Factually! with Adam Conover - Talking About the Weather with Daniel Swain

Episode Date: January 18, 2023

What are atmospheric rivers and bomb cyclones, and why are they mercilessly attacking us? This week climate scientist Daniel Swain joins Adam to discuss the meteorological events of the past month, and to explain the effect that climate change is having on the weather we face every day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the truth. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show once again. As I talk to an incredible expert from around the world of human knowledge and we learn some amazing shit that's going to blow both of our minds.

Now before we get going, I want to thank you if you support the show on Patreon. If you want to join our Patreon community, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. That's patreon.com slash adam Conover. That's patreon.com slash Adam Conover. For just five bucks a month, you get every episode of the show ad-free. You can join our community Discord. We would love to have you. Now, this week, we're talking about the weather. I know, I know. It normally seems kind of boring, but based on the weather we've been having the last couple months, I think you're going to want to hear this one. So let's just recap. This winter, most of the Midwest, large parts of America have been hit by gigantic Arctic blasts, winter storms that have delayed flights like crazy.

It has been wild out there. And in the early part of January, California, where I live, has been beset by rainstorm after rainstorm after rainstorm. We've already gone through, like most of the projected rainfall for a year in California, has been beset by rainstorm after rainstorm after rainstorm. We've already gone through, like, most of the projected rainfall for a year in California just in a couple of weeks. There's been widespread flooding, huge amounts of damage. A lot of people have died. And, you know, California is a state with a somewhat deserved reputation

for being sunny all the time. So when we get weather like this, it makes people start to freak out a little bit. They're like, oh my God, do I need to replace my roof? Is climate change causing it? Is this gonna happen every year now? Well, in honor of this winter's wild ass weather, I am honored to have back on the show one of my very favorite guests.

He is gonna tell us what is causing this weather, how he felt when he saw it forming over the Pacific Ocean, whether climate change is really causing it, and he is going to tell us what weather disasters we need to be prepared for in the future. His name is Daniel Swain. He's a climate scientist at UCLA and he has one of the very best social media presences about the weather. You can find him under Weather West wherever you get your social media. Without further ado, please welcome my very favorite weather nerd, Daniel Swain. Hey, Daniel, welcome back to Factually. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me back on the show. It's a pleasure to be here. Been kind of a busy couple weeks for you. It sure has. It often is when there's extreme weather in California and really anywhere in the West or whether, you know, I guess it's not just weather these days. If there's extreme wildfires or other things that are even indirectly related to that weather, my phone rings off the hook and my email inbox is a disaster. Well, it wasn't just by the way. So these storms have been hitting California, the entire West Coast. But it's also, they came just a couple of weeks after there was a gigantic winter storm across the rest of the country. So, first of all, what the hell is going on? It's a good place to start, I think.

Yeah, well, it's definitely been a really disruptive winter across a lot of the U.S., I think, starting with, as you mentioned, the huge, the polar blast in December, right during the sort of the peak holiday period that messed up travel for virtually everybody who was traveling anywhere in North America and in some spots, it was, you know, the coldest it had been in 30 years along some of the Front Range and the Upper Midwest, which is saying something since these are places that tend to get very cold in a typical winter. But what was equally interesting is just how transient that was. It was this incredible burst of really cold air, really disruptive blizzards and snowstorms. And then, you know, then it just went away. It has not been remarkably cold, or quite the opposite across most of the rest of the country since then. In fact, it's been unusually warm and all that snow in Buffalo that was caused such an extreme emergency in the short term has long gone. There's no snow left on the ground at all. So it was this huge

burst that occurred at a bad time. And then the rest of the country has now been sort of a little more quiescent in the wake of that. But now California has been under the gun with really wet conditions in this long sequence of storms that sort of started in late December, or maybe even mid-December, I guess, sort of right after that cold outbreak in the Midwest and the East, and has continued really since then. I mean, you know, we're recording this on January 11th and, you know, we're still partway through this storm sequence. It looks like it's going to continue for another week or so. There are some hints of a break, perhaps about a week from now, but we still have some more big storms to get through before then. Yeah. I mean, what's crazy about this podcast is that we're recording this about a week before it comes out, but more storms are going to come through this weekend. So I'm like, all right, this weather episode is still going to be topical a week from now. And by the way,

you mentioned, uh, unseasonably warm weather in places like Buffalo, Europe is having a heat wave right now, right. Or at least, uh, a huge, uh, temperature anomaly. I was just looking at some charts this morning that were covered in red all over Germany and France. So is there something strange about this year that is causing all of these weather anomalies? Or is this within the realm of, you know, normal variation? Yeah, it's a good question. There has been exceptional heat event. I think actually a lot of Europe, while California has been very wet these past couple of weeks, some of the warmest winter temperatures ever and temperature records in much of Europe go back farther than almost anywhere on earth. So that is actually saying a lot. So it's, you know,

it's been a winter of exceptional weather in other places where often, you know, sometimes the weather media in the U.S. is very North America centric, but there is, of course, weather in the rest of the world as well. The European heat wave has been notable. Arctic has been unusually warm as well, as is often the case when the more temperate latitudes get really cold in winter. the more temperate latitudes get really cold in winter, the Arctic has been notably not cold during those same periods. It's essentially, there is a physical reason for that. When the fence that holds in the cold air, if you will, in the Arctic kind of breaks down, it bulges southward and sometimes affects people living at much lower latitudes, which means the cold air is no longer fenced into the Arctic. So it's not there. The cold escapes the Arctic and like comes for us. Like it breaks the bonds that hold it to the North Pole.

Yeah. It's like very, very biblical feeling in a way or something. Yeah. Or it's like from Game of Thrones. It can be pretty dramatic because you get really cold and, you know, you see blizzards in places that don't always see them. And then places that are supposed to be super cold then aren't, and you see these rather, you know, amazing images of, you know, rain falling in northern Alaska in December, where, of course, you're in polar night. It takes a lot for the

Arctic in darkness to see liquid water falling from the sky, I'll tell you that much, and that's something that we saw back in December. So there's been a lot going on all over the northern hemisphere this winter. The interesting question is why, and is that outside of the range of variability? Well, by definition, record-breaking heat is outside of the range of variability that we're typically used to seeing with weather. And we did see a couple of instances of genuinely record cold across the U.S. during that big outbreak in December, although notably these are not equal and opposite events. We had a couple of days of record cold in a handful of places in the U.S. in December, and we've seen massive areas seeing

all-time record warm conditions for prolonged periods elsewhere in the Northern Hemisphere, really throughout much of 2020. And in some cases, even now in the early part of 2023. So the new year, more record heat in a lot of places, again, not everywhere all the time. But there is a tilt towards, you know, we're not seeing equal amounts of record breaking heat and record breaking cold, which if we were, would be an indication that the climate were not changing. If you saw record heat about the same proportion as you saw record cold, that would suggest that things are pretty much not changing over time. But since we're seeing such a skew, generally two to three times as many record heat events as record cold events,

it's really pretty dramatic, right? That's a big number. That's a direct indicator that things are non-stationary. In other words, that they're changing over time. So you're making the connection to climate change here, which I wanted to ask you about. And I know that it's a little bit of a dicey subject in meteorology because everyone wants to know every time there's an extreme weather event, how is climate change related? And I know there's a little bit of difficulty in attributing any one weather event to climate change overall. How do you think about it when people ask you that question?

Well, as I like to joke, you know, I'm a little bit of a reformed meteorologist. I may have even used that language on your show before. But what I really mean by that is I'm a climate scientist with a background in meteorology. So I really do approach the broad scale long term changes from sort of an episodic weather and aggregate kind of perspective. Because I think that, you know, that's what matters. It's the individual extreme weather events that cause all of the problems. It's not the average conditions or the ordinary weather days that are really causing anybody any harm. It's the things, it's when things are a little bit out of the ordinary. And the challenge is there have always been weather extremes. There's always weather that is out of the ordinary for whatever climate epoch you're in. But once that envelope starts to shift,

the envelope of what kind of weather is plausible in a given period of time, that's where we start to have even greater problems where we see historically unprecedented things start to occur. And 2021, 2022, we saw a lot of historically unprecedented things all around the world in terms of weather that have climate change connections. I mean, we saw the incredible record-shattering heat wave in the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 that just obliterated, you know, any records that anyone has observed in that region before. I mean, any records that anyone has observed in that region before. I mean, it was 120 degrees one day, or actually two days, in the glacial valleys of British Columbia. I mean, that's just a phenomenal heat wave. But then that ended up becoming eclipsed by multiple other heat waves

that occurred since June 2021. We had the record-shattering Western European heat wave in the summer of 2022, you know, where London reached 40 degrees centigrade. And we all saw those images of vegetation fires burning like California wildfires within the city limits of London, which was I still am kind of a little bit shocked by that imagery. China saw like continuously all time record high temperatures, which didn't make the news as much because there's been a lot of other things happening in China over the past year or so. All sorts of really just incredibly conspicuous record-shattering heat events across wide regions at the same time that we've seen a number of record-shattering precipitation events in some of the same regions, but also in other regions. And these are the two types of extreme weather events, extreme heat events and extreme precipitation events.

In other words, really heavy downpours that probably have the most direct links to climate change. And we are starting to get to the point where actually we can say, even on an individual basis, that those kinds of extremes in particular have direct links to climate change. Really? Wow. It seems that the science is advancing very quickly because I felt like a couple of years ago I was hearing more caution about that, and now I'm hearing those attributions

more often. What about the extreme cold events? What's the proper term for what happened across the Midwest when it got really cold? What should I be calling that? That's a good point. There really isn't a formal, like, accepted, universally accepted term. It's a, you know, Arctic outbreak maybe is a little bit less colloquial than polar blast, but not really. So I think anything goes. Sometimes you hear this stuff, like, you know, these terms catch the popular consciousness, like polar vortex, but I never know if they have any connection to... That's the one term I would recommend not using in this context because the polar vortex isn't an extreme weather event.

It's something that always exists in the polar regions of the Earth. So it is literally, the term used to describe just the fact that you have cyclonically circulating winds in the Arctic all of the time. There's just always a vortex. Hey, go up to the North Pole. You can check out the polar vortex that's always up there. Yeah, and that's that fence that we were mentioning earlier. That's the fence that can get disrupted.

So if the polar vortex weakens or becomes disrupted, that's when these pockets of really cold air can spill southward in the northern hemisphere and reach the mid-latitudes. But it's actually not so much that the polar vortex has arrived in Minneapolis or something. It's actually that the one that's always there is behaving a little bit strangely and it's weaker than it usually is.

Ah, so some of the cold air escaped the vortex and came for us in Chicago or everywhere. Okay. So this, so the Arctic outbreak, I love that because it really does evoke that sense of there's a vortex, there's a fence, and the cold weather escaped and got out. How might we talk about that in relation to climate change?

I have this general sort of sense that climate change makes weather events more chaotic, more unpredictable, like patterns that had been established for a long time can maybe break down or weird stuff can happen. And an Arctic outbreak, to me, sounds like it might fit that pattern. But that's just me connecting ideas. Is there any truth to that idea in your mind? Yeah, I mean, you're connecting some interesting ideas there. And this is actually sort of at the bleeding edge, if you will, of climate science. There's a lot of active research on these things right now. And so this topic in particular is an interesting example where some of the news media coverage has diverged a bit from what the science says more so than in other areas of climate science. And it's kind of instructive and interesting to sort of dig in a little bit as to why that is in this case. So what are we talking about here? instructive and interesting to sort of dig in a little bit as to why that is in this case. So what are we talking about here? Really, this idea that climate change increases all kinds of extreme

weather events is more of a colloquial idea than it is one that's necessarily rooted in the science. Now, let me be crystal clear. Climate change is increasing the frequency and magnitude of many, if not most, types of weather events. So as a general statement, I do think that's reasonable. But there are some events for which that's more true than others, and there are some specific kinds of events where actually it's not true at all. In fact, the reverse is true. And this may be one of those instances, but with some major caveats. So I'll be clear about that again. Overall, the number of extreme cold events on Earth is dramatically decreasing in a warming climate.

So we are not seeing both more extreme heat and more extreme cold. We are definitely seeing a lot more extreme heat. But in general, we're seeing less extreme cold, less persistent extreme cold and less severe extreme cold in the vast majority of places the vast majority of times. There are some interesting exceptions to that, though. And one of those happens to be over the central United States. Not that there's been an increase in extreme cold, but there's been a bit of a lack of decrease in extreme cold, even as we've seen increases in average temperature, increases in extreme heat, even in the same region. We haven't lost the very coldest events. We saw what happened in Texas last year.

That was an incredibly high-impact extreme cold event, just like the one this past December across the broader. So we have seen these in this region. And then there's another region in Eastern Europe and Siberia where the same thing is happening, where there haven't really been decreases in extreme cold during winter that we might expect, given how much warmer it's gotten the rest of the time. So there may be something interesting going on there. And there's lots of hypotheses as to why that might be the case. And it still isn't totally clear at this point whether it's just random bad luck, and eventually this will stop happening and we'll see pretty big decreases in the frequency of extreme

cold in these regions, just like we have elsewhere. But the other hypothesis is that maybe there is something interesting happening in the Arctic with the jet stream that is somehow not necessarily resulting in colder cold extremes in these places, but preventing sort of the warming of the cold extremes in these regions that we would have otherwise expected and that we're observing essentially everywhere else. Is it the fact that the Arctic is warming much faster than the rest of the world, and that's perturbing the stratospheric polar vortex more often or to a greater degree? It may be that the cold air in the Arctic just isn't as cold as it used to be,

so we can't get as cold or cold outbreaks. But are we seeing maybe slightly more of them in these regions? And so that's sort of counterbalancing the winter warming otherwise in these regions. This is genuinely an open topic of research, and there is evidence pointing in both directions at this point. One direction is just sort of random bad luck. You may have heard my X-Files ringtone there for a minute. Proof positive my phone is ringing off the hook these days. We can talk more about that in a different episode. Hold on. Climate side is the next file's ringtone.

That's a little suspicious to me. I don't know. What are you implying? Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm implying that I'm a fan of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, I guess, more than anything else. But I did rewatch, by the way, the series when I had COVID this past year, and it holds up over time. It's one of those ones that is still good. You know, somehow I never watched it. I'm such a, I really feel like I missed out. I should go back, I should go back and watch it. You totally should. Absolutely should.

Okay. Do it during one of the polar outbreaks. I just hope there's, this doesn't apply there's any conspiracies behind the weather, I hope. No, no. But sorry, go on with your point, please. Well, you know, I think that the jury's still out. And that's an interesting thing to be saying, you know, as a climate scientist. But for this particular thing, you know, my professional assessment is that there's there are a lot of things that we know with high certainty about the climate system. And then there are some other things that we don't know with high certainty. And this actually falls into that latter category. And I think it's unlikely in the long run that we'll end up

finding out that climate change, global warming is resulting in more cold extremes in any particular part of the world. In the long run, you know, we're going to see fewer of them and we already are in almost everywhere. But these regionally specific sort of deviations from what you would expect are interesting. And I think it is important to understand them. And there may be something interesting going on here with the Arctic. And this is sort of part of that broader hypothesis that maybe the radical changes, these incredibly rapid radical changes we're seeing in the Arctic, you know, the Arctic is warming as much as three to four times faster than the rest of the world.

So it's really dramatic warming. That probably is going to have some effects on weather in remote regions. We just don't understand exactly what those effects will be yet, because every time we run a climate model experiment or a scientific experiment trying to figure out what the effect is, you know, does it increase the, you know, the persistence of droughts or of floods in particular regions, or does it lead to more temperature extremes? The answer always seems to be that it does something important somewhere, but from study to study, it's not clear that it's, you know, studies have different expectations or different findings as to exactly what it does. You know, for example, there's one study out there

that suggests that the loss of Arctic sea ice could cause more California droughts, more persistent high pressure over the North Pacific and drier winters. There are other studies that suggest literally the opposite, that actually, perhaps, the loss of Arctic sea ice is one reason why California doesn't dry out more than it might in a warming climate. It's actually, in some ways, a saving grace for this. Those are literally opposite findings, and it's unclear which of them is going to end up being true. The interesting conclusion, though, is that either way, it kind of looks like the Arctic probably will matter for California directly in terms of our winter precipitation and our

hydroclimate. So all of a sudden, you know, we're used to looking to the tropics for California weather when we think about El Nino and La Nina and the tropical Pacific Ocean and the variations in the warm and cool waters that affect our climate here. But I think what's going to come out in the next five or 10 years is that we also need to be looking to the Arctic, perhaps increasingly so, in a warming climate in ways that are indirect and complicated, but potentially really important. Yeah, and it goes to show how global the weather system really is, which is not how we normally think of it as people just watching television, watching the forecasts in our area. But we'll talk about that more in a second. We got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Daniel Swain. Okay. We're back with Daniel

Swain. So talking about like how global the weather system is really struck me when i was watching first of all i've been glued to your twitter feed um because you're constantly retweeting things going this is storm is amazing like oh holy shit incredible images shit like that but you know a lot of times we'll be watching one of these images and looking at the storm system that's coming for California and going like, oh, this is like literally traveling more than halfway across the Pacific Ocean to get to me. And it makes me go, oh, did people in Japan, like the, the, these systems are so large that they're starting to feel a lot less localized than they did to me, you know, a couple of years ago. And I wonder what it's like for you, like watching these systems develop, you know, are you, do you have to like look at it as, as a global phenomenon, you know, something that's like traveling the globe,

something comes from this area, moves over here, but then it's pushing out something else to some other. Does that make sense as a question? Yeah, yeah. You know, that brings a few interesting threads I think we can explore. I think the answer is yes and no, and the yeses and the no's are both interesting. Yeah, I think some of the tweets you're referring to are, I always find it funny that I spend a lot of my time doing, you know, public-facing science communication. Sometimes it's the gee whiz, this cloud is cool tweets that get by far more engagement than anything else. But maybe, you know, I guess that's a good thing. Everyone can agree the cloud is cool, you know? Yeah, it's uncontroversial in some ways. Although actually, I did get some people saying,

this isn't that interesting. This isn't that dramatic. So apparently, you know, even even even you'll find haters even when it comes to cool clouds. But, you know, I think the particular tweet you may be referring to was actually during the quote unquote bomb cyclone event at the very end of the year in December off the coast of California. That's a term that has really had a renaissance in the last few years, seeing it a lot on the news. And it turns out it's actually an old school meteorology term you can see in textbooks from the 1950s and 60s. Bomb cyclone refers to a low pressure system that underwent rapid strengthening beyond a particular quantitative threshold. So the process

is known, and I think this is my favorite word in meteorology possibly, bomogenesis. That is actually the term. It has a formal definition. I think it's like the cyclone must deepen by at least 24 millibars in a 24-hour period. And then it will have been said to have undergone bombogenesis. It's just one of those textbook, like, smart word that sounds like it was made up by a stupid person. Just a bunch of guys here and go,

hey, what should we call it when one of these bomb cyclones forms? Bombogenesis. Sure, go for it. That's fine. You know, it was a lot of meteorology was sort of affiliated with the military back in those decades.

So very possibly someone just thought, what's a thing that changes quickly? And they're like, I know, a bomb when it explodes. And they're like, okay, a bombogenesis. I mean, I actually don't know. What would a poindexter call this? They put genesis on the end. So we'll go with that. Yeah, yeah.

So I don't know the exact origins of the term. But the point being, it's not a new term for the social media era. It is actually a formal meteorological term that got picked's not a new term for the social media era. It is actually a formal meteorological term that got picked up, I think, in the social media era, and a lot of folks are surprised to hear it's a formal term because, you know, it sounds like it's a bomb cyclone.

Yeah, it sounds like something the local news made up to scare you into watching the 11pm news. Bomb cyclone, tune in, yeah. Or that it's very colloquial, like, oh man, that's bomb. That's a's cyclone tune in yeah yeah or that it's very uh colloquial like oh man that's that's bomb um that's a bomb cyclone um as in very cool or interesting or yo that cyclone this is a lit cyclone yeah exactly i actually encounter a lot of folks think that's the origin it's it's not a real term it's just something that people were calling it on social media which perhaps now

it is but it has like three layered meanings, one of which is like in meteorological textbooks. So anyway, I thought that was an interesting anecdote about a satellite picture that I thought was cool. Um, and of the bomb cyclone, um, however you want to interpret that. But, uh, you know, the interesting thing about that one is that was one that did not come from far away. So this was not something that traversed the whole Pacific ocean. But one of the reasons why that was interesting is that it one that did not come from far away. So this was not something that traversed the whole Pacific Ocean. One of the reasons why that was interesting is that it blew up in situ, essentially in place. So the bomb cyclone was not a cyclone at all until it sort of blew up about 800 miles west of the coast of California.

So there was no major storm out there over the Pacific until this formed right there in place. And so this was something that had been predicted. This is one of the cool things about weather predictions. This wasn't just predicting where something would move blowing on the wind. This is predicting the formation of something out of the ether, if you will, in a spot where there was no storm before, and then 24 hours later, there's this massive cyclone and that's what's one of the cool things about modern meteorology is that we know exactly the processes that should have caused this and then they did when we thought that those processes would come into alignment and then we saw the impacts so this wasn't like hey there's a storm coming for us it's going to

be here in a couple days it's like meteorologists are looking at an empty patch of ocean and sky, blue skies or maybe just cloudy skies, and saying there's going to be a storm here in 24 hours. Like we can tell. The instruments told us. The models told us, et cetera. Right. And not because it's going to come in from somewhere else, because it's going to form here. But it does go both ways. And so that's one example of a recent dramatic example of something that just sort of formed in place. And then other storms in the same storm sequence in California that's ongoing

have come across the ocean from the West Pacific. So some of them have been sort of transported their, you know, water vapor or low pressure systems from thousands of miles away. So it's a mix. And that's why, you know, that's what keeps meteorologists on their toes is some things you literally see coming from thousands of miles away. And sometimes things just develop right in your own backyard. Cool.

So what would cause a storm like that to develop out of nothing? If you can explain it in a way that would be intelligible to me, a guy who knows absolutely nothing about the weather. Well, let's think about what atmospheric pressure is, barometric pressure you hear about on the news report. You know, really it's a measure, fairly directly, of the mass of air

in the column above your head. So high pressure literally means that there's more mass of air above your head in that moment than there is relative to some... There's a lot of air up there. And it's heavier than you might think. It's just that our bodies are designed to accommodate this multi-mile column of air pressing down on us at all times. pressing down on us at all times. And, you know, the variations in the pressure, the magnitude of that pressure are maybe like on the order of 10% between extremely high pressure and extremely low pressure at the surface. So they're not huge. Most people don't perceive them, although they're legitimately some folks with certain medical conditions can notice this more than others. I mean, there is some truth to the people who have migraines or arthritis,

you know, feel the changes in the weather. This is the main reason why there is actually less pressure or more pressure, you know, affecting your body. And again, it's on the order of plus minus 10%. So it's not tremendous, but it can be enough. And those variations in pressure are really what weather is. Low pressure systems, high pressure systems, meaning fair weather, low pressure systems, meaning active weather, stormy weather. A lot of us know that just from the weather maps on TV. But how does low pressure form? Well, you have to move some of that mass of air from the region where the low pressure forms to somewhere else, by definition, making that an adjacent high pressure region, because in comparison to the low, it's high. It's the process of evacuation of air.

So moving that air out of a region, the formation of the low pressure system. Well, the air wants to come in and fill the vacuum because then that creates a pressure differential and there's high pressure in one spot and low pressure somewhere else. If there were no other forces acting on the system, the air would start to flow from the high pressure to the low pressure. But it's not quite that simple in the world that we live in.

If some process causes that low pressure system to form, that inward rushing air begins to rotate cyclonically because we live on a planet that has something known as the Coriolis force. Because we're spinning. I know this something known as the Coriolis force. Because we're spinning. I know this. We're spinning. The Earth is spinning around.

We live on a spinning oblate spheroid. We can call it a sphere. But technically, it's an oblate spheroid, more accurately. So it's kind of flat on the edges. A little bit fatter at the equator. A little bit spheroid. Come on. keep going. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's just a lot of good insults

that come from meteorological terms or band names, depending on your philosophy. But yeah, I think my favorite insult would be the undular bore. You're such an undular bore. I don't even want to know what that means meteorologically. I just want to think of it as an insult that's thrown around at Noah. Maybe it's better if you don't know.

We can talk about it in the next podcast. But the movement of air from one place to another, removal of some of the mass of air in some spots and accumulation of that mass in others, low and high pressure systems. And they rotate in opposite directions, cyclonically for low pressure systems. And you'll be amazed by this term, anti-cyclonically for high pressure systems. So literally the opposite sense of rotation, which is also opposite in both hemispheres,, of course, the Coriolis force operates in the other direction in the southern hemisphere. And this is not notably what makes water spin the different direction in your toilet in the hemisphere is because the effect is far too small on those spatial scales. But on the spatial scales of storm systems, which are hundreds to thousands of miles wide, the Coriolis force is really actually

fundamentally important. It's why weather systems spin. And so once you start to get that air moving out of the evacuation of air, the less mass in the column of air, the formation of the low pressure system, you have that inward rushing air, which begins to spin because of the Coriolis effect. And all of this results in essentially in the storm. So as that air rushes inward near the surface, and it starts to rotate, well, you get rotating air at the surface. But you also start to get air that moves upward in a vertical sense in the atmosphere, because you have air coming in at the surface, it can't go into the ground, it can't go down. So as that air accumulates from the inward rushing,

it's got to go up. And the key thing that results in the formation of clouds and precipitation on Earth is upward motion of air. Because as air moves upward, it cools because the pressure decreases, it condenses, it forms clouds. Fundamentally, that's why low pressure systems bring stormy weather. And it's why high pressure systems bring fair weather because they do the opposite. You have inward rushing air at high levels, then it's why high-pressure systems bring fair weather, because they do the opposite. You have inward-rushing air at high levels that is forced downward to the surface. So that's sort of, in a nutshell, how weather works, actually. It's, that's, so that's sort of meteorology 101 in about five minutes. I know, I didn't intend for you to come on here and explain to us just fundamentally how weather works.

I guess that's the question I asked. Where do storms come from? I understand it so perfectly now, actually, as a result of that explanation. I love any explanation that turns a complex system into the simple interaction of a couple of, you know, systems working with each other. And one of the things I think I love about the weather and understanding it on that level is it makes me realize that I am just a part of a big physical system, you know, that like, oh yeah, at the end of the day, there's, you know, there's just air moving around, you know, that, that like there's air, air of particular density rushes from one spot to another spot.

And that creates motion and that creates things whirling around. And, you know, my life on a daily basis is so mediated by the information I see, by social structures, by, you know, all these other ways of understanding the world that it's easy to forget that you live in, you know, a gigantic, on a gigantic, gigantic billiard table where like things are bumping into each other and moving around according to, you know, knowable rules. And it's just like, it's one of the things that makes me so excited to whenever there is a large weather event to go look at your Twitter feed or to go to the National Weather Service website or to, you know, look at what a really great weathercaster is doing broadcasting because it allows me to sort of like appreciate, holy shit, yes, I live in a system like this. Yeah, you know, and that's that sense of awe, you know, is I think it's shared among a lot of planetary and earth scientists. I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of folks get into the

field in the first place, because they find these systems both interesting and also just, it's kind of amazing that we inhabit them. You know, the laws of physics are operating all the time, whether we acknowledge them or like them or not. You know, gravity is always there. Force, you know, equals mass times acceleration, no matter how bad your day is. So whether or not your day is bad because of force equals mass times acceleration is a whole nother story. But you know, I think that the and the other thing that I realized as somebody who comes more from the atmospheric science side of things, really thinking about the atmosphere, you know, as a system, is just how interconnected that is

with the other Earth systems. And this has actually been, I'm not sure I'd call it a revelation, but it's definitely become more apparent over the past decade or so that all of the earth systems are really interconnected in very complex ways that we actually still don't understand that well in some cases. And by the earth systems, I mean the atmosphere, of course, is the one that I study and that we're talking about today. But the atmosphere is profoundly affected by the ocean, that other body of fluid that we have on this earth that is enormous. It's of a very different density, but in a lot of ways, the ocean and the atmosphere and the study of the ocean and the atmosphere are very similar. It's just studying massive

fluids on a rotating sphere with very different densities and chemical properties. Those things are both connected to the cryosphere, the frozen world, which again has all sorts of different interactive physics and dynamics that are important. And then the biosphere, the living earth, all of these things affect the atmosphere. And one of the amazing things, you know, in climate science is that as our models get more sophisticated, they're no longer just atmospheric models describing atmospheric motions and producing weather and climate predictions, but they're also known as coupled Earth system models. These models now have modules where the ocean talks to the atmosphere, the atmosphere talks to the ocean,

the land surface talks to the atmosphere, and then when it rains, the atmosphere talks back to the land surface. And it turns out, my point in saying this all, is that when you perturb any of these things in a model in an idealized way, like you say, okay, let's get rid of this forest, or let's make the soil much drier, let's change this ocean circulation, it profoundly affects the global climate. and it's not always predictable you might do something in one part of the world in this model and then the biggest effect is like 8 000 miles away and this is true in the modeling world it's also true in the real world and that's the thing that's amazing about this is that everything really is connected in

that sense and i think we're only just beginning to understand a lot of those details. Yeah. I mean, something that I have only recently began to appreciate is the influence of geology and geography on the weather that, you know, the, why does the, and this is the extremely dumb, dumb version of it, but like, why does Los Angeles have the particular weather that it has? It's like, well, it has to do with the piece of ocean that's next to but also the mountains that it's next to and where it is in relation to those um and uh you know if you look at my understanding is if you look at like deserts in america so like if you you ever had the experience of going on a road trip and driving across the desert and then driving through a mountain pass and getting to the other side and seeing how drastically the weather is i remember the first time that ever happened

to me in my 20s i was like oh the mountains control the weather to a large extent yeah um and and once i start looking at it that way oh it becomes very obvious that once you adjust once you start like fucking terraforming like we are in the United States and like changing the geography by rerouting rivers or by like paving over surfaces or whatever. That's going to change the weather. Sorry, go for it. Yeah, I mean, I think it's an interesting thought experiment. If you were an alien geophysicist, if you were someone visiting from light years away and didn't know anything about the Earth in particular, but you did know the laws of physics

and thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, you would predict that almost all of the world's deserts exist where they actually do. And you would make that prediction because you would know where the mountain ranges are. You would know what direction the winds were blowing usually over these mountain ranges. You would know, you know, where the ocean circulations set up where they do. And so these things are actually surprisingly predictable based on geography. You know, the way, the reason we have the climate that we do in particular places is intimately tied to the more, we call it static. Geologists, of course, would yell at me for calling the Earth's geography static, because of, it's not, especially on long enough timescales over millions of years.

But, you know, over the course of a human lifetime, mountain ranges stay where they are. They're not moving around. You know, we can predict a lot of why the weather and the climate is the way it is from those things. One of the interesting corollaries is that over Earth history, you know, the climate changes pretty dramatically, not just because of variations in the Earth's orbit around the sun or variations in the sun's output or volcanic activity, but also just because of where the continents are relative to the oceans, because that's changed over time as well. So all sorts of really cool things pop out of this if you really think about what it means in a broader sense. But, like, geography is really important in understanding weather patterns and climate patterns.

And also in understanding how our climate is going to change. Because we're in this period of radical climate upheaval, essentially, that is really pretty astonishing in a geological context. is, is really pretty astonishing in a geological context. I mean, all of these changes are happening in less than a blink of an eye when we come to the geological setting of the earth. And so understanding these interactions, both between sort of the, the quote unquote, static things, like where mountain ranges are, and the more dynamic things like how the atmosphere interacts with the, the, you know, the vegetation and the land surface and the cryosphere and the oceans, they both end up being really important. Yeah.

And the blink of an eye that you mentioned is, I mean, it's so fast. Like 150 years ago, Los Angeles, where I live, was a wetlands that was like, had this like very variable river that, you know, sort of like flooded all the time. And, and, you know, there were marshes everywhere and et cetera. It was a very wet area when people moved in while we channelized the river to prevent the flooding and paved over like, uh, uh, how much would you say? Probably 70% of the, uh, entire, uh, couple of valleys, you know? And as a result, like the, the, the, I don't know if you'd say climate, but just the way that it is to live here, right, is vastly different than it was.

What happens to all the water when it rains here is very different than what happened to the water, you know, 150 years ago. But let's talk more about that in a second. We've got to take another quick break. We'll be right back with more Daniel Swain. We got to take another quick break. We'll be right back with more Daniel Swain. All right, we're back with Daniel Swain.

You were talking about your awe watching some of these weather systems come in. Last time that you were on the show, you talked about the arc storm, which is the, what, every 150 years or so, if I have it about right. You can correct me, but there's a giant storm in the Southern California area that comes through, parks itself over the mountains, and dumps a huge amount of water.

And last time it happened in, I think, the late 19th century, killed a bunch of people, huge amounts of damage. And it could happen again in Los Angeles or anywhere else in SoCal. Was there a point when you were watching the storm coming in where you were like, uh-oh, what if this is the big one? And is there a point where that awe turns to fear? Or do you start to feel like you're in a movie of some kind where, uh-oh, I'm the only one who knows what could happen?

Yeah, I mean, that tension arises often in meteorology and climate science when there's extreme events that are both scientifically fascinating and also horrifying sometimes from a human perspective. So, you know, current events in California are maybe a little bit of both. extreme storm sequences that we've foreseen and that we've sort of explored in these arc storm scenarios. I think since we last spoke, actually, we've done quite a bit of work on this as part of the Arc Storm 2.0 project and scenario for the state of California. So you may have heard some splashy newspaper headlines. I believe the MSN.com headlines, the headline was millions will die.

So no drama there. Regarding a hypothetical future scenario in which there's no evidence that that is even remotely true, even when it inevitably happens. But anyway, we essentially released some initial findings in the form of a peer-reviewed scientific paper back in August on the rising risk of a California megaflood. And this was part of

the broader ArcStorm 2.0 scenario research project and sort of contingency planning scenario. The idea being it's kind of similar, if you've lived in California, you might be probably familiar with the, you know, the great California shakeout and these earthquake scenarios. You go through the motions like, you know, duck and cover. You know, if you're in elementary school, like there'll be a day when the bell rings and you're supposed to pretend it's an earthquake. You get under the desk, everybody goes outside,

they take roll call, all that kind of stuff. It extends, you know, upward, like fire departments go through those exercises, offices of emergency management, mayoral offices, you know, state coordinating offices, they all go through the motions, essentially planning for it. This is the same idea, but it's sort of known as California's, quote, other big one, the original big one being a large earthquake, while the other big one would be a mega flood. And it wouldn't affect just one region like Los Angeles, or San Francisco, or Sacramento, big one would be a megaflood. And it wouldn't affect just one region like Los Angeles or San Francisco or Sacramento, but it would very likely affect all of those regions simultaneously, making it somewhat more complicated to deal with than an earthquake,

which as bad as it would be, would be probably in one major city and not all of them. And so the motivation for this is actually, I think, as we spoke about before, the sort of the kinds of mega floods that California has seen in deep history. So as you mentioned, in the 19th century, in 1861, 1862, the Great Flood that came and inundated, of course, most of Los Angeles County and Orange County, but also most of the Central Valley, as well as large portions of what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. So this was a, you know, that was the last time an event of that happened of that magnitude was now like over 150 years ago, so no one alive today remembers it. We wanted to explore these scenarios because, as you might imagine, a modern day recurrence would be pretty catastrophic in a contemporary California. And so we came up with some storm scenarios.

Importantly, the 2.0 version of ArcStorm versus the original 1.0 version incorporates climate change. The original version did not a decade ago. And what we found is that it's pretty important to do that because it appears that climate change has already doubled the likelihood of experiencing a mega flood event in California. So that's not a prediction about what might happen. That's an estimate of how much the risk has already increased as of today. And of course, there is more warming to come, so there'll be more future risk increase. The sequence we're seeing now in California, this multi-week storm sequence, there are some

parallels in the sense that, A, it's not just one big storm, but it is, you know, half a dozen to a dozen major storms in a row over multiple weeks. But where the differences become more apparent is that right now we're not experiencing widespread severe flooding in California. There has been some localized severe flooding and then more widespread, somewhat lesser flooding. And unfortunately, some people have died. I think the death toll is approaching 20. There has been substantial damage in some regions. So it's not to minimize what's happened at all, but it's to point out that this is not the big one. This is not the big catastrophic flood event in California. This is just a taste of it. And I think what would, you know, if we were to extrapolate from what we've seen so far to how much further we need to get to be in the territory of these scenarios, we might start off similar to what we've seen over the first couple of weeks of a scenario like

this. But right now, the actual real world weather forecast is about another week of this, you know, moderate to strong storms. And then it kind of tapers off and, we'll get a break later in January. But in the arc storm scenario, we'd be two weeks into this, we'd be like, okay, it's really wet, we're having progressively worse flooding. And then we look forward a week or two, and we'd say, oh, shit, this is, this is going to get worse. Like this is escalating further from where we are, and we've got at least two more weeks of it.

And that is not what we see right now. And that makes a big difference because the cumulative risk grows maybe exponentially. So we can handle two or three weeks of this stuff, but not four or five weeks. We can handle succession of moderate to strong storms, but once you start throwing in even just a couple of extreme storms into the sequence, everything really goes off the rails. So we're seeing taste of it now, but it still isn't anywhere close to the kinds of things we know are plausible and are becoming more likely in a warming climate. But I mean, even with the storms that we're seeing right now, I think if you told most Californians we've only seen a taste of it, they'd be kind of worried because the amount of storm we've seen so far is

bad enough that, you know, my dad's texting me, right? It's like, it looks pretty bad on the news. Uh, you know,

I have friends who, uh, I have friends who are not able to, they had to evacuate their apartment because they have black mold everywhere. Uh, because you know, it's leaky.

I have folks who, I know folks who, you water is up to their front door or et cetera, a lot of localized bad drainage all over the place. And there's certainly images on the news of folks in armpit deep water in various places in Santa Barbara or wherever it may be. And so in terms of the built environment that we have created, how much, you know, that did not exist 150 years ago. 150 years ago, I think there were probably a lot of dirt roads for, you know, caravans or whatever.

There was not, you know, miles and miles and miles and miles of paved asphalt and all this built environment that's channeling the water one way or another. So how might that, you know, is this something that we're not prepared for in terms of the risk of a gigantic storm? Or how do you think that might play out? Is that part of your models? Yeah, that is very much part of what we're trying to explore. So the first phase of this ArcStorm 2.0 project was, you know, there. What would it look like? What's a hypothetical storm sequence? Let's do the modeling, let's quantify, let's look at climate change. So that's check and done. We have that, that's published, that's out there. That's what made the splash this past summer. be. We need to get the hydraulic modeling done. This is something we're working on with the State Department of Water Resources to do the flood modeling for the whole state of California and say, okay, who gets inundated how deeply at a pretty spatially granular level? We don't have

that information yet for this scenario. It's going to be ugly, I can tell you that much, and it will look much worse than what we've seen recently. I can tell you that as well, but stay tuned for the details there. But the third phase is to really like look at what is the human impact? I mean, how many people have to leave their homes for potentially an extended period of time? You know, how might you evacuate? In one of the most populated areas in the country, San Francisco, downtown Los Angeles. That's two megacities you're talking about.

How would you evacuate that many people, a relatively orderly fashion quickly enough? And where would they go? You can't move people from Sacramento to the Central Valley if the Central Valley is going to be underwater. You can't move people from L.A. to the Inland Empire if the freeways are washed out and the mountains have washed onto the freeways. Well, there's bad enough traffic trying to get there on a Friday night. Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So there's some real so there's real interesting questions about, you know, what we would actually do and how we can mitigate these risks. And the built, you know, the built environment that we live in absolutely modifies the risk. And I think this is an interesting question. You know,

the built environment up to a certain point, minim risk, right? Like that's why the LA river is, I would say, unfortunately in a concrete box and why a lot of the, you know, the air, the air sprawl river channels and stream channels and the LA basin are concrete culverts, you know, under buildings going under freeways. That's what rivers and watersheds look like. And most of Los Angeles, you know, highly urbanized portions of Los Angeles County and really in many places, not just limited to LA, but LA is a good example of this. On the one hand, the reason why this was done was to capture the fact, you know, these significant flood flows on something like the LA River, which in the early part of the 20th century caused major flooding, you know, along the LA River in Los Angeles every couple of decades, you know,

people would die, buildings would get washed away. That hasn't happened since they put a concrete box around the LA River. So it is clearly up to a certain point, effective in corralling the river. But you can kind of see where I'm going here. It's not optimal 99% of the time, because there's almost never really any meaningful amount of water in it. So it's just this ugly box that, you know, isn't good ecologically. It could be, you know, green space in a highly urbanized area that would be really beneficial. But then it's really helpful in this about, you know, 0.5% of the time when you have high flood flows. But then it's also potentially not very helpful in the like the 0.01% of the time on the really

high extreme flood. So if we're talking about a mega flood scenario, it may be that the channel is really just shooting high velocity channelized river flow into, you know, movie studios along the banks. And so you can kind of see how it's like, it creates a chute for the water to travel down very rapidly, whereas before maybe it would have sunk into the earth or been distributed a little bit more naturally. So it's an interesting part of this. It's in both environment is absolutely modifying the risks in both directions, depending on the context. You know, much of the time it mitigates risk, some cases unnecessarily, other times it actually is

really saving us a lot of harm and aggravation. And then maybe at other times it makes the risks worse. And that's certainly true of the fact that, you know, there's so much impervious surface, there's so much pavement, parking lots, roads, buildings in Los Angeles, in places like Los Angeles County, the water can't soak into the soil very easily. So there is a lot going on with that. And there are solutions to that too. I mean, there are, you know, there are, you know, sort of water collection and percolation basins, you know, there's this Sepulveda basin, you know, there are, you know, sort of water collection and percolation basins. You know, there's this Sepulveda Basin, for example. We may be able to do more of this in like the Central Valley, for example, by using

a flood bypasses, you know, letting some places flood intentionally designated places that you say, you know, it's okay to flood this, you know, this agricultural land for a month if it spares Sacramento. Maybe we can even recharge some groundwater for the next drought in the meantime. So there are things that we can do. And one of the reasons why we're even bothering to go through these motions is one, to figure out what we're up against, you know, two, to figure out what kinds of emergency management we would need to engage in to minimize the harms, but also in the medium to long term, what kinds of, you know, policy and

infrastructure interventions would actually help us not just mitigate the risks of big floods, but also, you know, co-manage the risks of big droughts, since it's not like we're seeing any less of those either. We're seeing more of both. And so focusing only on one or the other is, you know, at our peril. And so, you know so co-managing the risk of drought and flood is one of the big themes right now in the California water space. Yeah, I mean, you hear people say around L.A., they go, well, we need the rain. Ah, it's raining, but we need it. And then you look at where it's going, and, well, it's cascading down concrete down to the street, where it's then cascading down to a storm drain

where it's going going down the la river like it's it's uh you watch all this sort of precious water flow away and it's you know it feels like flood or famine you know either uh neither neither scenario feels like we're we're perfectly prepared for it and it makes me think of how you know we did an episode of adam ruins everything uh about these topics, about natural disasters and talked about how, you know, so many natural disasters are in truth man-made because we are the ones who, you know, I think there was a hurricane in the Houston area that was a good example of this, that the flooding was much worse because of how much of that area has been paved over. Whereas, you know, if it were, if it were not the, the water would have just sunk into the earth, but it was, it's been modified in this way that, that caused the disaster to be much worse.

So when talking about this arc storm, when you say, you know, you're talking about the likelihood of it, is this the kind of storm that we should simply prepare to have happen one day? Because we, is it the sort of thing where, well, it's got a low chance of happening, you know, on any particular year. But if you look ahead 500 years, you're going to have this happen. It will occur eventually. Is it that sort of a situation? So I can be pretty specific about the math here.

You know, the claim that the risk has doubled essentially due to human-caused climate change to date is based on something that would have happened prior to climate change maybe about once in a century. So in any given year, you'd have about a 1 in 100 chance of it occurring. On average, you know, some of us may not even live to see a 1 in 100-year event, right? Because most of us, unfortunately, aren't fortunate enough to live to be 100. A doubling of the risk means that that's now a one in 50 year event. And all of a sudden, that's a pretty, pretty big difference. Because now that's something that most of us will live to see since most of us make it past 50. And then on the path we're currently

on, it could perhaps become a one in 20 to one in 25 year event in a few decades from now, all of a sudden being something that we actually experienced, you know, multiple times in a typical human lifespan. So that's a radical change. But the cumulative risk is sort of the way to think about this. So, you know, if you visit, if you if you live in LA for a year and go away, maybe your odds are about one in 50, you probably won't ever experience it, right. But if you're a lifelong resident, you know, we actually did the math over the next 40 years, which is, you know, it feels like a long time, but a lot of people live in a place for 40 years. And the odds of this happening over that kind of period are about two and three. More likely than not, we'll see one of these events

over a period of time, marginally longer than your typical home mortgage. So this absolutely is something we need to be thinking about and preparing for. That's unbelievable. And that makes your work very important to do the hydraulic modeling and everything else so that we know if this happened. I mean, I literally was looking at flood maps for my address to see, well, hold on a second, what's going to happen if there's like a large flooding event? And I, and I came away going, I think, I think a pretty high elevation. I feel like the water is going to run past me and go somewhere else. But you know, I don't know for

sure because of, you know, I mean, as far as I know, the LA river has not yet had the LA river in his current point has not had to deal with that amount of water. And so it's, yeah, so that work is really important. But I also wonder, there's sort of a problem with the human capacity to believe that such things are in the future. One thing that really stuck with me I read a couple years ago, and I don't remember where I read it, unfortunately, so I apologize to the journalist who pointed this out. But they pointed out that Barack Obama had purchased a home on Martha's Vineyard, his place he likes to visit, and that the home he had purchased, if you look at climate change maps, is predicted within the next couple decades to be subject to erosion and to fall into the ocean, basically, because of where exactly it's located. And the point of this was not to like roast Barack Obama. It was to say,

you know, if this, this man has had better briefings on climate change than almost anybody else on earth and yet lacked the capacity to look what would have, even just in pure self-interest, Hey, guess what is going to happen to your investment in, you know, 40 to 50 years, right? It seems to be, we have a real inability to you know look that far ahead and I would have to wager that most people who plan on living in Los Angeles or San Francisco for the next 40 years are not buying their homes with that in mind hey hold on a second there's going to be a catastrophic flood and I need to be careful about that so how we, maybe this is a good question to end on, how do we do a better job of balancing these very long-term risks with our daily behavior? Yeah, I think that's really, I think in some ways, the question. And I don't know if you ever got a chance to ask Obama

exactly what his thought process was. We were a little bit busier when we were recording our show. And so I didn't want to go, hey, by the way, about your house, are you a little, have you checked the flood maps? I felt like that would be a little bit out of place. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. But I think this is, it is an interesting example of a much broader issue, which is that I think there is, in a lot of ways, a collective failure of imagination. In some cases, that's kind of what I like to call it. There's a line of critical inquiry, sort of known as complex systems analysis, that looks at catastrophic failures in any number of contexts, whether it's, you know, space shuttle missions that went, that ended tragically, or nuclear reactor meltdowns, or I think even war gaming, you know, what kind of miscalculations things that in and of themselves perhaps are foreseeable

and not totally remarkable, but in sequence, in that particular unpredicted order, results in dramatically worse or different outcomes than most folks would have presumed. And I think that this is sort of along the same lines of not thinking critically enough about what's plausible. I mean, some of it just comes down to, you know, our collective memory is short. I have a colleague, Francis Moore, who's now at UC Davis, who's done some research using social media demonstrating that the remarkability of record-breaking temperatures really only persists for like three to five years. So we really only have about a three to five-year collective memory of what historically, you know,

what our parents or grandparents would have found just astonishing. It just starts, we acclimate very quickly. I mean, this is why people haven't felt climate change. Like I read a while ago about how, you know, a town in New Jersey where the, the, the pond used to freeze over every winter and everyone would go ice skating. And of course now it hasn't frozen over in 50 years, but no one there is like, Hey, what happened to the pond? We used to go ice skating. Cause it's been, you know, decades. Uh, and so we have that, we have that very big problem of short memory. There's three things going on. One is that even with our own lifetimes,

we forget, we forget what it was like when we were kids. And there's evidence showing, showing that. But then on the other, you know, timescale, part of the problem is the earth history is long and individual human

lifetimes are short. You know, a lot of big, bad things have happened that, that we can't remember because they happened, you know, a very long time ago relative to when we've been alive. But they're clearly physically possible because they've happened before and they will inevitably happen again.

But the third thing that's happening is that we're changing these systems. So this is a nice way to close because it really ties together two of the main things we've been talking about. One is climate change. The climate, what's the envelope of what's possible in terms of weather is actually shifting. We are seeing more extreme weather events. And also disasters. I mean, I think the term even natural disasters has somewhat fallen out of vogue because precisely because they aren't natural in many cases, they are because of other human influenced other anthropogenic factors like paving over watersheds or building homes right on the coast where you can get major storm surges. And so, you know, we have modified the background conditions. So we have a short memory. The earth can throw much bigger things at us than we can conceive of, I think, just because of just practical limitations of our lived experience. And then also what the earth can throw at us is shifting. And so those three things thrown together, I think, make for a complex soup of

misperception maybe, and, you know, lack of imagination. And so that's one of the reasons why we do things like ArcStorm 2.0 is we want to make very real and tangible the hypothetical and actually go through the motions and say, what would this look like? Would your neighborhood be flooded? You know, what would the state have to do to respond? And so, you know, that's sort of the motivation behind it anyway. Yeah. But I mean, returning to that earlier point, one of the reasons I love talking to you is you make me remember that I'm a participant in a physical system that I don't totally control. You know, a guest we had

a number of years ago is a woman named Jenny O'Dell, who wrote a wonderful book called How to Do Nothing. And she has one of the portions of that book. She talks about going to her hometown and finding a creek that was sort of buried under concrete, you know, or hidden, you know, was in between an alley between, you know, in the back of a development or whatever. And she points out that, you know, no matter how much we try to control that creek and, you know, put it under concrete and cover it or whatever, well, it's there because of a watershed. It's there because rain falls on high elevations and the water trickles down and it collects into a creek. And, you know, we can reroute it and do our thing. But at the end of the day, we're still subject as humans to, we still live on a geological

oblate sphere, right? That is subject to atmospheric weather systems and oceanic weather systems. And we have a limited amount of control over those. And we can make things worse. We can make things a little bit better, but ultimately we're still part of that system in a really deep way. And having an awareness of that is really important to us. Being able to live on it in a way where we don't die and don't suffer and can live well. So I love talking to you because it gives me that awareness. Well, I'm really glad to hear that. And that is one of the things that I try and convey in all of this is that it's not all doom and gloom. You know, there are some doomy things out there at times, but also there's a lot of really cool stuff in the space. And, you know, there are also burning fossil fuels, we are going, climate change will halt. So even the big problems in that context, you know, have potential solutions. Now, whether we actually pursue them aggressively is another question, but we can, and I think we will. It's just a question of, you know, when we release.

Well, I'll bring on a political scientist to talk about that on another occasion. Sure. Because now we're in the realm of social sciences, if we will, and how long will it take us to do it? But I thank you so much for coming on, Daniel. Where can people follow your work? Well, you know, you always feel free to read the peer-reviewed literature,

but if you'd rather stick to more traditional channels, you can find me on Twitter at weather underscore West. I actually just launched a new YouTube channel at weather West. No underscore. I was earlier in the game and getting my username there, I guess. And I've been doing some some even some live. I call them weather and climate office hours recently. They've ended up being really popular during these storm sequences for understandable reasons. But I'm also going to be doing interviews.

It's my pivot to video like a decade late, essentially, is what it is. That's what we're all doing. You can find me there on the Weather West blog, weatherwest.com. I'm very online. I love the Weather west blog because you give these long-form explanations of what's happening and then what i love is that every post of yours has hundreds of comments from weather nuts weather weenies as a guest on uh the g word uh called them uh just people who are excited to talk about the weather uh from an

evidence-based you know really, really, really scientific standpoint. That's a really cool community. So go check out Daniel at Weather West, wherever you get your social media of any kind. Daniel, thank you so much for being on the show. Love to have you back. And, you know, maybe, I hope we don't get this kind of weather next year,

but maybe in a couple years we'll get some more big storms. We're going to have you back on the show. Yeah, well, right now, but maybe in a couple of years, we'll get some more big storms. We're going to have you back on the show. Yeah. Well, right now, uh, the early signs are that we may be headed into an El Nino pattern next year. So stay tuned for that one.

Oh God. All right. All right. Well, then I'll talk to you about it again in about 10 months. Uh, thanks so much for being here, Daniel.

Sounds good. Thanks again for having me. Well, thank you once again to Daniel for coming on the show. I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. I want to thank our producer, Sam Rodman, our engineer, Kyle McGraw, and everybody who supports this show at the $15 a month level on Patreon. I'm just going to read five names today.

Thank you, John McPeak. Thank you, Rick Spurgeon. Thank you, Laura Willing. Thank you, Joker on the sofa. Thank you, Jeff Nash. And thank you, DM McCullough. If you want to join, head to patreon.com slash adamconover. Just want to remind

everybody that I'm going on tour again this year. I'm going to have more dates on my website soon, but I know that I'm going to be in Austin at the Cap City Comedy Club from March 23rd through March 25th. Tickets available at adamconover.net. You can also find me at adamconover wherever you get your social media.

Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time on Factually. I don't know anything.