Factually! with Adam Conover - The Flood, the ARkStorm and Why Weather Science is Amazing with Daniel Swain

Episode Date: January 29, 2020

Climate scientist Dr. Daniel Swain joins Adam this week to shed light on how climate change affects the chances of more extreme weather events, the main misconceptions surrounding weather and climate and the importance of weather science as climate change thunders forward. 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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And, you know, it's a standard joke that you can't trust the weatherman, right? When local TV anchors finish up their stories about the hero cats or the recent spate of doorstep package thefts captured on camera, you can detect a hint of disbelief as they turn it over to the weather person, right? Oh, and here's Tina with the weather, maybe? I don't know. Take a whack. I mean, come on. Everybody knows the weatherman's always wrong, right? Well, actually, that old stereotype just isn't true anymore. There have been incredible advancements in our ability to accurately predict the weather over the last few decades,

ones that have changed weather science as we know it. See, as late as the 1970s, weather predictions actually were pretty inaccurate. As late as the 1970s, weather predictions actually were pretty inaccurate. Even in the late 70s, attempts to predict huge storms were, quote, practically forbidden because the science was too weak. Climate models failed to catch major events, like the President's Day snowstorm of 1979, which buried D.C. and Baltimore in 20 inches of powder. But in the years since, forecasts have become dramatically better. That's for a few reasons.

First, there's been an enormous increase in the amount of climate data collected from a growing fleet of sensors and satellites, as well as advancements in the science that help us understand how weather works. But most importantly, we also now have enormously faster computers to run simulations based on that data. 40 years ago, NASA was proud to have a computer that could run a million calculations in a second.

But today, the weather service forecast is about 4 billion times faster. The result of all these improvements? Today, a five-day forecast is about as accurate as a one-day forecast was in 1980. Think about that. We're able to make reasonably accurate predictions about the weather, a fundamental aspect of our shared reality that conditions our every waking moment five days into the future. I mean, try predicting what mood you'll be in five days from now. You're probably wrong. So today, we know the weather better than we know ourselves. And that means we're no longer flying blind when it comes to the worst and most dangerous forms of weather. According to an article last year in Science,

predictions for hurricanes, blizzards, flash floods, hail, and tornadoes have made major improvements. And recent monster weather events like 2012's Superstorm Sandy or the East Coast Blizzard of 2016 were predicted about a week ahead of time. And even less drastic weather forecasts are now good enough that baseball games are actually rescheduled according to rain predictions, ensuring fans don't get soaked. But look, accurate weather prediction isn't just about baseball and picnics. It's foundational to our entire way of life. Accurate weather predictions help farmers get the most out of their crops, and without it, air travel would literally be impossible. And since the weather is getting more variable and more extreme all the

time due to climate change, expertise in the weather is only getting more important. Weather science isn't just a boring gig for people who love staring at the clouds. It's one of the most vital and important fields of study today. And today's guest is a weather scientist. Dr. Daniel Swain is a climate scientist at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA and holds appointments at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the Nature Conservancy of California. But really quick, I want to do a couple quick plugs. I will be at the Irvine Improv doing an hour of stand-up comedy on January 30th. If you live in the area, I hope you come check it out. And please check out The Crystal Maze, the new Nickelodeon game show I am hosting every

Friday at 7 p.m. on Nickelodeon. And now let's get to our interview with Dr. Daniel Swain. Hey, Daniel, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks for the invitation. So you're a weather scientist, correct? You study the weather out here. You run a blog called Weather West, right? That's about weather in the western part of the United States in California, where I live. That's right. Yeah, I'm sort of a bit of an odd one out. I actually, I sort of have a

professional background in meteorology, so weather science, but I'm also a climate scientist. So I sort of straddle this climate weather interface, thinking about stuff long-term and short-term. Got it. But what I really like about your work is you do these blog posts about like, here's what's been going on in the weather in the last month. Here's what's going on in the future. And, you know, we think of California as this place with no weather, right? That's the net people. Oh, you know, it's the same every day, never changes, especially in SoCal. Um, but you write about the way you write about it makes it sound so interesting and like constantly variable that there's always something weird happening. What,

what are people misunderstand about the weather in that way? Well, I think there's always something weird happening. What do people misunderstand about the weather in that way? Well, I think there's definitely an element of truth to the fact that most days out of the calendar year in most of California, the weather isn't something you have to worry about too much. I think that's part of the appeal of Southern California and Los Angeles. I think for a lot of people is that they do exist in this stable subtropical climate that's very rarely, you know, very cold. Typically, you don't have to think about big storms. But I think the tricky part comes, we have, you know, it's such a geographically diverse state. There are literally dozens of individual microclimates throughout California. So you have that spatial and geographic diversity. And then also we have this pretty

dramatic shift from one season to the next. You don't necessarily think about California having such profound seasons, but actually we have a drought every year in the summer. We have a wet winter every year in the winter. And unlike a lot of places in the world, you know in the summer in California, it's going to be dry. That's not the case in a lot of parts of the world. So I think the other element to that is that we have pretty wild swings from year to year. So not just these season to season swings, but a lot of years in California, the weather is relatively moderate. But every once in a while, a really big event comes along and I think throws everyone for a loop. And those really big events are maybe a little less rare, I think, than a lot of people perceive them to be.

Yeah, you've talked about the Great Flood of 1862. Tell me what that is. The Great Flood of 1862. Tell me what that is. So the Great Flood of 1862 is the big California disaster that I think a lot of people have never heard about. I've never heard of this, yeah. Yeah, everyone's familiar with the big earthquakes in California's history. Everyone's familiar with wildfire, obviously, especially given the recent context. But I think a lot of people forget, partly because it's sort of out of their own realm of experience, that California is also susceptible to really large flood events that can have huge societal impacts. of the flood of record in California. It occurred, obviously, not that long after California became a state when the region's population was closer to 400,000 than it is to the 40 million people who live here today. So it was a fundamentally different region, but the geography was similar,

the climate was similar, obviously. And when this flood occurred in 1862, it essentially inundated the Central Valley. There was effectively an inland sea in the middle of California. Wow, really? 300 miles long. And it was so bad that the nascent state capital in Sacramento was completely inundated. Leland Stanford, who was being sworn in as governor at the time, had to come back from his inauguration ceremony in a rowboat and entered his house through the second story. Wow.

And then the state legislature relocated to San Francisco temporarily because they realized the city was going to be underwater for months. So that's the kind of order of magnitude we're talking about. Incredible. And the Central Valley, for that to be a sea, I mean, that's where so much of American agriculture is right now. That's where like, if you've eaten an almond in the last 10 years, that's where it's coming from. And so the idea that that whole area was completely underwater, like a sea, that's massive. Is that something that could happen again? Yes. The short answer is yes. Okay. It definitely is. And you know, one of the things

that we talk about when it comes to extreme events and natural disasters are, well, what, you know, what, what does our historical experience tell us about what is physically possible and what might happen in the future? And obviously, we live in an era of climate change where the range of what's possible is expanding. But what we know, because this happened in 1862, before there was really any meaningful global warming, is that we don't even need to invoke global warming to get an event of this magnitude. It's already happened in our present climate. So this is definitely something that could happen again. And it's really one of those cases where if we don't know this history, we're really not going to be prepared. Like no one, everyone talks about, you know, the Northridge earthquake and that could happen again. And, you know, I had an earthquake proofer come to my home and put

museum wax on all my stuff. I don't know if that's going to be helpful at all, but, you know, I got some, I got some water in the case there's a, there's an earthquake, that sort of thing. But I don't know of anybody who's preparing for the Central Valley to turn into a lake again. Yeah. And I think that that's, that, that speaks to sort of the, the recency bias that we have. And we think about the kinds of things we need to be preparing for or the kinds of risks that might exist. Obviously, we're very attuned to wildfire risk right now because we've seen some really terrible ones in the past few years. We're relatively aware of the earthquake risk because in the last 20 or 30 years, we've had a pretty big one in the Los Angeles area and in San Francisco. So people tend to be familiar with that. We haven't had the kind of really catastrophic flood event that we're worried about in many, many decades, arguably over a century. So no one

alive today has experienced something of the magnitude that happened in 1862, for example. So I think it requires a little bit of imagination to think about what it would mean in modern day California to experience a recurrence of something like this. But that imagination is so hard. I mean, I'm reading Mark Eriks' book right now. It's a book called The Dreamt Land about water in California, the history of water in California, and how even farming out here that, you know, the farmers forget that there's a drought, that droughts will come almost immediately, that they live through the drought. And then as soon as water's back, they start planting, planting, planting, forgetting the fact that, you know,

they're planting in California and there's going to be a drought sometime in the next 20 years. And then suddenly they're left with all these trees that are drying up and they need to grab water from somewhere. And that the memory for those issues is so short compared to, you know, the pressure to keep planting, keep making money. And, you know, you could project that onto any other business that is, you know, similarly just thinking about tomorrow rather than yesterday. Is there a way to develop that historical consciousness that we need? Yeah, I think there is. And a few years back, there was actually a state-level sort of disaster

contingency planning exercise. So, a lot of folks in California have heard of the Great Shakeout, which is this big sort of earthquake preparedness sort of exercise where a lot of state agencies and regional governments sort of go through the exercise of saying, okay, let's pretend that the big one happened today. What would we do? Let's actually put these plans into action and see how well they go. The state of California actually started to move in that direction for big flood events a few years ago. This exercise was sort of a joint

project with the U.S. Geological Survey, and they called it the ARCSTORM. The Atmospheric River 1000 was the acronym. And really, it was intended to be sort of an exercise to see, okay, what would it look like? What would we do if an 1862-like flood came along today in California? And the answer was a little bit disconcerting. It's actually that the economic losses for an event like that would dwarf a large earthquake in Los Angeles, for example. And I think one of the reasons for this is it would be very widespread. An earthquake is likely to occur in Los Angeles or in San Francisco or somewhere in between. It's not going to affect all of these sectors at once. But a big flood in California would affect, as you mentioned, obviously, the Central Valley agriculture, but it would also

affect Silicon Valley and Hollywood and all the tourism and everything in between. So it would affect all of California's major sort of sectors simultaneously. And what would it take to have a flood like that happen? Like what sort of atmosphere or, you know, storm system are we looking at? What is the perfect storm, if you will? So I bet as a meteorologist, you hate that phrase. But what would it take to make a flood like that happen? Yeah. So California is susceptible to what are known as atmospheric river storms. So these atmospheric rivers are these sort of sinuous filamentary plumes of really concentrated moisture in the atmosphere that occur. There's always at least a couple somewhere on Earth. They usually occur over the oceans. But the big deal is when they sort of attach themselves to strong winter storm systems

that can sort of squeeze all of that moisture out of the air as heavy precipitation. And every winter in California, we get a few of them, at least sort of the weak to moderate variety. Every couple of years, we get a really strong one. But what happened in 1862, as far as we can tell, was essentially an unceasing sequence of these really strong atmospheric rivers over the course of three, four, five weeks. So arguably, it was sort of a 40 days of 40 nights of rain situation where you just got dozens of these atmospheric river storms back to back. And the amount of water that fell from the sky over that 30 or 40 day period was just phenomenal. There are sort of anecdotal

reports that Los Angeles saw somewhere around 60 inches of rain over that 40 day period, which is, of course, two or three times the annual average rainfall in that part of the country. So this was essentially the kind of thing that we would expect to happen again. If we ever do see a recurrence of this kind of event, which it will happen eventually, it's a matter of time. Yeah, that's probably not a very reassuring statement coming from a climate scientist. Yeah, for real. But it will happen.

And you can think of it sort of in the same vein you think of earthquakes. We know it's going to happen eventually. We know the risk is there and that in the long run it's inevitable, but we never, we don't know in advance that it's going to happen tomorrow. Although differently from the earthquake case, if it really were going to happen tomorrow, we probably would know today. So unlike earthquakes where there's really no predictability, if we're lucky and you have that new app installed on your phone, you might get 10 or 15 seconds of warning. Yeah, for real. With an event like this, sort of the silver lining is it's not just going to suddenly start raining and we'll say, where the heck did that come from?

This is something that will have a pretty good sense that we're headed for at least a few days in advance and maybe as much as seven to ten days in advance. And so it's unlikely that a really big flood in California would have as many human casualties as a big earthquake. So that's the good news. But the bad news is that the economic losses and the physical damage could actually be far more extensive. Wow. But that is a big difference between now and 1862, that now we've got weather satellites and imaging and models and all of these things. It's like, we're only looking at 150, 160 year difference here. It's an enormous difference in our ability to predict the weather. But it really strikes me that the earthquake seizes the public consciousness so much more. People are thinking about earthquakes all the time.

My girlfriend just texted me this morning on my way here. Oh, we slept through an earthquake last night, right? But, you know, because she's like gotten alert on her phone or and she's constantly concerned about them. like got an alert on her phone or, and she's constantly concerned about them. But for some reason, the weather doesn't seem to have that conscious of a, of an impact on people. Like, you know, like, all right, well, hey, turn on the weather, man. Look at the app on your phone. Oh, is it going to rain or not? That's about it. No one really thinks about it more than that. Whereas like, really it's the science of predicting the movement of these massive quantities of air around our planet that affect our lives in these really deep ways, right? So there's, to me, there's this strange

gap between the public understanding of weather science and what it means to actually do it. Do you feel that way as someone in the field? Yeah, I would say I think that there's, despite the fact that it's sort of ubiquitous and affects everyone every day on some level, there's a bit of a disconnect between sort of what goes into producing weather forecasts or climate projections, or even just understanding the variations of the atmosphere in general and what's really going on behind the scenes. I mean, on a certain level, it's an extremely widely consumed sort of thing. It's on your morning news multiple times every hour. There's a weather channel.

It's the first thing that pops up on your smartphone. And so I think a lot of folks tend to take all of that for granted. But there's really a tremendous amount of stuff going on behind the scenes, all the way from space, where we have our Earth-orbiting satellites that are telling us a lot about what's going on, all the way down to the really analog rain gauges, literally plastic tubes that fill up with water. So it's really the whole range of technology along that kind of spectrum. And there are thousands of people around the world whose job it is to understand and to model the atmosphere and the weather and the climate. how much access I have to it as a consumer. Like I can go on to the National Weather Service homepage and just start pulling down data, right, about historical weather patterns,

or like I can look at the raw data from all these different sensors. And of course, I don't know how to ingest it, but if I did, I would maybe be able to, I could have a lot of fun in that, right? If I wanted to make a hobby of following, you know, weather data as it comes in, I actually could like get my fingers in it in a way that, you know, we don't really have access to most other forms of science, right? I can't just go like, oh, let me just go look at people's genetic code and like see what their DNA looks like in the same way I can do that with weather. So I find that very cool. But I'm curious what brought you to it? Because I think a lot of people, if you ask the person on the street, they would think meteorologist, not that interesting of a job, right? But clearly, something must have drawn you to it as a vocation. What was it?

I think part of it really was that it is so ubiquitous and so accessible, you know, the atmosphere. So as you know, growing up, I was interested in the earth in general. I was interested in rocks and geology and earthquakes and things like that. But then also, you know, what was going on in the sky above. And I think that sort of won out for me personally, because it, it changed so rapidly, you know, you wait five minutes and something, something is different, even in a place like coastal California, where there is a little bit less variability than there is in other parts of the world, the sky is always changing. The atmosphere is so dynamic. If you think about it, it's one of the few things that is that changeable in your life. And there's always something new going on. So for

me, I think it was that rapid change, that variability that drew me to it. And I think a lot of meteorologists will say that they had at some point in their life growing up some sort of formative weather event that really drew them to it. And for me, growing up in Northern California, there actually was one, a particularly severe storm when I was probably, I think I was probably about eight or nine years old. So it does go back that far. And I think that, you know, for a lot of folks, and for me personally, at least, the weather and the climate increasingly, sort of as I've continued with that as a professional career, is appealing to me because it does affect everyone. And it doesn't affect everyone

negatively all the time. Sometimes it's just, you know, sort of an incidental part of our daily life. But in its extreme forms, it does cause a lot of problems and sometimes harm to people. And it's harm that can be averted partly because a lot of it's predictable. Yeah. And our ability to predict it can save lives to such a huge degree. If you can give people warning to get out of the way of a hurricane, et cetera, like our, and we can give, I spoke in the intro about how we can give people warning so much earlier now because weather science has gotten so much better over the last few decades. warning so much earlier now because weather science has gotten so much better over the last few decades. Yeah, weather science really has improved dramatically over the past few decades

and is probably going to continue to do so in the next few decades. And I think the reason for that is maybe a little bit different from what some folks might think. Part of it is that we are observing our atmosphere better than we used to. We have more numerous and more sophisticated satellites, for example, that tell us more information about what's going on, not just at the surface of the earth, but also throughout the atmospheric column above your head. So we need to know not just what the weather's like, you know, in your neighborhood, but also 30,000 feet above your neighborhood. And it's different up there. It's, you know, wildly different.

In fact, the fastest way to change weather conditions is not to go horizontally. I mean, above LA, if you go up 20,000 feet, it's well below zero. So you can suddenly, you know, transform the environment you're in just by going up a couple of miles vertically. But I think what's happened, the main advance that's really improved weather forecasting over the past few decades is weather modeling. So these systems of mathematical equations that are solved by supercomputers that represent the fluid motions of the atmosphere.

And we've had those kinds of models in some course form for decades. But what's happened as the computing power has rapidly increased and as our level of sophistication in these models has increased is that we now can represent physical processes in the atmosphere that we couldn't represent previously just due to computational constraints. So these tools that we use to predict the weather, these mathematical tools have become radically improved as computers have gotten better over the years. And it really strikes me that, you know, and often an ignorant argument you'll hear against climate change is, oh, these models that they have, like, oh, how

are we supposed to trust these computer models when their computer models can't even predict if it's going to rain tomorrow or rain a week from now? And that's wrong because they actually can predict whether it's going to rain tomorrow or a week from now with a very high degree of accuracy compared to what we had. Like, yeah, that joke would have worked in the 70s, but not really today. Yeah. I mean, if you actually look at the sort of the objective metrics of success of weather predictions, weather forecasts are really good today in general. And I think part of the problem is the correct way to compare these is to say, okay, let's pretend we knew nothing about what was going to happen tomorrow. How much better is our prediction than random guessing, essentially?

to happen tomorrow? How much better is our prediction than random guessing, essentially? So, you know, the nominal, you know, the nominal level of skill is, is it at least slightly better than random guessing? That's a pretty low bar, but we, you know, we've even, and we've reached that bar, you know, even back in the 70s, that was the case. But today, obviously, we're well above that to the point where we can actually rely on forecasts for really dramatic events. Like, you know, we track hurricanes when they're five days, seven days off the coast of Florida, for example. We, you know, we start warning about a big blizzard in New York City days in advance. In the case of California, if the arc storm were coming, we would actually be able, you'd hear it on the news, you know, next week there's a very high risk that we're going to see a big flood event.

So there are these sorts of skills, and they obviously aren't perfect. Weather forecasts are far from perfect, and there's always going to be room for improvement. Part of that is because the atmosphere itself is chaotic. the truly mathematical sense of the word in that there are random variations that beyond a certain point make it very hard to make a specific prediction for a specific location at a specific time more than a few days in advance. And that is, on some level, an irreducible problem. It's not, you know, we're never going to have a weather forecast for, say, three or four years in the future for a specific date. And I think this is where people who use the fact that we don't have good forecasts for, say, a year or two in the future, to argue that climate change projections, for example, aren't believable. Which is to say, well, we have good weather forecasts out to a week, but once we get out past seven to 10 days, it does become really hard.

We don't have good forecasts. I can't tell you what's going to happen next year, actually, in California with any confidence right now. You could tell me maybe broadly, you give me like a temperature range or something like that, but you couldn't say it's going to rain, for example. Yeah, there's no way I could say that on January 22nd of 2021, that it's going to be dry or wet or warm or cool. That's not something that's a scientifically tractable predictability question. But if you

ask me if the coming decade was going to be warmer than the previous decade, or if the likelihood of a very wet year or a very large storm 30 years from now in California is higher than it was 30 years ago, then I could give you an answer with pretty high confidence. But if you ask me what the weather is going to be on a specific date in 2030, that's just not something that scientifically is an attractable question. And now why is that? Is it because those are averages or you're talking in a larger generality. You're talking about, oh, the weather for a particular year over all of California, right? We can say something about that on average that we can't say about, you know, your Belinda at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

Yeah, it all comes down to what we call deterministic versus probabilistic sorts of predictions. Deterministic are sort of the specific case that you just mentioned, a specific location at a specific time on a specific date. Whereas the probabilistic one is more over longer ranges of time, not necessarily over broad regions. You can still do it for a specific place. But in general, what are the statistical characteristics of the weather at that particular place in this particular time interval? And if you only have one prediction, for example, so if you ran a weather model for 30 years into the future,

you would get one possible realization of what the future could look like. But there are countless other possible futures in that sense. And so one way we actually make climate projections actually is to take the same climate model, the same set of mathematical equations, and run it 40, 50, 60 times with different sets of initial conditions. So you might start it from yesterday's weather conditions and run it forward for 40 years. You start with today's weather conditions and then run it forward for 40 years. And then you ask, okay, 40 years from now, what is the range of conditions that's occurring in this particular place? Right. So it's sort of like you're evaluating as many

different possible future realities as you can, as many different alternate universes. And then you're saying, what's true of all of them? Or what general statement can we make about them? And then that is what allows you to say, oh, temperatures are going to trend upwards or the incidence of this type of storm increases in this general way. Do I have that right? sort of agnostic about which of those possible parallel universe futures is the one that we're actually going to observe. It could be, from our perspective, any of them. But if you look at all of them, you start to come up with a sense of what the different probabilities are and a better sense of how things are different potentially in the future from how they are in the present or how they are relative to the past. That is so cool. And it just gets back to my point about how this is one of the most vital forms of science that's being done.

And that is like most exciting to hear me, to hear someone describe, because it really is like we are learning how to predict, not control, but predict like one of the most powerful forces on earth, which is, and variable forces. One of the things that changes the most and forces on earth, which is, uh, and variable forces. One of the things that changes the most,

and that's been the biggest mystery to people, like how many millennia did humans live saying, Oh God, I wish there was going to be rain. How can we get rain to come? Uh, when will it come next? Let's,

you know, do some dances and sing some songs and hopefully that'll summon some clouds, right? Where, where it was just us dealing with what felt like the chaotic randomness of the universe. And now we understand it in this fundamental way where we can really make predictions of the movements of air masses around the earth. It's so cool. Yeah, I think it's fair to say it's, it's pretty darn cool. It's, I mean, you know, I'm a little biased. I'm a meteorologist. I'm a climate scientist.

So my perspective is a little skewed there. But I think, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And in some ways, we have more predictability over that aspect of our Earth than we do over a lot of other elements. We talk about. We geophysicists understand the physical processes of earthquakes quite well, but they can't really predict them at all still. Volcanologists, again, understand the physical processes associated with volcanoes. And there's a little bit of predictability there, but still nothing like, you know, there's no equivalent volcano forecast as there is a weather forecast, for example. And so, in a certain sense, it is the atmosphere that we really have a handle on in a way that we don't other aspects of our world. And I think that's pretty cool. We are sort of in the business of predicting the future. Well, despite that, I still think there's this gap between

the power of the science and how that science is conveyed to us. And I have a question for you about that, but I'm going to ask it right after this break. We'll be right back with more Daniel Swain. I don't know anything. I don't know anything. Okay, so Daniel, I think a big issue with the weather is still how the science is presented to us and specifically how it comes to us through the news media, right? And I get annoyed when people jump on the news media too much. I think it's a boring thing to complain about. But there is a really complex issue here about how we get weather information. I remember living in New York when Hurricane Irene came by.

Do you remember what year that was? I actually don't remember exactly the year. Might've been 2011. That sounds about right. So let's say it was 2011. Hurricane Irene comes by New York City and there's almost never hurricanes in New York. I grew up on Long Island and I remember there was like one time I think Hurricane Bob came through and we like hunkered down a little bit, but it was mostly just say the trees rattled and some branches fell down. No big deal. Right. And so this never happens to New York. No one's really prepared for it. But the news goes wild with it and everybody's preparing, you know, everyone's raiding the, raiding the bodegas to get canned food and stuff like that. And then the hurricane, it just misses us is my memory. It just sort of whizzed by, went up to, it clobbered Vermont and New England, but you know,

didn't have that much trouble in New York. And everyone was like, ah, hurricane was overhyped. The news media overhyped it. Ah, stupid, whatever. They always make a big deal out of nothing, right? The next year was Hurricane Sandy. And as the hurricane was coming, people started saying the same thing. They were like, oh, this news is going crazy with Hurricane Sandy. Terrible, whatever. And then that one hit us very hard, right? It was a major disaster.

I'm sure you remember. I'm sure folks listening to this remember it was like the biggest natural disaster to happen to new york city in years and suddenly they're talking about now we have to start building hurricane barriers in the in the harbor and etc but i remember having that feeling of like because i was listening to podcasts by weather scientists and like reading blog posts on the weather underground because that's what i do is I try to go find what the scientists are saying. And I was like, wow, these people are really concerned. In both cases, they were like equally concerned about both of those hurricanes. But it wasn't getting through to the public, right? It was getting through to

the public via, you know, Good Day New York, which was presenting it in a way that people had trouble believing. And so I wonder, as someone in the field who is a science communicator, right, I've found you through Twitter and through reading your blog. That's clearly part of what you're doing. You're not holing up in a lab somewhere. You're trying to get it out to the public. What do you think the issues are in weather communication and what can be done about them? Yeah, I think there are a number of issues, but I think at the core of it is a bunch of really good science. So the good news, I think, is that at its fundamental core, the right information does exist.

There are really good predictions of something like Superstorm Sandy, for example, and Hurricane Irene. And there's also examples of really good weather science communicators, both in sort of the more scientific realm and in the broadcast realm, in sort of the public consumption realm, too. But I think there often is, as you say, a mismatch that takes place between these two. And I think part of it comes from the fact that the people sort of producing the underlying scientific predictions, for example, or the underlying

warnings are on the science side. In the U.S., that's essentially a federal government endeavor. That's the National Weather Service, the National Hurricane Center, the National Center for Environmental Prediction, these centers of excellence in meteorology and hurricanes and what have you that are tasked with producing the underlying forecasts and formally disseminating it. So they're the ones who issue the hurricane warning or the flash flood warning or whatever it is. But the people, you know, you don't really have a majority of Americans logging on to weather.gov or turning on their weather radios realistically to sort of consume this information. So there's usually some middleman, some process by which this scientific information is translated into something that is more broadly consumed by the public. And sometimes that's done very well.

Sometimes that's done not so well. And sometimes it's done very poorly. So there is a really wide range of what happens there. But I think one of the challenges in the case of something like, for example, Hurricane Irene, which you mentioned, which was very much a hurricane. It was very much a risk to New York City, according to the best forecasts at the time. And it did very much hit the United States, but it didn't hit in exactly the place that it had initially been predicted to. So there's a perception that if you were in New York

City, that that was a huge forecast bust. Some people might call it a forecast bust. That's the lingo in the comments section in the weather blogs, at least. The vicious, oh, they're vicious in the comments section of the weather blogs. They'll tear you to shreds. Tear you to shreds. So there's this perception that there was a bad forecast, even though on some levels, something was missed. It didn't hit New York City, but it did hit somewhere nearby, and it was a hurricane. So on another level, it was a very good forecast. And then Hurricane Sandy, for example, was an extremely complicated situation. This was something that was becoming a potentially huge hazard days in advance, but we didn't really know where it was going.

And it didn't just sort of make a beeline for New York. advance, but we didn't really know where it was going. And it didn't just sort of make a beeline for New York. It sort of did this weird thing where it sort of went a little bit out to sea and then made this big left hook back towards land. So it took this crazy, tortuous track, and there was genuine uncertainty among weather forecasters and the hurricane specialists at the National Hurricane Center. Was this thing going to go harmlessly out to sea, or was it going to recurve and hit New York City pretty directly with huge, huge societal impacts. And an even more clear example of this disconnecting communication, I think, is actually during Hurricane Sandy, because what happened was that the storm, well, it was a very powerful hurricane until about the latitude of southern New Jersey.

And then officially, technically, it took on slightly different physical characteristics, became known as a hybrid cyclone, no longer a tropical cyclone. And so the National Hurricane Center technically lost jurisdiction over it because it was no longer a hurricane. What, really? So they couldn't continue to issue hurricane warnings because it wasn't a hurricane, even though it was actually a larger and stronger storm than when it was a hurricane when it made landfall. That's so fucked up. It was a post-tropical cyclone.

And so what happened was a lot of the news media was saying, oh, it got downgraded from a hurricane. Wow. Whereas really, it got upgraded to a post-tropical cyclone. But because it wasn't, we didn't have the language to really communicate what that meant. That just sounds like some boring science-y term, rather than this potentially devastating hurricane-like storm moving directly for New York City, which is what it was. Yeah. The ability to sort of parse that and explain that actually, even though it's no longer a hurricane, it's every much as dangerous as a hurricane and maybe even somewhat more dangerous because of the new characteristics that it took on, that was really missed. So that was a communications failure sort of on all levels. That was sort of a bureaucratic problem with respect to these federal agencies that they have since fixed.

Okay, good. I was going to say, this is one of those things where it's like, I can't think of the example, but it's like, oh, the FDA covers it if it's a sandwich, but the, you know, the FTC covers it if it's a burrito or whatever. It's like one of those weird classification things, but applied to a hurricane? That's unbelievable. Yeah. And so now I think there's think things are more streamlined directly in response to what happened with Superstorm Sandy and the fact that it caused all that damage and devastation as a non-hurricane, technically. Now there are ways to sort of smooth these sorts of transitions and make sure that people have a better sense of what's really coming. So that was from sort of a communication, I hesitate to call it a failure, because all the forecasters, all the federal government people were really emphasizing that it had not weakened

and it wasn't being downgraded. It was just sort of this procedural change. But I think the broadcast media didn't necessarily pick that up to the same degree as I think they probably would today. Yeah, and I remember the Super storm thing being confusing at the time. And by the way, you might notice, I know it's super storm Sandy. I still called it a hurricane the first time. Cause it's like, I think that for the public, a hurricane is a big ass storm that could kill you. That's spinning on a map. Right. And like that's, so that's what Sandy was, right? It killed people, caused flooding. Exactly. And I think that's one of the challenges, sort of simplifying some of these communications and just really focusing on what you need to do, what the hazards are,

rather than what it's called. Like, what is this storm going to produce in your neighborhood? Is the ocean going to flood your house and force you to move up into your attic so you don't drown? It doesn't really matter what kind of storm it is if it's going to produce that sort of impact, for example. So on the other end of the spectrum, I mean, we have an issue in Southern California, right, where every time it rains, it is literally breaking news. There'll be live shots of the 405 stopped in both directions. Arguably, that's not so different from the usual state of things. But, you know, even light showers become sort of this breaking news in Los Angeles. And then it becomes sort of contrary to the

Superstorm example where it was, on some level, downplayed. Then, on the other side of things, everything gets so hyped up on the other end of the spectrum that it can be hard to differentiate between sort of a run of the mill, you know, storm or rain shower and, you know, and the arc storm. And I would hope that there's more differentiation if that ever really does come to pass. But I think there is this sense that, oh, the media is just hyping up every little storm because it's moderately newsworthy. So this one's just going to be like the last one, no big deal. Yeah, that can be really dangerous if people decide not to leave their area or et cetera.

You know, when a storm is barreling in on them, that can be a real danger. them, that can be a real danger. But it strikes me that you're describing that there's this gap between, oh, all the science communicators from the National Weather Service, et cetera, were out there trying to get on the news. What's strange to me is that the news, like you said, is constantly covering the weather. And they're constantly using very scientific phrases. We've got the AccuWeather 9000G with the brand new radar, da, da, da. They've got like displays and stuff like that. They the folks on TV are called meteorologists. I'm sure many of them are trained as meteorologists. Right. But when you're watching them, you rarely get the feeling that you're that you're interfacing with the science or that you're watching a weather scientist. Right. Someone who's educating

you in that way about here's what's really going on, you know? Like a lot of times it feels more like they're like El Nino. I don't know what it is, but that's what it says on this piece of paper. You've got this very, and, and so that's so strange to me because I, as a viewer, I'm like, I want the science. Tell me what it is exactly. Right. Give me, give me the straight dope. I want to understand the way the weather works. And that's such a strange dynamic to have. Yeah, I think there's actually a really wide range of what you see on TV and on the Internet in terms of how much sort of expertise there is behind the scenes going on. And as you say, there are actually a lot of meteorologists on broadcast television who do have degrees in atmospheric science. One of the meteorologists in NBCLA right now, I was in the same graduating class with him in the atmospheric

science department at UC Davis. So, you know, there are actually a lot of these scientists on TV. And I think one of the challenges becomes for a lot of them is that they are sort of tasked with being the so-called station scientists. So they're expected to be experts, not just in weather, but also in climate and in seismology, whenever there's an earthquake or wildfires, whenever there's a fire. And that's a big ask when you have 45 seconds, you know, in between segments between traffic and sports, I think. So I think that's one of the challenges is the time pressure and, you know, the pressure from the fact that it, you know, it is a television program that's supposed to make money.

And so they're trying to focus on the aspects of the weather that people care most about moment to moment, I think, which is, you know, how is it affecting my commute? For sure. And I don't mean to cast aspersions on those folks, but I think that, you know, a lot of the management of those stations are like, hey, why devote time to this when you can just have somebody read the forecast off an app on their phone for 30 seconds? Like, isn't that what the weather is? And there isn't a respect for the science in, you know, the upper echelons of the people making the decisions, right? the upper echelons of the people making the decisions, right? Yeah, and I think on some stations, in some locations, that is probably what happens, unfortunately.

I think that there is such a wide range of expertise. There are some real station scientists, and then there are people who don't necessarily have a background in science formally. And I think the challenge becomes, most of the time, that's relatively low consequence. It's not a huge problem, except when it is, when there is a big event, when there's a hurricane or a blizzard or a major wildfire, and these sorts of moment-to-moment updates can become a matter of life and death, then communicating that nuance and what's really going on really does become very important. And I think it can be difficult to do if you're not sort of used to doing it on a regular basis, which is why I think it's interesting you bring up the fact that you are sort of a weather blog aficionado because, you know, in certain circles, people who are interested in weather, who are really sort of deeply weather geeks on some level, which there are more of us, I think, than a lot of folks realize, they do gravitate in the internet era towards these blogs, towards these sort of these non-traditional conduits on Twitter or social media

because those do offer platforms for people who are good at communicating or are willing to spend the time to communicate in that way to sort of be unconstrained and be honest and not subject to the 45-second limitation in between sports and traffic. Yeah, and actually have a communication about what's going on in their communities. I read the r slash weather subreddit, right? And it's people saying, oh, here's some crazy clouds in my neighborhood. Here's what my home weather station says.

We're having weather where I live in Iowa we've never had here before. What a strange occurrence. And you really feel that they're connecting to the places that they live. And that's one of the things that I love the most about learning about the weather because, you know, I'm new to California. And one of the things I like about your blog is it helps me understand this strange new place I'm in, right? To read, oh, an atmospheric river. This is a type of weather event that we have here that's different than they have in other places, right, that causes certain effects. Like one thing I read, and tell me, I don't remember where I read this, so I want you to correct me if this is bullshit, all right? But I read that, you know, people say, oh, California has no seasons.

California has no seasons. Every year, you know, it gets to be June in California and people say, it's still, it's all gray still. What kind of June? It's supposed to be summer. What's going on, right? And what I read was, actually, we do have seasons. We just don't have four seasons. We don't have spring, summer, fall, winter,

according to the months that you have them on the East Coast, because we're in a different part of the world. We have basically two seasons, a rainy season and a dry season, like a lot of other places in the world have. Like if you have, you know, I was in India and they're like, don't come during monsoon season. It's too wet. Come during the dry season. Right. Well, obviously our weather's not like India, but you know, we've got like, when I started thinking about it that way, I was like, oh yeah, the dry season is

like the summer, but it actually runs until like November. And then you've got a wet season that, you know, you get rain intermittently up until, yeah, like almost June in a way. Right. And I know there's more nuance to it than that, but like, that's, that's the actual pattern. Right. And once I started looking at it that way, I understood the place better. But the issue was that people, you know, the pattern of, you know, white American settlement was from the East coast to the West coast. And so we brought all those language, we brought all those season words with us, right? People from New York migrated to California and said, well, it's January, that's the winter, right? Well, it's June, that's the summer. And so our concepts don't match the place that we live. And as a result, like we don't have, we're not like in sync mentally with the place that we live. Like people don't realize, oh yeah, flowers bloom in January here because we, or, you know, if you go to the park in January, you'll see a lot of greenery because there's like suddenly been rain,

which is not the case in other places. They're like, oh, it's wintertime. You know what I mean? It's such a strange thing. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. You know, what's interesting is that it's almost exactly reversed. I mean, there's so many people who move to California from elsewhere, elsewhere being places that have these very distinct four seasons, for example. But there's also a number of people who have spent, you know, who grow up in California and

live most of their lives in California and then go somewhere else and then are equally surprised to find the existence of four very distinct seasons. And in fact, the idea that if you think about it, I mean, you know, anybody who's traveled extensively outside of California, almost anywhere else in the world, including most of the United States, will be surprised to find that it actually rains in the summer almost everywhere else in the world

except for California. California is very weird in that way. Yeah. And it does have a summer dry season that's really not just drier season, but like you can, you can really count on it not raining between June and the end of August, at least maybe. Yeah. I mean, we, we, that's why my TV show, we shoot it in the summer. We shot like 65 days, never got rained out one

time. And you're, you know, anywhere else you'd have to buy insurance to make sure, cause you're going to lose money if that happens. But here you can like never worries the line producer one day. Yeah. So I think folks who grew up in California and sort of become, you know, became very familiar with California's intrinsic wet season, dry season, sort of bimodal seasonality are then very surprised to go elsewhere and find that it actually, it rains most of the year in a lot of parts of the world, or maybe in some places, like where I'm sitting right now in Boulder, Colorado, the winter is the dry season. It's the driest time of year, for example. But I think the other part is true as well, where people sort of import their expectations about

what the climate and weather should look like from other parts of the world. And because California is such a special place from a climatological perspective, that I think it's often mismatched with expectations. And I think that plays into the sense that California has very little variability. It's just that the variability here is on a different timescale than I think folks are used to elsewhere. Yeah. time scale than I think folks are used to elsewhere. Yeah. It's just so strange that I know people who every winter I meet people who say,

oh, my roof is leaking and it's so cold in my house. And it's like, well, I guess your house was built by someone who forgot that it actually does rain here. It actually does get cold because we've got this narrative that those things never happen. And there's this strange lack of sync often that we have between ourselves and our environments. But it's just why I love learning about the weather is because it connects me to the place and makes me realize, oh yeah, no matter what we do to the built environment, no matter how many trees we chop down, no matter how many, you know, roads we build, we still live like next to some mountain ranges and next to some oceans that are going to make this place have a specific weather. And we can't really change that. we are profoundly altering the climate system and therefore the weather that occurs within climate. Within that, we are still, you know, California, for example,

will continue to experience California-like weather in the future. It's going to be in some ways pretty dramatically different, but it'll be... How so? Well, so it'll be essentially a more amplified version of the things we already experience. So the heat waves will be hotter. The droughts will be deeper. The floods will be bigger. And the wildfires will be worse.

None of these things are things that we have not already experienced. We've talked about all of them already today. We've experienced a lot of these things just over the past few years alone. But what we expect to see is not necessarily a California that is perpetually drier or perpetually wetter. We actually expect to see more wetness and more dryness in alternate years. We expect to see an even more profoundly warm and dry summer and an even more profoundly short but very wet winter season as well. So it's sort of the amplification of these things that we already see in California, which on some level is comforting because I don't think we're going to lose our coastal fog. You know, the west side of LA is always going to be cooler than the San Fernando Valley. These fundamental things that are driven, as you say, by the proximity to the ocean and the topography and the geography, those things won't change. And yet we'll still see enormous shifts in what we're actually experiencing day to day, even though these

patterns of variability will be familiar, they will be quite different still. But that's where we run into our short memories for weather again. Like I read commentary from a friend of mine, Alyssa Walker, a wonderful writer here. We had last year snow in, you know, LA County, very rare, right? It was made the news. Oh, snow and not at every spot, but you know, snow fell within the borders of LA County. And she said, you know, the shame of this is that that used to not be infrequent. That if you look at weather reports from, you know, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, like, yeah, you'd get flurries. It would happen. And now it doesn't.

And we don't realize that because of the and that our, you know, our days of getting snowfall are down because it's something that happens with a random frequency. It's not something we experience every single day. It's just the frequency of the event goes down. And that's a profound change, but one that it often seems like our human minds, our puny human minds are somehow incapable of actually feeling and internalizing. Do you ever feel that tension as a meteorologist? I feel that tension as somebody, as a climate scientist who thinks a lot about weather, actually, because that is precisely one of the big issues, I think, in climate communication is that when we experience these shifting baselines, well, actually, we don't experience them very, very well. We're not good at perceiving these shifting baselines. In fact, there's actually research out there from the past couple of years that suggests that we really are only contextualizing weather

within our frame of reference from the past five to 10 years. We've essentially, you know, even if somebody is 50 or 60 years old, they completely forget about the weather that happened the first 80% of their life. Right. So they're really only collectively, and this is true on a population level and on an individual level, apparently, we're really only thinking about, you know, about a decade's worth of weather or even less, arguably. In some cases, it's like five years. So I think we've just experienced this in California. So for example, last winter and last spring were actually pretty wet and relatively cool. But it turns out that they were actually still, despite everyone saying in Southern California it was this ridiculously cold winter by Southern California standards, it was still slightly warmer than the 20th century average.

Wow. It's just that the preceding five or six winters had been so astonishingly far above that average that we had essentially adjusted just in five years to that temporary new baseline such that an average year now feels really cold. Does that really, I mean, this runs into the big question about climate change, which is like, are our human minds and the way that we run our society up to the challenge of internalizing this well enough to actually do something about it. Like I was really struck by a wonderful writer, Charles C. Mann, wrote the book 1491. I follow him on Twitter. Great follow. He had a thread about how former President Obama purchased a home in Martha's Vineyard. And that if you look at the maps of sea level rise for where this home is,

this home is guaranteed, if not to be flooded, to lose value, right? Because of how the coastline is going to rise. It's a bad investment, right? Just if you look at a weather map. Maybe Obama knows something that we don't, but let's just trust for a second looking at the weather maps, looking at the climate, the sea level rise maps that like, you know, this is not the kind of home you're going to be able to resell well in 30, 40 years. And this is a guy who knows the science as well as anyone on Earth is at the forefront of fighting for us to make it make changes to adjust for climate change and to fight climate change. changes to adjust for climate change and to fight climate change. And still, when it comes to his own wallet, where he should be, have a lot of care and importance, and he is able to make unilateral decisions, still makes a decision that seems to, to us as outside observers, not take climate change into account. Because of, so that's where it looks like this sort of default human, not short-sightedness, but that narrow frame of reference that we are stuck in having.

Do you have any pessimism about that or optimism about our ability to really take in the truth of climate change? What's interesting is that I think our sort of collective understanding of what climate change really means on a very visceral or practical on-the-ground context comes in sudden spurts, I think. It's sort of episodic in the sense that it actually does really seem to be linked to when we suddenly start experiencing something that's outside of our realm of experience is not good. And I think California recently just went through this in a pretty profound way with the wildfires. You know, wildfires are nothing new in California. They're an intrinsic part of the natural landscape. They're also, you know, a part of the folklore in Southern California. You know, when the Santa Ana winds come up, all sorts of spooky things are said to happen, including these, you know, but wildfires among them. And, you know, it's a land that is partly because of our intrinsic climate primed to burn. We have this long, dry summer every year, followed by these autumn winds that push these

fires. But what happened in the last few years was sort of a step change. It was really fundamentally different. The fires were so much worse than anything that anyone alive today had ever experienced in California. In almost every dimension, there were larger fires than we'd previously experienced. There were far more destructive fires burning tens of thousands of homes. There were fires that killed dozens of people at once. None of those things had happened previously in California until the last few years. And even though climate change is not the only part of that equation, it's not the only reason why we're suddenly seeing so much worse wildfire conditions in the state, it is a big part of the reason. And it is something that has sort of facilitated this jump into what feels like a completely different level of severity. I think

some folks in Australia are going through that right now for similar reasons. And I think in different parts of the world, these episodic jumps into something that feels qualitatively different from anything you've experienced before is sort of the impetus for a sudden jump in not just public acceptance of the existence of climate change, which is actually, despite what you might hear from politicians, is actually quite high to begin with among most people. The belief that it's actually going to affect you personally and harm you personally, that's an indicator that has always lagged belief in climate change itself. This notion that it's happening, but it's not going to harm me personally. And that, I think, is something that changes

when we get these extreme events that are at least partially related or facilitated by the new climate that we're living in. And so I don't actually know if that's good or bad news. I mean, we've been seeing more of these bad, unprecedented events, which is not a good thing. But it is on an episodic basis, I think, maybe tipping the balance a little bit. So maybe there's a silver lining there. But I honestly don't know how to describe myself, whether it's more optimistic or pessimistic about the future in that sense, simply because we are still headed towards a dramatically warmer world than we're currently experiencing. For all the progress that we've made, it's not nearly enough yet. We still could get there. We still could get to the

point where the progress is good enough, but it isn't yet. And the state of the world right now, it's not something that appears to be on a lot of people's immediate priority list. It's on a lot of people's immediate priority lists, but it's not yet on some very important people's priority lists. And then for people when it is on their priority lists, but it's not yet on some very important people's priority lists. And then for people when it is on their priority list, is it, are they doing enough about it? Right. Are they, they can, it's a lot easier to say that it's a priority than it is to make the changes, you know, that actually make it a priority. Right. And the concern is too many people saying, Hey, I bought a Tesla. I'm done. That's all I got to do.

I think this is one of the problems. This isn't sort of something that's going on at the margins. It is really a total global societal problem that if we don't address globally, we aren't really going to address it to the degree that we need to to solve it. it to the degree that we need to to solve it. And I think there is this perception also on the other side of things that, you know, if we just scale up these small-scale individual actions, that if everybody does these, you know, these small things, that it scales up to solving the problem. And I actually, I don't think that's the case. I think the good and the bad news is that we really do need large-scale solutions to this. And it's not enough.

Right now, it's not easy to make good choices. It's great if you can afford to buy a Tesla. But A, that's not an option for everyone financially or practically. But also, it only is really addressing the easiest part of the problem. The transportation is easily electrified in a certain sense. part of the problem. The transportation is easily electrified in a certain sense. It's still much harder to change other aspects of the world that we live in that contribute to global warming, for example. And so right now, for example, there's this movement toward flying less or not flying, not taking commercial aircraft because of the outsized carbon emissions that that form,

that mode of transportation produces. And I think there are some pretty compelling arguments about the fact that there is a lot of global inequity and who gets to fly and to whom the benefits of flying have accrued. It's mostly the top economic echelons of global society. So, a point taken for sure. But on the other hand, you know, if you do have a reason where you need to go to another continent, and, you know, and many people do for a variety of reasons, there currently isn't really a great option that doesn't involve taking

a plane. Right. And so, you know, an example of this, I mean, I still take commercial aircraft. I still have to go places where there really isn't a huge option other than flying. I don't like to do it. I don't think anybody in their right mind enjoys commercial air travel. But it is sort of the option that exists because we live in a globally connected society. And so I don't think necessarily the solution is to never fly again and ask people who live on different continents to never see their family again. Instead, I think the solution is, you know, how do we make it so that most people don't need to fly as often? How do we make it so that air travel doesn't produce the same sort of negative externalities that it currently does?

It might be expensive and somewhat difficult to make that happen, but it is within the realm of technological possibility. So right now, as an individual, if you want to go fly from the U.S. to some other continent, you don't really have an option other than flying that produces these large negative externalities. Hopefully, we can create a world where it is possible to make a good choice, not just with respect to flying, but with respect to just about everything, whether it's your morning commute or the food that you buy or the sorts of buildings that you inhabit, for example. And where the good choice is the default choice. I mean, we talk about on this show all the time that the focus on individual people, hey, you just need to buy better light bulbs. You need to not get plastic bags, stuff like that is a red herring, right?

And look, I spent as much time trying to use less plastic bags than anybody else, right? Like I'm constantly fretting about it, trying to turn off lights and like keep my thermostat low because I care about climate change. It's hard to get out of my head, right? Because I was brought up that way. But at the end of the day, everybody keeping their thermostat low and buying Teslas is not going to solve climate change, right? Because you're still powering a giant metal vehicle that a lot of fossil fuels went into building, right? The bigger change that we need to do is redesign our cities so that not everybody has to buy a car in order to get around their city. And so that, you know, public transportation is the best greenest choice, right? Is the, also the fastest way to get there. It's not to say cars aren't going to exist. I'm

sure if you live out in a farm, you're still going to have a nice electric pickup truck, right? Because we're not probably not sending a bus out there, but since most people live in cities, that's like the way to, you know, have this broader societal change. Flying is the worst one because it's like, what is the reform that we could make to our system of flying that would cause it to not have such large carbon emissions? That's a very, very difficult question to answer. That's like one of the hardest sectors. But, you know, I agree that shaming people for flying, I mean, hey, don't take needless flights that you don't have to, right? And knowing that taking a direct flight is better than taking a layover is like good if you want to make a

greener choice that way. But the idea of like shaming individual people for taking flights is not a good approach. You could, for instance, get a large sales company to commit to using more teleconferencing, right? On a, on a large basis, that would be a way to make a bigger change, for example. But yes, the, the, the, the emphasis on individual action that we all need to do our part is wrong. We all need to take individual political action, right? To pressure our political leaders in order to take

the collective action that's actually going to solve the problem. And, you know, to your point about there's a point at which we can do enough, I also just want to hit this nail every time that topic comes up. Any change is good change. There is no too late point, right? There are goals that we want to hit, but, you know, if we go past two degrees centigrade, let's try not to hit three. Let's try not to hit four. Let's do everything that we can because the warmer the world is, the worse, correct? Yeah, less warming is always going to be better than more warming. And I think this, and just to be really clear about, you know, the importance of individual actions, I still think they're critically important, but not for the actual impact they have directly on the climate, but for the signal they send so that large-scale change

becomes more realistic and more plausible. So just to be really clear there, I think it is valuable to take as many individual actions as you personally are able. But as you say, I think shaming people for not doing a specific thing, like not becoming a vegan or ever taking a flight again, I think is problematic. Because in aggregate, even, that doesn't solve the problem. But as a signal for large-scale change, I think that's really important. scale change. I think that's really important. And then on the level of essentially there being this cliff that we fall off of, after which all hope is lost, that's just not what comports with our understanding of the climate system. Essentially, there are nonlinearities that pop up in certain parts of the system. There is a specific point at which water freezes. So once you get above that point, you know, you melt

the ice. But in general, you know, there isn't, it's not like one and a half degrees or two degrees is some intrinsic physical threshold beyond which it all goes to hell. Things definitely do get progressively worse and some things maybe get worse more quickly. But it's not like 1.9 degrees is a catastrophe, whereas 1.8 degrees is totally fine. They're both not great outcomes, but they're actually kind of similar outcomes. There isn't some bifurcation there. And so it's always going to be better if we miss a target. bifurcation there. And so it's always going to be better if we miss a target. If we get to one and a half degrees or two degrees, we still don't want to get to three or four or five degrees.

And all of those options are still potentially on the table. So that's a huge range of possible futures still. I mean, an enormous range. Those are like three fundamentally different planets that we can still choose between, depending on what we do with our carbon emissions over the next few decades. Amazing. Absolutely. And I love your example of veganism, by the way, because just to talk through that a little bit more, that like, look, if you want to be vegan to support the climate, right, that's great.

And that actually does help out, right? But how are we going to stop climate change? It's not by individually convincing every single person in the world to become a vegan so that we're a society of vegans. That's not going to happen. That's not a good goal. We're not going to go around wagging our finger at every single person. We're going to spread the message, hey, eating less meat is good generally. So if you can do that, great. And then we're going to provide better food options to everybody and reform our system of industrial meat-based agriculture so that there's more delicious, healthy plant-based foods in the pipeline that people can go get.

And so that the cheapest food that is most readily available to every single person in America isn't a Big Mac, but is something that is better for the person and better for the planet. That's the way you create change. If you want to be a vegan too, go for it, you know, but the big, the big ring that we should all be grabbing is that big change. Fundamentally, it's about making the best choice, the easiest choice and making the best choice, the most accessible choice from an equity perspective, it needs to be available and easy and the most economical option for everyone. Man, I could talk to you forever, but we got to wrap it up. I got one more question. What are you bringing back to weather science, right? And how many advancements we've had over the last few decades? What advancements are you looking forward to?

Where do you think weather science is going in the future? Well, since so much of weather science is rooted in these mathematical weather and climate models that are run on these big supercomputers, one of the big advancements is going to continue to be, as computing power increases, we get increasingly sophisticated weather and climate models that can tell us more about the kinds of weather processes that we actually care about. So still today, a climate model, for example, might have a spatial granularity of something like 100 miles on a side. Whereas what we really care about, I mean,

if you're in LA, you drive 100 miles from the beach all the way to Palmdale, and it's a fundamentally different sort of situation. So one exciting aspect is that we can drill down more with that spatial granularity and say, hey, we can represent these weather and climate processes that are occurring in your neighborhood that we actually care about. So these fine-scale sorts of processes. So one thing that's exciting are these advances in computing technology that allow us to create better models, better simulations of what the atmosphere is doing in the real world. But also I think it's a matter of understanding our world better in terms of observing. There's still a lot that we don't actually see. There's a lot of missing information.

We don't know a lot about the oceans, for example. We don't know as much as we should about the ice sheets up in Greenland and down in Antarctica, for example. So by increasing our observational capacity through satellites or by even sending scientists or unmanned vehicles into these areas and exploring them better, we're going to be able to describe not just the climate system more accurately, but how the whole Earth system works together in a more realistic way. And hopefully that'll tell us more about what we can expect in the decades to come and potentially how we can avoid some of the negative consequences of climate change. Hell yeah.

Well, I gotta thank you for coming on here to tell us about this. I'm such a geek for this shit and I really appreciate you coming on. It's been a really awesome conversation. Thank you so much for being here, Daniel. Thanks so much for the invitation. I really enjoyed it. Well, thank you once again to Dr. Daniel Swain for coming on the show. I hope you loved that interview as much as I did. I want to thank our producer, Dana Wickens, our engineer, Brett Morris, our researcher, Sam Roudman, and our WK for our theme song. Hey, you can follow me on Twitter

or anywhere else, at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list and check out my tour dates at adamconover.net. Until then, we'll see you next time. Thanks so much for listening. I don't know anything That was a hate gun podcast.