Dr Gavin Schmidt - Global Warming Exposed

Full transcript: Dr Gavin Schmidt on London Real

4:45 This is London Real, I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Professor Gavin Schmidt, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of the world’s top climate research organizations. You’re only the third person to hold this post for NASA, taking the role after James Hansen, the father of climate change awareness. You’ve written over 120 publications that specialize in simulations of the past, present and future. And Scientific American cited you as one of the 50 research leaders of 2004.

5:10 You proposed that climate models are skillful, but more importantly, it’s essential that we get off our carbon diet. Gavin, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. It’s great having you here, but this isn’t your first time in London, is it? You spent time here, you’re born in this country.

5:26 I was born in London, born in Barnet, and lived in Hannah Smith for a long time. What’s it like to come back and see this city, it’s kind of rebirth or seeing it grown up? Is it weird? London has always been these multiple layers on top of each other, kind of cheek by jowl, and the Victorian pub next to the Roman wall, next to the brand new building. And the 30 years it’s been since I’ve lived here, you’ve just seen more layers being added on top of that.

5:57 Plus, I think it’s become a lot more friendly for pedestrians, for cyclists. There’s less traffic in the center, there’s a lot more open space in pedestrianized areas. I have to say, I’m liking it. I love the bike system. And you’ve been in New York City for the last 20 years?

6:14 Yeah, well, a lot of the same things have been happening there too. Things have been cleaned up, there’s a lot of great new development, there’s been a lot of pedestrianization, there’s been a lot of support for cycle infrastructure. And that makes, I think, both of these cities much more livable than they used to be. How do you compare those two? Is it the tale of two cities now as we go into the future, or are they very, very different in your eyes?

6:38 Because they kind of do compete. Yeah, the reason why I stay in New York, and I live in New York, is that the people there, it attracts people from all over the world. And you meet people, and there’s no default about what it is you’re supposed to be, or who you’re supposed to talk, or how you’re supposed to live. And people are basically taken for who they are, for the most part. It’s not a perfect city for obvious reasons.

7:10 And that was always very refreshing to me. Growing up in the UK, travelling around, living in Europe a little bit, I often felt that you had to always be kind of defensive about the fact that you had a German last name, or that you spoke foreign languages, or that you ate funny food, or that you had cousins that lived abroad, or that you were Jewish, or you were this, or you were that. And it’s not that any of those things are problems, or that people were mean about it or anything, but it was just like this constant always being on the defensive.

7:48 Interesting. And in New York, that never happens. Right, because you’re in a melting pot full of weirdos. Well, everybody has a story, and if you’re not interested, fine, you move on. But there’s no default.

8:00 Yeah, I would argue that London today, it’s probably pretty diverse when you win. There’s no question that it’s more diverse than it used to be. So yeah, I like coming to visit here, so don’t misunderstand that. I enjoy spending time here. So much to talk about. I don’t really know where to jump in.

8:17 But first I want to say, it’s something I realized after watching your TED Talk when you dropped the FORTRAN reference, which is a computer code that they used to teach back in the 60s, 70s, 80s, which I think they’re still using in climate science. Not that it doesn’t work. No, no, it works really well. That’s why we keep using it. But I used to code FORTRAN when I was a kid, and I learned when I was about eighth or ninth grade, and I actually ended up working for the Scripps Institute of Oceanography when I was 16, helping one of the scientists there with climate models.

8:45 And I was programming these silicon graphics machines, which were like one of the very first really beautiful 3D graphics pieces of hardware that you could really watch climate models over years and years. And we were using data from buoys that were spread across the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, and El Nino was the big thing. And climate change wasn’t really something that the public was talking about, that I remember. El Nino would come along every now and then and kind of knock some industries out and shake some things up.

9:14 But I forgot that I was kind of involved in some early days here. Now it’s progressed a lot, but I was in this kind of science and institute place where they would run a lot of simulations and then try to figure out what was going on. Do you remember those days? And how can you fast forward us to today as it has gotten a lot bigger, has it gotten more political, has it gotten more public, your work? So all of those things.

9:39 So I remember using those same SGI machines when I was doing my PhD here at UCL. And I remember the first time somebody said, hey, download this browser thing. And I remember the first thing we looked up, and it was a list, and we looked up somebody in Argentina who had a site on the, had a dance the tango. And we’re going, oh, this is cool. I wonder if it will amount to anything.

10:04 It was the early web, like 91 or something. Yeah, Mozilla, right. Yeah, maybe 93. Oh, no, yeah, no, it could have been 91. Yeah, yeah, that was when I was there.

10:14 Anyway, so, you know, me too. I started off doing coding small-scale things, ocean modeling as well. And, you know, my PhD was of interest to perhaps four people around the world. Like every great PhD. Well, you know, which wasn’t perhaps the smartest career move that I made.

10:34 But it was after that that I got a job. And I said, well, you know, you could do that kind of theoretical stuff, but really we’re moving into this climate business. And I said, oh, that’s interesting. I said, oh, yeah, we’re going to be looking at the ocean circulation and the thermal haline circulation in the North Atlantic. And I said, oh, that sounds fantastic.

10:54 And I remember putting the phone down and then turning to my advisor and saying, what’s the thermal haline circulation? And you were interested. I was kind of like, you know, blagging just to get a job. But it became this really big thing. And so I went into this really as somebody with skills in coding, in the theory of things, but really without much experience or understanding of the climate issue as a whole.

11:20 And so I went to Montreal and I spent three years just kind of basically soaking up everything that there was to be soaked up in climate. And this institute, they’d only just started. And so they were doing the same thing. They were bringing in all these people from all over, tell us about everything. And it was a great fertile period.

11:41 I like to kind of, you know, so I did some courses, I read some books, and blah, blah, blah, you know, and then started working on models of the climate that were kind of relatively simple. I mean, complicated, but relatively simple. And I ended up suffering from what was called dimension envy, right? Where, you know, you just want, you don’t want to just be looking at a two-dimensional view of the whole world. You want to see everything, three-dimensional, four-dimensional.

12:09 And so I then moved to New York where I got the opportunity to work on really complex models that had all the dimensions that you could possibly look for, where you’re not thinking so much about, you know, how beautiful your theory is, but you’re thinking much more about how accurate this is, how realistic are the simulations. And you’re trying to understand the simulations for things that happened, you know, hundreds of millions of years in the past, ought out to, you know, thousands of years in the future and everything in between. And when you start to deal with the complexity of the real world as opposed to the kind of nice, neat theory that, you know, students kind of grow up with, what you find is that it’s not just four people that care about what you do.

12:56 It’s 40 people, then it’s 400 people, then it’s 4,000 people, then it’s 4 million people, then it’s pretty much everybody cares about the problems that you’re dealing with. And then that kind of pushes you to be thinking, well, hold on, like we’re doing something that now matters. It’s not just an academic issue. It’s something that matters, so we have to do a better job. We have to make it more realistic.

13:19 We have to see, okay, what are the questions that are coming from outside that we need to answer? And you kind of rejig the science a little bit to answer questions that are coming both from the public or from policymakers or from decision makers or from, you know, from the media. And you think, okay, well, we can answer those questions because you’ve built these tools that are so multifaceted that you can use them to answer an innumerable number of questions.

13:49 And it’s not just, well, what’s the global mean temperature going to be or, you know, is it greenhouse gases that’s caused the warming? It is, but that’s not a very interesting question after a while. In your TED Talk, you talk about this concept of 14 orders of magnitude. Right. So going down from a very tiny, tiny amount of measurement of what, 10 to the minus 6 meters or maybe less.

14:09 Yeah, so that’s the size of a nucleating particle for a cloud droplet. Okay. Right? So that’s what causes clouds. It’s happening right at the microscale.

14:19 Okay. And yet clouds have such a massive impact on the climate that are affecting the whole global climate, which is like 10 to the 8 meters. So you’ve got these like 10 to the minus 6, 10 to the 8. It’s like 14 orders of magnitude. It’s massive.

14:31 There’s no single theory, even in theoretical physics, that works across such large orders of magnitude and is still correct. And people that know an order of magnitude is kind of a 10x step between each one. Yeah, I mean like powers of 10. There was a classic… 10 to the 14th power.

14:46 Right. So 10, 1 with like 14 zeros. And you need to get that one right, you need to get that one right at the end right as well. And then on the other axis is your time orders of magnitude. Right.

14:57 So very micro pieces of time out to just long millenniums. It’s the same thing, yeah. So you’re doing things that are happening on the microsecond scale, millisecond scale. You know, the sun comes out from behind a cloud, warms up the ground as evaporation. All of these things are happening very, very quickly.

15:14 And yet the processes that control climate, you know, have timescales of thousands of years. You know, what’s going on in the ocean, you know, there’s water in the Pacific that’s 10,000 years old since it last saw the air. Right. And so circulation works in a very, very slow timescale. But you’ve got to get the really fast things and the really slow things.

15:36 And that really, that’s a real challenge computationally. And so what’s been happening over the last few decades is that every 10 years we’ve been able to get another like order of magnitude of stuff in. That you feel like you can model successfully. That you feel that you’ve got a real grip on. Okay. Every 10 years an order of magnitude, that’s still slow.

15:58 I mean, it’s amazing that you can accomplish that. Right. It’s actually massive. And you’re going, oh my God, this is so impressive. But, you know, the problem is that if you want to be able to predict what’s going to happen in 2100 with perfect accuracy, because you’ve understood every single process all the way down to the millisecond micron level, you basically are going to have to wait to 2100 to work that out. Right.

16:22 And that’s not acceptable. And your TED Talk has some beautiful graphics in there. And you kind of show, okay, this is our, you know, what we can do as far as modeling the world. And here’s what it starts looking like. And then this is the world.

16:33 And you can see a lot of things happening. You’re like, there’s some cyclones coming up. We didn’t model those. And how could we? And then it could be the pollution in China.

16:40 It could be this thing here. It could be this thing here. All these little variables that are almost impossible to model. And so you’re not, you’re not, what you’re doing is you’re trying to model the processes. Right. So these models are very different to what you might be thinking of as models.

16:55 And so, you know, somebody has done a little bit of statistics. They think of a model as like, you know, a line through the points. Right. Okay. Well, this and that’s not what we’re doing.

17:02 Or you think of a model, like, I don’t know, if you’re in biology, you think of a nematode as a model for, I know, human genes or something like that. Okay. We’re not thinking like that. What we’re talking about is trying to put together all of the different processes that we see happening in the real world. So you go to the Arctic, right?

17:19 You know, you’ve got the sun that comes down. It reflects off the ice. The ice melts. And then it goes, the sun goes into the ocean. Those things can be encapsulated. They can be measured.

17:28 You can work out how reflective the ice is. You can work out how quickly it melts, how fast it forms. And then you pull all of that into code. And then you join it up with all of the other bits and pieces of the system. Right. So the clouds, the winds, the ocean circulation, the rivers, the soils, the lakes, all of it.

17:48 And you put each of them in and then you just kind of basically say, okay, well, the winds did this and then now what’s the ocean going to do? And now what’s the ice going to do? And now what’s the ocean going to do? And now what’s going to… You just keep going around and right.

18:01 And all of the things that you mentioned that you can see in those animations, the tropical cyclones, the storm systems, the pollution coming up and swirling away and dissipating. The vegetation that’s absorbing sun and water vapor. And growing and being fertilized by carbon dioxide and being desiccated by drought and all of those things. You can pull all that together and what you see are these emergent patterns. These things that we didn’t code in specifically, but they just kind of emerge when all of those things are working together.

18:35 There’s a great example of whether… Have you ever watched like a big flock of birds? So a big flock of birds and you look at them and they’re swooping and they’re gyrating and you think, oh my God, what a beautiful pattern that they’ve designed. But they haven’t designed any pattern. That’s just an emergent property from each of the individual birds.

18:55 All they’re doing is paying attention to what the other birds around them are doing. So if the bird on their left goes a little bit that way, they go a little bit that way. And they don’t do it perfectly, so it’s not totally… So it’s a little bit random, it’s a little bit chaotic. But the beautiful swooping patterns, they didn’t design it.

19:12 It kind of just came from those small scale interactions. So the climate is exactly like that. The patterns that you see, they emerge from these small interactions. The solar radiation over a day, the wind pan, the clouds, all of these things and the rotation of the earth. All those things fit together to create a storm, to create a tropical cyclone, to create the seasons.

19:38 Okay, that sounds massively complicated. And also, if you forgot something like the vegetation, that could throw the model off completely. Well, so you don’t forget about these things. But earlier on, you didn’t include all of the variances. So you’d say, okay, well, let’s just keep the vegetation fixed.

19:55 Let’s just assume that the vegetation is always the same and it doesn’t vary from one year to another, which is not a terrible approximation. And then as we get better and as we get more experienced and as we get bigger computers, we start to say, okay, well, let’s loosen that approximation. What if it changes a little bit as a function of drought, as a function of rain, as a function of carbon dioxide? And then you start to see slightly better fits to the observations and you can use more interesting information to check how well the models are doing.

20:27 But every time you’ve done that, it really doesn’t change the big picture. The big picture has been pretty stable. And the big picture is what? Is that we have to get off our carbon diet, which is not always what people want to hear. Right, so the big picture, let me, before we go into what we should do, what’s the big picture for what is, right?

20:45 So what’s actually happened over the last 100 years or so. So we have seen global warming. It’s been about a degree Celsius. Nobody really knows what that means, but it’s about a quarter of the difference between the pre-industrial period and the last ice age. Okay. Right?

21:03 So it’s not a trivial amount of things. Okay. And that’s what period of time? Over the last 100 years. 100 years, okay. It’s gone up a quarter of…

21:11 A quarter of an ice age unit. Okay, a quarter of an ice age unit. Yes. So if an ice age unit is like how cold it was in the ice age, compared to now, so the ice age was about 20,000 years ago. It was about four or five degrees colder than pre-industrial.

21:25 So just about one degree, it’s about a quarter of that. Okay. So that’s a better context. Yeah, all right. The planet has warmed, right?

21:35 We see it in everything. We see it in the weather station data. We see it in the ocean data. We see it in the retreat of the glaciers. We see it in the movement of ecosystems, up the mountains, towards the poles.

21:48 We’re seeing it in growing seasons. We’re seeing it in a thousand different parameters, right? There’s no question about that. Why is that happening, right? There’s a ton of things that cause climate to change, right?

22:03 You know, we’ve had the whole of geological history to see how many different things have caused the climate to change. You know, we’ve got… we’ve had asteroids. We’ve had massive volcanic eruptions. We’ve had continents moving around and changing the ocean currents.

22:17 But none of those things have really happened in the last hundred years. The last hundred years, we’ve had… The sun has been doing a little bit. The volcanoes have gone off. You know, Krakatoa went off, and Pinatubo went off in 91.

22:32 Mount Agung went off in 1963, cooled the climate by about two-tenths of a degree, and maybe just about to go off again. I didn’t check the news this morning, but it’s been rumbling all week, and people have been evacuated from this same volcano. That affects the climate. But then there’s all these things that we’ve done, right? So all the human input.

22:54 So we’ve chopped down a lot of trees, really. I mean, a massive amount of trees. We’ve increased the amount of ozone pollution on the surface, smog, and we’ve decreased the amount of ozone in the stratosphere because of our use of spray cans back in the day. What was that compound? It wasn’t that…

23:11 CFCs. Yeah. Chlorofluorocarbons. Chlorofluorocarbons. Which we no longer admit.

23:16 We were good about that? Yeah. So we’ve actually stopped to mean those completely thanks to the Montreal Protocol. And they’re decaying slowly because they’re very long-lived. That was part of the problem.

23:25 And they’re decaying slowly in the stratosphere. So we’re just starting to see the ozone recovering and the ozone hole recovering from the peak harm that we did it to it. So we did that. And we’ve emitted a lot of greenhouse gases. So the biggest one is carbon dioxide.

23:46 Second biggest is methane. Nitrous oxide comes from agricultural activity, for the most part. Methane comes from mining, from agriculture, from cow farts and the like. Yeah, that’s always funny. Documentary capspiracy, which just points to methane.

24:04 Yeah. It says per unit, it’s much more destructive than carbon dioxide. Yeah, but some of the numbers in that documentary are not valid. So they over-egg their pudding, so to say. Okay.

24:16 They exaggerated some stuff. Yeah, some of the stuff in there is exaggerated. But methane is a big deal. But carbon dioxide is the biggest deal. And so that comes from burning fossil fuel, burning oil, burning coal, burning natural gas, and anywhere that you get those things from.

24:31 So shale oil, shale gas, tar sands, all those things. It’s the same basic idea. And we’ve increased carbon dioxide levels by about 40% over the last 150 years. And that’s the dominant thing. And when you do each of those things in turn, and you see, okay, well, what are the natural things done?

24:54 What are the natural things done? And the basic answer is that over the last 100 years, natural things wouldn’t have changed the climate at all. There have been a few blips there and there, but we’d be basically the same as we were 100 years ago. Even with volcanoes? Even with the volcanoes.

25:06 Okay. That’s what your modeling’s taught you, or that’s what just running… Well, so that has to be a model, right? So what you’re doing there is a counterfactual, right? Yeah.

25:15 Because that didn’t just happen that only natural things happened, right? Right. In the real world, there was only one path that had us and all the natural things all together. Right. So when you’re trying to do an attribution study, when you’re trying to say, well, what caused what, what you need to do is you need to take out, you know, factor A, take out factor B, take out factor C, and then put them all together again and see if you can explain what’s going on.

25:38 And when you can explain it, you know, which one of those factors is the dominant thing. Right. So that’s what you do. So you need to have a model to do that. Right.

25:46 So say, for example, the last 100 years, we have data, so we know what happened. Right. So you could go back 300 years and four or 500 years and predict each increment of 100 years correctly. You would hope or assume your model might correct that last, you know, predict that last 100 years correctly. Yeah.

26:03 And you compare that with the real data. Is it something like that? No, it’s something that’s not quite like that. Okay. You know, the hindcasts we do, they’re not predictions as if we were living in 1900.

26:13 They are, you run the models forward knowing when the volcanoes went off, knowing what the sun was doing, knowing how much extra greenhouse gas was in the air, because we know those things. Right. So we put those in and then you say, okay, well, how much warmer does it get when you just have the sun going on? Well, how much warmer does it get when you just have the volcanoes? Well, it actually gets a little bit colder.

26:37 Well, how much warmer does it get when you just have air pollution or ozone or the… Anyway, you do all of those things. And what you basically find is that the only thing that warms like we’ve seen, that explains what we’ve seen is the effect of greenhouse gases. Okay. So let me use another analogy that might be useful.

26:59 So you might have talked about like the Higgs boson and the Large Hadron Collider at some point. Yeah. Fascinating project, right? So you’ve got an enormous amount of data that’s being produced by these massive collisions all the time. Then they look for anomalies, right?

27:17 So they have a model for what it should look like if everything is as they expect. And then they try to find anomalies. But you see anomalies all the time because things are random and you get departures. And so if they see a two sigma anomaly, they say, nah, that’s not enough, right? Like that happens too often.

27:34 Yeah. Three sigma anomaly, they start to get interested. Four sigma, we’re going, hmm, yeah. Five sigma anomaly, that’s when they say, okay, if we’re seeing a five sigma anomaly, then we’re seeing something that needs to be explained. And we’re going to try and explain it with our theory of the Higgs boson, right?

27:51 We’re doing the same thing, right? So we have a theory, a background theory for how things are working when you just have natural things going on. And where we are, the signal in the temperature that we can go and measure, that’s a five sigma anomaly from what we expect. Okay. So it’s the same level of detectability that the Large Hadron Collider people had for the Higgs boson.

28:17 Whichever one says it must be correct, and then they found these new particles, and yet you have people that disagree with you. Yes. And if the science is so obvious to you and the people that you work with, why is it so controversial? Well, the science is controversial, not because of the science. So as sciences go, nobody is being handed out of the field because they’re frauds or because they faked a graph in a paper which happens all the time in biology or in microbiology or anything.

28:53 You know, we don’t have those kinds of standards, those kinds of skills, we have those kinds of standards. We haven’t got those kind of scandals. But people attack the science because of what it implies, right? And we’re not the only science for which that is true. You know, evolution in some parts of the world, the southern US or in Turkey is attacked because of what it purports to say about man’s relationship with God.

29:24 Now, I don’t think it has anything much to say about that, but opinions differ, as they say. And so the way that people deal with difficult science is to react by shooting the messenger because it’s much easier to do that. Oh, my gosh, this scientist is an imperfect human being, therefore I shall ignore their science because I don’t really want to pay attention. I don’t want to conclude that humans are impacting the climate. Because it’s not in my economic interest.

29:54 It could be economic, it could be worldview, it could be religious, it could be ideological. I mean, it could be tribal, right? You know, science comes from, you know, highly educated people on the coasts of the US. I mean, that’s a horrible stereotype. I mean, science is being done all the way across the US.

30:21 But, you know, it’s clear that there are cultural divisions in the US that are being, you know, this is a period in which they are amplified. And unfortunately, climate change and climate science has been taken along for that ride. And so that’s a pretty bumpy ride. But you find people who have never given climate science a thought dismissing the science of climate mainly because that’s what their tribe is doing. And there’s a few key voices that are trying to break out of that.

30:52 But unfortunately, that’s a big part of it. And your critics say climate’s always changed. You’ve heard this argument all the time. But it’s not an argument. Nobody disagrees with that.

31:03 Climate has always changed. The issue is not, oh, we thought that, like, these idiot scientists who think that the climate didn’t change before humans came around. No, you know, I spent all my time looking at climate changes in the past. Like this last week, I was at a workshop looking at these massive warming events that happened in the Paleocene or in the Cretaceous or in the Jurassic. I mean, these are massive, massive changes.

31:26 Mass extinctions, you know, huge rearrangements of the climate system. We’re not… Climate science is not unaware that big things have happened before. I mentioned the ice ages before. Like, it’s not…

31:39 Of course climate has always changed. It’s not… That’s a stupid question. It’s not a stupid question. It’s true.

31:44 But it doesn’t imply what people are trying to make it imply. Okay. Other critics say it’s not manmade. They say, well, all this stuff, we can’t attribute it to be that, right? You’ve heard that one as well.

31:56 Well, but then you show them the attribution studies and you show them how to do it and you show them, okay, well, here’s like five different ways to do it and you all come up with the same answer, right? You know, they’re just like, well, I’m just going to go into another argument there. You are a bad person. You get that a lot. I do get that a lot.

32:14 And it’s quite funny. It’s… I mean, you may resonate with this one. But, you know, I haven’t got a lot of hair, right? And I haven’t had a lot of hair for a long time.

32:30 And I kind of liken most of the personal attacks that come my way to somebody coming up to me in the playground at school and saying, you dirty hippie, you should get your hair cut. And you’re going, what? And so most of it is like, it’s just like they insult you, but they don’t know you. They don’t… They have no idea who you are, what you do or what things.

32:56 And so you’ve got this like weird kind of internet doppelganger that exists, that people like they take their name and they say all these terrible things about that person and it just happens to be your name and it’s your job. But it’s not you and these people, it’s… You know, you become kind of, I wouldn’t say iconic, perhaps symbolic. Of other things that they don’t like. So the intellectual arguments against your theories and science are just very base and they don’t have a lot of intelligence.

33:26 No, because if you actually talk to the scientists and you go to the meetings and you see who’s working on interesting things, the number of credible challenges to the mainstream view of what’s been going on, it’s pretty close to zero. Okay, even though it’s getting more momentum now, this thought. Well, it’s always been bubbling there. And it bubbles up when it’s useful for people to have it bubble up. And so these things get amplified by commentators, these things get amplified by politicians when it’s kind of useful for them to be doing so.

34:00 And you’d rather wish that they didn’t do that, they’d find something else to talk about. But there’s a number of people here and a number of outlets in the UK and in the US that persist in total kind of ostrich head in the sand type of discussions on science. Okay, which is kind of what’s happening now. We’ve seen that happen. And so, yeah, I mean it’s no surprise or it’s not new news that Trump organization is talking about that.

34:31 It’s very friendly to oil and gas and shale and people think it’s kind of reversing a lot of the policies that Obama had in place. And so the world’s dealing with that removal of the Paris Accord. And of course, you know, Trump is kind of NASA’s boss too, which I’m sure puts you in a difficult situation. Right. So NASA is a pretty robust institution.

34:52 It’s a science institution. It’s not a science agency. It’s not a policy agency. So, you know, the science that we do, you know, serves an enormous range of end users from people making weather forecasts to people tracking disaster relief to people looking at long term changes in ecosystems. You know, the science that NASA does transcends a lot of the bickering that occurs just because of the climate change part of it.

35:24 So NASA is a $20 billion agency. Earth science is about $2 billion of that. And the vast majority of that goes to support the satellite program that we have in no Earth orbit. So we have satellites up there measuring ozone levels and temperatures and sea surface spray and salinity and land cover change and clouds and the depth of clouds and the concentrations of clouds. We spend a lot of time looking at clouds. What else?

35:58 So that’s why NASA is doing this climate research because of the low Earth satellites. That’s kind of why this agency does it. Right. So on the surface, if I say national aeronautical in space, why are they doing climate change? That’s why, right? Right. So we’re really the only agency.

36:13 I mean, ESA is getting up there, but we’re the only agency that for the last 30 years has really maintained monitoring instruments in low Earth orbit that have tracked the climate through all those El Nino events, through those big volcanic eruptions. And the data that’s coming from those has helped improve weather forecasts so much so that a seven-day forecast now is as good as the three-day forecast was even 15 years ago. And really, I mean, that’s an enormous benefit to everybody.

36:55 So the climate change part of NASA comes because we’ve been doing it for a long time and now we’ve got trends, right? So a lot of the things we’re not put in space to look at how things are changing, but they’ve been in space long enough and we have records that are solid enough that we can now see the changes. So we can see the changes in temperatures in the atmosphere, temperatures in the stratosphere. We can see the changes in the gravity, the shape of the gravity field on Earth.

37:24 And this is like incredible technology. So we have two satellites that are flying called the GRACE satellites and they have a laser beam that goes between them. And what it measures is exactly how far apart they are. And you think, okay, what can you do with that? So as they’re going around, if they go over a mountain, the mountain’s a lot more mass, right?

37:48 So the gravity is a little bit larger as you’re just going over a mountain. So when the gravity’s a little bit larger, it pulls the satellites together a little bit more. Not by very much, by like, you know, kind of femtoseconds, right? But we can detect that. And so we can detect when it goes over a mountain, they get a little bit closer together.

38:06 And when they go over the ocean, they get a little bit further apart. And we can track that. And so the idea with that satellite was to measure what the gravity field was, right? Because that’s really important for the other satellites, so that we know exactly what orbit they’re in, right? Because if you go over a little bit more mass, it slows down, less mass it speeds up, right?

38:24 So you need to know that very accurately. But those satellites have been in orbit since 2003. And not only have they mapped the gravity field, they’ve mapped the changes in the gravity field. And you think, okay, well, where is gravity changing? How, like, what?

38:42 What does that mean? Gravity’s changing? Okay, gravity’s changing on the ice sheets because the ice is melting and falling into the ocean. And so there’s less mass on Greenland. And so they used to slow down some, and now they’re not slowing down quite as much.

38:58 And so we can detect that trend even on a decadal scale, right? So we can detect that we’re losing ice in Greenland. We can detect that we’re losing ice from the Alaskan ranges, and in fact, all of the Manchian ranges. We can detect that the ocean is gaining mass. We can detect the places where we’re unsustainably taking out groundwater, right?

39:20 The California and Central Valley, Northern India, China. That’s that there’s less gravity there than there used to be. I mean, not that people are kind of bouncing, like they’re on the moon or anything, but there’s less gravity there because all the water that used to be in the ground is now in the ocean. And we can keep track of those things, not because that’s really what we wanted to do at the beginning, though I mean, people did think that that might happen.

39:43 But you know, these things had design lines for like three years, and yet they’ve lasted 14. And so you get these trends. And so that information, the information that NASA is producing that is demonstrating that climate is changing, right? That’s why NASA cares. It’s like, well, explain this, like, so do the simulations, do the data analysis, you know, find ways to pull that information in and make it comprehensible, make it coherent with everything else.

40:17 Okay. If it wasn’t for NASA, will we be way behind when it comes to understanding climate change or? I think so. I mean, NASA has been a huge pioneer. You know, it hasn’t done every single new thing.

40:29 I mean, ESA has been doing some… ESA stands for? The European Space Agency. Okay. So they’re really gearing up, and they’ve been well-funded in recent years.

40:39 So they’re doing a lot of innovative things. But yeah, a lot of the long-term records are coming from NASA and NOAA satellites. Okay. NASA’s budget is supposed to be cut next year by 3%. Is that going to affect you?

40:55 And what if people don’t want to hear us talking about climate science anymore? What if you worry that NASA budget will go towards new space vehicles and not hiring Gavin again? I’ll skip that last bit. So, you know, the budget process, if you spend any time looking at the federal government in the U.S., you will realize is a massive sausage-making machine. And there’s lots of opening gambits, and there’s things that happen, and there’s things that…

41:28 So until you actually have a budget, you don’t know what’s going to be in your budget. Okay. And everyone’s got their finger in the pie, and everyone has continued to use it. Yeah. I mean, NASA is pretty widespread across the country, and spends money through universities, through contractors, through the centers all over the country.

41:49 This is money that kind of invigorates the economy and produces great data. So, I mean, I could see that there would be lots of arguments for not cutting NASA’s budget. But, you know, the fact of the matter is we’re an executive agency, right? You know, we don’t exist outside of the federal government. And, you know, Congress decides what the appropriation is, and if they said, well, spend less money or spend more money on this, then, you know, NASA would do the best that it could with whatever constraints that it’s given.

42:24 You know, having said that, most of what we do, you know, is stuff that is of use to, you know, a huge range of end users, from weather forecasters to disaster preparation to FEMA, USDA. I mean, like, so, you know, we produce a lot of data, and produce a lot of science that a lot of people use. So, you know, personally, I think it would be a little bit short-sighted to cut that. But we’ll see what happens. Maybe they could just cut the guy that’s making conclusions about climate change.

42:59 The funny thing is, it’s not just one guy, right? And one of the great things about NASA is that it’s a totally open data policy, right? So, for the most of what we do, the stuff comes down from the satellite, it goes out straight away. So, we produce free data. People can analyze it themselves.

43:22 All of the data, you know, we have a very small operation where we kind of collate weather station and ocean data to produce, you know, statistics for the global mean temperatures every month and every year and things. But it’s not a very big part of what we do. But all the code is open source. All the data is public data, you know. So, you know, they could say, don’t do that anymore.

43:47 Say, fine, somebody else will do it. You know, we’ve kind of built in that robustness because it’s important. It’s important that these analyses be transparent. It’s important that they be replicable, right? That’s a key part of science because they matter, right?

44:06 So, you can’t have a single point of failure. You can’t just be, well, you know, if that one guy there goes away, then all this data goes away. No, that would be crazy. And so, you know, we’ve designed the way that the data processing works such that it isn’t just one person. Anybody can actually go and do this themselves.

44:25 And there are multiple groups who are doing, you know, similar or basically just taking our code and running it. And so, you know, things are more robust than one sometimes fears. Okay. So if you go missing, I won’t have to go look in the shale oil fields. There’ll be someone else that replaces you and continues your work, I guess.

44:45 Hurricanes are in the news, right? Big time. We thought Houston was bad and then now we saw, I think it was Maria afterwards and now Puerto Rico. And again, now we see, you know, the controversy get political as well and go on Twitter and now it’s Trump against the mayor of Puerto Rico. And I’m kind of following it.

45:01 But, you know, when it’s on Saturday Night Live in your hometown, it’s hitting the news. What’s your read on hurricanes? Is that caused by climate change that it’s been caused by man’s emissions? Okay, so that’s not a great question, right? So hurricanes, you know, have always existed, right?

45:19 And we can model them better than ever these days? And we can model them better than ever, yes. So, I mean, if you saw the track forecast for Maria, you know, they were within 50 kilometers, days and days and days ahead. Which is amazing and hugely useful. And hugely well.

45:34 That is alone a reason to keep NASA’s budget the same. So, yes, I mean, so a lot of that is NASA data that’s providing some of the input that allows that to happen, yes. So, the thing about forecasts, though, is that, you know, you’re supposed to use them to plan ahead. And I think part of the disaster that we’re seeing, a little bit in Houston and certainly in Puerto Rico, is that the evidence from the forecast is not being used effectively. You know, people were discounting in Houston.

46:07 People discounted the extreme rainfall forecasts that were coming. They said, well, it’s never done that before. But it was like massive records. You know, total devastation in Puerto Rico, you know. You know, the kind of emergency response aspects, you know, I think even since Katrina, you know, things have got better.

46:31 But obviously, I think we still, as a government, we need to be working more on that. Houston could have been better. Houston could have been better. Yeah, I mean, they were talking about how they massively improved it since Katrina and all these agencies being to each other. But it was still a mess.

46:46 Every time we have something like this, people go back and they say, what could we do better? And then there are things that we could do better every time. Okay, trusting the forecast, you’re saying, would have been one of them and taking them a little more seriously. Yeah, that would, yes. But kind of coming away from the immediate disaster, you know, hurricanes and tropical cyclones are part of the climate system.

47:11 They emerge naturally when you’ve got a rotating flow, very warm air and, you know, massive amounts of evaporation. It just happens. Now, but the statistics of hurricanes change with respect to the climate. So if you’ve got a very warm water, you expect more intense hurricanes. And as the water gets warmer and nothing else changes, then you expect the hurricanes to get more intense.

47:38 So that’s a pretty robust prediction. And the water has been getting warmer. So this year is a particularly bad year for hurricanes, the worst since 2005. But it’s also been a particularly warm year in the Atlantic, in the main development area where these hurricanes seed. But we’ve had some massive hurricanes in the Pacific, you know, and so we’re seeing as well, you know, some hint that the intensity of these storms is increasing.

48:06 Now, you know, they don’t happen that often, right? I mean, so you have about 90 tropical cyclones every year. So our ability to have like good statistics on what the variations should be and is limited because we really only have good data that goes back to the 60s, right? Because prior to that, you know, you could have a hurricane in the middle of the Pacific and nobody would ever see it, right? So, you know, your statistics become kind of a little bit more uncertain as you go back in time.

48:40 And unfortunately, you know, the physics of hurricanes requires that you go like one or two orders of magnitude beyond what we’re doing with climate models right now. So the models that are doing the forecast for the hurricanes, they’re highly optimized just for that task, very high levels of spatial resolution. So the grid boxes are very small, so they go a lot more detail in there. And we’re not yet at the point where we can run those models for climate change studies.

49:13 So we’ve got a little bit of a gap between what those models are telling us about tracks and intensity and what the input from climate models will tell us how that whole environment will change. Now, we can make a pretty good prediction on, you know, how many hurricanes they’re going to be, how many intense hurricanes they’re going to be on a year-to-year basis, right? So we can explain that. And it’s affected by El Nino, it’s affected by, you know, the gradients in the Atlantic.

49:43 And so those are things that we can do. But we’re not yet at the point where we can, you know, take a particular hurricane and say, okay, well, let’s just make it like it was the… take away the human impact and see what it does and then put in the human impact and see what it does. We can’t quite do that yet. Okay. So we can’t say this is due to global warming, these hurricane season, or to human…

50:06 No. So I mean, so you’re going to have variations in hurricane season anyway. But what we think is happening is that the major hurricanes are becoming more intense. But we don’t have really enough of them to kind of really nail that down. But when we do, my guess is that that’s the answer that we’ll be finding.

50:23 Okay. What happens if we don’t make any changes in our carbon emissions 100 years from now? What does this world look like if we continue on this trajectory? Because a lot of people say it’s going to be great when it’s warmer, so I wear less clothes. So that’s not one of our options, staying still.

50:39 So what we’re doing right now is we’re increasing our emissions. So actually, the last three years, they’ve been pretty static. But static emissions doesn’t mean static climate because we’re putting in way more than the system can do. Okay. How have they become static the last three years or why?

50:54 So the last three years, coal use has gone down a lot. So natural gases repost coal in a lot of the U.S. China, which was the big driver of the growth in emissions, has kind of scaled back down their coal production, mainly for air pollution reasons. Just because they’re getting complaints from the population, not because they’re trying to comply with global demands. I’m not sure that the Chinese government pays a lot of attention to complaints from the people.

51:19 Okay. But then why do it? Well, because hundreds of thousands of them are dying from bronchial infections. It’s none of their economic interests. Because China doesn’t seem to care too much about global warming in a theoretical or humanitarian perspective.

51:35 Or is that unfair? I think that’s unfair. I mean, one of the interesting things about China is that there’s a lot of scientists quite close to the central party. So there’s a lot of engineers. There’s a lot of people who came through the technical schools.

51:51 And so if you look at the backgrounds of the people making decisions in China, there’s a lot more scientists and engineers than there are in the U.S. at similar levels. In the U.S. it’s a lot of lawyers and bankers and real estate agents. And they’re like not so many scientists.

52:07 Well, they’re in government. Yeah. Okay. So the science in China and the Chinese scientists that I’ve worked with, they don’t have the same counterculture anti-science thing in China that they do here. So obviously China has its own problems in how to run itself.

52:32 But it doesn’t have quite the same problems in the U.S. Interesting. So in a way it’s more advanced that way. You know, I’m a big fan of democracy. So I’d have to hesitate before saying that.

52:43 Okay. But senior people in the government are actually scientists, which is rare in government. So they might be a little closer to understanding. Yeah. So they get this.

52:55 So they’ve reduced, they had these big plans for, oh, everybody has to have power. I’ve been co-power stationed here. And they were bringing an extremely dirty coal and massive, you know, very bad conditions in their minds there. And so they’ve been reducing that. So a lot of the plans that they had have been shelved.

53:14 Okay. Good. So we’re done. No, no, we’re not done. So let’s be clear about the size of the problem here, right?

53:20 So right now we’re putting out about 10 gigatons of carbon every year collectively. Okay. 10 gigatons, okay. Right. Yeah.

53:27 It seems like a big number, gigatons. That’s a billion tons, right?

53:33 And what the ocean is absorbing, which is where it’s going to end up in the end, right? The ocean is absorbing about two. Okay. Doesn’t it end up on the land? It gets a little bit, but the land recycles quite quickly.

53:45 So the permanent storage on land is small. So almost all of the carbon that we’re putting in the system will end up in the ocean. Right. And the ocean has the capacity to deal with it. It’ll take a while, but it has the capacity.

53:59 So we’re putting 10 out and the ocean is absorbing two. So that means that there’s this, this is like eight. Right. And that’s that eight gap. That’s what’s causing the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere to go up and up and up and up.

54:14 Okay. So even if we stopped the emissions, we still have, well, even if we made them static, we still have to deal with that eight every year. Right. So even if we keep things static, then things are still going to get worse and still go up. So to keep things steady, right, you’d have to reduce things by 70 or 80 percent.

54:33 Right. So it’s a huge challenge. Yeah, it’s a huge challenge. That was a big long digression. I can’t even remember what the question was.

54:41 I don’t know. It was China, I think. I don’t know what your question was. It was always what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen in the next hundred years?

54:47 What happens is just going to get warm. We just get some sun cream. Or what happens if we continue? So let’s let’s let’s look at what’s actually going to happen. So if you think about a worst case scenario, we just continue to burn everything we can find.

54:59 We burn all the coal. We burn all the oil. We burn all the shale gas. We burn the tar sands and the methane hydro. I mean, there’s a ton of hydrocarbons in the system.

55:09 More than a ton. There’s 10,000 gigatons of carbon in the system. Anyway, we burn that as much as we want. Right. Without anything. Then the temperatures that we could be seeing by the end of the century, like four or five degrees warmer, that’s a whole ice age unit.

55:27 Right. So that’s going to be as different a planet as the ice ages to now. Right. How is that going to be different? So you’re going to see shifts in where the rain bands are.

55:36 So the tropical circulation. So you got, you know, that you got rising motion at the tropics. Right. You got a lot of rain right in the tropics. It’s kind of dry, kind of to the subtropic area.

55:46 So what you expect is that’s going to expand. Right. So the air, the dry areas are going to expand polewood. Right. The storm tracks, you know, kind of where we’re living here are going to be pushed north.

55:57 Right. So you’re already seeing a little bit of that. So the Mediterranean is in a multi-decade drying trend. That’s kind of part of that kind of shift towards the poles. Sea ice in the Arctic.

56:09 Well, you know, some of sea ice is gone. I mean, it’s pretty much gone. It’s not. It’s on its last legs. You know, it might take another 20 years, but by the end of the century, there isn’t going to be any summer sea ice.

56:25 That has, you know, ecosystem implications, not just for polar bears, but pretty much, you know, the whole of the northern areas. Permafrost melt. So all of those areas that rely on permafrost or ice roads in Alaska, you know, they’re gone. That has impacts for, you know, the industry. The, you know, the Arctic drilling relies on pipelines that are sitting on permafrost.

56:49 Right. So but the bigger the bigger issues rainfall, I think, is the biggest patterns of rainfall. But then the one where there’s no winners is sea level rise. So the sea is rising right now about three millimeters a year. It’s accelerating. Right. So it was rising around one, one millimeter, one to two millimeters a year.

57:14 Thirty years ago. Now it’s now it’s now it’s a three millimeters a year and it’s going to continue to accelerate because things like Greenland are continuing to melt as it gets warmer. And we’re also seeing melt from West Antarctica. Now we’re seeing melt from the Antarctic Peninsula. So that’s the bit of Antarctica that’s kind of sticking up towards South America.

57:31 We’re seeing, you know, like massive iceberg formation events when those icebergs melt. You know, you’re seeing that water enter into the system and more. And more they they they often allow the glaciers on land to kind of stream out faster, which is adding adding mass to the ocean, which increases the sea level faster. We’re losing glaciers, increasing sea level. The water itself is getting warmer. Right. Increasing sea level.

57:57 Expands fail. So so how how is that going to play out? Right. So, you know, it takes somewhere like Miami. Right.

58:04 So so now it floods pretty much every king tide in large parts of the city, which is every month or what’s the game? OK, so now it’s already experiencing flooding, which hurts the economy. And then when you have a big storm surge like they had with Irma, you know, the flooding becomes much more extensive. I mean, actually, Miami dodged a bullet there. I mean, like there was a lot of damage.

58:31 But, you know, if it had been, you know, 30 kilometers further to the further to the east, they’d have seen much, much more. We’re taking that city out. OK. Right. So so, you know, coastal properties, sea level rise changes in rainfall shifts in in in ecosystems.

58:48 And this is where the tricky part comes in. So so things like viruses and pests and pathogens and insects all are quite closely tied to the to the. The climate, they depend on the temperature to trigger various things. They they grow fast or slower depending on how much water there is, how much rain there is, how much temperature. Well, you know, and so you’re seeing some small little things like the pine bar beetles in the West that are that are that are growing like twice as fast as they used to grow because they’re no longer getting cold during the winter that’s killing them off.

59:24 OK, that’s unpredictable. What happens? And it’s very hard to pretend that scares you because that could take out entire agriculture’s entire like the economy of California, very agriculture based. You don’t know what will happen there. Right. OK, so so there’s there’s some big unknown unknowns there. OK, what about the place like Bangladesh?

59:42 I mean, again, sea level rises. I mean, this is more than an inconvenient flood in South Beach where, you know, people can afford to move. The club has to close up for a little bit. This is like people dying. Right. So so people die much less than they used to because of the early warnings that you get from the satellite and the weather forecast.

1:00:01 So, you know, one of the there was NASA. Well, not just NASA, but yes. But thank you, science. You know, one of the one of the cyclones that hit Bangladesh in the in the 1970s killed over 100000 people because they didn’t get enough early warning. And so people built shelters. But now they get enough early warning. And so people can be moved out of harm’s way.

1:00:19 However, right, you can’t farm land that’s in total that’s continually inundated by the sea. You retreat. Right. So so a lot of Bangladesh, when they had when they evacuated people for a tropical cyclone earlier, maybe maybe two months ago, you know, they had they had to move out hundreds of thousands of people. And at some point, they’re going to move it and they’re not going to be able to come back. And where are those people going to go? And how robust are our social institutions dealing with massive refugee flows from from things like that?

1:00:59 And and that that more than terrifies me, because, you know, I look at how our societies are reacting to two smaller issues. And we’re not doing a great job. Right. Like Syrian refugees will be tiny in comparison. Well, I mean, that’s the Syrian refugee problem is there’s like three million refugees. I mean, so that’s that’s a massive problem.

1:01:21 So, you know, whether it’s that large or not, but we’re not dealing very well with those with issues of those magnitude and the dangers of the I mean, not the certainty, but the risk that we’re going to see similarly sized events because of, you know, people moving out of of South Florida, people moving out of Bangladesh, people moving out of Shanghai or Tianjin or having to evacuate, you know, small islands. OK, so Barbuda was evacuated right after Irma. OK, sixteen hundred people and they haven’t gone back.

1:02:00 And you think, well, you know, well, that’s not very many people, but it was a whole culture. And, you know, and they’re being absorbed by another tiny little island, which has barely, which has a few more people, but not that many more people and no capacity to deal with these things. Maybe how are they being helped? OK, you know, sea level change is a big thing, microclimate change and then all the ecosystem challenges that happened there that could shift population, shift industries.

1:02:27 Those are the big things that we will see as problems unless we can. Well, I mean, so so so it’s not these are risks. Right. Right. And and if you’re you know, you work, you worked in banking, right? It’s all about trying to hedge your risk. Right.

1:02:43 You don’t want to like sometimes you have to do things that are risky because you have no choice. But you try and, you know, find ways to mitigate that risk, to spread it around, to try and find what you know, this is what we should be doing. We should be looking at this as a risk management problem. And we need to be doing three things. But we need to we need to be doing two things.

1:03:02 And then the third one is the one we need to avoid. We need to be mitigating to reduce emissions so that we don’t push into those worst case scenarios. We need to be adapting right now to make us more resilient to the climate that we have and the climate that we can predict to come. And the choice if we don’t do any of those things is that we suffer. Right.

1:03:22 That the people suffer. And so we want to minimize the suffering by maximizing the adaptation and the mitigation. OK. And and we those are the three choices. Right.

1:03:33 There isn’t another choice who says don’t pay attention to it and it will all be fine. That’s not one of the choices. The second one, just adapting to the change. Does that mean moving populations? So we’ll sell places where we have heavy concentrations of people who are already adapting. Right.

1:03:50 Not necessarily perfectly. We’re building a new Thames barrage. Right. Because the current one is not going to last. It’s not going to work brilliantly with another, you know, two feet of sea level.

1:04:01 So we’re building one further act. The Moes project in Venice is doing something quite similar. We’re trying to, you know, fortify our sewer system so that every time it rains hard, it doesn’t push a ton of untreated water into the rivers. That’s that’s a huge issue. You know, how cities deal with sewage and how sensitive that is to strong rainfall, which is increasing. Right. Those are massive engineering works.

1:04:33 You know, we’re in London, you know, you’re still using effectively what was designed in Victorian times. And, you know, it’s a challenge. Right. And again, it’s risk management. One of these days we might have that event that’s becoming more likely where it’s going to take the sewer system out and we’ll be like, OK, we’re going to do it. And then you’ve got greater risk of diseases and then you’ve got greater risk of waterborne pests.

1:05:02 And, you know, and then, you know, just all the physical damage that having tons and tons of sewage flowing through your basement does to you. Let’s go to that first one. Let’s talk about how we could realistically reduce those fossil fuel emissions. Let’s say I put you in the White House and you got 10 years. Let’s just say that they they they elected a Brit with a German name whose Jewish and is balding.

1:05:28 Right. Let me say that that is a highly unlikely process. A great CV at Nestle. You never know these days. Look what happens. What would what would you say if you said, look, OK, let’s do this, everybody. Let’s cut down 70 or 80 percent.

1:05:41 I mean, I know you’re not a policymaker. I know you’re not this. But what are the kind of steps that we would have to enact to get us even close to that? Right. Does it mean electric cars only? Does it mean cutting the deal with China? Say, let’s just shut all that stuff down. Like, what would make a dent in this problem? Because it feels like that’s what we’re trying to do. Just make a dent. Right. So so there’s lots of ways to make dents.

1:06:01 OK, so obviously, preface ever. This was this is not like NASA policy or anything. NASA doesn’t know this is my opinion. Yes. So electrification really helps. Right. So the price of electric vehicles is still too high. That needs to be brought down by whatever means.

1:06:21 If you can get people to stop burning oil in engines, then you’re transferring all of the emissions to power supply. And so in power supply, there’s a lot of things you can do. Right. So one, you can increase the renewable mandates. You can I mean, coal for lots and lots of reasons, not just climate, should just be shut down. Right. The coal. It’s not even clear that burning coal is a net benefit to society at this point.

1:06:47 The health benefits that you put the health effects of coal, the environmental impacts of the the fly ash and all of those things. All of these things cost money, which is not being borne by the by the utilities. Right. So it never should have been burned probably in the history of mankind. Well, I mean, the problem is that like now we know that it’s a net negative. Yeah. Right. At the beginning, they didn’t. Right. So, you know, we’re living in London, which is a huge beneficiary of the Industrial Revolution starting here.

1:07:18 And at the beginning, you know, it was pretty noxious. I mean, you didn’t live here in the 1950s. But but, you know, London pollution. I mean, now it’s spiking up again, mainly because of diesel and NOx emissions from cars. But back in the 1950s, the the biggest contributor to the smog was people burning coal at low temperatures, very sooty. And then that was kind of combining with the the the fog. And it made this huge piece. We don’t get that anymore. Now we get something else.

1:07:47 We need to get off coal. Right. So you can go a little bit to natural gas. Right. But the the biggest thing that you can be doing in the U.S. is making a smarter grid. Right.

1:08:05 So we have huge untapped resources for wind and solar in the U.S. that are unusable because we don’t have a connected grid system. Right. So North Dakota, Wyoming could be producing huge amounts of wind power, but they’re not connected to the to either the West Coast grid or the East Coast grid. Right.

1:08:29 Texas is producing a massive amount of wind power at the moment. Right. It’s huge. Right. And you would tell Texas why they into wind power. Texas winds wind power because they have huge open land that has basically nothing going on. It’s a whole kind of a Scotland.

1:08:45 That’s driven to West Texas. Right. Exactly. And Texas is also the kind of place where nobody tells me what to do with my land. And if I want to do whatever I want, I’m going to do it. And so there’s been a lot of very, you know, independently minded folks saying, hey, I can make a big deal. Right.

1:08:59 I’m going to make money with wind. I’m going to make money with wind. OK, that’s ironic. It’s mildly amusing. Yes. Oil capital and yet. And now a wind capital. So these things aren’t contradictory. Right.

1:09:12 So but the Texas grid is not connected to anybody. Right. So they could be exporting that energy to the coast. So we need smarter grids. We need better connections. The same is true. British Columbia and Alberta.

1:09:25 Alberta, you know, burns a lot of coal. But British Columbia has a ton of excess energy in hydro and planned hydro. But there’s no connection between British Columbia and Alberta. Right. There is a connection between British Columbia and Washington State.

1:09:42 So so but it’s like the grid connections really make the difference. So this needs infrastructure investments. So that’s what I understand about electrical energy production is you can’t store it very well. Right. That’s why you need to be connected.

1:09:54 So someone can use it immediately. Right. So so the bigger your network, the more you can balance things out and the less storage you need. OK. So if you have a small network, you need a lot of storage. Right. So storage is in storage. Yeah. But but but the a lot of the inefficiencies come because of our weird diet like pattern during the day of how we use energy. So you know, in the midday.

1:10:18 So it depends a little bit where you are. If you use a lot of air conditioning, then you peak in the in the middle of the day. If you need heating, then you peak at night. Right. But I need to reduce by 70 percent. Right. 80 percent. These are big moos. So you’re making dense. Right. So what you’re doing is you’re going to dance on my making 10 percent. So 10 20 percent dense are totally conceivable with better organization and current day technology. OK. And these are permanent dense taking that eight gig tons down to seven.

1:10:47 To six. But at some point that’ll flatten out. We’ll have to come up with a new idea. Right. And so at some point you’re not contributing to the warming effect even when you’re a president. Yeah. But I mean, part of the problem is that you have you have to reduce emissions for future benefits. So do we need to reduce emissions today by 80 percent? It’d be great if we could. But it’s impossible. So that’s not going to happen. Because the economy needs to keep sure people need to live. There’s inertia in how we do everything. Right. Things.

1:11:17 Can’t turn on a dime. I mean the the economy the energy infrastructure things need time to work out how things are because you know when we’re human and this is a problem. It’s not necessarily the problem that people will care about every single day. Which is OK. Right. And the economy is important because when the economy doesn’t grow at whatever percent a year. People don’t have the jobs and the resources they want. And not everyone is willing to take a hit for this. Right. Right. Exactly. That’s really the truth. Right.

1:11:45 That’s really the truth. Right. So, I mean, I’m a big fan of carbon pricing, right? So you try and price the external costs that carbon is imposing on the system. It’s a bit of an inexact science, but any price on carbon pushes people away from burning carbon into something else, either greater efficiency, better different sources.

1:12:12 Is it a penalty you put on that they can buy and sell and trade these carbon benefits? Yeah, I mean, you can make it complicated like that, or you can have something simple, which is just basically a tax on every ton of carbon that’s burnt. Okay. What do you do with that money? That’s the key thing, right?

1:12:29 So if you pay that money back, you use it to reduce income taxes, right? Then that’s a net benefit to the economy and pushes you away from carbon fuel. So you can do top-level stuff that lets things work their way out without people having to think exactly what their carbon footprint is of every choice they make, which is debilitating. So you put those concerns into the marketplace. Okay.

1:12:58 Are we still getting there, though? Is that, are we still going to get to our 70 or 80? It’s hard. Okay. So that can give us another 10 frames.

1:13:05 So then we have to really think about how much energy we’re going to need in the future and where that energy is going to come from. So countries that are stable enough to maintain and secure nuclear facilities, I think, should continue to do that. But the problem- You’re going to get a lot of controversy on that, because it’s easy to point at the anomalies and say, we don’t need another Japan, we don’t need another- Well, I mean, Japan, obviously, that was a very badly designed situation.

1:13:35 The big problem with nuclear now is it’s too big. So all of the current projects that are ongoing in the US, Hinkley Sea in Finland and in France, they’re years overdue, they’re billions of dollars over budget, and in the US, they just canceled two big projects that they’ve been working on for 20 years. Meanwhile, the people that have paid for that have been the ratepayers, and they’ve got nothing for it. In South Carolina, Georgia, it’s been a disaster.

1:14:08 Okay, but we still need to invest in nuclear, because it’s clean. But right now, it can’t be that nuclear. So there’s a lot of experimental stuff with small modular reactors, people are talking about fourth generation nuclear. I want these people to demonstrate that that’s going to be better, because the current plans for nuclear are not … It makes no sense for any utility to invest in that, because it’s much better for them to invest in offshore wind.

1:14:37 It’s much better for them to invest in even onshore wind and in places with good solar things. I mean, it’s crazy that Germany, one of the cloudiest and most miserable places I’ve ever lived, is doing great guns with solar, because you’ve got relatively efficient solar panels and you’ve got them everywhere. So these are the things that we could do, right? But we’re not going that way right now. So we’re out of this Paris Accord.

1:15:03 Does it surprise you? No, we’re not, actually. We’re not. Okay, so the we … So the Paris Accord exists.

1:15:08 It’s a global agreement. The US has signaled its intention to leave the Paris Accord for reasons that make no sense to me, which we could go into. But they can’t withdraw until like four years after they enact it. So it turns out that they can’t withdraw until after the next presidential election. So whether this actually ends up being withdrawn or not, really it depends on a lot of things that are still yet to come.

1:15:40 Okay, why are we leaving the Paris Accord? So the stated reason is that they want to negotiate better terms. Okay, well that sounds superficially okay until you actually look at what the Paris Accord was. The Paris Accord was an agreement to voluntarily say what you were going to do and report back whether you’ve done it. Right?

1:16:08 You, as a nation, would tell people what it is that you were prepared to do and then tell people whether you did it. Okay. Right? So you really negotiate better terms than you just saying what you’re going to do. How are there any better terms?

1:16:26 And so the response from the rest of the world to this claim is like, I don’t know how to do that. And so then there’s no renegotiation that’s going to happen because you can’t get better terms than the terms that we already agree. So it’s politics. So it’s symbolism. Okay.

1:16:47 And it’s one of those things where maybe we’ll do just as well because the states are doing most of the work in the US. Yeah, let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about California because it is forging ahead. It’s always been a leader in emissions. It’s always been telling Detroit what to do.

1:17:08 Ten years before it made cars. Really wanted to, yes. Yeah, I actually worked for a motor company one summer and I worked on an emissions device for a car that wasn’t going to be produced for five years at Crown Victoria. And it was California that was saying you have to have this, this, this, and this dictating things. Right.

1:17:25 And California hasn’t missed a beat when the Trump administration seemed to have been completely 180 in the policies. What can you tell us? Am I accurately summarizing what California does and what are some of the things we can expect from it and how do you see it? Is it going to be leading the charge? So the pressures that California are putting on utilities and manufacturers are the pressures that will benefit everybody.

1:17:49 Those are the ones that the federal government was doing before but now are not doing anymore. But it’s not just California, right? So Oregon, the Northeast States, New York, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, they have a trading scheme that has allowed them to reduce emissions from their electricity production dramatically over the last 10 years. Quebec, Ontario, British Columbia. So places are experimenting with lots of different things.

1:18:26 So California is going down one route. So they have a carbon tax, they have a mandate, they have a trading scheme in the Northeast, that’s connected up with. So there’s lots of different experiments going on. And the big cities, so New York City has a great plan for both becoming more resilient and reducing their own emission footprint. And lots of these things are being taken on by other cities in states where nobody cares about this.

1:18:59 But people are taking action. So I think one of the things that one should guard against, particularly from this side of the pond, just kind of looking over to America, is thinking that the only thing that matters is the federal government. The federal government matters, but it’s not necessarily the biggest thing. And there’s a lot of great stuff that’s happening at the lower level. Because the state of California, if it was a country, would be the 12th or 13th largest economy in the world, something like that.

1:19:25 Yeah, I think it might be even higher. Might be higher, right. Maybe it’s even in single digits. And so it’s policies, whether it’s Governor Jerry Brown or all the companies inside of there, if they say, we are not doing business with this or you must do this, it can be an agent of change on its own. So not all is lost when things on the federal level seem to be going bonkers.

1:19:46 Well, when things on the federal level don’t seem to be moving. We’re seeing a lot of movement at the state, city, and town level. I mean, the fact of the matter is that the US emissions have been trending down since like kind of the mid 2000s. And that’s great. And we may even reach the Paris goals without any input from the federal government at all.

1:20:11 So it’s the short term Paris goals. So one learns to, like there’s a lot of talking and some of that is not very, has less effect than you might think. Okay. But I must say when you woke up to this year, to people talking about like, let’s get the shale oil fields back and let’s keep, let’s start burning some more stuff and let’s put these pipelines through and let’s publicly deny that emissions have anything to do with climate change or there’s any climate change.

1:20:47 I mean, you didn’t see this coming. Well, I mean, does that make it hard to do your job though? Because you’re here, you’re on the front lines, you know, in a way, pardon the pun, but you have the cold face. I mean, you can see the data right here and yet everyone is denying that data and you’re thinking, look, we’re going to kill ourselves here. So you have, I mean, that’s a great kind of general point.

1:21:18 I mean, so, you know, what is it that gets you up in the morning as a scientist? You know, your basic point is like, you know, I’m going to take the universe and I’ve wrestled some information from that universe, make some predictions, they come true and hey, you know, look how smart I am. We are as a society, our science is because, you know, we wrestled information from a harsh and uncaring universe and we’ve made it and we’ve done something useful with it.

1:21:48 So kind of a trivial example, but you know, last year, you know, it was clear from the data that 2016 was going to be the warmest year on record. And so I have a little, you know, I have a little model that kind of predicts these things and so back in March I said, yeah, 2016 is going to be the warmest year on record. People say, well, how do you know? It’s just March. I’m saying, well, we’re starting off with this big El Nino, we’ve got the long-term trend.

1:22:18 This is what I would say, like, you know, with whatever it was, 80, 90 percent confidence, this is going to be the warmest year. The year goes on, you know, it’s pretty warm, it’s pretty warm, it’s pretty warm. You know, you get to the end and lo and behold, 2016 is in fact the warmest year on record by a ton. And then people say, oh, yeah, so that was a pretty good prediction you made there. That’s like, oh, no, that’s a pretty good prediction.

1:22:44 Look how clever I am. It’s my scientist brain talking, right? You know, I’ve won something from the universe. But it’s not my scientist brain, it’s not my citizen brain. My citizen brain says, I don’t want it to be the warmest year on record.

1:22:58 I don’t want the trend to keep on going up and accelerating. I don’t want these things. And I’m still, I’m both of those people, right? I’m the scientist who’s saying, you know, gurr, universe, give me information. And I’m also the citizen that says, no, this is not what I want to be happening.

1:23:18 And we all have to kind of balance those those two things, right? I mean, it’s totally shortsighted to ignore the data because it doesn’t make you feel good or because you want something else to happen. Right. So this is this is like part of the training that you have as a scientist. Right. You don’t you don’t wish your result just because it’s a more convenient result.

1:23:44 I mean, I mean, obviously there are people that do that mostly on the other side. But but that’s totally shortsighted because if you ignore reality, it’s going to come back and bite you on the ass. But you have this this this this citizen part. And and it was it was very well encapsulated by showered rolling Roland, who was one of the scientists, the chemists who won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, for working out the the reactions that led to ozone depletion in the stratosphere.

1:24:17 And many years after they’d done that with I was in the 1970s, 1974, and they won the Nobel Prize in the in the 80s. He’s he said, what’s the point of having developed a science good enough to make predictions if all you’re going to do is sit around and wait for them to come true? And that’s exactly what what we’re in. What like how we’re feeling that we’re making predictions. But we do not want these predictions to come true.

1:24:52 Right. But these predictions are always contingent on things happening now. And we can affect those things. And and I think by by talking about the science, trying to improve the level of conversation so that you’re not just just like kind of trading stupid talking points, but actually engaging with what’s really happening with the world, you can help people work out what things we can change, where we can push things to make a better outcome because we don’t want those predictions to come true.

1:25:26 Well, it makes your work very exciting and very relevant because it is extremely relevant. It’s a life or death situation. Right. Right. What’s it like when you get to debate the people that are in complete opposite views to you, the people that come on and say, Gavin, no, it’s not true.

1:25:44 We should continue building burning fossil fuels and everything you say is just going to hurt the poor people and let’s move forward. I mean, do you ever get to talk to them off camera and say like, this is real. Your grandkids are going to pay for this. We’re going to pay for this in our lifetime. I mean, some times are they bad people?

1:26:01 Are they misinformed or are they based in their own? Do we do we end up not seeing things that aren’t in our own interests a lot of times if it’s not in our financial interest? Do we just kind of ignore it? A lot of questions. So that’s a that’s an interesting question.

1:26:15 I’m not sure quite how deep to go into it. So I’ve met a lot of these people.

1:26:24 Some are. You know, they basically just kind of hook their their train to this wagon or this wagon, their train, whatever. They just they’re just going along because their business. It’s it’s you know, it’s more attention. You know, I mean, I mean, I’ve met one guy, a Canadian guy, old geologist.

1:26:46 And, you know, he’s done some good stuff. And then he just he just kind of like just starts going totally. Do lally in terms of what he’s saying. And and you know, we’re having dinner afterwards. And I’m going, well, why do you say those things?

1:27:03 And he said, well, I said, but like, do you know anything about what you just said? And I demonstrated quite clearly that he had no idea what he was talking about. And he said, well, you know, it’s just like, you know, I feel that I feel that, you know, we should be making these points. And for them, it’s like kind of a game. It’s like, well, you know, I’m just contrary and I’m getting attention and the people are inviting me places because.

1:27:25 And so that can be a bit of a self-sustaining, you know, career path for some. I mean, you have to put aside ethical considerations. But, you know, if you know, if you’re feeling neglected and, you know, it’s a way to kind of boost your profile and and get invited to fancy dinners. Especially these days, there’s a lot of policymakers that want you to come over and well, exactly. I mean, that’s been true for a while. OK.

1:27:52 Then there’s other people who have like a real, real ideological objection to anything that I just said in terms of what we should do about this, right? You know, the idea that we should mandate how we make energy or the idea that that, you know, we could nudge people to use to be more efficient or something like that. And it’s there because it’s anti free market and people should just be left alone and we should reduce government to the smallest thing possible, basically just the military.

1:28:23 And for them, it’s like, you know, all of these things are distractions and you are distracting people with this talk of climate change. So therefore I’m going to argue against it. And then others are just like total sleaze bags. I mean, there’s a couple of people who are just who would just do anything for a dime. And and I, you know, I mean, I have respect for some of the people I argue with, but mostly not. Yeah, you’ve refused to argue with some of them in the past.

1:28:48 I mean, so, you know, I mean, I you know, I was invited on to Fox Business News, which is a pretty ideological channel. And he says, you know, I just want to hear your side. You know, and I said, sure, let’s do an interview. You and me. I’ll just explain. You can ask me anything you want.

1:29:03 And he said, sure, sure. OK, you know, I’ve got this other guy over here. And like, you know, he wants to argue. And I said, look, I don’t argue with you. Like you want to know my side here.

1:29:11 Let me just, you know, ask me anything you want. And and so. So, you know, I go along and he he’s set it up as a as a as a as a Gavin sandwich. So he’s got this guy comes on and he gives his thing. And then he says, well, now now he’s going to go away and Gavin’s going to come.

1:29:32 Because he’s like, argue with you. I’m going, yeah, like that’s we agreed that we’re just going to have an interview. But no, it’s like now it’s like I refuse to debate this guy. And and so, you know, I go on and, you know, I can watch it, which is pretty good. Like it was it was pretty much five minutes solid on Fox News with with basically no interruption because the kind doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. So I can just like talk. Yeah.

1:29:56 I saw that. And, you know, I thought I was pretty good. And then he says, oh, well, I’ve got this other guy here. And he’ll come back. We can talk about it again.

1:30:04 I’m going, no, I don’t want to. I’m not playing these games since I walked off. You don’t want to debate because ultimately it’s just the better debater that’s going to win, not the better science is going to win. So there’s an element of that. But but the biggest thing is, is that it’s these these debates tend to be about stupid things. Right.

1:30:25 You know, they’ll say something ridiculous and then I’m going, oh, this is ridiculous. And like and so it ends up like not being about anything. So people what they see, right, because television is visual medium. So people actually aren’t paying that much attention to the words that are being said. What are they seeing?

1:30:41 They’re seeing people getting very, very technical. And then the whole point of that is, well, it’s very complicated. I don’t know what’s going on. Right. So so the the point of having debate is not to get to a resolution, but it’s just to give the appearance of controversy. Right. Right.

1:30:59 I don’t need to be playing along with that. These things are not controversial. I shouldn’t be having to deal. I shouldn’t be part of a circus that is pushing that image to people who are not paying attention to the right degree. And so, no, I don’t do these things anymore.

1:31:16 Right. That makes sense. And very much does. Some of the arguments they throw out is that poor people suffer from these policy changes. Is that is that an ignorant statement?

1:31:26 Or is that a thing to also get people kind of riled up? Well, but the weird thing is, these are people who are often pushing totally regressive taxation policies. You know, I mean, you know, let’s cut the the tax for the wealthiest one percent and raise taxes on the poor. And they’re complaining that a carbon tax is going to hurt the poor. Like, really, like, show me some actual evidence that you care about poor people.

1:31:50 But the fact of the matter is it’s it’s a ridiculous talking point because, you know, there’s a lot of smart economists, there’s a lot of smart policy makers and there’s a thousand different plans that quite clearly, you know, your best guess is that no, it’s not going to hurt the poor at all. Because what you do is you reduce the burdens on the poor, which are massive. Right. The poor attacks the much higher marginal rate than the wealthy. And, you know, they’re penalized for, you know, having low bank, low balances in their bank accounts, that they’re taxed for not having enough money effectively, their tax because they’re always being fined for this, that or the other, because they didn’t do something like so.

1:32:30 So being poor is to be taxed at a much, much higher rate. So we should be reducing that. I mean, forget carbon change. I mean, this is, again, my own personal opinion. We should be we should be doing an enormous amount more to reduce the tax burden and the penalty burden on the poorer society.

1:32:48 I mean, the the Europe does a better job than the US, but in the US, it’s appalling. OK. Arguments that say, OK, the US goes ahead and enacts all of this change and the G20 countries enact all this change. And yet China and India just play their own drum and admit whatever they want. And the net effect is that nothing changes.

1:33:06 What do you say to that? You get people into an international accord where everybody pledges to, A, reduce emissions and B, share how they’re doing it and then allow for the best practices and the cheapest practices to percolate, which surprise, surprise is exactly what we did in Paris. OK, so we’ll try to comply at the end of the day. Well, no, but China, China is complaining. I mean, you know, everybody is doing it for their own benefit.

1:33:33 But China is very climate vulnerable. Right. He has a lot of very low lying cities and industry. Tianjin, Shanghai are right at sea level. Even Beijing is actually not that far above sea level.

1:33:48 So, you know, they’re going to be seeing flooding at a massive scale very, very shortly, plus they have the air pollution issues. So when you restrict fossil fuel burning, you restrict all the other harms that fossil fuel burning does, particularly nitrous oxides, black carbon, sulphur dioxide, which becomes sulphate, which becomes acid rain. Right. These are massive environmental problems in China. Right. So they see, OK, well, we can do two things at once, you know, and, you know, you know, and solar panels work much better if there isn’t like a huge amount of haze in the air on top of it.

1:34:29 Right. So, you know, India, for instance, you know, was just kind of had a contract for the new power development. And the cheapest bid was wind. Right. So, you know, things are moving in the right direction.

1:34:45 So this idea that that China and India are just going to like continue to increase emissions while everybody else pays the price. I don’t think that’s valid anymore. But how are we going to encourage them to do more? Well, you encourage them by working as an international community to do more. You encourage them by sharing technology or sharing methods and by working with these groups, you know, so that would call for more international engagement, not less. OK.

1:35:13 And leading by example, maybe. And leading by example. I mean, historically, the US has the lion’s share of what’s happened. I mean, it’s going to be a long time before China catches up with that, if it ever does. England and the UK has a large historical burden because it started so much earlier.

1:35:33 Right. So, you know, in terms of fairness, you do expect the people to cause the problem to pay more for it. Right. Paluda pays is a pretty good principle. Do you ever feel like Galileo?

1:35:48 Well, look, I know all this stuff that’s happening up here. I know these truths. There are scientific truths and yet they’re not palatable to the church or the politicians and all that. And you’re like, OK, one day they’re going to see this. It’s going to be 100 years or 200 years.

1:36:02 I see it now every day. Yeah, I mean, I like the comparison, but really, that’s not. But you know what I’m talking about. I do. But the big difference is it’s not just me.

1:36:13 Right. It’s not one person who’s written a book. Right. It’s a whole community. It’s scientists on every continent, including Antarctica.

1:36:24 It’s communities who’ve looked at this data and they’ve done it over and over and over and over and over again. Right. If it was just me, I would probably have a bit of a crisis of confidence. But it isn’t just me. Right.

1:36:36 You know, the work that I do or what I talk about builds off the work of thousands of other scientists, maybe tens of thousands of other scientists, and they’re all building on that work as well. And so, you know, it’s a very robust. Scientific conclusion that we’re coming out to. It’s not a Galileo figure screaming into the wind. You know, what you’re talking about here is a very, very well supported amount of data, amount of analysis and understanding. OK.

1:37:09 Talk to me about James Hansen, the former guy that had your role. These are his shoes. These are his shoes, literally. The world’s most famous climate scientist. I mean, the father of climate change awareness.

1:37:21 Can you just talk about the work that he did, your relationship with him, and what’s it like wearing his shoes? So Jim is great. You know, over his career, he reconfigured how we think about this problem, you know, maybe three or four times, and, you know, I’d be lucky to do that once. Anybody would be lucky to do that once. I mean, he, you know, he started thinking about this problem as a as one of basic, you know, whoa, this is the radiation coming in and this is the radiation coming out.

1:37:53 Right. That’s how we should think about it. The way that we compare carbon dioxide and methane and aerosols is all based on the ideas that the framing that he came up with back in the 1980s. He made the first predictions for what was going to happen, which have turned out to be extremely skillful. He was the first person to to be the public figure on this when, you know, I mean, in hindsight, it was obviously true.

1:38:26 But but so, you know, you might you might appreciate this. So, you know, the temperature is warming up. I was flat for a little bit in the 1940s, 1970s, and then it kind of started creeping up in the 1980s. And so the question of detection, like when when do you detect that something is outside of of what you expect? Right.

1:38:45 And so and then you say, well, you know, this is not really outside of what I expected. I kind of said, you know, we’re still kind of. And then kind of in the early 80s, right, kind of 80, 83, 84, 85, you know, it starts kind of coming out of the noise. Right. So it’s like we mentioned that, you know, the sigma events.

1:39:01 So so in the 1980s, it starts to become more than like a two sigma event. And everybody’s very kind of shy at that point. And they’re going, well, it’s only a kind of a two and a bit sigma event. It’s too soon. Like, you know, we have to be cautious.

1:39:17 We have to be, you know, conservative. And he’s saying, oh, we understand this system. What we’re seeing here, this two sigma event, it’s going to get bigger. And I understand why it’s going to get bigger. And so, you know, we have detected it.

1:39:29 We have detected it now. And now we can go back. We can look at all that data and we can say, OK, well, when when when was it detectable first? You know, when could we have first confidently said, oh, now we and it was right then. Right.

1:39:41 And he was and he was right out there. And that takes a, you know, a certain cojones that that not every scientist has. But it was based on solid understanding of the system. It wasn’t like, you know, there’s all sorts of people who make like kind of wild claims about all sorts of things. And sometimes they’re right.

1:40:04 Sometimes they’re not. Mostly they’re not based on a solid understanding of what’s going on. This was OK. And subsequent to that, you know, he that was the 1980s, like the 1990s. He’s saying, oh, OK, we’ve got to worry about these other these other things that are contributing to warming.

1:40:18 That black carbon. We really haven’t worked down that. So, you know, so that was a whole new thing. Then we’ve got to think about, oh, well, you know, how these things slightly different and we have to think about the efficacy of all these different forces, totally new paradigm for how things are moving forward. We have to think about measuring what’s going on in the ocean.

1:40:34 You mentioned that earlier on. Right. It turns out that those measurements in the ocean, which he like said, no, these these are the things that are going to demonstrate that we’re right. He said this back in the early 90s. Is that as soon as we get good records of how much heat is going into the ocean, we’ll know whether we’re right.

1:40:52 Prediction data comes in. Perfect. And now we’ve got that data. Right. And now we’ve got that thing.

1:41:00 And so, you know, I mean, like he hasn’t always been right. Right. You know, and you know, and I’ve had my disagreements with him on numerous things, not like I’ve inherited projects that he worked on. We kind of moved in slightly different direction. But, you know, like superlative career, super unique.

1:41:22 Are you continuing with some of these traditions of putting yourself out there, the TED Talks, the moves, calling attention to these sense of things? Because you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to do that. No, I mean, but we so guess which is our institution. You know, leadership comes from the top, right?

1:41:41 And and the people that worked at GISS for, you know, for many years were encouraged. No, we need to be doing media. We need to be responding to inquiries. We need to be getting out of it. We need to be talking to high schools and hedge funds and church groups and whoever asks us to get because it’s important.

1:42:05 And so that was that’s that was the ethos at the institute. And that’s something that I took on board. And, you know, I’ve been I’ve been moderately successful at it. And it’s something that I continue to to have other people follow on. So we’re trying to bring up the kind of the early career researchers.

1:42:24 We’ve got a couple of great young scientists who are doing stunningly good work in outreach. Kate Marvel, Ben Cook, and, you know, and encouraging the people that are good at this and that want to be doing it and have the enthusiasm to do more and to do it more effectively. And so, yeah, so that’s something that that’s a cultural thing that that he instigated that I’m trying to I’m trying to push forward or to continue. You know, the importance of modeling, the importance of making your simulations.

1:42:54 I mean, so, you know, that’s where he started. You know, and then they weren’t very good. You know, they had a lot of approximation. Now we’re doing much better. So but, you know, that’s kind of part of a thing.

1:43:06 I mean, one of the things that I do a little bit more, I think, is, you know, like really trying to find episodes in the past where you can you can take the the model for a test drive, where you can demonstrate that, you know, well, you know, like, OK, a car, right, you know, you’re about to go on a cross country trip. But let’s go around the block a few times just to make sure that everything is working, right, let’s go to the shops and come back. Let’s let’s go to this next time and come back right before you do the big thing like to see whether you what you predict about what’s going to happen when you take that big trip is going to be valid.

1:43:45 So we spend a lot of time thinking about, you know, paleo climate and now exoplanets, all of which using the same basic theoretical understanding of the system. Trying to see if we can predict things way outside of our current comfort zone, right? And we do a pretty good job. And I think that’s really that’s key to demonstrating the predictions that we’re making for the next hundred years are credible. It’s not just because they’re complicated that they’re credible, right?

1:44:15 There’s lots of complicated things that are told rubbish as you’re well aware as a banker. But to build credibility in those predictions, we have to we have to demonstrate that these things are credible, you know, and big changes in the past like the ice ages and these massive hypothermal events that happened in the in the ESE or something. Which which goes back to that point, you know, climate has always changed, say yes, and it provides us an enormous amount of information that we can use to test our understanding of the system.

1:44:50 Yeah. And it passes. Do you ever worry about waking up in the morning and getting sacked for your views? Not really, no. Not worry because you’d find a job or not worried because it wouldn’t happen.

1:45:10 I think it’s pretty unlikely. You think so. OK, but then I like now just so it’s a hostage to fortune right there. What’s that? That’s a hostage to fortune right there.

1:45:19 A hostage to fortune. What does that mean? It means you say something and then like it totally comes true. OK, I mean, if the FBI director can go, you know, he never know. Oh, look, you know, I mean, you know, nobody has a has a totally permanent job.

1:45:35 But, you know, I think I do my job pretty well. You know, I manage 150 people. We produce good science and Al Gore recently came out with the sequel to The Inconvenient Truth. I haven’t seen it. I haven’t seen it either.

1:45:50 One thing he had said in an interview before is he had said that what he thought he saw seen, what he was seeing these days is the same kind of tactics that a lot of tobacco companies used to create a lot of false doubts were now being used by the, you know, the hydrocarbon industry. So that’s been true for many years. That’s been true since the 1980s. And before that, the same tactics were used to push back against doing anything about CFCs and ozone pollution.

1:46:20 I mean, these are tactics that just pop up because they’re good tactics. They’re unethical and they’re, you know, they’re immoral tactics, but they’re effective. So, yes, I mean, so there’s also a lot more awareness that that’s the kind of thing that’s going on. And so we’re seeing a lot less of that stuff pop up in mainstream TV. We’re seeing a lot less of the world, both sides in the in the important papers.

1:46:50 I mean, you know, it’s still there. It’s still kind of pushing. But I think it’s actually become a little bit marginalized because the fact of the matter is that it’s just repetitive. It’s the same thing all the time. You say, well, hold on, you just made that point 10 years ago.

1:47:03 And subsequently, you know, things have got much warmer and you didn’t predict that and you go, well, why do you have any credibility? And the answer is no, they don’t have an incredible ability. And I think a lot of observers of the of the of the situation or the people who work in the media can I don’t want to give the media too much credit, but hopefully they are better at telling who has credibility than who doesn’t. OK, let me ask some questions about you personally.

1:47:31 Is there anything you changed about your game, Gavin, like in the past 10 years that made you a better scientist, you know, that morning routines or anything? I know you did a run this morning or anything that just got you to be more effective because you’re probably always trying to optimize your workflow. But what makes you a more productive human being even when it comes to managing 150 people? So, I mean.

1:48:00 What would we be surprised to learn about Gavin Schmidt? I can still write a unicycle and we were the national champion unicycle hockey team when I lived in London. It must be a dangerous game.

1:48:39 I broke an arm once. But not not compared to American football. OK, so much people on unicycle is going around and there’s a ball on their sticks. Basically. OK, that’s pretty crazy.

1:48:51 What what keeps you awake at night? My daughter basically kicks me in the head. She’s only two. So I forgive her. Dinosaurs love tacos, right?

1:49:01 They do. I’ve got to go get that. And what did you move back to Britain or are you in New York or now born in Britain? Barring any geopolitical shifts of a major of a major science. Yeah, no, I’m in New York.

1:49:20 OK, I had Kevin Kelly in here a few months ago. He’s one of the founders of Wired magazine. Oh, yeah. And he said he’s in his 60s, I think, maybe 70s. And he said, Brian, you’re only as old as the last time you changed your mind.

1:49:33 And I was wondering, what have you changed your mind about in the last six months or a year? Ah, you should have prepped me for that one. I changed my mind about it. Doesn’t it be work related, but it could be. I’m in a state of flux as to how robust our institutions are.

1:50:05 And I think a year ago, I would have said, no, things are pretty robust. You know, we can withstand a lot of different things. And and I’m seeing other things in the last six months, responses to disasters, responses to corruption, responses to democracy. And not just in the US, in Catalonia, in Quebec, in Scotland, in the UK. And and I’m thinking that our institutions are less robust than they used to be.

1:50:49 And that that I that’s bothering me and I’m hoping that I’m wrong. But but the flip side is. Well, maybe it’s just that people just need to be aware of how fragile institutions are so that they act to make them robust and that this is maybe not a necessary thing, but but the consequences of our current moment are actually going to end up strengthening our institutions. So I don’t know. And so it’s a bit of a prediction or an issue for the future.

1:51:27 But, yeah, no, I had confidence in those things and I have less confidence. And institutions are governments or agencies, governments, standards, norms, kind of unwritten things. You know, how how people get away with latent lies in ways that you didn’t think they would get away with, that you think would be not supported by the media or would be pushed aside. And like I said, that bothers me. Yeah. OK.

1:52:08 Very well said. Kevin, I always ask everyone here a few questions at the end. I’m going to ask you if you could pick up your mobile phone and make a call. Yes, you can. You can’t do this, though.

1:52:21 Make a call to the 20 year old Gavin Schmidt and give that young man a bit of advice. What would you tell him? I was 20 years old. What were you doing? Undergrad?

1:52:31 Yeah, I was an undergrad, Math major Oxford. OK. Not very not not not not many plans for the future. After I finished my undergrad, I didn’t really know what I was that I wanted to do. So I bumped around the world for about two years, worked in restaurants.

1:52:51 It was a security guard in Gucci and Logan Plaza in Boston. I drove cars for AVIS until I crashed it into the Hertz car lot. I ran a youth hostel, which is a lot of fun, I have to tell you. Where? In Perth, Western Australia.

1:53:06 I picked grapes. I, you know, I tutored and I did a lot of different kind of interesting things. That was a good thing for me to do. So when I was 20 years old, I said, that thing that that wandering around the world thing and not knowing what you’re going to do, you do that. That’s totally fine.

1:53:24 But remember, that is not going to be intellectually satisfying. And at the end of that period, I got I got a little bit frustrated that all I was doing to use my brain was was like the crossword like once a week. And I thought, you know what, I could probably do better. And I would have told my 20 year old self, do better on that, travel the world, but like know that you have to do something better and and and I might have given myself some pointers as to where the interesting problems were.

1:54:03 Right. You know, do theoretical things. That’s fine. But you personally, me, I know this now, you’re going to be the happiest when you’re doing the problems that are of the most interest to the most number of people. And I don’t think I knew that.

1:54:19 Do something big, too. That’s important. I think that’s not quite so much in your in your power. OK. So I’ve I’ve kind of you know, the why I’m here with you today is kind of contingent on a lot of little things that happened, but but I don’t think that that was something you would have planned could have planned for.

1:54:40 OK, but again, you would have said, use all that intellect, do something that challenges you, do something more and make sure you kind of get out and get up to it because otherwise you could have kept. Yeah. Because I knew you and then I liked explaining things to people. I liked kind of bringing people up to speed. I liked kind of putting things together.

1:55:01 Right. And those are the those are the skills that really, you know, have driven both my science and my communications, you know, bring things together, big picture, see how things fit, make it make it work. And so, you know, I’m not I think I’m much nicer person now than I was when I was. I was a bit of a jerk when I was 20. So don’t be such a jerk.

1:55:29 That would be good advice. You mentioned Carl Sagan earlier and then we were earlier talking about Neil deGrasse Tyson, who’s up on my wall here. What do you learn from those two men when it comes to kind of taking their own celebrity status and pulling along their science with it? I don’t know if you would agree. That’s what they both did.

1:55:45 But so actually, they both they’ve both taken very different paths. So so Carl was a scientist, first and foremost, and kept doing science. His entire career. Neil really doesn’t do a lot of science, but he’s become a much, much better and more professional communicator. And so we had a big conversation with this once and we were talking and he was telling me what he did in order to improve everything that he did.

1:56:10 And like to and so it’s a he he works full time at being more than full time at being a better communicator. Right. Right. You spoke to him about this. Yeah. So what were your New Yorkers?

1:56:21 Well, it was it was it was we were coming back from from an event that we did together and and and you say, no, you know, it’s a full time job. Right. What connected with people? What fell flat? You know, how what what are the kind of things that really engaged people?

1:56:40 What what drove their curiosity? And every time he gave a talk, every time he’d analyze this to death. So the next time, you know, his you know, his his ratio of standing of operations, like kind of moved from 80 percent to 90 percent. Right. And I’m going, oh, my gosh.

1:56:58 That’s an enormous amount of effort. And I and I realized then that I was not a model that was I was never going to do that because. I mean, I mean, I’m much more like Carl, you know, I mean, so I I’m I’m much more interested in the science. I like the communication, but I can’t put down the science to just do communication, but maybe that’s what’s taken. I mean, let’s go to that next step.

1:57:21 Right. That’s what you need to do. And so, OK, well, maybe that’s not where I’m going. Right. Yeah, it’s an optimization choice, I guess, at one point, what will have a greater impact.

1:57:31 But yeah, that makes sense because he’s it makes sense that he’s done the work to do that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like, I mean, if anybody thinks that these things are effortless, you know, they have another thing coming like these are, you know, to be a professional communicator, you have to work. It has to be, you know, every single thing, like from the tone of your voice to the to the way that you address people, to the to the stories that you tell.

1:57:56 I mean, I can learn. And I am learning, I think, from from people like Neil and others and Catherine Hayhoe, you know, how to how to communicate better, how to reach more people, how to empathize better, but we’re all different people. And so there are some things that that I’m never going to know. I mean, he’s way ahead of me on many levels. Second part of that advice question is what is the best advice you’ve ever received?

1:58:24 And this could have come from the the AVIS rental car, the great farmer, or the youth hostel, or it could have come from James or from anyone that Oxford, but or from a parent, I don’t know, but best advice you’ve ever received. Never defend the indefensible. Who told you that? My father. So my father was a contrarian type.

1:58:45 And when we were growing up, we’d argue a lot. And and, you know, and occasionally he’d argue just for fun. Right. You know, and take some position that was totally outrageous. And like, you know, and I’d kind of splutter and like said, oh, and, you know, and then you kind of suddenly occasionally put me in a position where, you know, you take like the opposite thing.

1:59:08 So this is depending. And because you’re you’re trying to do this, this is like a side thing. You end up defending something which is totally indefensible. And and you see that happen in politics and in politicized science all the time. You see people like, you know, it’s going to be it’s going to look bad for your team if if this is if if you don’t support this.

1:59:33 And every time I see somebody defend something that’s indefensible, whether it’s, you know, appalling human rights abuses or appalling lack of principle or you know, some some outrageous manipulation of data that’s totally illegitimate. And I’m going, don’t do that. And I try really, really hard not to do that. So, you know, if there are things that that aren’t being done right, I will generally say, I don’t think that’s being done right, regardless of what side that that’s on.

2:00:11 And I think that that’s that’s good advice. And I should I should actually follow it more. But when I see other people do it, I give them the same advice. Don’t do that. Last part of that question to that 20 year old that’s out there watching us, listening to us from anywhere around the world, China, Bangladesh, South America, Miami, Puerto Rico or Japan, they’re not watching that.

2:00:35 You’re right. What advice do you give to them if they want to be an agent of climate change, if they want to the opposite? Yeah. The agent of the lack of climate change or if they want to just I don’t know, change the tone of this conversation or tell their administration that they’ve got it wrong or what is the most effective thing they can do? The most effective thing they can do is realize that their voice is multiplied through a dozen different channels.

2:01:07 You have a voice as a consumer, right? When you’re 20, you’re not buying that much stuff. But so that’s not so we have a and you have a voice as a homeowner, right, deciding what to what to do with your installation, what to do with your power supply. You have a voice as a citizen in your town councils. You have a voice as a member of your faith group or your your whether you’re a mix in or I know any other kind of social institution.

2:01:37 You have a voice as a member of a citizen of the country that you’re in. You have a voice as a citizen of the world. And I’ve met not even 20 year olds, 15 year olds who are maximizing the loudness of their voice across those realms by doing things, by prodding the people that think they know better, by kneeling them into doing better. Also, that their schools and that their universities and that their camps and all the rest of it. And they can make a difference.

2:02:14 And in fact, as people said, like it only takes a few people like that to really, really make a difference. So you can make a difference. The idea that we’re just one in seven billion people and therefore nothing that you do matters is total is BS, right? Anything that’s happening that matters is being done by individuals who are finding ways to magnify their voices and to amplify their concerns. And if you are concerned and you have a voice, you should be trying and aiming to magnify it as loudly as it could possibly be magnified.

2:02:51 Can’t model that behavior, can you? One person can really make a difference. I think so. Gavin, thank you so much for coming on today. You know, at London Real, we’ve been around many, many years.

2:03:01 I’ve never really had a proper conversation intelligently about climate change. And I hope this is one of many to continue. It’s not easy to find the right people to speak to, you know. And so I appreciate you coming in and talking openly and honestly. I’m a scientist engineer background.

2:03:18 You know, little did I know, maybe I was involved in some of this early research by doing a little bit of Fortran code at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. And I don’t study this cause, but I must say in the last year, when I watched statements being made and policy changes happening, something in my gut knows that this seems a little ridiculous and kind of preposterous. And so even though, you know, I don’t know all the detailed science, I don’t know exactly what, you know, what might happen if we continue this course, I think I have to admit that it’s pretty obvious we cannot continue this way.

2:03:53 And I think most people have to admit that as well. And so, you know, much like tobacco, it seems like this this ultimately has to become extremely obvious sooner than later. And we all need to try to really get this conversation happening right now. And again, start start voting with your credit card and voting with your voice and make these decisions that are intelligent based on our carbon footprint. Citizenship isn’t just, you know, one vote every five years.

2:04:23 Amen to that. Yeah. And we all make choices every day. And again, if we look at a lot of our carbon based choices, they probably aren’t necessarily even how we’re voting. So we probably could all really take a long look and say, well, what are you doing?

2:04:36 You know, and maybe that maybe that doesn’t mean putting solar panels on your roof, but maybe it does. And again, sometimes just acting as the agent of change and putting your foot forward first makes a big difference. So so thank you for coming on. I know you have a very interesting role there where you’re, you know, you’re doing a lot of important science. You’re also the figure of the organization.

2:04:56 And yet you also, you know, have other political things to kind of wade through. And so you have to balance these things sometimes. But yeah, it seems doable. Yeah, you definitely do. So thank you so much for coming on.

2:05:08 Real honor having you here on London. We say it’s about the journey and it was my pleasure to get. And so please keep up the good work and come back and see us soon. I’d love to. Thank you very much.