Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Steven Koonin: Stop POLITICIZING Climate Science! (#344)

Episode Date: September 6, 2023

Is climate science being politicized? Are facts being misrepresented and distorted to fit a certain narrative? Are climate scientists trying to dictate policy instead of investigating the actual truth? And what does it mean to be accused of being a global warming denier? Here today to discuss this controversial topic with me is no other than Steven Koonin! Steven is a renowned theoretical physicist and has recently been working on urban studies and government policies. He has also published a very provocative book, Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters. The book caused a lot of controversy as it challenged the dominant narrative on global warming, and today, he is here to state his case! 📚 Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin: https://a.co/d/7nEMiol Please join my mailing list 👉 briankeating.com/list for your chance to win a real meteorite 💥! Join me and ⁦Lawrence Krauss for an Onstage Dialogue ⁦at the San Diego Air & Space Museum Tuesday, Oct 17, 2023 at 7:00 PM: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-onstage-dialogue-brian-keating-lawrence-m-krauss-tickets-699430514497 Support The INTO THE IMPOSSIBLE Podcast by supporting our sponsors: Post your free listing at LinkedIn Jobs https://www.linkedin.com/impossible Thanks HelloFresh! Go to https://www.hellofresh.com/impossible and use code 50impossible for 50% off plus free shipping! As an Into The Impossible listener, you can get 15% off a MASTERCLASS annual membership masterclass.com/impossible Subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show for amazing content from Apple’s best podcast of 2018! https://www.jordanharbinger.com/podcasts  Please leave a rating and review: On Apple devices, click here, https://apple.co/39UaHlB On Spotify it’s here: https://spoti.fi/3vpfXok On Audible it’s here https://tinyurl.com/wtpvej9v  Find other ways to rate here: https://briankeating.com/podcast Support the podcast on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating  Become a Member on YouTube- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmXH_moPhfkqCk6S3b9RWuw/join ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating 🔔 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1 📝 Join my mailing list: https://briankeating.com/mailing_list ✍️ Check out my blog: https://briankeating.com/blog.php 🎙️ Follow my podcast: https://briankeating.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is our planet reaching the point of no return? With global temperatures rising and natural disasters intensifying, this question is becoming ever more relevant. But is this question also being politicized? Dr. Stephen Coonan is a theoretical physics professor and former Undersecretary for Science. In recent years, he's been criticized for his stance on climate change and efforts to separate the politics from the science. Join us to hear his take on what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why that matters.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Welcome everybody to another exciting edition of the Into the Impossible podcast. It is I, your formerly fearful host, Dr. Brian Keating, joined with a very, very special guest today all the way from New York City. It is Stephen Coonan, a renowned physicist, and more recently involved in government policy and also urban studies of a kind. and we're going to get into all that. Welcome to La Jolla. Great to be here, Brian, and chatting with you. We have so many things to talk about today.

We're going to talk about your wonderful book, which is provocative, which is controversial, which is technical and chock full of information. We've had on many, many climate scientists and those who are interested in climate change just from a human perspective. We recently had on Kim Stanley Robinson, who's written many books about this, who's an alum of UCSD, as it turns out, and we had on Tim Palmer last year, who shared the Nobel Prize, I believe, back in, way back in the mid-2000s along with Al Gore. And I think maybe we'll start with the book, as we often do, because when you see a book,

you're never supposed to judge it by its cover. But my audience knows, I love to judge books by the covers, because what else do you have to go on? You know, when you don't know the author, I know you very well. Your reputation is Titanic. explain for my audience, please, the choice of title, the subtitle, and most delightfully, the heart on the cover as well. So let me start with the title. You know, in retrospect, I've come to understand it's really a triple entendre.

It refers primarily to the state of the science, that there's an awful lot we don't know about climate science. It refers to how I felt and how many other people feel when they're exposed to what the UN, for example, or the research literature says about what we know and what we don't know. And then finally, it refers, I think, to the uncertainty about what we're going to do about all of this, the growing human influences on the climate. So that's the title, if you like. A major motivation for writing the book was to expose non-eastern. experts to what the IPCC, the UN Climate Panel, and the research literature really say about what we know and what we don't know, which is very different than what you get from the media or the

politicians or other activists who were talking about climate. As far as the cover art goes, I know very little about that. I was given a set of possibilities. Pick one. I consulted with a lot of people, and this is the one we came up with. I very much enjoyed this book. I listened to an audio. We had the physical hard copy, and discussing it in detail, I think, is necessary for an audience like mine. It is an erudite audience, the most intelligent audience in the known universe, as I

like to say. And I want to take it back, as I often do to my hero, Galileo said the following. Our job, as scientist, he said, is to measure what's measurable and to make measurable what is not yet so. And your late great colleague at Caltech, my former advisor and mentor, Andrew Lang, he quoted that on the occasion of the induction of him and his team into the Lincean Society, which is what Galileo would put out all of his books after. What do you make of the ability of climate scientists to both utilize the methods of science,

of hard science, of data acquisition and collection, much of which is, a lot of which is done here at scripts? but also to maybe make inroads into politics, as Galileo did, unintentionally so. What do you make of the highly politicized nature of this? Because I don't have this in cosmology. Nobody wakes up and says, I hate that constellation over there. That's a Republican constellation. I will not look at it.

Why has it become so politicized? It is atmospheric chemistry, which is derived physics. Tell me, Steve. There is a real science at the heart of all of this. It's actually a wonderful science that mixes up physics and biology and geology and chemistry and so on. And as I have learned it over the last 20 years, I've become a fan of it.

I think it's great. We can go into some of the challenges and so on. But I think what has caused it to come a cropper, if you like, or become so politicized is that the implications of it, if some people are correct, mean that we need a radical restructuring of the, the way society works globally in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and find other ways of using energy. Many scientists in the business, though not by no means all, have come to

mix up their role as informers and advisors with that of persuading and trying to dictate policy. And I think scientists cross the line when they do that. Yeah, I call them political scientists. All right. Very good. Yes. Now, one of the things that I very much enjoy about this book, and I emphasize quite frequently with controversial guests that come on with those that don't believe sort of, quote unquote, on the standard narrative or the accepted narrative that is settled science, as obviously the book connotes this, you know, dissension from that opinion. But the notion that we should listen to experts and that there is uniformity of experts. And even if there is a preponderance of experts. I mean, the statement by

by this gentleman, Albert Einstein, that you know, when a hundred scientists came out against the theory of relativity, he said if they were really right, just need one. But of course we have people like your former colleague at Caltech, Richard Feynman, who would say things like, you know, science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

So what do you make of this? What is a layperson to do? Or maybe an educated layperson, technically minded layperson. We are dealing with a heat wave. They tell us of, you know, unrivaled proportions. And yet, that wasn't predicted last year. In other words, we're living through, you know, supposedly the warmest year on record, maximum records in Palermo, Sicily just yesterday, 25 days of a heat over 110 degrees in neighboring Phoenix. What is an educated person to do when confronted by seemingly disparate

facts and evidence, local and predictive? How do we assess all of this? So I teach climate science at the graduate level at NYU, and I'll start teaching again in a month or two. And what I tell the students is, first of all, it's a mix actually of engineers and business people. I tell them, don't read the summaries, don't read the press, read either the IPCC summaries or go look at the data yourself. And then judge from that.

And eyes get opened up. When they read, for example, there are no long-term trends in hurricanes, as you can find in the IPCC report. a lot of confusion is about weather versus climate. The official definition of climate is that it's a 30-year average of weather properties, averages, extremes, variances, and so on. And so anything that happens in one year or in a given year is not climate. So, for example, California has been in drought for the last 20 years or so.

that's climate. But then you get last year deluge of biblical proportions. That's weather, unless it continues for so many months, so many years. So, you know, the tricky thing about all of this is that the weather has natural cycles in it. The El Nino is probably the most familiar cycle, but then there are longer term cycles, periods of 60, 70 years, which, which are probably called climate cycles, such as the Pacific Decado isolation, the Atlantic multi-decato isolation and so on. And you can get fooled. I like to show, as you can find in the book, the record of the height of the Nile over almost

a thousand years, which the Egyptians were able to compile. And what you see is that there's tremendous variation from year to year, but there are multi-decade trends. And so in the beginning of the record starting at about 630 AD, you see it go down for about 100 years. And no doubt there's some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying new normal, new normal as it got drier and drier. And if they just waited 100 years, it comes back up again. So this is one of the challenges in the science to distinguish the natural variability from the response to human influences. My particular interest is it would be on astrophysical constraint. and we'll get to those in a minute.

But just to point out, I often go down to visit my friends that have a much nicer view on the coast of La Jolla Cove that are based at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which is co-co-recipients of that same 2006 Nobel Prize with Vice President Gore at the time. And there's a picture.

And it shows the very first building, which comprise the very first academic institution in La Jolla, California. And that is the Scripps building, the director's building, or their office building. And in the background, you can see La Jolla Cove. And you see our famous sea caves and whatnot.

And you see Scripps Beach, which is a protective thing. And the sea level, and those are taken in 1905. The sea level hasn't changed at all. I mean, actually completely identically flat, no variation. And this is like you can see the evidence right outside your window if you're down there. So to what extent should we pay attention when we hear things like, you know, Florida, you know, coastlines are going to be underwater and Manhattan's going to be you're going to be, you know, kayaking to work next year in the village. What, you know,

to what extent should we be mindful of truly planetary scale phenomena of which, you know, sea level is a certainly very, very important metric. To what level can those be tied to physical observables that may be predictable? Yeah. So the prediction is quite a separate matter. You start first by asking what has been changes at the global level or regional level over the last 120 years or so, which is about as long as we've got good records, maybe 140 years or so. If you go back beyond that, you've get into historical records,

and then even further back, you've got paleoproxies, tree rings, lake vase, things of that sort. So we all have a relatively short record. And we do see changes on the multi-decato scale in that relatively short record. I described for you the Egyptian height of the Nile, But global temperature has certainly gone up.

We've gone up about 1.3 degrees since 1900. And that rise is not monotonic. It was rising pretty rapidly from 1910 to 1940, was flat or slightly declining from 1940 to 1970, and then has been going up again since about 1980. So that alone will tell a scientist, or even a non-scientist that it's a lot more complicated than just CO2 is warming the planet. Because the CO2 was increasing steadily during that time, but the temperature is going up.

Right. I mean, oftentimes I see things like, oh, it's the highest temperature ever, a set of temperature record last set in 1947. Well, well, then why was it ranging? Or not 1847. And that kind of brings up the notion of what we call, you know, Malmquist bias or a form of sample variance bias that we're attentive to things that we can measure. As Galileo said, you should make measurable which you can't measure, and we don't have built-in CO2 detectors in our

heads. So by making it measurable, what extent is correlation conflated with causation? So the IPCC, when you read the reports as opposed to the summaries, very carefully distinguishes between the detection of a change, which is relatively straightforward if you've got the data. versus the attribution of a change to human influences, let's say, rising greenhouse gases. That attribution is really tough for two reasons, at least. Maybe I'll think of a third, but I've got two at least. One is it's a very noisy system, as we've said. The second is that there are these natural long-term oscillations as opposed to the forced response. And then the third is that human influences are physically small. The planet absorbs and re-radiates as heat about 240 watts per square

meter of sunlight that comes back out as long wave infrared radiation. The human influences on that net of CO2 and aerosols and methane and nitrous oxide and so on is about two and a half watts per square meter. So we're talking about a 1% change in the radiative balance of the planet. You might say, well, that's not a big deal. On the other hand, if you do astrophysical style estimates, 1% of 300 Kelvin is 3 degrees. And so the numbers are about, right, we worry about 3 degrees. But it's a small number, which means you're in the noise as far as other influences go. And often we see these plots, the famous keeling curve, of course, derived here by Keeling, Professor Keeling. Oh, you did? Oh, wow, fantastic.

So his, well, I want to get into him and his son, who's currently a professor here, because I've heard wonderful talks by him that are persuasive. And I think, you know, it's very interesting to get into these discussions. Let's first take a giant leap backwards. Let's talk about your theoretical physicist by training. What is a model and, you know, how does it differ? You know, we talk about the standard model of particle physics.

We talk about models of cosmology that I study in my graduate. What is a model? And then by what metrics can we really apprise the good, a fit of a model? In other words, we talk about sigma, and we're getting into lots of sigma. What is a sigma? What is a model? A sigma is a measure of uncertainty, either in the data. No measurement is perfect. There's always some range of likelihood for a given measurement. And then the models, there's not just one climate model. There are about 50 of them, and they don't all give the same answer. And so you can have a sigma or uncertainty in the model as well. And so

we're trying to compare to uncertain quantities, how did the climate change over the last 80 years, and how do the models predict or describe that change over the last 80 years? Because, all right, so let's talk about what a model is. In the present context, it's a large computer program that follows the motion of air, water, momentum, energy, radiation through the atmosphere and in the ocean. where you also have some of the in currents, step by step through of order 10 million voxels for 100 years and tries to describe the gross features of the climate system, jet stream, Gulfstream, deserts, Hadley cells, things of that sort. And then it tries to say, if the CO2 goes

up, how are things going to change? So that 1% change in the, the radiative balance. And that's a very difficult problem to do, in part because it's a big computer problem, but more importantly, the size of the boxes you can make in the model is only about 100 kilometers on a side. And there's a lot that happens within a box. Think about thunderheads, for example, which are a few kilometers long. You can't describe those explicitly, and so you're going to have to make an assumption about how many clouds are there, where are they in the voxel, when do they appear, when do they disappear, because that affects the sunlight and the infrared radiation. Different people make different assumptions, and so you get different

answers. Behind you is a vial, there's a large beaker. And that I collected, when I was at the South Pole, right, in Antarctica, the second time. I've been there twice on occasion of the national government sending me there on an all-expenses trip for the Bicef experiment. That was cosmology, tremendous work that's done there, including samples of ice cores that go back hundreds of thousands of years and monitor. The science of climate, you know, CO2 impact goes back to what, Iranians and others back at 1800. When they start to realize the infrared activity. Yeah. And then, hey, this is going to change the climate. They thought it would be a good thing. That's right. Yeah. Arise was from Sweden. Maybe not surprised.

That's right. Yeah. Nobel. Nobel is preferentially biased towards Swedes. So when I look at that vile now, I'm reminded of some recent talking points that I'm seeing online that we have a six sigma deviation to the negative of Antarctic ice shelf thickness as measured by, or extent rather, as measured by these satellites that do such things. And it's just obvious when you see the trend and I'll put a picture up for the viewers and listeners to the podcast on audio can find it on my YouTube channel, Dr. Brian Keating. But if you can speak to that, what level of, you know, kind of concern should we have when you see a number like six sigma it's it's it was good enough for higgs to to win a ball price right um so what what do we make of this as a theoretical physicist you'd be delighted if any

of your predictions yeah the problem is that you know today's six sigma uh happened uh many times in the past so particularly with respect to ice and we can maybe talk more interestingly about the north pole at some point but uh you know things change a lot the planet currently is coming out of, well, we're not sure what it's coming out of, but it's in what's called an interglacial. If you go back 20,000 years, the planet was mostly covered with it, well, not mostly, but there was a lot of ice on the planet, and the great ice sheets extended down to Chicago or even New York. And if you go back even further, 125,000 years ago, those ice sheets had retreated. Basically, they were less than what we have today.

the planet was a degree warmer and sea level was six meters higher than it was. That's called the EMEAN period. And those variations, which are pretty cyclical, are driven by astronomical phenomena, the way in which sunlight falls on the Earth, the Earth's orbit, the tilt of its axis, and so on. So we shouldn't, at one level, be real surprised that we'll lose at ice right now. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. In terms of returning to astronomical topics, my favorite subject besides me, is the net amount of carbon is not is not infinite. There is a certain amount of biological material, which was deposited, you know, millions or perhaps, you know,

even longer hundreds of millions of years ago. And even according to anyone who is firmly believing in the anthropogenic and carbon dioxide, you know, a modulated global warming, they will say, under oath, they will say, yes, there's a fine, there's a limit to how much carbon. We can't produce where there is not an infinite store of carbon in the Earth's crust. And we don't have access to it. To that extent, what are the kind of astronomical or planetary scale phenomena? It's been calculated.

I heard Charles David Keeling as the son of Ralph Keeling, right? And he spoke about this. He first brought to my attention that there is a finite amount. So to what extent do we have to worry about reaching the complete, combustion of that carbon converting to carbon dioxide before say we reach what I call, you know, clean energy escape velocity. In other words, at some point we will have fusion. We'll talk, we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about fusion. We're going to talk about high-tc superconductors because I can't resist the physicist, you know, I love to nerd out and we will,

and it's very pertinent to this climate discussion. But to what extent do, you know, can we make it kind of stretch the glide where we're never going to burn all that carbon. But even if we did, there's some upper limit and how much we're going to burn before we hit escape velocity and just everything is, except for rockets are closed. So this is where the real world of economics and technology, people in the fossil fuel business, which is what carbon is in the ground, oil, gas, and coal, talk about a supply curve, namely how much oil or gas or coal could I get out of the ground at today's price with today's technology. And the answer is we've got known carbon in the ground, known in the sense that you could invest in it. We've got about 30 or 40 years of oil, let's

see. And you might say, oh my God, we're going to run out. But in fact, you know, what's called the resource as opposed to the reserve, the amount of stuff you could imagine getting out with better technology or at a higher price, that's 100 years, at least. Okay. So we're not running out anytime soon, but it may be that the cost of extracting it will go up. And at some point, it becomes more economical to get your energy some other way. So we will not run out. But, you know, the famous quote that the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone. All right. So the carbon in the ground is so much more than what we use right now, that that's not. going to be a major fact. So you brought up, you know, fossil fuel, so companies I'd be remiss to say that

you didn't, you know, participate and you weren't involved with British Petroleum for some years. Right. What do you say to those people out there like your fellow professor at NYU, Professor Scott Galloway, who's in the Stern School? He said, quote, science is uniformly on board with the climate, almost what you might call, you know, extremists. And only the right wing lunatics deny that this is settled. Right. What do you say to Scott? Yeah.

So what I would say to Scott is, if you've read my book, Scott, you'll see that everything I say is right out of the UN reports or the research literature. And so if you think I'm denying something, tell me what I'm denying, because I'm quoting to you the official science. Scott, your problem is you haven't read the reports in any detail. That's right. So getting back to the question of human innovation and when we we're using different types of stones, you know, glass and metal and so forth, silicon stones, right? Petrochemicals.

Petrochemicals, right. So I always say, you know, that when people, and lately there's been a tremendous amount of interest in extraterrestrial life and it's a fascinating topic and we do talk about this quite a bit on this channel. But besides that, I always wonder, you know, for a spacecraft to get here, I claim if we were going to go spacefaring and they were to ask us when we get to you know, planet Blurcon 7, they would ask us how, how'd you get here? What was your technological pathway? And at some point, we'd have to describe what a whale is, right? I mean, there's no way, like solar panels don't come from solar panels. We didn't build a microprocessor using microprocessors. So we had all this primitive technology. So my question is, you know, how much, how likely is it

that another civilization exists that has fossil fuels, or has some form of prebiotic or pre, you know, advanced life forms and that was then used over geologic timescales, maybe involving plate tectonics, et cetera. But how likely are these planetary phenomena ubiquitous throughout the universe is a question I've always had? So the laws of physics, we believe, are invariant,

including the laws of chemistry. That's right. Which are much more rich than the physics laws. But anyway, and you know, there's, only a finite number of ways to get energy out of the universe. You got radiation, photons, you've got the rearrangement of atoms, you've got the rearrangement of protons and neutrons, you've got gravity, and we pretty well have tapped into all of those in one way or the other. So I would be very surprised if we came on a civilization that had yet another way of getting energy out.

Yeah. And because it's a precursor, you can't build a fusion reactor unless at some point you had fossil fuels at least in our timeline. Yeah, I've talked with Professor Adam Frank of University of Rochester about this. And he's claimed that we should look for as a techno signature. We should look for global warming on another planet. We should look for CO2. Wow. Okay. It's really hard to be able to do that. All right. We have a hard enough time measuring the temperature of our own planet. Well, maybe not global warming, but carbon dioxide. Well, sure, there will be carbon. Of course, we know that there's carbon left over. Molecular oxygen, things like that. Is it true that there are much more powerful sources of atmospheric forcing functions like methane, water vapors as a greenhouse gas? At what level do you think that these people who are so in the climate, you know, kind of leading to a catastrophe caused by human being, settled science, so-called camp? How do you respond to them when they seem to have multiple agendas?

Like one agenda that I'm hearing a lot is what I call or what just seems to be like kind of anti-natalism where they want to have population control. And this is very reminiscent of, you know, the 1970s when this was Erlich and others in East Coast. Yeah, they were complaining about. Faber Rome and old. Yeah, who won all these prizes, of course. And deep population seems almost like a more pressing concern. So some of the concerns that I've heard about this book are completely.

about the book is look you say things there's some fixed fraction of the of the earth's population who are going to die whatever that means you are going to be killed by again this is their terminology i didn't say that no you don't say that but you make a forecast or there are forecasts in the book and people make this how many deaths can be attributed to global warming so can you speak about that let's talk about the deaths which i talk a little bit about in the book let's talk about what has been first rather than what the projections are and there's a actually never I think two articles in The Lancet, which is a reputable medical journal, which looks at globally the deaths attributable to temperature extremes over the last 20 years.

And what they find, and I've referenced the paper in many talks I've given, it's right there, anybody can look at it, is, and I'll make up the numbers approximately, because I don't remember them exactly, about five million deaths from... 2001 to 2018, globally, five million, were attributable to temperature extremes. Of those five million, 90% were attributable to extreme cold and 10% were attributable to extreme warmth. Right. But there's no way to target, you know, let's have some warmth targeted to Minsk, you know, where these deaths are taking place. No, I mean, but, you know, to say that the warming of the the globe is causing more people to die.

Right. Is a true statement. Right. But it's not factually complete. It's not, because it's also causing fewer people to die from cold. And the net actually is that there are more people alive because the globe has been warming. What do you say to people, young people? I don't know if you have children, but I do.

And, you know, I hear a lot about the following that we should, actually the best way to reduce the most effective way is not reducing the number of flights, not. not reducing the amount of meat that you eat, not, you know, driving less and carpooling more, buying electric cars, having fewer kids. And I always get concerned about that because I think there's a not, you know, significant gap between that and saying, well, if more people died, it would be better for the climate or, you know, people, climate suicides. And there are deaths of despair now.

And there's tremendous psychological damage occurring to children because of climate, you know, some call it hysteria. So how do you react to that, depopulmonary? What I'd say to your kids is, again, I don't know them, but what I've taught my kids who are 30-some-odd years old, is that there are only one and a half billion of us in the developed world, the OECD countries. We live a wonderful lifestyle, on average. There are six and a half billion people on the planet whose theme or meme is not enough, not enough energy, not enough food. not enough transportation and so on and it is immoral to deny them the energy that they need in order to live a better life

and so I would say to your kids go spend some time in Nigeria or in the poor parts of South America and then tell me that we should be cutting back globally on energy now okay so in the book you make a very interesting set of logical, you know, syllogisms. One is that, you know, in order for this to truly be catastrophic, you know, it has to be caused by human beings. It has to be, you know, unavoidable, irreversible, and, and so forth. So there are several different premises of the book, which seem, you know, prima facie in arguable. Like if humans aren't contributing to it, then humans can't necessarily solve it unless we, you know, kill every coward. Well, I mean, adaptation is a solution.

I want to get to that. So here's, so one theme that I believe is attributable to in the book is that there's no plausible way to reduce the CO2 contributions to the atmosphere. Now, I want to, I want to just before you respond, I want to say if that is your contention, what if I tell you that there have been two recent breakthroughs, one of which I talked about with your colleague, Charles Seif, NYU, and that's nuclear fusion. And then today's news, which I've talked about with my colleague Jorge Hirsch here many times. And that is high-TC superconduant. Let me tell you, God hands you a letter. Says, Steve, guess what? I've got good news and I've got good news.

We've got high-tc, superconductivity, ambient pressure, and we've also got nuclear fusion. And they're about six years away. And better yet, AI is going to control everything. And so put it AI in charge. Do you stand by that we can't vacuum out or, you know, decarbonize the atmosphere? I mean, if I had wings, I could fly, right? Okay.

The thing is, I think there are two things here. Does the science or the technology exist? Okay, and we can talk about ITC or fusion. But the second is it's got to be better than the alternatives economically and ability to scale. We can produce, you know, electricity right now from fusion. It's just a question of how expensive is it going to be and will it scale? Same is true, fission, by the way. It's a little more expensive.

Yeah. But, you know, if you're willing to pay the cost, you can run the whole country or the whole world on wind and solar. But that would take so much resource away from other things we need that it's a values question for the world. Do you want to do that versus giving more refrigeration to a few billion people? Pivoting off of that. My question was it only directed towards the supply side of the carbon equation. It was also the negative subtraction. In other words, if you had infinite free energy on top, could you suck out?

And how would you do it? Have you thought about it? Let's talk about the carbon cycle for a second. Okay. Every year, there are about 200 gigatons of carbon that flow up and back from the surface of the planet into the atmosphere and then back again. That 200 gigatons is caused by the growth of vegetation. it's caused by absorption or desorption in the ocean and so on.

And it's just about an equilibrium, we believe, or at least it would be, except for the fact that we're taking about nine gigatons a year of carbon and adding it to this annual cycle. So if you could make a small perturbation in that annual cycle by making plants grow better, for example, you could counteract some of the emissions, maybe all of it. So that's one, and people are trying to find fast-growing plants and so on. The other way you're doing it is to capture it thermochemically out of the air, direct air capture, as it's called. There again, it's a question of economics and scale. The current cost right now is a couple hundred dollars a ton of CO2 removed.

And we're talking about gigatons. And so you quickly quickly get up to big numbers. Now, yes, you should work on technology and so on, but it's not there yet. I wonder if you have a take on the, you know, if you can perhaps react from a physics level, the resistance to fission. I view that as a tell because you'll see people like the famous, you know, know it all like Greta Thunberg talking about, no, nuclear can't be part of the solution. And to me and others, that's kind of like, you know, you're drowning in the ocean. If you really think you're drowning, you know, the old joke, you know, you don't wait for the helicopter.

You know, God says, you know, I sent you a helicopter. I sent you a boat. I said, but what do you make of the resistance of fission? I mean, is it all just like three mile island, Chernobyl and Fukushima or is there something deeper at work? So there is. We shut down the reactors you probably saw on your drive down. Yeah. Yeah.

We shut down Indian Point. It's $2 million a day to store the weight. So what do you make of this? So there's a very nice book by Spencer Weirke. who is a historian of science, and I think it's probably about 40 years old, called nuclear fear. And it talks about the deep psychological fear

that many people have of powerful forces that are invisible and you shouldn't be messing with. And he takes it all the way back to the Frankenstein myth, right? Do not, do not reanimate and so on. And I think a lot of people, that's a fear. I think also there's personal fear radiation. I don't understand it. There are issues, I think, soluble of what do we do with the spent fuel, not waste,

spent fuel. But there are people who are starting to understand the realities of energy. Schellenberger, Stewart Brand have come out and said, yeah, we have to do vision. I mean, it's the only one that's, you know, planetary scale. We can actually power incredible cities. 20% of U.S. electricity already. And more in France. More in France.

It's 80% roughly or something. We haven't built a reactor in this country in a long time. We've just got a couple of new ones coming online right now. I think the technical innovation that's needed there is twofold. We need to be making reactors smaller, a typical reactor. sizes about 1,100 megawatts. People are talking about reactors that are 100 megawatt scale.

So that's kind of the scale in a naval vessel. Build them in a factory, standard design, not the big ones, which are each bespoke. And then the economics will be a lot better. But, you know, it really depends how much do you value being carbon-free? If you don't want to be carbon-free, be carbon-free, you probably don't need it. But if you care about carbon emissions, then it's

absolutely essential. Let me take a little detour here. I am very close friends with a person we have in common. Paul Steinhart has also been on the podcast. And Paul has been accused of being a multiverse denier. I reacted to a book that makes such a claim. It talks about and not by a professional physicist. It talks about all the evidence for the multiverse. I'm blanking on the name, although I did review it for physics today about three years ago. But it didn't leave the greatest impression on me, but he talks about multiverse deniers. I found that in my review, I said that.

It evokes kind of a word which should not have its currency devalued, not just because of my personal connection to, you know, people that perished in the Holocaust. But there is a very consistent thread of people that accuse you of being, you know, a climate change denier. What does that mean? And how do you react to that? Yeah. You know, I think it means that I don't buy into the narrative, which you can say in a few words, right? That we've already broken the climate and it's going to get a lot worse unless we do something rapidly and on a large scale. And I think when you read the science, so what, as I mentioned, what's in the book is not my science. Right. It's right out of the official UN science.

So please tell me, what am I denying? I guess what I've heard it criticized in particular was that the data are not, it's not saying it's cherry picked. It will say you took an AR, these assessment reports, right? But then AR6 came along and it's true. show that actually there's not, it went from low confidence to mild confidence. So how do you, how do you react to that? It's always going to change. Okay. So it's always going to change. The book was written before AR5 came out. So I quoted AR5. I make in the book, you know, references to some of the research literature that was included in AR6. And I'm pleased to say

they say more or less the same things I said. There's probably, you know, in the works and update, which would, but there are essentially no things in there that I would change. Yes, some of the specific wording is different in AL6, but the fact that there's no long-term trend in hurricanes that Greenland is melting today no more rapidly than it was 80 or 90 years ago, that sea level rise remains on a long-term basis at three millimeters a year. I mean, those are things that We're in AL5, and they're there in AL6. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination

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Must be 21 to 8th. Center. So one of your former students apparently, Mark Boslow, wrote a review, which I felt was a series of strawmen and women maybe that get torch. So it says, unfortunately, unsettled is a book you can accurately judge by its couple. Well, thank you, Mr. Bosler, Dr. Boslow, baby, because, you know, that's my signature stock and trade as we open the opposite. He may, you make use. He accuses you of an all strawman concocted by opponents to the class. in the 1990s, creating an illusion of arrogant scientists, bias media, and lying politicians. The phrase, science, settle is repeated as target phrase. It seems like he only read the title. Bogus Science has settled rhetoric. So he's really just taking into account the title and essentially this notion that these things are, you know, constantly in doubt and never in doubt and always an error, as Landau used to say about Cosmo. Searches do come up with a.

But there are many examples of physical problems that are difficult to model. So a lot of the criticism I heard from Lawrence Krause, who's been a guest on climate change, Tim Palmer, we're going to get to him in just a bit. Some of the criticism I get is Stephen thinks he's better at modeling than we are. He thinks that we are not as good as the modeling that is necessary and sufficient. How do you react to those criticisms? Well, the modeling is what it is, all right? And again, I quote what's in the book.

Let me say a word about Mr. Boscoe first or Dr. Boswell. He was in one of my classes, if I remember, right? Yeah, I don't think he was ever actually a student in the sense that a graduate student. No, not a graduate student, right? But he tosses that in. Yeah, of course. And the review he wrote, unfortunately, it was really light on science. I mean, I'm happy to respond to specific criticisms.

Kuhn't says X, but in fact it's Y. And you will find on my medium page some really detailed responses to some of the mainstream climate scientists who criticized me, and I think I've responded effectively. Do I know more about modeling than those guys? No, absolutely not. They know more, but I do know modeling, all right? And I do know in other spheres what a good model is and what isn't, and also what these certainties and uncertainties are. And again, I just repeat what's in the book. Last and most kind of ludicrous claim in this article by Mr. Dr. Boswell, third is climate scientists, not deny, that have been compared to Nazis and perpetrators of genocide.

In fact, it was Crichton, Michael Crichton himself, and the appendix to his book, State of Fear, who directly equate, I don't know, climate scientist eugenicist. But, I mean, but wait, it is true. There is climate hysteria that is leading people to not have children, to not get married, and to consider having, you know, basically becoming, you know, sterilizing themselves

so that they don't have children. So, I mean, maybe it's not eugenics in the Nazi sense, God forbid. But at a certain level, he's saying that you are in the camp that is accusing the good guys. I'm not accusing anybody of anything at the science level. I am accusing some of the prominent scientists, the journalists, the politicians, and some of the scientific institutions of misrepresenting what's in the official reports or the research literature. And I give in the book, and I've given subsequently many examples of that, which are really tough to deny.

So the scientific American also, which is, you know, no longer a real state of affairs that it used to be when I was a kid. I loved it. I had the amateur scientist. I used to build the experiments. Martin Gardner, the Mathematician. Yeah, I loved it. That's really fallen out of favor.

But their critique is that, you know, that two such statements by Kunin follow the the simple preamble for the literature and government reports summarizes that heat waves in the US are now no more common than they were in 1900. That's one thing they're taking issue with. And the warmest temperatures of the US have not risen the past 50 years. I mean, what, I mean, it's, these are just data points, right? So it should be, you can find it on the government websites. It's not your personal data, right? You know, it's not my personal data. It's just the EPA. I can give you the URL. You can see the graph yourself. I have to say, Steve. I mean, the low level of intellectual kind of engagement of both of these things. The first one by Boslos is,

is predicated on the cover. And the name. of the book. And this one is predicated on the first two pages of the book. It's clear. Look, I try to read every book or listen to every book, but certainly something I'm going to be talking about with the author. But certainly if I'm criticizing a book, say the book about multiverse tonight. You would think that both the Scientific American article and a fact check that was done by climate feedback, I think. They were criticisms not of the book, but of a review of the book. All right. And so the Scientific American folks put words in my mouth that are never in the book at all. And yes, I think the most disappointing part of all of this is that we have colleagues who are nominally accomplished scientists who are behaving in ways that we probably throw our students out if they behaved that way. Let's go back to models.

So the past three years have seen an incredible amount of both trust in scientific institutions and great skepticism, more or less predicated on the veracity of modeling. And I think, you know, in the case of Tim Palmer, who has been a past guest and delightful to talk about, but he has called for an agreement with you that we need better models. And I think he talks about this state. You talked about the size of these voxels, which are the three-dimensional analog of a pixel, which is two-dimensional, and getting those down to a kilometer scale. So his words, that requires a CERN, you know, our Manhattan Project style effort, which is nowhere

in sight and would seem to then require, you know, government scale investment. What do you make of a CERN for climate change? How do you react to his... We'll just spend on a lot of money on climate modeling already. I think it's misspending a lot of it because they spend... cycles on doing silly runs for the IPCC about different emission scenarios. Let's talk about computational requirements first. So naively, you would think that, well, you need 20, 30 layers up in the atmosphere or another 15 down in the ocean, but it's the horizontal size of the

voxels that really determines the computational load. It's currently 100 kilometers. If you shrunk it to one kilometer, that's a factor of 100 linearly, a factor of 10 to the fourth, quadratically, but then you get another factor of 100 because you've got to make the time steps a lot smaller from the current condition. So we're now talking about a factor of a million. All right. It goes as the cube, basically. And you're going to wait a long time before you got a computer, that's a million times more powerful than the exascale machines that are at the forefront today. So I think computing is going to develop for its own reasons, you know, national security reasons in the U.S. and other things. And we don't need the climate problem to push that. I think

you want better observations at the subgrid scale level. I think you want more continuous global observations, different variables. I think you need to engage professional statisticians, which they've not been doing right now, and you need more thinking than computing. Kerry Emanuel, who's another mainstream distinguished climate scientist at MIT, who was happy, by the way, to criticize my book before you read it. Kerry says more thinking and less computing, or at least more thinking, not necessarily more computing. Or pencil on paper.

I agree. Yeah, right. Understanding. All right. I have a very long question, but since he is a past guest and a friend of the podcast, Tim Palmer, who authored a wonderful book. We had him on the podcast last year. I can find that.

I'll put a link somewhere up here. He says the following. It's a lengthy question, but here we go. Go ahead. Climate models are not perfect by a long way, and collectively, they do not tell us how bad climate change will be in unambiguous terms. At one end of the spectrum, they predict climate change outcomes which could well be manageable by society without substantial mitigation. At the other end, they predict outcomes which are catastrophic, indeed existential to much of society, e.g., through

semi-continuous heat waves of a severity that the human body cannot withstand unless we do mitigate. the distribution of the possible climate change is peaks somewhere between these two extremists. And so we end up with probabilistic estimates of climate change. But we are getting used to probabilities and weather prediction. If the chance of rain is 20% this afternoon, will I bring my waterproofs, my umbrella in our afternoon hike? If I do, it will weigh down my backpack, making it somewhat uncomfortable. If I don't and I get the drenched, it'll be extremely uncomfortable. So what to do?

It's a personal decision, not one that a meteorologist can make. Given these estimates that are probabilistic of climate change, what is your opinion on whether it is worth the economic costs of trying to reach net zero by 2050 like the weather forecast? It's not a decision that climate scientists can make on behalf of individual society. So for all of your concern about skillfulness and realism of models, how have you decided? In his view, is the current estimated risk of catastrophic climate change big enough to get to net zero by 2050? I guess the one way to say is there's an expected value, right? You took the probability of the negative outcome, the probability and the impact economically,

human impact, all sorts of different impacts, and then you subtract the negative of those possibilities. So tell me, have you, I guess, how have you decided? Should we, is the risk, is the Pascal's wager of climate change, I guess? And what I would say is Tim is confusing his role as a scientist. with his role as a citizen. I think his role as a scientist and mine is to properly portray the probability distribution

to the decision makers. That's the broad society, industry, politicians, and not just in the U.S. or in the UK, but for the developing world. Okay? And what we have to do is to balance the risks uncertainties and benefits of a changing climate against the growing need of the rest of the world for reliable, affordable, and clean energy. And in weighing that balance, it's a values discussion,

it's risk tolerance, intergenerational equity, and oh, by the way, it's economics. If Tim were to ask that question to a general person in Nigeria, he will get a very different answer because those folks are facing a real existential threat that is certain, immediate, and soluble, whereas the rest of us, it's vague, uncertain, probabilistic, and so on. You know, there's a wonderful paper I like to quote by a guy named Anthony Downs, and he was political scientist, economist, died a year or two ago. He was working at Brookings.

But early in his career, he was working at UCLA. And in the 60s, he was watching the smog get worse and worse in the LA basin. And it was getting worse in large part because more and more people were getting cars. And what he said in this wonderful paper, he wrote, was that the elites environmental deterioration is just the common man trying to improve his lot. And so, Tim, you go ask that question in Nigeria, okay? And let's get 100 different voices from 100 countries together

and decide what we're going to do about this. Nobody has given an answer that provides the energy needs for the developing world and at the same time gets to net zero by 2050. Right. And so we have to think carefully about these things that are multi-coupled. And I guess that may answer the original question that I had is why is this so fraught and perilous politically?

We look up at a constellation. Unless we're looking at a comet or an asteroid coming to destroy the Earth, it doesn't involve existential questions. It may involve deeper meaning, philosophical questions, et cetera. So, okay, great. Well, Steve, we've reached the final segment of the podcast where I love to ask my esteemed guest,

such as yourself, four existential questions, which I call the final four. are the quintessential quatra. I can't say quintessential. And it's four things. So the first thing, and all of them are somewhat related to Sir Arthur C. Clark, who is the namesake of the center that I associate relatively direct here at UC San Diego, Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination.

And the first one has to do with his very, very famous quip, which is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable for magic. And my super producer, Stuart Volkow, who's over there, hi, Stu, always inserts. that in every podcast opening. So you actually hear Sir Arthur's voice saying those iconic words. I want to ask you in sort of a big picture, nothing related to the book anymore. What invention or creation of humanity is most closely evocative of magic? You know, I often, my father died at a relatively young age about 45 years ago. and I often think what he would think if he were alive today to see the tools we have.

Certainly information technologies that we have would have seen magic to him, I think. And my other favorite is the biology. The advances that we've made in understanding and manipulating how living things work, those are, I would assert indistinguishable from magic to people from as recently as 50 years ago. In the spirit of Sir Arthur C. Clark, the next question I like to ask is the following. He said, and I quote, the only way to determine the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible. And that's the name of this podcast. I want to ask you what former event in the form of advice to your.

younger self, maybe 20-year-old Steve. What would you advise him? You have 30 seconds to talk to old Steve or young Steve. Would you advise him to give him sort of the courage to do as you've done bucking, you know, so many scientists around the world and with facts and data to go into the impossible. In other words, advice to your former self. You got the... Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. A few seconds to talk to your...

Oh, boy. You're 20-year-old version. Steve, you know, first of all, don't feel inhibited by self-doubt, by lack of self-confidence. You're no different than everybody else. You won't make mistakes, but you'll learn from those mistakes.

Use your imagination, but also use the tools that you've been given of logic, quantitative, love for understanding how the world works, and go out and just have a swing at it. Okay. The next question is equipped by Sir Arthur. He said, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. And we talked about Feynman's quote that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

What is an expert? Should we aspire to be an expert? These two gentlemen are kind of casting aspersions on this. One I used to think, and I still do, to be honest with you, that you. You should aspire to greatness. You should aspire to mastery and merit and earning. But how do you react to that? What do we make of these, you know, as William Epuckley Jr.'s to say about the,

he'd rather be governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book. So what do you make of experts? Do we need them? Are they necessary? So let's distinguish between experts in the sciences versus experts in other fields. Absolutely. And I think there are two dimensions of expertise. one is a deep knowledge of the subject, the facts, the figures, what has been done before,

and so on. But then there's another dimension which is, I think, a bit pernicious, and that is that you get locked into certain ways of thinking, community ways. You know, plate tectonics is maybe the best example of where the experts were all wrong and the evidence was staring them in the face, but it took a long time until they... came around. So, you know, respect expertise for their knowledge of the facts and figures, but not necessarily of the paradigm that they lay on top of the science. Very good. Okay. The last question inspired by Sir Arthur C. Clark is the following. He said, and I quote, when an elderly, I'm not calling you, but an elderly but distinguished scientist says something is possible, he is

quite likely to be right. However, when he says something is impossible, he is very likely to be wrong. What have you been wrong about? I was wrong about the solar neutrino problem, okay? Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, we haven't. There was this famous factor of one-third deficit, and I think I've actually said at a conference at some point, you know, there's probably some feature of the sauna plasma physics that was wrong. And I was actually sitting on a thesis at Caltech where it was about coherent neutrino propagation, and he came so. And he came so close to what we now know is the answer. I, you know, I poo-pooed it, so that can't be right.

So I was wrong, okay? But, you know, look, I would say a batting average of one-third on, like in baseball, on major questions like that would be doing pretty well. So I've been right about something. They say, you know, a theorist only has to be right once in his life to have a good career. And experimentalist only can be wrong once in his career. Professor Steve Coonan, let me just take one quick question, detour. What is the state of academia today?

What's it like at NYU? NYU is a very, I see it as a very imaginative. I've talked to people at NYU Abu Dhabi. I know there's one in Shanghai or someplace like that. Talk about academia. What is the new model of academia look like? And what can we do to, because you're a renowned teacher as well. Most of education is sclerotically stuck in the way it was in the University of Bologna in

1080 AD. Talk about what innovations we might expect from the perspective of a master teacher. Yeah. So I'd like to distinguish the undergraduates from the graduates. Of course. I think at the undergraduate level, you've got to become an expert in something, at least if you're going to be in the sciences, T-shaped, you know. So you've got to learn your mathematics, you've got to learn biology, geology, whatever it is you're going to specialize in. because that's the pedestal on which you can then reach out as a graduate student to try to tackle some of these broader multidisciplinary problems. I mean, you know, in my own career, I cut my teeth in nuclear physics,

and it took me about 15 years after my PhD to start to get interested in these squirmier scientific problems, never mind the societal problems. So I'd like to teach the kids, the undergraduate level, you know, tend to the basics first. Get some sense that there are these bigger problems, but don't try to tackle something bigger until you've demonstrated mastery of something first. Yeah. But then at the graduate level, you know, tackle those big problems, absolutely. Yeah, I used to say to my students, you know, if I was your art teacher, I'd say paint the masters.

You know, do the derivations that came before. exercises, right? It gives a direct pathway to the... So when I was a kid, when I was thinking about graduate school, I said, they told me, don't go into nuclear physics. It's a dead field. Now we've got Oppenheimer. You guys are rock stars, literally. Have you seen the movie yet? Not yet. Okay, you should see it. Everybody's interested. Yeah, everyone's interested. So as someone who also served in the Obama administration, worked in government, what do you say about people, you know, scientists and, you know, informing people in Congress, perhaps? You see the, the tragedy that, occurred to him and persecution that he underwent. You've been relentlessly attacked, I think,

in the media, by colleagues and so forth. Would you advise people to get into government or to serve the country in such a way? Or would you have reservations? Yeah. So, you know, you cite some high profile cases, but I know many scientists who work either as federal employees or as in the national laboratories. And they are as dedicated and as honest as people in academia, you or I would be. We'd recognize them as credible scientists. The problem is when that work starts to touch policy issues. And whether it's epidemiology or it's climate and energy environment, other environmental issues,

That's where sometimes people will spin the story and not give a straight answer. You know, I'm far enough along in my career. I've got enough of a reputation. I frankly don't care. My main goal is to just try to inform people in a transparent, unbiased way. And I guess lastly, you know, now with the advent of artificial intelligence, large language models and so forth, I found it very exciting actually and I'm playing around with it. not only, you know, as, you know, human interest level of just, you know,

constructing my own what I call bribebot, but also constructing physics tools. Because I do believe that we are stuck in a model that's a thousand years old, and how many thousand-year-old things have not been disrupted. And I do believe we could have things where we have distance learning. We have artificial Galileo. I've worked on because I have access to the written text of the dialogue, which I've recorded the first ever audiobook ever by Galileo. with Frank Wilczek and colleagues at Scarlo Rovelli and others.

But when I think about the potential for that, so here at UCSD, we had famous Herb York, I'm sure you knew who plays like maybe a millisecond role in Oppenheimer. We had Harold Uri, who is a big component of the Manhattan product. We had all these people that were involved in government and also in organizations. But the question I have is, you know, how do we translate whether or not this is an existential threat an existential benefit, you know, a boost to society or not. Where are you falling in this camp of can artificial intelligence lead to, say, new laws of physics, perhaps? Well, we've seen it lead to new strategies in Go, for example, right? You take an AI that's learned how to play Go,

and it surprises the Masters, right? They did it that way. My God, I never thought about that, right? So I think there are specialized AIs we can be building. Physics is a great example, or even something more narrow in general relativity, for example, that would be tremendous tools for education, for research. I mean, even now, of course, I'm sure you and others find, as I do, Google just a wonderful way of ferreting out information that you need or interested in. So I think the AI, chat GPT, for example, will be when properly tuned, wonderful. I give you a my experience with Chat GPT, all right? And one of the things I'm interested in is Greenland's ice loss, right?

And so I asked it, this was a couple months ago, is Greenland losing ice? And I get kind of the standard media story. And then I said, well, what about this paper that shows, in fact, it's not losing ice so rapidly. And it took me about four iterations until I got to something that was consistent. Yes, you have to supervise. Yeah, you've got to keep correcting it. But I think it's got a lot of potential. So I'm not worried about an existential threat.

I think it will be a great boom. Well, Steve Coonan, Professor, I think of you as an educator, as a curious soul, as somebody who's very much interested in solving the biggest problems, whether it's at the realm of the smallest possible entities, nuclei and quantum fields, all the way up to entire planetary scale phenomena. I want to thank you for spending so much of your valuable time here with our humble podcast, and I know our audience is forever grateful. It was a great conversation.

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