StarTalk Radio - StarTalk Live! Storms of Our Century (Part 2)

Episode Date: July 19, 2013

The climate heats up in the Bell House when Neil deGrasse Tyson and the StarTalk Live crew, including Questlove and Dr. Adam Sobel, look at the causes, politics and science of climate change. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. We are live at the Bell House, Brooklyn, New York, StarTalk Radio. I've got with me Adam Sobel, climate scientist from Columbia University. Questlove, Eugene. Yes, and Michael Showalter, everybody. Yes. We're talking about storms, hurricanes.

We're trying to get to the bottom of this. And I'm wondering, is it psychological? No. Thank you for that answer. Storms are real. Go on. Can I ask a question? Yes, Quest.

Go for it. Okay, so I'm really fascinated by all the facts. You're telling me and I have absolutely no reason to believe that you're feeding us false information. Now, having been very active on the campaign trail, why are, quote, they so hellbent on proving otherwise? How does that personally feel? You know what he's talking about. You know what he's talking about. You know. No, no, no.

When you hear of political revisionists denying that these things don't exist. How does that make you feel? You're asking about a climate change issue. Well, yeah. Let's define climate first. Because people get climate and weather confused. Right. And everybody wants to take one incident and say, that that's climate change And just give us the background on that

And then we can explore the politics of this So climate, what is it? So climate is the average Over a long time of what the weather is So a week, a month, a year What's a long time to you? As much data as you've got We usually define it as the average

Over some long period of time 30 years, 50 years The trends over long periods Well, first the climate is the average And then a trend would be a slow change in the average So if one period of 30 years is different than the 30 years before that Then we might say there's a trend in the climate There's a change in the climate

Is there a trend in the climate? Yes Okay, that's my understanding as well. And it's also, I think, our life experience looking at weather patterns, which if you average would make climate today versus when many of us grew up. So what's the challenge then? Why are people still out there saying no? Isn't the debate as to whether or not the reason for this change is man-made or not? So there's a couple different questions.

So we started off talking about hurricanes. There's two different questions you can ask, because hurricanes are a very special, very unique part of the weather, right? They're not just any old weather. They're unusual. They're like the closest thing we have to a black hole in astronomy.

There are singularities, right? And so you can ask, is the climate changing? Okay, if that's your best singularity, I got it beat. I just want to tell you. I got a singularity that will eat the entire Earth. You know. But that's fine. We all do what we can.

You'll do what you can. So you can ask, is the climate changing? The answer is yes. It's getting warmer. That does a lot of different things to the atmosphere and the ocean and all the systems on the earth that depend on them. Can you quantify the rate of getting warmer? You know, on the order of a degree Celsius in the last century.

So we'll all be dead in about 80 years? It's warming at an exponentially faster rate well exponentially is a little hard to measure since the industrial revolution haven't things increased yes the industrial revolution is the cause of it since the industrial revolution we started burning a lot of carbon from the ground and that goes into the atmosphere and makes carbon dioxide and that's the main factor that's warming the climate. I must clarify, we're burning More complex chemicals with carbon In it, and then the carbon

Separates from the rest of its molecule Leaving carbon behind. We're burning oil and gas Which is complex carbohydrates And then those. Good, because if you actually try to burn carbon You can't. Those you try really hard Right, pure carbon The diamonds don't burn Diamond has the highest melting point of

any... Carbon has the highest melting point of any element. So you can't melt a diamond. That's correct. Essentially, you can't. What if you threw it into the sun with something? It would vaporize. It wouldn't melt just before vaporizing? No, some things go straight to gas. Like dry ice, it doesn't melt. It just goes

straight to gas. Alright, you win this round, scientist. Okay, so finish. Finish before we get to the next question. So you can ask if it's warming because of humans burning chemicals that make carbon, put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The answer is yes. Then you can ask, is that doing something to hurricanes? And the answer is, we think it will eventually, but it's too hard to see that clearly now because the hurricanes are so rare that you have to count a lot of them before you can compute an average meaningfully.

And so then if you want to see a change in the average, you have to wait even longer because you have to have the average now and the average later. They're so rare. They're such bursty things that from just the observations alone alone It's hard to prove that the hurricanes are changing Of course we all in New York feel like we are I just want to put some emphasis on what you just said So this is true for any scientific study Yeah Right

If you can get a set of data You can get averages That's fine But now you want to see what the change in the averages are You need more data than what you just got to get the same confidence in what's going on. So it doesn't mean they're not changing. It means we just can't prove it that way.

But you're asking, if I'm not mistaken, why the need to refute your evidence? Why people want to refute it, I don't know. I don't have any particular scientific expertise. I have an oil company and I can answer that. Because it's a psychological... Well, right, I mean, I think... think i want 10 billion and not nine billion dollars it's a little easy to but there's lots of people who don't own oil companies that feel strongly

that but they might one day in the hope of owning an oil company oh you can let me get deeper into it what is your frustration level when they have their own scientists trying to debunk your My frustration level is very high. Yeah, it shows. Yeah. They're the... Yeah. You're totally freaking out.

Wait, that was Eugene joking. Eugene saying. In the fact that... It shows. No, and the fact that they have, quote, their own scientists. Isn't there a fraternity, sorority of scientists? Sort of like, you know, with lawyers and doctors. Yeah, we have a few of those.

Don't you have your own oath of which you're not supposed to lie about these things? No, actually, we don't have an oath, but we all know we're not supposed to do it. Wait, Quest, there is an oath. It's just not taken explicitly, and you know what it is? Thou shalt not lie, because if you do, your colleagues will discover it in you, and you'll be exercised. Ostracized. Extricated. Ostracized.

Ostracized. You'll be ostracized. But I will say that climate science is an interdisciplinary science where you have to know a lot about a lot of different things. And some of the people who deny climate change have a specialty that doesn't look at the other factors which is why they are wrong right is that part of it or thank you eugene for that expertise it's a pretty good joke no uh is that true yeah i mean the science is pretty much settled among those who study this seriously pretty much everybody agrees that the earth is getting warmer because of human activity there's a few people who say that it's not.

The situation is a lot like the cigarette companies trying to tell you that smoking didn't cause cancer. And I think it's for much the same reasons. Or that guns don't kill people. Yeah. That they simply make them slightly heavier. Right, that's campaign trail, was it a big platform point that was made? There are people that were looking to the president for various things just views on the economy education and i guess you know and i just happen to be a lot around a

lot of people that were kind of staring at their watches impatiently like okay when's he going to get to the environment like really stick his foot to the man which i personally thought that he was going to wait until after he's secure in this term, and then he's really going to stick his foot. I mean, just from having spoken to staff and what, you know, sources, you know, I'm in contact with some of them. So

I got friends in little places. Yeah, so I I'm more, I'm not, you know, I'm not surprised about politicians that lie to get what they want and you know their hands in other pockets but the scientists that they have to debunk these theories like how come it's a pretty small number of people like where's the bully on your side of the fence like the al gore yeah i mean it's frustrating for us i mean the

scientists in this field and there's a lot of us We feel that we've been saying the same thing for a long time It hasn't really changed a lot, it's just become more and more certain But wouldn't you think Some people don't want to hear it, most of them are in the United States The rest of the world is better Wouldn't you think that the people who are in denial When confronted with the damage

Of category 3, 4, and 5 hurricanes Might just think differently about it? Yeah, it's interesting I mean, we certainly could have had a Hurricane Sandy 200 years ago. You can't say it's a result of climate change in the sense that it couldn't have happened without it. So for those who are still in denial, even among our colleagues, perhaps, yes, they're the minority of the bunch, but they're out there and they get peddled forth by those

who have politically different views. What will it take? Well, I think these catastrophic events help. I mean, even if you can't. The sentence of the night, people. But wait, do they really? Because I thought, well, it takes a tragedy for us to learn our lesson. But we tend to forget after.

Yeah. You just rebuild and act like it didn't happen. We haven't forgotten this one yet. Like we were willing to forget about Colorado and then Sandy Hook happened. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, we kind of have to deal with this situation. I mean, it fades in our memory. I'm certain that it will take four or five more

Hurricane Sandys to hit New York before, you know. What you were just going to say? Well, I had another random question, which is, let's say this warming continues, right? Could it get cold again? Because there was like the ice age, right? Right. Could it get hot and then all of a sudden something else happens and then it starts getting really cold?

Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's anything we have to worry about anytime soon. But is it possible? Could you quantify the word soon in your sentence? If it starts getting hotter, is that irreversible? That's my question. If it starts getting hotter, is that irreversible? That's my question. It's pretty much irreversible for the foreseeable future of our lifetime and our grandchildren's grandchildren.

The ice ages in history come about because of the slow changes of the Earth's orbit due to the other planets pushing on it gravitationally. Neil, you know anything about this? It's almost a gimmick. But that takes tens of thousands of years. C plus on that one. Go on. You have a singularity

that could eat the entire Earth. That's right. But those take tens of thousands of years. No, no, it's worth saying a little something about. So Earth's orbit around the sun is not a perfect circle. What? Good band, though. Perfect circle.

It's oval, okay? Which means sometimes we're closer to the sun and sometimes we're farther. So that's fact one. And by the way, that happens it happens that in January we are closer to the sun than we are in July. And by several feet. Yeah, by about

three million miles closer. Yeah, so I'm right. I just use a different measure. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we're 3 million miles closer. Yeah, so I'm right. I just use a different measure. Yeah, yeah, that's right. So we're 94 million miles away. We'll get someone to convert to metric for you later. 94 million miles away. It's from 1910.

In our summer and 91 million miles away in our winter. So that is one cycle. Another cycle is the tip of our axis, which right now is 23 and a half degrees, that bobs up and down. Okay, so it goes from like 22 to 24 degrees. The more it tips towards the sun, the hotter the two hemispheres will get in their respective summers. So if you cycle these two phenomenon, have you tipped down more towards the sun and closer to the sun, you have a warming trend.

If you tipped away and up, you have a cooling trend. And you cycle this through, you run the math, you run the numbers, because one can happen while the other one is not ready yet for it to combine. But when they combine, you run through these master cycles of climate on Earth, and you get the Ice Age, which enabled the early migrating humans to go from Asia into North America over the Bering Strait.

Because when it's cold and it rains... It snows. Thank you. When it's cold, I caught myself, but apparently not fast enough. So when it snows under these conditions, the moisture comes from the oceans, which are still liquid.

It snows on the land and it stays there. So there's a systematic draining of the oceans, which are still liquid. It snows on the land, and it stays there. So there's a systematic draining of the oceans that occurs during an ice age. And huge glaciers build up on the land masses, and the oceans become lower and lower filled. And you start exposing land masses that were previously completely buried, like the land bridge that is the Bering Strait between Alaska and Northwestern Asia. Right.

Right, okay. So that's just the little interlude there. Please continue. So that's the past ice ages. I mean, there's times when in the past, in the geologic record... Oh, can I add? Wait, so watch what happened.

No, this is... No, I can't stop there. Wait. Yeah, yeah, start 10 billion years ago. No, no, watch, watch, watch, watch. Watch. No, no, this stop there. Wait. Yeah, yeah. Start 10 billion years ago. No, no, watch, watch, watch, watch. Watch. No, no, this is important. It's irrelevant, but important.

So our early human ancestors migrate. They enter North America, and they keep going through Central America and South America, and they're hanging out and making, you know, civilizations. Then we come out of the Ice Age. The glaciers melt back into the oceans the oceans fill up again it breaks the land bridge and strands an entire branch of the human species in North and South America where no one else in the rest of the world knew about them and so when Columbus came across in some ways that was the most significant event in the history of the world knew about them. And so when Columbus came across,

in some ways that was the most significant event in the history of our species because two entire branches of the human species that had been separate and distinct for 10,000 years reconnected. Wow. Wow. No, I'm saying it's irrelevant but important. I would say it's not irrelevant. It's not irrelevant because some of the ice is still there in Greenland and Antarctica. That's left over from the ice age.

That's left over. And if that, as we warm the planet, as that melts, that is what's posing the danger of raising the sea level higher. And the sea level getting higher is what's going to make us at risk for a lot more coastal flooding events, even if the storms don't change. And to think those two people's like the same bands Wow so Adam do you expect more hurricanes as the temperature of the earth rises or fewer hurricanes or more that are more intense or fewer that you model this stuff right yeah so what does it tell you about hurricanes and climate change because i want to know the future so it's it's actually a difficult problem that a lot of people have been working on and there's still a lot of uncertainty but we're

starting to hone in on some general results that we think are right in at least a buffer that answer any more than you just did Think we might have back yeah, we kind of think we might be converging possibly on what yeah I don't know why deniers don't believe you There's a 98 point well you never know really it's You're not the first to say that. We are all flooded. All right, so go. Tell me.

We think that hurricanes will get more intense in a warmer climate on average, and so the worst ones will be worse than what we have today. At the same time, we don't think that there will be more of them on average over the whole Earth. Yay!

We think there's more likely to be fewer rather than more But they'll be more intense on average So the real question is And I don't think we have the answer to this yet Will there be more or fewer of the most intense ones So it's like if you ask How many kids took the test and got an A

And you let fewer kids take the test But they all study more Will more get an A or will fewer It depends which effect is bigger That example didn't help me understand your hurricanes. I actually kind of enjoyed it. Well, you did. I think that's a good example.

If there's fewer hurricanes... But they're all getting A's. Wait a second. Hurricanes are taking tests? What you're saying is that if there are fewer hurricanes, but the hurricanes that remain are more severe, that could in fact be more devastating to us than more hurricanes that are based on that Dante-esque descent into hell that I just... Because as you said, the... Give me 10 Category 2 hurricanes, I don't ever want to see a Category 5. That's right.

A single... With each category, the damage goes up very, very fast. So every category go up. It's not like a linear scale. It's not like, well, category four is just one more than category three. When I read the one where there are no leaves left on any tree, that just freaked me out. Is it possible to predict whether, right now there's a 10-day forecast. Is it even possible to, even with the best technology, predict it beyond 10 days? Are you limited by chaos? The answer is maybe a little beyond 10 days but not much there's a limit beyond which you can't go

and it is because of chaos that's right you want to explain that no you go for it i got your back if you're chaos is chaos an acronym? Chaos. I'm sorry. Is that a Maxwell? That was a get smart. What was chaos? I know, but there's an acronym for cannibalistic humanoid. No. Okay, go. If you have some kind of dynamical system, a dynamical system means something that has rules that govern how it behaves in time. Then with certain types of systems, if they start from two different points that are almost the same, but slightly, slightly different, as time goes on, the path that those two systems are on, the rules are exact. So if they started exactly the same place, they'll do the same thing. There's no doubt about the rules that govern the system. It's

completely predictable in principle. But if you start at two slightly different places, those two trajectories will diverge. So the two paths will become more and more different until after a while, they're as different as any other two states of the system that could reasonably happen. And you never know the state of the system now perfectly. We don't measure the temperature and the wind and all that everywhere perfectly. So there's always a little uncertainty in what the weather is now. There will never be a 20-day forecast. There will probably never be one that's any good. That means no, I think. I mean, 20 is around the edge.

I mean, we think 10, 15 days. You know, 20 is probably beyond it. But you can predict the climate for longer. The climate is the average. And that can sometimes evolve in a more predictable way. So a perfect example is you know that the winter is going to be colder than the summer. And that's because it's being forced by the orbit of the Earth so that the sun is shining at a different angle and all that. But it's a predictable climate change.

But you can't predict the weather on any day in the next season. You can just predict the average. I checked the weather report avidly. And this storm was not being talked about a week ago. No, it kind of came out of nowhere. Which one, The one tomorrow? The one we're going to get tomorrow. I am addicted to the 10-day

forecast. This was not in the forecast. No, no. No, this came out of nowhere in the last couple days. That's right. And that can happen. That's chaos. Yeah. Just to add emphasis to your chaos

discussion. So what you're saying is that because models are perfect in what they can calculate two models that are exactly the same will evolve the same forever but an arbitrarily small difference in the initial conditions given the forces of chaos can have them rapidly diverge into a completely different thing that it could have gone ahead. You started the model from somewhere else. That's exactly right.

And so, and weather is such a complex system and you want to project it forward with all these dynamical forces. Back to the future. Operating. I said sliding doors. You said sliding doors and I went a little bit less obscure.

I said sliding doors. You said sliding doors, and I went a little bit less obscure. Okay, so when did we start first even understanding that we were limited by chaos? 60s. A guy's name was Ed Lorenz. He died a few years ago. He was at MIT. I remember him. I remember him.

He had a very simple model of the weather. It wasn't accurate enough for forecasting, but he had stripped it down to just a couple of equations that he could solve on what now would be considered a very primitive computer. And he did the same experiment twice to make sure he'd done it right, and he would get completely different answers. And then he would check back again what his initial conditions were, and they looked the same. And he'd check the program and it looked right, and he'd keep getting a different answer.

And it was only after he checked a lot of times that he realized that his initial conditions which was just a couple of numbers because he wasn't trying to do the whole weather it was a much simpler mathematical problem his initial conditions were different far down many decimal places down so instead of 1.0000001 it was 1.00002 or something like that it was a difference so small he would have never noticed it but after a while that became he stumbled on chaos he did but he was smart enough to understand it and this is the famous butterfly effect yeah it says a butterfly today can cause huge difference. He stumbled on chaos. He did, but he was smart enough to understand it. And this is the famous butterfly effect. Yeah. It says a butterfly today can cause a big difference in the weather. This is why I warn people about time

travel. It really is very dangerous. And then there's the Fibonacci code, but we won't even go there. There you go. Because I don't know what it is. What are the top reasons to not go there? We'll say Fibonacci for a math show. Tom Hanks was in the movie, that's all I know.

That's all. Yeah. So, do your climate change models also think about storm surges, along with wind and rain and other kinds of precipitation? precipitation and are you including the fact that as water gets warmer as it heats up it actually expands so that the ocean level will change simply because the temperature changed and while meanwhile back at the ranch we're melting greenland's ice caps we're melting antarctic ice caps and so the water is returning to the ocean from whence it came. Yeah. So most of the great cities of the world are on the water's edge because they were merchant-based.

They were founded on shipping and trade. So where's all this going? You're asking about the models or what's going to actually happen to the planet? Apparently models don't have to be correct. No, they don't. But we'd like them to be correct. Yeah. What are your best models telling you? The best models are telling us that as carbon dioxide increases, the planet's getting warmer.

It's a greenhouse gas. It's a greenhouse gas, so it traps the infrared radiation that the Earth emits and reflects it back down. Like the way a greenhouse lid traps heat, the greenhouse gases do that in a somewhat different way. Hydroponic. They keep the planet warm. Would it help to chop down all of the trees in the world? No. Would that be helpful?

No, it would not help. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Sorry. Wait, just to clarify, so Earth doesn't just radiate infrared on its own. Visible light comes in from the sun, gets through the atmosphere just fine. Carbon dioxide doesn't trap visible light comes in from the sun, gets through the atmosphere just fine. Carbon dioxide doesn't trap visible light. If it did, you wouldn't be able to see the sun in the daytime. So the atmosphere is transparent to visible light. As obvious as that sounds,

it's in fact an important feature of our atmosphere and sun. So visible light comes in, gets absorbed by the earth. The earth re-radiates that energy back, not in the form of visible light, but in the form of infrared. And that's how you can trap sunlight because we just transformed what that sunlight was from visible light to infrared. Pick it up there. Yeah, go. So as we add carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the planet, we're warming the climate. Something like, as you double carbon dioxide, so it was 280 parts per million pre-industrial, and now we're up to 380-something.

I don't remember. Maybe it's 390. So double would be 560, I guess. So we'll reach that sometime late in the century, and the climate models predict something like 2 to 6 degrees of warming Celsius. So it's about double that, Fahrenheit For the global average of the planet And we expect a lot of things to happen as a result of that It's going to be very hot, first of all I think we talk a lot about hurricanes and all that kind of exciting stuff

But the temperature is going to be a big problem In places like New York City Where 100 years from now, the coolest summer is going to be a big problem In places like New York City Where 100 years from now The coolest summer is going to be hotter than The hottest summer that anybody now has experienced So it's a little bit disturbing Yeah, don't live for 300 years Because you're going to be screwed, buddy

That's right Not to mention Miami Wait, wait, wait I think you implied something that you didn't say You said in 100 years, the temperature will go up by 2 to 6 degrees. I can handle 2 to 6 degrees. Celsius.

Celsius, okay. Double that in Fahrenheit. Okay, so it's, you know, okay. What are we on? Five nines plus 32. It's about double. Just double it. I'm serious, though.

What are we? We're Fahrenheit. We are Fahrenheit creatures. So make it 4 to 10, okay years from now it's going to be on average 12 degrees hotter That's the upper end of the range Well that's for doubling CO2 100 years from now we might more than double CO2 Why are you so angry with me?

I'm just this guy Who Wait wait wait So There's something else that went unmentioned there and correct me if i'm wrong okay everything rises but not only that isn't it true that under global warming scenarios the extremes increase so on a heat wave it gets more hotter than a hot heat wave, it gets more hotter than a hot heat wave would have been a century

before. Absolutely. I mean, the temperature oscillates up and down in some chaotic fashion all the time, but if you start, if the whole average is higher, those oscillations are going to be on top of a higher average. So the high points are going to be higher, and the low points are going to be higher than the low points used to be, too. So we won't have as cold

winters. We'll have hotter summers So when should we Move to Mars? Mars is very warm Mars climate Has got a long way To go to get to where Mars is several hundred

Degrees below zero I think you should Just first start With Quebec And then when That's too hot Then you should be like Let's get a spaceship

But if people Get their act together Can they slow the trend? We can slow it But we can't stop it. We're committed to quite a bit of warming because the carbon that's already in the system that we've already put up there, the warming from that is going to take a while to play out. Hundreds of years. There's a lag time, partly because the oceans take a long time to heat up. The oceans have just only the top layer.

The oceans have begun to warm, and the oceans have got a lot of water in it. begun to warm and the oceans got a lot of water and it's very heavy takes a long time heated up so the we're committed to quite a bit more warming and there's almost nothing we can do to to stop that but we can stop it from speeding up more can we i mean in your so we can't solve this with just like i don't know like say like four nuclear bombs it would not slow anything down if it was like say in antarctica and green, which is really icy Actually, I mean, this is something People talk about, not nuclear bombs But putting dust up into

The stratosphere, which would Block the sun and cool the planet That's a bad idea for a lot of reasons Name two I mean, I can imagine some, but what are two reasons Bad to put dust up in the sky? So one reason is I can't believe I'm saying that, but what are two reasons bad to put dust up in the sky? So one reason is... I can't believe I'm saying that, but I really want to know.

One reason is that what that dust would do, you have to put it up very high, first of all, and it stays for maybe a year or so, so you have to keep putting it up there. And once it's gone, the planet will just warm up again to where it would have been anyway. So it's sort of a short-term fix that you have to keep doing. A band-aid, a climate band-aid.

It's a band-aid, right? The other thing is that it wouldn't just stop global stop global warming would have a lot of other negative effects in other words carbon dioxide is not just the opposite of dust in the stratosphere right it would change the rainfall patterns and do other things that are probably bad ideas i think most of us in this in any environmental field think that it's um not a good idea when we're doing big changes to the planet to try to it's usually better to try to stop doing those bad things than to try to do other bad things that would

somehow patch them up. Okay, great. I did a calculation once. If you take the current rate of population growth and extend it into the future the same amount of time as the time elapsed since Columbus. So a little more than 500 years. If we maintain that rate of population growth, there will only be enough room on the landmass of the Earth for everyone to stand up straight. By what time? By when?

500 years. From now? From now. Yeah, so... Sounds like climate change. We've got to get nice, make nice with other planets, From now. From now. Let's move to Mars. Yeah, so... Sounds like climate change ain't so bad. We got to get nice, make nice with other planets. Drain the oceans.

Or drain the oceans. These guys are good. How to make more beachfront property. Right, it's just... You can do that with an ice age, sir, as we have established. So let me just put some closure on this. There's a period of time some years ago, geologists refer to it as the Carboniferous Era. This was a period, why would they call it the

Carboniferous Era? Because in that era, plant life, trees in particular, did not have the organisms surrounding them that would decompose their material substance. When a tree falls in the forest, and it makes sound whether or not you're there. I doubt it. Tell that to your philosopher friend. So a tree falls and then it decomposes. Well, it doesn't decompose by accident. There is a portfolio of fauna that dine upon the material that was once a living tree. And this decomposition of the tree returns the chemical composition of that tree back to the environment.

It's a very natural cycle of life. During the Carboniferous Era in the history of Earth, such organisms did not exist. They had not evolved yet to exploit the fact they had a fat, dead tree in front of them ready to be consumed. So trees would die and they would stay there forever. Another tree would grow up, it would fall and die and stay there. And vegetation kept growing. And vegetation is made of carbon.

That is the principal ingredient of the vegetation. So every tree that grew took carbon out of the atmosphere, it fell, the carbon stayed with the tree this continued and continued and huge layers of Dead vegetation gets submerged in the crust of the earth that vegetation became fossil fuels and so the balance of carbon in our atmosphere is disrupted when we take carbon

from a place where it has been buried for millions of years and introduce it into the stable balance of carbon in our atmosphere today. So the act of doing so changes Earth's carbon dioxide levels from what it is accustomed to managing in the balance of the atmosphere.

So, here's the challenge to us all. We like energy, right? Especially here in America. We have come to demonize the consumption of energy. You see the Hummer and you, you know, at least if you're sort of liberal minded, that's the wrong attitude, in my opinion. Wrong attitude is not to demonize energy, it's to, if you want to demonize something, demonize that which alters your environment. The universe has limitless energy.

I tweeted recently that I'd be embarrassed to tell an alien who just moved through the vacuum of space bathed in limitless starlight that here Earth, we kill one another to extract oil from beneath the sands, because that's where we're getting our energy. So the goal here really ought to be, what are all the ways we can make energy so that one day we'll have a future where there's actually limitless energy? We wouldn't even have to have these conversations, and we wouldn't have to be warming up the atmosphere and have earth do things that it hasn't done in a million years. And so I'm upset when I see people not thinking about these other pathways, getting back to the point where solutions can rise up from unexpected places. Right. Is the solution stop to stop burning fossil fuels or is there some other solution that comes along that doesn't negate this it just renders it completely obsolete

as the car did to the horse i mean other examples of this what happens if you run out of silver to make your silverware oh you discover aluminum and now you can still have silverware made of aluminum. Right? Airplane solved flying on pterodactyls. Yes. Just as one example. I saw that exhibit in Kentucky. Nice comeback.

Nice comeback. Yes, yes. Just to help out. So I think the lesson here is, of course, it's all interconnected. You turn the key of your car some co2 goes out and your climate models change our understanding of the climate for the future changes and what we bequeath to our descendants is really the product of our foresight or absence thereof thank Thank you all for coming.

Thank you. This has been StarTalk Radio. We are funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. They believe in what we're doing. Okay.