StarTalk Radio - Understanding Climate Change with Bill Nye - StarTalk All-Stars

Episode Date: July 26, 2016

StarTalk All-Stars Series Premiere: Host Bill Nye the Science Guy and co-host Chuck Nice answer Cosmic Queries about humanity’s major challenge, with a little help from climatologist Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

This is StarTalk. Hello, hello, Bill Nye here. I'm the host of a brand new series. It's like nothing you've ever seen. It's StarTalk, but this is StarTalk All-Stars. That's right. And here with our regular comedian, insightful man about the world, Chuck Nice.

Oh, wow. I was looking around. Who's he talking about? Yes, that's me. Yes, indeed. That's me, Bill. Dr. Gavin Schmidt is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I guess that's the NASA Goddard Institute.

That's the NASA Goddard Institute, yes. And you are one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change. So they keep telling me. Well, you've probably published a few papers. I have, yes. You've looked at thermometers. Occasionally. Occasional barometer.

It's great to have you here, but this is Cosmic Queries. Indeed. So these are questions from out there. From out there. This week on All Stars with Dr. Schmidt, it's going to be all about climate change. That's what it is. Climate change all the time.

We've solicited questions from the internet, and we have quite a bit. People are really interested in climate change. And we have from Facebook, Twitter, and every other place where you will find StarTalk, we have people who are writing in, and they are asking us about climate change. So I'm going to start off with a question from one of our Patreon patrons. Oh, Patreon is yet another outlet. Yes, Patreon is another outlet where you can find us. You can go in and let us know on the outlet.

That's right. It's brilliant. It is. And the great thing about Patreon is they actually support us financially, which is why we take great pride in reading their questions. So let's do that. Okay, here we go. This is from Dylan Hallahan, who says, Sir William, in my area this year was 70 degrees outside on Christmas.

Not only that, but it didn't get cold until mid-January, and now we seem to have daily changes between 60s and 70s and snow. While I know that weather and climate are different, do you see this as a sign that everything we're trying to warn

everyone about is coming even sooner? There's a reason. Let me ask, where does he live? Washington Township, New Jersey. New Jersey, right down the street. Yeah. Yeah. So we have had some very exceptional weather here over the winter.

It's been very warm, except for that one little period when it was very cold. And a lot of that is weather. A lot of that is tied to impacts of the El Nino that's going on right now. It makes everything warmer, right? It does make everything warmer on average. And particularly across the north of the U.S., all the way across to Alaska, you're seeing record warm temperatures. But they're record warm not because of the El Nino, but because we've had this long-term warming that is just going on decade by decade by decade. Can I say superimposed?

You can. You can say that the El Nino fluctuations and the La Nina fluctuations are superimposed on that warming trend. So a couple of years ago, we had very cold winters here in New Jersey, New York area. Now I don't believe a word you say. There you have it. Right. There you have it.

You just said it was cold a couple of years ago. It was. So it's over. I'm sorry. But if you look over the global picture and you average everything, you average the cold areas and the warm areas, what you see is that there's this steady march towards warmer temperatures. Last year was the warmest year on record globally. January was the warmest January that we have in that record.

So this was 180 years back? It goes back to the mid-19th century. And we don't think it was warmer just before we started. So in fact, these are the warmest decades that we're seeing in maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of years. Wow. So now with specific respect to the question, as we see this proliferation, does that mean that things are getting worse or are these just anomalies within the occurrence itself?

So there's no obvious reason why that particular pattern of weather should be associated with the trend that you're seeing. They're mostly just oscillations on top of that long-term trend. But that's what you're going to see. You're going to see winter periods getting shorter. You're going to see more exceptional warm weather in January and December and February. You're going to see earlier springs.

You think, oh, that's great, but actually it's not so great. What's happening is that around here, you know, things are budding very early. And then we're still going to get variability. We're still going to get frosts in, you know, in March and in April, which is very variable. And actually, you can do a lot of damage to crops and apples and things like that.

The problem in farming is the pests, the parasites and um in uh voracious insects are showing up sooner and sticking around longer which means more insecticide more herbicide just more work right if you can do it at all i mean in the west you've got the issue with the with the pine bark beetles where there's there's a there's a six-week window while they kind of prepare themselves for winter if it gets cold enough in that six-week window while they kind of prepare themselves for winter. If it gets cold enough in that six-week window, then they won't be able to breed again until the next season.

But if it doesn't get cold enough, they harden themselves in the winter and they're ready to go, you know, two or three times as fast as they would have done. And so part of the huge mountain pine bark beetle outbreak that they've had in the West all the way up through Colorado, up to British Columbia,

has been tied to the fact that it just hasn't been getting as cold. So the warming trend is kind of like a Barry White music to these Pine Bob Beatles. It's, you know, kind of sets the mood for them. A little wine, a little... But he says you'll never find... But I think he means you're always fine. Yeah, I used to keep warm. Yeah, I'm English. We don't quite share the same cultural touchstones. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.

He's like, I'm English. Barry White. Exactly. Who is this Barry White? Chuck Tice. British accent. Yes, exactly. But Dr. Schmidt, Gavin, you said we don't think it was warmer before, let's say, the middle of the 19th century.

But we kind of do know it wasn't. We look at ice cores and so on. So you can look at ice cores. You can look at tree rings. You can look at where the glaciers were. We have actually records of those. They leave imprints, for crying out loud. Yeah. So if you look at the glaciers that are melting now, and you can see, okay, well, what's the stuff underneath them? How old is that?

And that gives you an idea of when that glacier first kind of went forward. And so now it's receding, but it went forward at some point. Okay, I got you. When did that happen? You go back and you date these things, and it's 1,000 years ago. It's 4,000 years ago. It's 4,000 years ago. Otzi, the Iceman that they dug up in Austria, was 5,000 years since he'd been covered in snow. There are places in Baffin Island up in the Canadian archipelago where we think that the stuff that's being uncovered is 120,000 years old.

Wow. So it's been cold there for the last 125,000 years. And now it's warm. And now it's warm. Let's take the next question. All right, man. Why have you changed? It's Hard Talk All-Stars.

You know what I like about this conversation? It's so terribly uplifting. You've got three kids, right? Exactly. Welcome to your future, kids. All right. Well, we're working on it. We're going to change the world here, people.

Okay. We are changing the world. We are. For the better. Oh, okay. One. Specified. change the world here people okay so we are changing the world we are yes for the better oh okay one specified juan carlos uh uh ruiz from uh facebook says dear mr nye given that the earth experiences ice ages periodically what will happen to the next one given the current state of our climate so we've had ice ages before. Does this mean that we will not have another ice age? Or will it mean that this will precipitate an even greater ice age? What will it

do? What will it do? So we have had ice ages before. So the peak of the last ice age was about 20,000 years ago. Here in New York City, that was pretty much the edge of the ice sheet. It actually stopped in Brooklyn. I'm not quite sure why it stopped in Brooklyn, but probably for a latte or something. But those ice ages, the ice ages are driven by the wobbles in the Earth's orbit, which are slow but kind of persistent. Is this Milankovitch? Milankovitch cycles. That's exactly right. Okay, guys. i'm sorry uh please expound because i have been left out milankovic uh the only milankovic i know is donald trump's wife so this was a different this guy was a was

a serbian and he did all these calculations while in jail for for political activities in serbia back in the 19 back in the 1920s um and so what he worked out was that uh the the orbit of the earth around the sun as so we all know it's an ellipse but the but the eccentricity of that ellipse moves in time uh basically because of the influence of jupiter and saturn well it does it wobbles and uh the tilt of the earth that wobbles a little bit and the precession of the earth. So kind of where it's spinning around. Like a warped record on a wobbling tumbler. Take a drinking glass and give it that wobbling.

We're in New York. It should be a dreidel. So if you look at a dreidel. Okay. So like a dreidel. So that wob was around so these things wobble on 20 000 40 000 100 000 year frequencies and they interact these three effects and they interact and they they change how much sunlight gets to the poles how much sunlight gets to the tropics and that helps the ice ages grow

and and recede but the interesting thing is that they haven't they haven't always happened right they've only been happening for about the last two and a half million years and the reason why we think that they've started happening in that relatively recent period is because the carbon dioxide level dropped to a to a level that allowed glaciers to expand in other words the wobbling was going on in the past but there was wobbling has been going on overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect well it didn't it didn't make a difference because the planet was so warm in the cre, but there was... Wobbling has been going on forever. It was overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect. It didn't make a difference because the planet was so warm. In the Cretaceous, the planet was really, really warm.

And there was much less. Ancient dinosaurs running around in Antarctica. Swamps and crocodiles up in the poles. Inland seas. Giant, giant creatures. Sea level was about 80 meters higher than... 80 meters, yes. That's like, that would go from...

We're on the east coast of the United States. That would go where? To Chicago or something? Well, so a lot of the Mississippi Basin was an inland sea at that point. The sea level in the Pliocene, which is not quite so far ago, about three million years ago, there's a, right in the middle of New Jersey, there's the old Pliocene cliffs. But they're a long, long way from the coast now yeah uh yes yes so let's get let's get to this guy's question the answer is no we're not going to see any more

ice ages uh the next one would have been due uh in about 30 000 or maybe maybe 50 000 years um sorry i'm gonna miss it yeah you are you are miss it. But it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen because the timescale for the carbon that we put into the system is hundreds of thousands of years. And so no more ice ages. No more ice ages. That is really a striking thing, everybody. No more ice ages. Yeah. Because we make hilarious jokes about the ice ages.

I went to school in the Finger Lakes, which were carved by glaciers coming south. It's not going to happen anymore. Those were the days. Are the glaciers, all the glaciers we know, going to go away? So almost all the mountain glaciers that we know are receding, some of them quite dramatically. The only part of the planet where ice is pretty stable is East Antarctica, which is the biggest chunk of ice, and that's very cold, very stable. And so that's the part that's going to stick around

the longest. But the other bits, the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, Greenland is losing mass at about 250 gigatons of water a year. The West Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass. So everybody, if you want to see Glacier National Park, before it's Mudslide National Park, get going. You're watching and listening to StarTalk All-Stars.

I'm your guest host, Bill Nye, here with our beloved Chuck Nice, man about the world, insightful provider of insights. And our special guest, our All-Star this week, is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies right here in New York City. The town's so nice they named it twice. And this week on Cosmic Queries, it's all about climate change all the time. We'll be back right after this. Welcome back to StarTalk. This is not just star talk everybody this is star talk all-star edition and i'm here with dr gavin schmidt from nasa's goddard center for space studies right here in

new york city new york new york the town so nice we named it twice and chuck nice who's he's pretty nice uh man about the world seems. You seem so convinced about that. A regular. You're my best here. You have a family. Exactly. But we're talking this week is Cosmic Queries. Your questions from all over the electric social media out there on this planet. And this week is all about climate change, which, as you may know, is a subject deeply important to me. And simply not just because you have a book called Unstoppable about climate change,

not just because of that. What we're going to do about it. And because also Dr. Schmidt has a book, Climate Change Picturing the Science. Yes. Yes. It's got lots of pictures in it. How long have you been compiling pictures having to do with climate change? So I talked to actual photographers and it turns out that my pictures really aren't very good so we had to throw out all of those and just use theirs instead uh but they're great photos uh and these people have been traveling the world finding interesting stories and they're stories that you can't tell in the news and they're not being told in the magazines for example so uh how do you uh talk about uh changes in uh you know plants as they move north as it gets warmer right uh you know trying to track the the kudzu which used to be

like a deep south thing but now it's right here it's like it's it's it's on long island my father new jersey was a very good boy Scout and the joke that they had This would be in what pick a number 1920 19 what's call it? 1928 the joke was you put your ear to kudzu you could hear it growing That was a hundred years but 90 years ago. That's not so funny anymore. Yeah. Yeah Wow So stuff is taken over everything. so they're taking they're they're taking pictures there and they're doing great art and great journalism and we the scientists are

kind of helping them put it together give it context and explain you know what the big patterns that you're seeing are not just in ecosystems but on on you know in in sea level rise or in technology changes or you know just how people go about finding out what's going on in the world. Awesome. Well, Chuck, I was just going to say, I'm really, this is a very serious topic and we talk about it scientifically, but the big thing that I'm always running is what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do? So Chuck, we have a question. Yes, we do. We do have a query. And speaking of what are we going to do about it? John P. Garrett from Facebook wants to know this.

How effective are the policies for dealing with climate change proposed for the immediate future? Are we doing anything about this? Are we really doing anything? And by not just we, I mean the three of us. I mean our government, worldwide government. What are the policies in place right now that will help this? So there's actually a few things that are making a difference. So restrictions on coal power plants, those are making a difference.

Coal is the worst fuel that we can have for putting out carbon dioxide. And here's the bad news, everybody. We'll never run out of coal. There's just, it's limitless. No, seriously. Not limitless. No, seriously. Not limitless. No, there's so much coal all over the world. It's just too easy.

Things like the CAFE standards in the U.S., things like the renewable standards for... CAFE is... The fuel emission standards for cars. Fleet emissions. That's right. The increasing amount of electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines. The renewable standards at the state level for, you know, making like 5, 10, 15 percent be produced from renewable sources. All of those things

are actually making a difference. Now, the question is, are they enough to take us to... So the way I like to describe it, after COP21 in Paris, this big conference on climate change in Paris, you could say we've taken our foot off the accelerator. But we haven't really gotten around to putting our foot on the brake. No. And we're getting closer and closer to the cliff.

And we're going to go rebel without a cause right off it. Now, why this is obvious to everybody, but nobody's doing anything about it, is this a big philosophical question, a deep question. Why wouldn't humankind get to work on this? Why wouldn't we? Because it seems to be too big a problem. And just to get all conspiratorial on you, there's no question that the fossil fuel industry has worked very hard to obfuscate things, to make it hard to understand what they're doing and to defeat, to derail laws. Like the president of the United States tried to have this

restricting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants. It was derailed. Well, but these things are ongoing. Like anything that EPA does is always litigated. And that was true for the mercury regulations. It was true for acid rain. Eventually, it will come through. But it's a slow process.

And we're getting closer to the cliff. So speaking of the cliff, and Thelma and Louise and all of us going off holding hands with the cop lights flashing in the background, is there an actual tipping point where we can say, good night, people. That's it. Well, the number you guys like to throw in is two degrees Celsius. Is that right? So here, I'm going to argue a little bit.

Okay. So I don't actually think that there's one tipping point. I don't think there's ever going to be a point where we get to it and we say, oh, yeah, well, nothing worth doing. We are always going to be making decisions. And every time we make a decision, we can make a decision that's going to make the problem worse or make a decision that makes the problem better in the future. And we're always going to have to be making those decisions. And if you say, oh, it doesn't matter suddenly, that's not true because you can always make it worse, right?

Oh, that's great. We can make it worse. That we can make it worse that's our new rallying climb don't make it worse don't make it worse uh and and so you know this talk of like you know the the cliff i like the i like the the metaphor but actually it's a little bit better like we're driving in the fog and perhaps we're taking our foot off the accelerator but we have no idea what's going on we don't know if there's a cliff we don't know if there's a boulder we don't know if it's rough ground we don't know if the road's going to run out we don't know right we have a pretty good idea that the sooner we come to a stop the better it would be so yes we know that we know that just driving in the fog like crazy you know it's probably not going to work out it's a a curve in the road. Very James Dean

of us. Exactly, let alone a turtle that's going across. Cool. All right, well, there you have it. Let's get another query here. This is from Richard Martin, also coming to us from Facebook, who says, hello, Mr. Nye and Mr. Schmidt, an awesome

guy reading this. Why? I don't know. Awesome guy reading this. Did he really don't know. Awesome guy reading this. That's you. Like you're awesome. But did he really know that I was going to be the guest host? Did he know that? Otherwise, he wouldn't have said it. Maybe.

Maybe. Exactly. Anyway, as you were saying. Here's what he says. Richard says this. I've heard the sun expands and uses its hydrogen fuel. Is there any evidence that this has had an effect on climate change, or does it happen over too long of a time to measure? Oh, it's very measurable.

Yes. It is measurable. So the sun is a main sequence star. So over the last four billion years that the Earth has been around, the sun has got brighter by about 30%. And in another 2 billion years, it will get large and brighter still. And in fact, it will evaporate.

But the timescale is big. But the timescale is big. The timescale is billions of years. And there is evidence that it's affected the climate. So if you go back in time, you go back to the oldest rocks, the oldest evidence that we have, there is evidence that we went through

periods that are called snowball earth, where the ice caps expanded pretty much all the way to the equator. And there were, you know, obviously, that was not particularly helpful to life. But for periods of, you know, many, many millions of years, the planet was a snowball. Now that can't happen now because the sun is brighter. But back then, it was dimmer, and so things were a little bit more fragile. And so when you had wobbles that would put you into an ice age, those ice ages could potentially cover the whole planet. But that's not happening now. That is not happening now.

And so the sun is still getting brighter or not? Is it going through one of its cycles? It's getting brighter on a very, very long timescale. But actually, there are other things going on. Over 11 years. We have sunspot cycles. There's activity in the sun that kind of waxes and wanes over about 11 years. Right now, we're just kind of coming off a solar maximum.

But in fact, this was a smaller solar maximum than many of the previous ones so in fact how do we determine what happened in the past on the sun with respect to the sun

and its maxima and minima physics but is it in the rocks so there are so the solar activity also modulates the cosmic rays

that come in from all around the cosmos those cosmic rays very high energy from all around the cosmos. Those cosmic rays are very high energy. They come into the atmosphere and they create isotopes. Carbon-14, beryllium-10, chlorine-36 that don't occur any other place in the Earth system. And they'll just keep creating it. And so when you have something that's made of air or made of carbon uh that's how you

can do carbon dating right so so you're not part of that but if you go back you can actually see that the those uh those of you who are listening on the podcast he's his hands going up and down hands going up and down here we go wave visually showing us the ebb and flow yeah but yeah you're up and down yeah these cosmic rays will make some protons become neutrons, some neutrons become protons. That's right. So they'll hit a nitrogen, and they'll make a carbon-14. Yeah. Or they'll hit a…

Nitrogen-7 will become a carbon-6 plus an extra neutron. That's right. Oh, that's fabulous. Yes, yes. So you see, this is why you've got to pay attention. Well, it's science. Science, people. Here's the thing that I say to everybody,

because I deal with a lot of climate denial people. Okay, these isotopes are created in this special way. There's no other way to make these isotopes. So there's nobody running around with a hypodermic needle making isotopes for kicks to fool people. So when you have this evidence, it's incontrovertible. It's like, let's go, people. Let's get this done. Let's get to work. Chuck. All right. Give us another query. Okay, so this is

Russ Ismaloff. Ismaloff. Ismaloff. Thank you. Ismaloff? No, it's not. No, it's on. Thank you. Do you know how many times he's heard that joke? I'm sure right now Russ hates us. I included us, but you know it's me.

I was going to say it's me. Go ahead. Okay, so Russ wants to know this, and he's coming to us from Facebook. Does oil production affect the climate change directly or indirectly? Kind regards from Kazan, Russia. Well, if you're in the, I can tell you this, if you're producing oil, what they call synthetic crude oil in the tar sand region of Alberta, the province of Canada, in Western Canada, you are just a process to produce this synthetic crude. It takes a tremendous amount of energy. 30% of the energy in the crude oil is used to produce the synthetic crude oil.

And it's just pumping carbon dioxide in the air. And then when you burn the crude oil, the synthetic crude oil, you pump even more. 30%. It's extraordinary. And what they've done, just to whine and complain in Calgary, I was there in end of August, beginning of September. They've created this boom and bust cycle in the economy. Put all their eggs in the synthetic crude basket, if I may. And the place was not deserted, but there were very few people working. And it's just, it couldn't be worse. That is fascinating.

I can't believe I've never heard that before. 30%. Oh, man. So you. It was discovered in 1884. Geologists running around the Athabasca River, Athabasca River runs through there and it cuts a swath through the layers of soil. And you can see this layer of tar and it's sandy, tar sand. And the oil companies have had a campaign to call it oil sand. But you pick up a handful of it, it is goo. It's tar.

And this guy said, boy, if you could exploit this, it'd be fantastic. So in the 1970s, some chemical engineers came up with a process to make it into very usable crude oil. Wow. So you're creating a crapload of pollution so that you can create a crapload of pollution. Brilliant. And accidentally just mess with the economy of this otherwise lovely province. Wow. Fantastic.

Hey, Russ. But Gavin, you were going to chime in. Hey, Russ. But Gavin, you were going to chime in. So just to answer his question, it's indirect. Like it's not, you know, it's the burning of the oil

that causes the carbon dioxide and all the other pollutants which have the effect. But I can tell you in oil field production, you burn a lot of oil running pumps and generators and compressors.

Yes. I used to work in the oil. Oh, yeah. I'm not going to argue with that. Okay. I was looking forward to the argument, but I guess we won't. We're not. All right.

Let's move on. And this is from Pete Nagy from Facebook. Pete wants to know this. Hey, Pete here from California. The sun is lauded being near limitless as a source of energy, but it isn't technically limited by solar collectors. After all, the sun isn't always shining down here on the ground. What are some of the possible solutions to this dilemma? Wow.

Could we not tell these people? And could you guys just write it down for me so I can go make a fortune and retire? No, you can make a fortune. I tell everybody this. Okay, good. Then let's do that. We had better batteries. And we have very good batteries, but they could be better and better energy storage systems, whatever that might be. It could be these great gravity, these giant pistons that go up and down. Molten salt is very useful. Molten salt, we love that. Okay, sorry guys, as the non-scientists in the room, can we please have a little lesson on molten salt?

Because I know Morton's salt. So what we do, it's not that hard. Giant mirrors, and you can see them from airplanes here in the U.S. Giant mirrors concentrate solar power, beam it up to a big black ball full of, it's largely sodium chloride, table salt, right? With a little calcium chloride, the salt you melt snow in front of your sidewalk mixture, and it gets liquid. It's so freaking hot, it gets liquid. And so when the sun's not shining overnight the stuff stays hot it's so massively uh it holds so much heat its thermal capacity is so high so you can continue

to run a steam turbine all night long yeah that's it if you have it worked out all right we're just scratching the solar uh concentrated solar power surface on this. Unbelievable. The potential for this is enormous. And the place that also ironically has huge potential for it is in the Middle East where all this oil is produced. They'd have these concentrated solar power collectors. Yeah, here it gets hot there.

That's right. So you are watching StarTalk All-Stars. We're here with Chuck Nice and me, Bill Nye, your host. And this week our All-Star is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City. We'll be back right after this. Beloved Chuck Nice, man about the Earth. Yes. And speaking of the Earth, our all-star this week is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Center for Space Studies, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City, which is part of NASA.

You're a NASA employee, ultimately. I am. And this week on Cosmic Queries, your queries from the cosmos are all about climate change. And here to read the next query, or do you want to talk about salt some more? Molten salt. Well, no, I just found that to be a completely fantastic idea. Oh, it's cool. I don't understand why these...

Or it's hot. Yeah, it's hot. Very hot. That's hot. You know, I just don't understand why these type of alternatives are not put forward in such a manner where there's a public awareness.

Well, if you live in Las Vegas, there are three huge solar plants out there. And it ends with a public awareness. Well, if you live in Las Vegas, there are three huge solar plants out there. And it ends with a paw sound. In California, there's a big- Ivanpah. Thank you. Yes. Ivanpah, Ivanpah.

Ivanpah. Ivanpah, California, thank you, is a huge concentrated solar collector system, CSP, concentrated solar power. And this is the thing thing we're just getting started on this, Chuck. Now, just speaking as a political commentator and guy who's thought about this a little bit, when you have a standing army on the other side of the world to protect oil fields, that is effectively a subsidy for that form of energy. It costs billions of dollars to maintain a military on the other side of the world.

If we were to encourage concentrated solar power, photovoltaics, wind energy at that same, a tenth of that scale, we would have all of these systems in place in 30 years. Yes, but then how would we destabilize the Middle East? Great question. I think that's not that hard. With podcasts and Facebook. Right, exactly. No, that thing's been going on. It's called the Bible.

Absolutely. The conflict's been going on a while. They don't need any help is what you say, right? No, they actually do need a lot of help. That's what I was going to say. No, I mean to destabilize. Yeah, yeah, we're all being hilarious. All right, here we go.

A cosmic query. Here we go. A cosmic query. Here we go. This is from Benjamin, who is at Bernard3 on Twitter. Gavin said, I wasn't giving Twitter any love, so let's go to Twitter. Here's what he says. People emphasize negative aspects of climate change, but are there any foreseeable positives? Hmm. Well, so let me give you one. Please.

So I'm English. Do you know... I do, yes. We hang out all the time at the palace. And for many years, many years, there was such a thing as English wine. And there was an old joke in Victorian. English wine.

Yes, in the Victorian period that it would take four people to drink English wine. One to drink the wine, two people to hold the person down, and another person to pour it into their throat. Pretty funny. Very troubling. Yes. Okay. But now it turns out that there are more vineyards in England than there have ever been in history. And in fact, the champagne…

When you say history, you're talking about over 500 years. Oh, thousands of years. Yes. We have records of vineyards in England going back to the Doomsday Book over a thousand years ago. But there's more now. And the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins. the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins. So wine quality in England is actually now on a par with the best that the French can produce. Boy, the French people are going to be unglued about that situation. Absolutely.

So in fact, the champagne companies are buying up swaths of what are called the South Downs in the UK because they know that the temperatures in champagne are now at the limit. So if it gets much warmer in champagne region, they won't be able to make as good champagne there, and they're thinking about moving their production to the UK. So that will be a foreseeable benefit for English wine drinkers. The UK is a little cooler. Yes, it's a little bit further north, but it's very similar soils, very similar terroir. And now it's actually happening.

So there's your answer, Benjamin. The positive will be you get to piss off French winemakers. Well, what it means, but writ large, is agriculture is going to change. That's exactly right. So you're seeing the same thing in the US, right? So Napa Valley, where we're producing a lot of great wine now, is at the limit of how hot it needs to be. If it gets much hotter, it's going to be hotter.

So production is moving to Oregon, Washington State. There's some excellent, excellent wines that are really emerging there. And that's part of British Columbia even, yes. So, I mean, I tasted wines in British Columbia maybe 20 years ago, and the same joke would have been true then. But now they're actually— So agriculture is going to change. The whole problem, everybody, the way I see it, is it's how fast it's changing.

We have an interstate highway system. We have trains in Britain for carrying produce to market or carrying produce to the winery where you're going to make the grapes into wine, for example, or the oats into oatmeal or what have you. But we're not set up to have all that production move farther and farther north or farther and farther from the equator. And rain patterns are changing. I mean, for niche things like vineyards, you know, they're pretty much on the ball. And so they pay attention to these things and move things along quite quickly but your bigger problem is is the staples not not the luxury goods you know uh wheat corn uh barley soybeans all of those things are affected by better known as food food for most of the world

straight up food let's try another one okay here we here we go. Let's just very quickly in that same vein, Tobias, who is at Miko on Twitter, wants to know this. Does animal agriculture have any impact on climate change? So the way we grow and raise our food, you know, our livestock, does that hurt or help climate change in any way? you know, our livestock, does that hurt or help climate change in any way? So, you know, if you run a farm, you can integrate the animals in the farm so that they eat a lot of the waste. And, you know, so that's okay. By waste, you mean silage. Yeah, exactly.

I like pigs will eat anything. And so, you know, that's a good way of recycling stuff that would otherwise be wasted. But your big climate impacts come from cows and sheep. And they have this second stomach, which has what's called enteretic fermentation, where you produce a ton of methane. And that's a very powerful greenhouse gas. Natural gas.

Yeah, it's basically the same stuff as natural gas. And since we... Believe me, I know. You have three kids. Oh, yes, yes. And your wife has pointed out. Okay, well, that's too much information. It comes at their burping. This is a myth.

It's not coming out their tails. Mostly cow burps, yes. And we've increased the number of cows and sheep enormously in the last century. And that's certainly contributed to the fact that levels of methane are more than double what they were 150 years ago. Methane or methane is a more powerful… It's all about me, Bill. Uthane is much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide even. Pound for pound.

But there's much less of it. Carbon dioxide is a much more powerful thing gas than carbon dioxide even. Pound for pound. But there's much less of it. Carbon dioxide is a much more powerful thing because there's more of it. So raising livestock has a huge effect, Chuck, or Tobias, to answer your question. And the other thing, just writ large, when I was young, there were 3 billion people in the world. When my grandfather was young, there were 1.5 billion people. Now there are over 7, 7.3 billion people. And everybody wants protein. Everybody wants to eat.

And here we are. Yes. Going through this stuff and the farming and the agriculture and the animals. And we're adding nothing to the atmosphere. So when they say. Gasoline on a fire. When they say one day vegetarian actually helps the world, ecology, that's actually true then? Yeah, that's actually true.

So if you take a diet that's a vegetarian diet, compare it to a diet that's got a lot of meat in it, your environmental footprint, not just in methane, but also in the fuel that's used to transport and create these things, the amount of fertilizer that's being used, the amount of nitrate runoff that's going into the rivers, which is creating the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It all adds up. It all adds up. So you have a number, or you felt like you were building to a number? I could have made up a number, but I didn't actually have a number.

It's big. Yes, it's a big, big number. So as we like to say, Chuck, if you don't like regulation now, just wait till it gets to the point where somebody has to regulate the amount of protein, or rather animal protein you take in.

Right. And we're actually regulating farmers to produce less of livestock protein. That could be a big deal, everybody. So if you like to worry about things, you're living at a great time. There you go. Take a yes. And believe me, that's going to be a tough fight.

Just ask Oprah. So Paul Bunyan wants to know this. And that's what he says his name is. And he is at Matthew Birch. With the rising ocean levels due to polar melt, how soon before the Hudson River becomes the Gulf of the Hudson? And let me just add an addendum to that. How soon will this have a verifiable and measurable effect on our coastal regions? Because when you look at all of the world, most people live on the coast of wherever.

That's right. So already we're seeing the number of coastal flooding days is increasing all up and down the East Coast from Miami to Newport to Boston. The storm surges that we're seeing when you have a storm, wherever the storm is, it has more damage because the sea level has risen about a foot in the last 100 years. And it's increasing faster now than perhaps any time in the last 3,000 years. And that's because of polar melts. It's because the water itself is getting warmer, and so it's expanding.

And it's happening right now. So they have an expression in Florida, nuisance flooding. Nuisance flooding. Nuisance flooding. Now, everybody, when you think of floods, you might get into some biblical thing where everybody's underwater in enormous, hundreds of feet underwater 100 meters underwater but the nuisance flooding which is inducing insurance companies not to provide insurance to where you park your car because salt water is getting in your wheel wells it's just a few

centimeters a few inches deep but if you put a few inches of water on the floor of your house, you ruin almost everything. You ruin the stove, you ruin all your furniture, you ruin your carpets, you ruin your bedding, you ruin everything. And so this expression nuisance is kind of shorthand for You're not in good hands. You're on your own. Yeah. And so I said to this guy, Mr. Hill, who's a legislator in Florida, I said, what are you going to do? He represents Pensacola, Florida, and they have nuisance flooding continually. I said, what are you going to do when everybody moves? You know, they're going to move, he says.

Where are they going to move to? How are they going to displace themselves? If you're a middle income or lower income person, how do you pick up everything? And where do you go to get a job? And so on. And that's in the U.S., which is civilization. Wait till you're in the developing world where you just don't have resources. Jeez. God. Man. Let's raise awareness, Chuck. Read another query. I'm going to raise awareness. God, this is really serious stuff.

Well, man, yeah, yeah. Yes. All right. Here's something that... He's giving it the wry smile. It's upbeat. Take it. Here's a little something that I wanted to get.

And, you know, since you have Unstoppable and since you are a... You just got Climate Change picturing the science. I do, yes. How many books in a carton? 20? They make great gifts, everybody. 60. They make great gifts.

The equinox is coming up. So can we have three just major points, three major talking points, three tips that we can put out to kind of silence the climate denying arguments. Well, my big thing is why do you really think that your intuition about weather and about your whole life is more accurate at predicting the future than the world's climate scientists? And then to follow that up with, the future than the world's climate scientists and then to follow that up with do you think the world's climate scientists are in a conspiracy gavin are you in a conspiracy where you guys text each other yes well we we we get uh we get signals from the vegetarian overlords uh really to tell you when he says that's I was thinking, you know, dick pics, but I'm sorry. Oh, wow. Sorry.

Our talk is an entertainment show. That escalated quickly. You know what? I can listen. I've been hanging with Brett Favre. What can I say? Hey, wow. It's unexpected.

But are there three tips? We have just a few seconds left before break. Gavin, you got any ideas? Look at the evidence. The planet is warming. One. We understand why. Two. We're not stopping our emissions, so it's going to get worse. There you go. It's that simple. So, Chuck, Gavin, the answer to this problem is the evidence is overwhelming. Let's get to work. Is that right? I like that. This is StarTalk All-Star Edition. I'm here with Chuck Nice, a regular man about the universe,

and Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA, right here in New York City. And this show has been about climate change. I've been your guest host, Bill Nye. Tune in to StarTalk every week and turn it up loud. We'll see you next time. This is StarTalk every week and turn it up loud. We'll see you next time. This is StarTalk.