you also looked

00:46:13

at the long-term feedbacks as you said that change in ice sheets over the Earth over long periods of time and you said that the based on the forcing today if it stayed constant that we would hit

00:46:25

eight to 10° Celsius of warming which I think it's safe to say would be utterly catastrophic in every way imaginable so that got a lot of people worried so is that something we're committed to or is

00:46:38

the future still in our hands and what does that mean but how should people think about that number that that would be the equilibrium response if you left the atmospheric

00:46:52

composition in place permanently but but it would you would end up without any ice sheet on Antarctica or Greenland so obviously this is going to take

00:47:03

time uh so it's not something that you need to worry about happening this Century or even Next Century it takes longer than that because as I said just

00:47:16

the thermal inertia of the ocean means that it takes a hundred years just to get 60% of the fast feedbacks takes a thousand years to get

00:47:30

90% so the equilibrium warming is not something that you have to worry about happening in your lifetime or your grandchildren's lifetime but that that atmosphere is not going to stay constant right either we're going to keep working

00:47:44

to increase the composition of C or we're going to decrease it over time and hopefully we're going to decrease it right so that's more like a scenario that you were looking at not you weren't predicting the future the it's the

00:47:56

classical uh problem to look at that's what Charney looked at what is the equilibrium response to a given uh foring and it was useful because it's

00:48:09

the relevant response when you look at the entire Seno era the last 66 million years and a reason that it's useful to

00:48:20

do that is it it uh one thing that we show is that the point the CO2 amount at the time the

00:48:33

planet went from Ice free to beginning to have ice on Antarctica was at about 450 PPM so and and so which we're almost at

00:48:49

yeah but the the thing is and the ice sheet models would tell you oh no you need 800 BPM in order to melt the Antarctic ice sheet well that's not what

00:49:00

the cenozoic data tells us so it it's an indication that ice sheet models are not realistic they're not realistically sensitive to uh change in the foring

00:49:16

okay how much time can we go over an hour by the way because you don't have another interview coming up because right I want to get through a lot of things here and and I want to get back to the solutions and especially the

00:49:29

technical but I do have a couple more like you know climate sciency questions for you and uh you mentioned this earlier so I want to get to it a little more detail in in in your previous papers and writings and what uh as well

00:49:41

as a recent paper from dlon and dlon if I'm saying that right we're going to interview one of them in a a few weeks on climate chat you and they warn of a collapse around mid-century of the Atlantic meridianal overturning

00:49:54

circulation or the a Mo or the ocean conveyor belt that takes heat from the tropics and brings it up to Northern Europe keeps northern Europe in a nice climate uh and you're saying that you and there are saying this could shut

00:50:07

down around mid-century like around 2050 time frame so first of all what does an amok shutdown mean to people what what are some of the things that will happen if that does shut down and I understand

00:50:20

it's irreversible if it does and uh what should we do about that what should we do to try to prevent an amok shutdown okay so the reason um yeah we that that was this ice melt

00:50:39

sea level rise in superstorms paper is something that we worked on for a decade uh because it done an experiment in 2006 which suggested that the

00:50:53

realistic rates of fresh waterer injection from increasing Polar Ice m is going to uh cause this shutdown of the deep

00:51:07

water formation and I you know the other models were not getting that and so I really had to uh figure out what's going on in our model and we were trying to

00:51:19

reduce I I think that there's a common problem in most models and that is excessive mixing especially small scale mixing which is parameterized in

00:51:33

ways which are partly intended to stabilize the models and unfortunately the real world doesn't do that so anyway we we tried to

00:51:45

minimize um unphysical mixing and found that in our model that if we start with [Music]

00:51:58

observed rates of freshwater injection and let that increase with a doubling time of 10 years or 20 years that within a few decades we actually get the amok

00:52:11

shutting down and I think that's the right answer and I think the real world uh is beginning to show signs of that it's it's slowing down and the

00:52:22

southern meridianal overturning Circ population also is slowing down for the same reason uh and that what what does that mean because let's assume you're right

00:52:36

okay let's assume you're right and it and we stay on the path we're on which is not the right path to be on we'll talk about getting off that path but we get to two degrees boom it shuts down that amach doesn't mean anything to anyone you know ex outside of climate

00:52:49

circles so what should a regular person be should should be worried about that well that change our lives in any way well it's going to make a climate very chaotic in the North Atlantic

00:53:03

region you know it will tend to cool the ocean in the North Atlantic it will make much more stormy we showed that in our ice melt paper uh very general ways you

00:53:17

can uh infer that it's going to get much stormier and we have evidence from what happened late in the Eman period as it uh cooled

00:53:31

off and started heading toward um ice age uh but a one implication is that the normal transport of heat from the

00:53:45

southern hemisphere into the North Atlantic will stop or slow down which makes it warmer in the Southern Ocean and increases this melt of the ice

00:53:59

shelves around Antarctica so it it also has undesirable consequences for the stability of the West Antarctic ice

00:54:11

sheet so it's both bad for climate in in the North Atlantic and it's uh bad for the sea level issue we actually interviewed ma Matthew England on

00:54:24

climate chat last year I guess it was and or earlier this year I can't remember uh he did a study of what happens not not not when the imach will collapse or what happens once it does

00:54:38

and he he was also saying that there would be much lower rainfall across the entire Northern Hemisphere uh that would impact agriculture productivity so let's see he said very Stormy in the North Atlantic storms bigger than we've ever

00:54:50

seen I think you mentioned that one point uh England is going to get Northern England's uh Northern Europe's going to get very cold but now you also mentioned that this warm water will stay around Antarctica and accelerate sea

00:55:03

level rise so we'll get much higher sea level rise faster um storminess and also don't you also get more water on the East Coast almost immediately because of the well we're

00:55:15

get slash back the slash back we're getting that a little bit already but the real issue is of course whether we're going to lose the west and Artic ice sheet whether we uh set in motion

00:55:30

the loss of that for our grandchilden uh regardless of what they do so that's why we need to begin to take action soon if we're going to uh

00:55:43

have a chance of keeping our coastlines where they are okay so we talked I mean I could spend hours talking about the climate science side of things want to move a little bit more

00:55:55

into policy what how you're perceived your uh the ipcc doesn't think the amok is going to collapse soon they say it's going to be you know Next Century uh they also don't agree with

00:56:08

the findings of your pipeline paper they think the three degrees instead of 4.8 um and you've written long ago about the scientific reticence you said why do you

00:56:20

think first of all the the why what what what do you mean by scientific r since number one and why do you think the ipcc is having trouble and the ipcc scientists are having trouble accepting

00:56:31

your research what what's going on um I think there are a number of factors in scientific reticence there's this uh article by Barber published in science in

00:56:47

1961 so it's more than 60 years ago uh and it's

00:56:58

um one of the factors is the preference for immediate rewards over delayed rewards so that there's the the penalty for

00:57:12

crying wolf for warning that there's a danger is immediate but there's no penalty for fiddling while Rome is burning

00:57:26

so it's it's there's a reluctance to to cry wolf uh and you'll find it's hard to get funding if you

00:57:38

do yeah so uh I think there's there the incentives do not do not line up for

00:57:50

um for uh warning of a problem like this yes but but you you've provided the scientific B you know you didn't just say hey I think it's 4.8 degrees the climate sensitivity you said here's the data here's the Ice Age here's this

00:58:04

here's that you laid it all out in the well researched paper yet many climate scientists are I think without even really reading the paper in detail are are kind of saying

00:58:15

nah we we like our other numbers does that does that make sense they didn't have time to read the paper iter their their comments came out

00:58:29

so quickly could possibly have read paper um yeah but so for example when I testified in Congress in

00:58:43

1988 there was then uh an article written by Richard Kerr in Science magazine which was called him versus the world on

00:58:56

global warming and there there was a statement by one scientist that said well if there was a secret ballot at this meeting we would probably agree that the greenhouse effect is actually

00:59:10

changing the climate and then another one said what bothers that is that we have scientists telling Congress things that we are reluctant to say

00:59:22

ourselves it it kind of is an example of their reticence to say everything that they know I think the scientific Community

00:59:36

knows just how dangerous the situation is right now and is not fully um describing that

00:59:50

um it's um yeah there there are various reasons for reticence but um I think um we

01:00:03

will you know as a scientists we have a moral obligation to to uh young people to tell everything that we know and I think the situation is pretty

01:00:16

clear so you you kind of answer the next one I was going to ask you about you know you testified 1988 you said what would happen you said we had to you know reduce fossil fuel emission instead we increased them tremendously since that

01:00:28

time everything you said would happen at least by this point has already happened the opening Northwest Passage the the the emergence of the global warming signal from the noise and on and on um

01:00:41

you were all right and yet the world still is not acting on what you said back then or what everyone is saying even if you say the ipcc scientists

01:00:53

don't agree M with how bad you say it is they still say we need immediate action we have to do all these things and the world still isn't really doing much of anything can you've been probably frustrated about this for for many many

01:01:06

decades but do you have any insight you can share on why you think the world and I don't mean just again specifically scientists sure policy makers even the public is sort of ignoring this great

01:01:18

this great problem before us yeah it's because the emissions are primarily from burning fossil fuels and fossil fuels have been very useful they've raised the

01:01:29

living standard of much of the world uh they're still providing 80% of our energy one one gallon 3.7 lers of

01:01:41

gasoline or petrol as the equivalent of several hundred hours of work by a healthy adult that's extremely valuable and unless you have an equally good

01:01:53

alternative uh and equally priced you're not they're going to keep using that because there are other parts of the world China India

01:02:06

Africa who want to raise their living standards that makes it um difficult um but we have Alternatives now we have Alternatives now of course right I mean we have a renewable energy

01:02:20

which is actually for electricity generation is getting to be less expensive than fossil fuel generated energy so that's good um yeah now let let me uh comment on

01:02:31

that the uh sure solar pan if you look at how many kilowatts you can get out of the solar panel when the sun is shining it seems to be inexpensive but you have

01:02:45

to take account of the whole Energy System you have to uh have reliable energy uh 247 and you know there are countries that

01:02:56

are trying very hard Germany Denmark and if you look at their electricity prices those two countries have the highest electricity prices uh it's not and it's a lot of

01:03:11

work they've been it's they've got very good engineers in Germany and they're working very hard on this you need transmission lines from the places where you have your renewable energy your

01:03:23

windmills or whatever uh you need battery if you're not going to have uh dispatchable energy source you're going

01:03:36

to have to have batteries or something to store the energy for when the wind isn't blowing and that turns out to be expensive and it's also but dropping incredibly dramatically dropped 90% in

01:03:50

the last you know 10 years and it's continuing to drop dramatically well the battery in my car was $1,000 a kilowatt hour when I bought my car in 2012 and now it's $88 or something like that yeah

01:04:04

so yeah but we could I'd love to we could spend a whole hour on that so I don't want to but we we're going to get to nuclear power actually in a moment but before we do that you said in your

01:04:17

paper and this is a pretty dramatic statement I think that uh you you called for the need to purposely lower the Earth Energy imbalance that means the the difference between the energy coming

01:04:29

and the energy going out we have a problem where there's more energy coming in then going out Earth is warming and you think that's very dangerous and you say we have to purposely change that can

01:04:40

you talk about first of all H how can that be done how can we purposely change the Earth Energy IM balance what kind of things are you uh suggesting there yeah

01:04:53

so you know it's understood that we have to if we want to avoid warming that exceeds limits that everyone agrees would be

01:05:05

dangerous two degrees for example we've got to do something so ipcc concocted scenarios and in particular it it made

01:05:18

one that was intended to keep warming have a 2third chance of the warming being less than two degrees MH that's called RCP

01:05:31

2.6 uh but that scenario you can make up any scenario but they they did it by means of burning biofuels in power

01:05:44

plants capturing the CO2 and storing it permanently that is implo on a scale on an enormous scale and it's just not happening so

01:05:59

what we see is that we're exceeding that scenario and you say okay well then we've got to get some of that CO2 out of the air well we know how to do that and it's it's at the moment it's quite

01:06:12

expensive in fact just talking about things like direct air capture carbon dioxide removal that kind of thing right so direct air capture of CO2 at the level that would be needed to keep on

01:06:25

the scenario the two degre scenario is now three and a half to 7 trillion dollar a year at the current price of extraction so that's simply not going to happen but that's also at but literally

01:06:38

literally at kiloton scale and we want to be at gigaton scale a million times more than that price will probably drop significantly if we scale from kiloton to gigaton don't you think well but we

01:06:50

can't we got got kickart it it's like solar pels were super expensive years that's so those so they're assuming so if you want

01:07:02

to stay under two degrees you need a miracle uh and we we don't know that Mir we that may happen so that's why it's going to take several years to for the

01:07:17

socialization for the public to understand and accept the fact that if we want to keep a climate that

01:07:29

is hospitable for young people we're going to have to do something because we know that we're not going to turn off fossil fuels instantly so we're

01:07:42

now at a point where we're going to have to do something in addition unless a miracle occurs so but if that Miracle had better appear within the next few years or uh or

01:07:54

we get ready to do something to rebalance the planets energy balance and that and that is called what I like to call sunlight reflection methods also

01:08:08

called solar radiation management or SRM is that I assume that's what you're speaking of that we have to reflect more sunlight away from the earth and there are proposed multiple proposed ways to

01:08:20

do that I'm wondering if you have any favorites of those um well we know I I I don't have a a favorite but we do have the example that when

01:08:35

Pinatubo volcano went off it it reduced the energy coming in by three watts per meter squared or a year that is more than double that's

01:08:50

about double our current energy imbalance so and oh okay uh so you could so with the Stratos aerosols you could reflect

01:09:03

away the sunlight and actually cool down the planet so people know what that means that means we would purposely put sulfur particles in the stratosphere where they last about a year or

01:09:15

so and and that would reflect the sun we are doing that today at the low the coal plants and the ships are putting it in the lower atmosphere they last about a week I understand um so you're saying we

01:09:27

did it on purpose that that's one method but mimic a large volcano put sulfur up in the stratosphere reflect Sun away cool the Earth and that could be done that could be done or you could have

01:09:40

autonomous sailboats that are spraying uh salt water say with salt particles that would serve as condensation nuclei for clouds and the

01:09:52

clouds would brightening is another method yeah so we have what do you think about the mirrors putting mirrors on the ground you know about the mirror project so they're all all you have to

01:10:04

look at them in terms of what is practical from a financial standpoint uh they're relatively equivalent but

01:10:17

and any of them you could stop if you wanted to uh but we have to look at that I'm not saying we're going to do that today but we have to seriously think

01:10:30

about doing it on the time scale of a decade so do a lot of research right now right and and and figure out which one's the best one to do or maybe by the way you can do multiples you don't have to

01:10:41

do one I mean you can and of course the highest priority has to be on reducing emissions as fast as you practically can uh and I don't do not think that talking

01:10:55

about the uh reflection of sunlight is going to cause emissions us not to work on emissions I think actually that'll cause

01:11:06

people they don't like the idea of of uh doing aerosol reflection so therefore they'll work harder on trying to reduce emissions I think yeah there people say that's a moral hazard to to talk about

01:11:21

that but then again I I always think well what you're saying is you're not taking climate seriously in other words you're going to ask fossil fuel companies to Pretty Please reduce their emission rather than tell them that they have to and if I guess you know if we're

01:11:34

assuming we don't take climate change seriously then then we're not then we really have to take it seriously but uh all right so so that's a little bit on that by the way there's another method we didn't mention that's a space Bas

01:11:46

reflector at the L1 point between the Sun and the Earth Eli here our comod on on this call uh is done a lot of research on the economics of that and the technical feasibility of that so but that's where we've we've had long

01:11:59

discussions in climate chat about that but uh so there are these different choices and you're basically saying let's let's do some research right now so we already within this decade of starting one of these to cool

01:12:13

the Earth off that's what you're saying yeah if we're if we are right that we see global warming acceleration past one and a half degrees within a year or so than a year or so

01:12:24

well on the way to two degrees we we will and we see that the that the uh grounding line of the ice sheets is continuing to go toward a very dangerous level Point uh we had

01:12:39

better be ready to take some action or we're going to lose our coastal cities and more than half of the coastal of the large cities are on coastlines as well as all all the other things that we're

01:12:50

seeing increasing with uh with the global warming so a lot of people concerned about the side effects from the solar radiation management but basically what I think I hear you saying the side

01:13:03

effects of not doing that are really catastrophic losing all our coastal cities Etc versus you know maybe some shifts and rain patterns or something like that that might

01:13:16

happen of course you know you flap a butterflyes wings and you change the weather patterns so we we cannot predict exactly where how climate patterns might

01:13:28

shift if we change the planet's energy balance but we know that overall the climate is going to be much more Pro better if we don't have this excessive

01:13:42

warming so in any case we need to have a global fund to to uh to help the places where climate anomalies occur and the

01:13:56

magnitude of those anomalies will be much less if we keep get the planet back in energy balance and uh get the temperature down a bit okay so let's

01:14:09

talk about some of the the broad solutions that you proposed in your paper uh one is you called for increased cooperation between the East and the west and especially between the US and China what would this cooperation look

01:14:22

like and how would it Venit action on climate yeah I think good example was uh I was invited to by the Kissinger

01:14:35

Institute on climate in the US to attend a uh a meeting in Beijing this was in 2013 or

01:14:49

2014 um and I it was on climate and infectious diseases but uh I was the climate scientist from the US and um they China

01:15:04

was working very hard on developing solar panels and wind Mills and trying to bring down the cost of those and they're they were very successful at that but at the same time we saw that

01:15:18

all the coal emiss Coal use was continuing to Skyrocket there and so I propos that we have a workshop on uh modern nuclear

01:15:33

power and we and uh China hosted this Workshop in hyan China and I I proposed that we although the workshop and I we brought the best experts from the United

01:15:48

States and uh the top nuclear experts from China and and talked about ways that we could make the Next Generation nuclear power which would be

01:16:00

inherently safer than the old technology in the sense that it would shut down in case of uh emergencies and earthquake or whatever and

01:16:12

um but um I suggested that we invite the Chinese expert on energy their energy plans and their

01:16:27

Energy Efficiency and and he did come to the meeting and I talked with him about um fee and dividend and said well okay that would that would be great for China also

01:16:40

because it has the same problem that we do where the wealth disparity is growing and fee and dividend benefits lowincome people and he he agreed he said oh let's

01:16:52

write a paper together on that well when I got back we had so much trouble uh publishing our paper on the nuclear uh where there's such a prejudice against it in the United

01:17:06

States it it took a year but uh that but we proposed in that that we should US the US needs to have modern nuclear

01:17:20

not the old technology and it but it needs to be cheap it needs to be inexpensive and it should be because as we pointed out the amount of material

01:17:32

steel concrete that goes into a nuclear power plant is actually smaller than any uh competitors the energy cost should be small that from do you like

01:17:46

small modular reactor because one of the problems with nuclear is that it every time you build it it's a custom building and building over time not down no exactly wrong uh the uh it should not be

01:17:58

a custom building so that's what we said you should you should have a a product type uh approval and so you don't have to go back and spend five

01:18:11

years asking the uh nuclear Regulatory Commission for approval for a new one it should be identical to the prior ones you make them in a shipyard or in a factory that's the reason to do it

01:18:24

smaller and then put together several of them when you want a big plan right so but it it should but uh in order to have the market for driving down the cost the

01:18:37

same way we did with Renewables where you're making so many it started out Renewables were more expensive but with time make more and more they get cheaper and cheaper and we don't have the market

01:18:49

in the United States right now for nuclear power plants because of the resistance uh to them is very expensive I mean I mean for all the reasons you mentioned it's an expensive technology especially there's no reason that it

01:19:01

should there's no fundamental reason that it should be expensive are there any particular small modular reactor companies or technology you looked at that you think are exciting there there

01:19:13

are several that are exciting but they have to be they have to be tried they have to be uh developed that's what we could have done in operation with China and we're starting to you know Bill

01:19:26

Gates was building one type of modern nuclear power plant in China but then uh Trump said no more technical cooperation so they had to close it

01:19:38

down um okay we China is good at driving down the price and partly because they need a lot of them we would like to see them replace their coal plants with no

01:19:52

carb carbon energy sources and they are building Renewables they're building windmills and solar panels faster than any other country but they also

01:20:05

need energy that's not intermittent they need uh reliable 247 energy so they would like to build nuclear but they want to make sure it's good and we could

01:20:18

do better if we work together I I should point out by the way there are some uh academics like Mark Jacobson at Stanford that say we can actually do 100% 247 365 power using

01:20:30

Renewables and there are some places getting close to that actually in some places no no that's wrong that's wrong the the serious Studies by MIT even by Google include that you need

01:20:44

that 100% renewable is going to be very expensive and it's proven by Denmark and Germany look at their electricity crisis and they're not getting there look how slow it is you know you know the country

01:20:57

that did great Sweden they decided oh we need to have 100% carbon free electricity they decided on a design they built 10 nuclear power plants and

01:21:11

they went in a decade to carbon free energy well Germany's been working for decades and they're not anywhere near they're still now they're backing off on the nuclear they had because of yeah Fukushima and things like that so yeah

01:21:25

there's a lot of yeah people have an irrational fear of nuclear I think they should have that fear of coal Coal is really dangerous every possible way and will kill you

01:21:38

100% not helped we're not helped by our media which um has a bias and uh you know for example nuclear

01:21:51

waste you know it's contained in these containers right uh it doesn't harm anybody and yet it's got this terrible reputation but the waste from the other

01:22:02

energy sources is dispersed and mercury in the ocean from the coal waste and gets into rivers it's really awful um I want to keep going on what young people

01:22:15

can do so you've been arrested many times protesting fossil fuels there's a now a growing movement of people especially young people using nonviolent Civil Disobedience to highlight the need

01:22:28

for climate action what message would you like to send to those people or the people consider considering joining them that you know as you mentioned in

01:22:43

the introduction I was arrested several times because we were trying to draw attention to this issue which was not yet well understood by the public I

01:22:57

think now what is more important is to affect the political system if there's a I I'm not too supportive of actions which

01:23:12

disrupt the public in ways which then causes the public to be angry and it it can be counterproductive I think that what we have to

01:23:24

do is have the revolution that Benjamin Franklin said we need if because if we don't solve the problem in the United States I don't see us solving the global

01:23:39

problem we need to be the example that I think we were providing at the end of World War II when we provided the leadership that uh

01:23:53

um helped uh you know use uh the World Bank the universal

01:24:05

Declaration of Human Rights the United Nations there were a lot of things the this uh funding for Europe for reconstruction we we were very positive

01:24:17

example but now we've we've become with our special interest with the fact that our democracy is not functioning the way it was intended by the founders of our

01:24:30

government which now $1 dollar replaces uh it gives you more sway than the your vote so we have to fix the democracy and actually going

01:24:44

unfortunately going in the opposite direction right where we're fearing on losing our democracy there's a large segment of the population well willing to vote for authoritarian kinds of things why why is

01:24:56

that because they know that Washington is a swamp it we throw out one party the other one comes in they take money from special interests and we don't have a government that's serving the interests

01:25:09

of the public that's what I think we have to fix and I don't see how we do that unless we have a party that takes no money from special interests and that's where I but but but but you said we only have years and I don't unless

01:25:23

I'm wrong I I don't see this uh ground swell even beginning yet do you have any suggestions on how we Kickstart that or or get it to grow to prominence against by the way two

01:25:35

parties who each will not like that right even though they're the opposite to each other they still both won't like a third party coming in uh so what what well but it could it could happen very

01:25:48

rapidly I mean you saw how it gave you the examples of uh Obama Bernie Sanders where just just the support it can change can happen very

01:26:01

rapidly um and I think the public can appreciate that what the problem is it's the role of money in our government and we've got to take that out and you know when John McCain talked about campaign

01:26:15

Finance reform he found neither party would support him Republicans wouldn't support him uh so but so we have to do it um and but to to get a third party we

01:26:28

do need to work on this ranked voting so that we're the third party is not a spoiler that ends up electing the worst candidate we have that Oakland here live in ber you know work in Berkeley but

01:26:41

nearby Oakland has it and some places are starting to do it but I don't think it's really caught on yeah there are efforts now it's there are there's uh sorry I don't have the

01:26:53

the link but there is an effort to try to get it in all states unfortunately you have to do a state by state but um I think that if you had a third party

01:27:06

that took no money the public would flock to that party you know even when we had this this little Texan who saw martians on his front yard he got 19% of

01:27:19

the vote I'm talking about Ross pero uh if we had a good candidate you know third party Jim you gotta I don't know Jim you got to get your your stump speech uh written um i' I'd like to go

01:27:34

back to another climate science issue one that I actually haven't heard talked about since your your paper uh your your global warming of the pipeline paper and that is there's this concept of zero

01:27:46

emissions commitment like if we go to zero emissions today or 20 years from now let's say we at 2050 then the the theory goes that warming will stop because even though

01:27:59

there's global warming in the pipeline the oceans will continue to take up CO2 just like they did before and that those two things would cancel out and and while uh aerosols would also go away and

01:28:11

cause warming methane and other short-lived gas uh greenhouse gases would dissipate over 10 20 years and that would offset the aerosol uh uh warming so you know so those four two

01:28:24

things and two things cancel each other and you end up with hopefully a temperature roughly stable after we get to zero emissions but with your paper you're kind of saying well wait a second the

01:28:35

warming's more before and the cooling's more than before would that screw up the zero emissions idea if if we can go to zero emissions we've solved the

01:28:48

problem whether it's been a slightly warm for a few years years and then go down it it's not the issue the point is okay zero emissions in even in 2050

01:29:01

which is now 27 26 years from now is not going to happen the the people are talking about zero emissions they're saying oh zero net emissions well what does that mean they're all saying oh

01:29:16

they know that they're not going to zero and so they're saying well we'll do something else we'll PL some well well carbon capture I think is part of it yeah or carbon capture which is not shown to

01:29:29

be economically feasible but if you did carbon capture okay so then real carbon capture and storage with zero Le leakage okay but um well do you think by

01:29:44

the way you say very expensive you say it's very expensive and right now we talked about some of the cost it's $500 a ton but believe it'll get down to $50 to $100 a ton but even so don't tell me

01:29:57

about what's going to happen at 2050 we gotta wor my point is is isn't it more expensive not to do it though what is the cost of not of letting climate change continue is very expensive isn't

01:30:09

it yeah so the the point is we have to do something now don't don't give me a promise for what you're oh yeah I agree with that you're talking about now do the uh the some kind of solar management

01:30:22

I'm no get our emissions down to zero I'm not talking about solar management I'm talking about emissions okay you don't say that oh I'll promise you

01:30:34

that in 2050 I'm going to have net emissions zero that's hogwash that's that's that's what they've been getting away with and then we allow the stuff to

01:30:47

continue it's it's uh we're going to see effects way before 2050 so we've got to look at what's happening um and we've got to we've got

01:31:00

to get emissions uh to go down they're still going up so one of the ways you said we can do get our emissions down quickly is the uh carbon fee and dividend and again to remind people in in the YouTube uh right up there's a

01:31:15

link to a paper that that Jim and I did on that you can hear what it's all about what that means but um I also think that the obvious answer is to phase out fossil fuels and we're doing that with

01:31:27

appears at Le some places doing that with cars right California has a 2035 no more ice cars Europe bunch of places have that too so on cars it seems to be going well but but why don't we have it

01:31:39

on electricity generation go down it's not it's not it's not going well on vehicles okay well because because fossil fuels are inexpand

01:31:52

ensive so it doesn't matter if you if you in California you say okay we're not going to we're going to have all electric vehicles in California doesn't solve the problem

01:32:04

because you haven't made the price of fossil fuels on us and if you all you've done by stopping your emissions in California is reducing the demand Global demand for

01:32:18

the fuel make it cheaper and somebody else will burn it okay so the only way you can do it is to have a price that's why Number One requirement if you look

01:32:30

at the three essential requirements at the end of our pipeline paper the first one is you have to have a price on carbon okay and if you if you have that

01:32:42

if the United States and China would have that and say we're going to have border duties on products from countries that do not have a carbon price then that would encourage most countries to

01:32:55

have their own carbon price so they can collect the money themselves rather than El have us collected at the borders that's if you don't have that you haven't solved the problem so you're just kidding yourself by saying that I'm

01:33:09

oh I'm I'm now clean I'm now driving an electric car that that's not solving the problem if we don't have a price on carbon the global emissions are not really going to

01:33:22

go down significantly if we don't have a price on carbon so this is the paper that the white paper that you and I did I'm sharing that right now so people can see that the link is in the description

01:33:34

so that's great what other what other ways to um uh to reduce F I mean I I thought that you know essentially Banning you know over at a certain time frame like electricity all

01:33:48

has to be non-fossil fuel in 2035 is what I would say 200 countries Dan yeah yeah how are you going to how are you going to ban it in Iran how are you going to well that's a

01:34:00

good question because I'll go to cop and get it done so with that you set yourself up I want to get your take on cop 28 you didn't you didn't go uh you heard what's going on there was led by a

01:34:12

fossil fuel executive is the head of the cop what are your thoughts on cop 28 and how effective it it it's going to be you know afterwards I I decided not to go because

01:34:25

they're not addressing any of the three requirements they're they're not you know at uh cop Paris cop in 2015 the the

01:34:37

head said well people say we should talk about a price on carbon but it's not so simple well it's it's uh it's actually

01:34:49

pretty simple uh it is if you carbon fee and dividend is about as simple as you can get and then you need a border duty and that's that's uh that's it and it's so simple

01:35:03

that the number one objection I get when I give a talk on P dividend and by the way I should mention I should put it in maybe the link I have a tedex talk on carbon fee and dividend that explains it but the number one objection I get is

01:35:15

that people don't believe that the government will do what I just said in other words it sounds so good that people can't believe a government would actually Implement such a good policy and that seems to be the number one

01:35:28

objection they want oh the government will keep all the money the government will do this you know well no that's not the problem the problem is the fossil fuel industry won't let them because our governments are influenced by special

01:35:41

interests and there's no special interest more powerful than the fossil fuel industry okay so unless we have uh a a government that does not take

01:35:54

money that's that's what Benjamin Franklin called corruption he said that within a couple hundred years you're going to have that problem you're going to have to have a revolution well that revolution has got

01:36:08

to be a political party that takes no money from special interests and that revolution could happen very rapidly but it's got to get people behind it in

01:36:19

order to happen so um that that's that's going to be the bottom line of Sophie's Planet I have to get people to understand that if they if we don't get money out of our government

01:36:33

we're not going to solve the problem the special interest the ones with the big money and fossil fuel industry has so much money that it's uh very difficult

01:36:45

to um overcome that so so normally on climate chat we have a whole bunch of audience questions but we've been getting those sent to us and everything and we have our two Co mods here so I'd like to bring them in for a question

01:36:58

that they'll ask you uh first is Stacy rander uh who's who will ask you a question I think it's may be related to what you were just talking about hi Stacy welcome thanks um Dr Hansen very

01:37:11

very nice to be in your presence um so the US where I keep saying we're the problem um when you testified to Congress in 1988 the US was responsible

01:37:25

for nearly one-third of all historic CO2 emitted to date now we're down to about a fifth of all CO2 people on the other side will say

01:37:37

We'll point to China and other nations as their emissions will exceed ours today but on a per capita basis ours is nearly double that of China

01:37:52

and on a historic basis no Nation can even touch um that combination of um historic emissions and on a per capita

01:38:04

basis in the Paris Accord uh they we said we need to reduce emissions of the World by 43% of 2010

01:38:16

levels the US has reduced about 12% it looks like like but and we have what six years to get down we're not doing it and even if we

01:38:31

did reduce ours to the full 43% how can we turn to other countries who have been traditionally conservative

01:38:43

have not blown at all and the ones at the bottom of the pile that are trying to get a better way of life how can we ask them to cut when

01:38:57

they're already pretty much at the bone and here we are with our what um 18 tons per person how do we address this how do we

01:39:11

address one we're not doing anything and two even if we did like oh our share it's not our share what do you yeah well well that's

01:39:24

exactly right and we are more responsible uh than anybody so we have to have an approach which will work

01:39:39

for the rest of the world as well as for us and again going back to carbon fee and dividend is you know when I when I met with the

01:39:56

Chinese energy expert he agreed see their emissions are now like two and a half times ours they're by far the biggest source and they're and they're still increasing their coal

01:40:11

use um also China is mainly making stuff for us to buy yeah yeah I mean so it's not like oh you know my equivalent China is just like jet sitting and doing all

01:40:24

this crazy stuff it's the factories making stuff for the world but largely us yeah so you see what happened then President Biden was elected what

01:40:36

did he do as almost the first thing was to call Taiwan the the the worst thing he could do in terms of if he wanted to cooperate with

01:40:48

China but why did he do it because he wanted to appear strong compared to the other political party and you know in a sense China has become almost an

01:41:01

adversary certainly a competitor and that uh but that's that's because you know you um but we have to

01:41:14

work together we're we're in this sailboat together and and it's leaking and we've are we going to fight each other or are we going to fix that leap but don't we have a moral obligation to do more than what China

01:41:27

does well and how can we do that how can we actually affect the global emissions that's we're working with China so we together can reduce their emissions as well as our own that's why I went to

01:41:41

China I proposed a workshop there went there and they and they actually agreed but our politics doesn't allow it our politics says we got to treat China as an enemy as if we expect Chinese

01:41:55

soldiers to be charging up the California beaches and attacking the United States I mean it's screwing but that's what we're doing that's we're that's what we're acting like okay and

01:42:08

ignoring the global the fact that we're gonna go down together so did we declare war on the climate instead yeah so that's why we need a third party we we

01:42:20

our two parties are are just are just uh competing with each other to see who's tougher on China when in fact we need to work with China very good so now want to turn to Eli Rani is the other comod here

01:42:33

and Eli what's your question for Dr Hansen uh so um there are kind of two closely related questions um in in your your most recent paper you you talk

01:42:46

about you know predictions that are uh of higher temperatures than the ipcc predicts as as a modal uh prediction um are there significant uh uh temperatures

01:42:59

even beyond that or uh those temperatures occurring sooner than you predict um you know in in the range of risks that are uh maybe not as likely but also things we can't uh NE safely

01:43:13

neglect um and related to that going back to one of your comments uh uh earlier um about uh uh if we reached uh zero absolute emissions you know soon you know in the next couple of decades

01:43:26

for example we'd be okay do we really have enough certainty about feedbacks and how they interact to support with high confidence that we'd be okay with

01:43:38

absolute zero emissions um well I'm I would be very happy if we went to zero emissions and I would take my

01:43:52

chances but we're not doing that we're not going to uh zero emissions um the the the Earth's energy imbalance is

01:44:05

just such a valuable diagnostic of where we're headed we're already as warm as we should be so we've got to actually reduce that imbalance to zero and and

01:44:19

instead of reducing it it's going up you know it's doubled in the last decade so we've really got our work cut out for us um but that requires the combination of

01:44:34

all the above it requires reducing emissions as rapidly as practical uh and it uh probably is going to

01:44:47

require purposeful actions to affect the planet's energy balance but that will be but it's we can't do that tomorrow we're not ready to do it we've got [Music]

01:45:01

to conduct this socialization we've got to get people to see they're going to see what's happening they're going to see the climate is getting worse they're going to see these extreme events being more

01:45:14

extreme uh so they will but they uh so we need to be ready to take additional actions but in the meantime we've got to reduce emissions as rapidly

01:45:28

as possible and the only way that that is going to happen is if we put a price on carbon and frankly a corollary to that is we

01:45:40

need complement to intermittent renewable energies and I think that we should be putting a high priority on developing the Next Generation nuclear

01:45:54

power uh but it's uh it's uh it's going to be a a tough job and as long as the as the special

01:46:05

interests are controlling our government uh we're not going to solve it do you do you think that the impacts from climate change they going to as you were predicting going to get you know

01:46:17

much worse quite soon do you think think that will help I mean it it as you said next year we we'll know whether your your your numbers are right in your pipeline paper around May of next year

01:46:30

and then it's going to be a very warm year it's going to be a lot of Destruction then we need we need to see how far the temperature Falls with the elino with the linia that follows but I

01:46:42

I expect it's not going to fall as much as you would otherwise have expected because of the large planetary energy balance there's more energy coming in than going out so it's hard for the

01:46:55

linia to cool it off as much as it used to so given all this and thank you so much for your time by the way one of the uh I should say one of the quote questions I got and and asking for

01:47:09

questions from the public was to say thank him from all of us so let me thank you not just for being on this interview but for all of the work you've been doing since 1980s on this and trying

01:47:22

your best to alert alert us all about what's happening and even though we weren't listening enough I think it was still very yours was a very powerful voice in helping us understand the dangers well well well thanks for

01:47:36

arranging this but and actually I have to apologize I'm not a good communicator but I think that I'm going to make the story clearer in this book that I'm writing because which I'm finally planet

01:47:50

yeah because I you know it got delayed because I realized that there was this issue about aerosols and climate sensitivity which I disagreed with ipcc decided I had to finish that and it took

01:48:03

like two and a half years to do that paper now I can finish the book and I'll try to make it clearer that's great and and I want to give you this last moment here to you started off with a message

01:48:15

to young people you said hey here's the bad news here's the good news maybe you could uh just reiterate some of the good news about what you think could be done maybe even in addition to the political side that the Technical Solutions the the

01:48:29

fact of making their voices heard and what do you want to say to young people they should not young people should not underestimate their political power and

01:48:41

they will not only have their own voice but so many of us older people who are concerned concerned about their future so

01:48:56

um don't don't be um discouraged or depressed by the fact that we're in a situation where the climate is getting worse and worse and people are making bad predictions for

01:49:10

the future we can still deal with that if we get control of the political system but right now we don't have control the people with money who are

01:49:23

bribing our Congress people and it's both political parties we have to solve that problem and I think that young people are the

01:49:35

ones who can push the system to have the revolution that Benjamin Franklin says we need so I I will try to

01:49:47

make that story clearer in my book but I don't underestimate your power to change the political system it has to be fixed and

01:49:59

I think that young people can provide The Spar that makes it happen Okay well with that I want to thank you so much for your time and going over time actually to continue

01:50:12

this conversation longer than we originally planned and thank you so much for your help you you are obviously welcome back anytime and maybe next time we'll really do some geeky deep dive into climate science that trying to hold

01:50:24

off a little bit today um and thank you again for all the work you've done and thank you Dan and thanks to everyone here this is the climate chat I'm your host Dan Miller we were speaking with Dr James Hanson about a wide range of

01:50:38

topics and this will be available we're doing this live right here but it will be available later thanks everyone for coming and we'll see you