The Derivative - Super Storms, Mathematical Modeling, and Hurricane Hunting with Dr. Jeff Masters

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

With storms named Gamma and Delta making their way to US shores – we really couldn’t have timed this release better from a hurricane-content-meets-alts-investment podcast; it’s the: perfect storm (buh-dum-ch). Today’s guest is creator of Weather Underground and the Cat 6 blog, a person who has flown through an actual hurricane, and a whiz at modeling weather data in a way that us non-meteorologists can understand – Dr. Jeff Masters. In today’s podcast we’re talking with Jeff about hedging commodities based on storms, water futures contracts, the Cat 6 blog, historical context of extreme weather events, the transformation of weather modeling, heat output dissipating from WFH, fat tails based on 1-in-100-year events, economic fragility around climate change, hurricane Hugo, weather data inputs that matter, starting weather underground, Jeff’s upcoming book Eye of the Superstorm, hedge fund world catastrophe bonds, Jeff’s most dangerous storm experience, and the impact of COVID on weather modeling. Follow along with Jeff and subscribe to his content at Yale Climate Connections. And last but not least, don't forget to subscribe to The Derivative, and follow us on Twitter, or LinkedIn, and Facebook, and sign-up for our blog digest. Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations, nor reference past or potential profits. And listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. For more information, visit www.rcmalternatives.com/disclaimer Chapters: 00:00-01:29 = Intro 01:30-20:35 = Background, “The Final Flight”, & Weather Underground 20:36-32:19 = Building Weather Models 32:20-57:35 = Storm Financial Impacts, Catastrophic Bonds & Fat Tails ( It’s a complex system) 57:36-1:04:10 = Water Shortages & What We Need to Do 1:04:11-1:14:02 = Favorites

Thanks for listening to The Derivative. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of RCM Alternatives, their affiliates, or companies featured. Due to industry regulations, participants on this podcast are instructed not to make specific trade recommendations nor reference past or potential profits, and listeners are reminded that managed futures, commodity trading, and other alternative investments are complex and carry a risk

of substantial losses. As such, they are not suitable for all investors. Welcome to The Derivative by RCM Alternatives, where we dive into what makes alternative investments go, analyze the strategies of unique hedge fund managers, and chat with interesting guests from across the investment world. We've got millions of points of data to start out the model. So you subdivide the atmosphere into a grid, a three-dimensional grid, and each of these grid cells is a few kilometers on a side, say 15 kilometers on a side, covering the entire globe. And then vertically in the atmosphere, you've got like 50 or so layers, too.

So if you multiply all that out, you're talking somewhere. I can't do the math right now, but we're talking millions of different grid points. And each of those different grid points, you have to solve the fundamental physical equations that govern the flow of the atmosphere. So you're doing these calculations every few seconds. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. It's not only tweets and retail option traders that affect the day-to-day movement of the markets. Other worldly forces can affect the market and hurt it just as much. On today's topics, one of those worldly phenomenons, hurricanes. Billions of dollars in damage, oil refinery shutting down, crops destroyed, all from the wrath of a giant storm we named Sally or Teddy or something.

So to break down the who, what, why of these storms and the math and modeling involved in protecting us from them, we've got the hurricane master, Dr. Jeff Masters, joining us for today's podcast. Jeff's a hurricane scientist who's hunted down and reported on them for over 34 years. Also co-founded the Weather Underground and authored one of my favorite blogs on the internet back in the day, the Cat 6 blog, which I used to read like a kid with his first Harry Potter novel anytime there was a storm brewing. So Jeff now writes for the non-profit website Yale Climate Connections and we're excited to have him on today's podcast. Welcome, Jeff. Well, thank you very much. So I have to start with your old job of flying hurricane hunters. Tell us everything. How'd you get into that? What was it like? Was it as insanely dangerous as it sounds?

What kind of person you got to be to fly into the storm? Yeah, I started that way back in 1986. I was just a young fearless kid, age 25, and had a master's in green meteorology and wanted to go, you know, see the world's most impressive weather. And I thought it was a dream job. And what I did is I worked as a meteorologist on two weather research aircraft that flew out of Miami, Florida, run by NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And in the summer, we'd chase hurricanes. In the winter, we'd go do winter storm projects. In the spring, we'd look at severe thunderstorms. So it was really an ideal job for a meteorologist. I mean, you got to fly all over the world and see the most incredible weather phenomena and work with the greatest scientists in the field, because each of these field projects

featured some of the biggest names in weather. And early on, I got to work with Dr. Ted Fugita, inventor of the Fugita scale for tornadoes. And then when I flew into hurricanes, I worked with all the top hurricane scientists, including Bob Burpee, who went on to become the director of the National Hurricane Center, and some of the other heads of the NOAA's research division. So really a dream job and really wasn't as dangerous as you might think flying into the eye of a hurricane. When you're out over the water, there isn't that much that you have to worry about with respect to intense thunderstorms. You don't get the kinds of shearing motions and large hail that you see in a Midwest severe thunderstorm.

All over the water, it's not cold enough. Just pure wind speed is the issue there, but that's fine? The plane just handles it? Well, planes don't like wind shear. I mean, wind shear when you're flying is bad because that means you've got a different loading on one part of the aircraft versus the other. Say you got a 100 mile per hour wind blowing on the nose and a 40 mile per hour wind blowing on your tail, then that's going to skew the aircraft. It's going to kind of, yeah, it's going to kind of skid through the air. And even worse is in the vertical, if you get kind of updrafts and downdrafts, if your tail's in a downdraft and your nose is in an updraft, that really gives you a bucking motion. And in a hurricane, you can get some

pretty intense g-forces if you go into the eye wall, which is the most intense part surrounding the calm eye. And there have been a few missions in the past before I joined the Hurricane Hunters where the plane got in trouble and intense turbulence in the eyewall. And you worry if you're flying too low and the pilot can't control the aircraft, then you'll splash into the ocean. Not ideal. Generally, you don't fly in at low altitude. You go in at 10,000 feet, and that gives you a lot of room for error if you get a big downdraft. I mean, a lot of times you'll hit a downdraft, and the pilot can't control it. You know, you go down 500 feet or 1,000 feet in just a few minutes. Wow. So if you're flying at, you know, 1,000 feet, then you're in the ocean.

Did you ever lose your lunch? Did you ever get sick? Was it kind of bucking all the time? You know, I personally did not, but we certainly carried barf bags on every flight. And, you know, we always had reporters on board. They always went, you know. Oh, really? Right. Yeah, they ride in the back and take photos and, you know, report on what it's like to fly through a hurricane. And there were a few reporters who weren't used to the turbulence that would lose their lunch. And that's still to this day, they got reporters on them? Oh, sure. Pretty much. Yeah. I mean, you can get in line and fly down to Florida and get on a hurricane hunter flight if you're a journalist. I don't know if

you qualify there, but. Right. I can do that. Yeah, right. Go for it. What kind of planes are we talking? Are these specialized planes? Are there? They're four-engine turboprop planes, and they were originally built for anti-submarine warfare for the Navy, P-3 Orions. That's what NOAA flies.

And the Air Force flies C-130s, which are also four-engine turboprops. And a turboprop is really pretty ideal for hurricane flying because you've got the power of a jet engine. That's the turbo part. But you've also got a propeller blade, which means that it flies slower and it gives you more control. So it's better to fly slower through intense turbulence because that means that the wind shear on the airplane is less. If you're flying faster, that means you're going through intense changes in wind more quickly, and it provides more shear on the aircraft's surface, which is more dangerous. So the P-3s are really ideally suited for hurricane flying. All right. Awesome.

So then you hung up your spurs on that and started Weather Underground. What drove that decision? Well, the thing that drove me to leave the Hurricane Hunters was my final flight, which you didn't ask about. I don't know if you read my story of flying into Hurricane Hugo. What wasn't your final, final flight since you're... Well, in a very permanent sense, it very well could have been. We were flying into what we thought was going to be a Category 3 hurricane out over the Atlantic. And we went in at low altitude, 1,500 feet, thinking it was going to be a Category 3. And it turned out to be a Category 5. And you shouldn't be in a Category five at 1,500 feet. Very dangerous.

And sure enough, as we were penetrating through the eye wall, we quickly realized we were in over our heads. We started getting, you know, 2G accelerations where you're twice the force of gravity pushed into your seat. Then zero Gs where you're dangling weightless. But once you're in the eye wall, you've got no choice but to gut it out and make it all the way through to the calm eye because you really can't do much maneuvering you've just got to go for it and get through it so during this two minute penetrations it started getting worse and worse the winds were 140 150 160 miles per hour 170 and we're just hanging on the pilots having trouble controlling the aircraft were bucking all around we're ske hanging on. The pilot's having trouble controlling the aircraft. We're bucking all around. We're skewing through the air. And at times, I don't think he was really in control of

it. But finally, we got right near the eye, which of course is calm, and you can start to see it brightening up. And I said, oh, it's brightening up out there. We're going to make the eye. But right then, the plane hit the most catastrophic updrafts and downdrafts ever encountered by the hurricane hunters. We hit a 40 mile per hour updraft, followed by a 20 mile per hour downdraft, followed by a 30 mile per hour updraft, all in the space of seven seconds. And that's a tremendous amount of wind shear. And at the same time in the horizontal, the winds went from about 180 miles per hour down to 70 miles per hour. So the plane's skidding through the air and bucking.

We hit 5.7 Gs of acceleration. The plane's only rated to 6 Gs. The pilot lost control of the aircraft. We started plunging down towards the ocean. And our number three engine caught on fire at that time too. So fortunately, yeah, I was thinking this is it. I was thinking like, you know, this is what it's like to die in battle. I was saying my prayers, literally.

Fortunately, we popped into the calm eye right then. The pilot was able to pull us out of the dive about 900 feet above the ocean and extinguish the fire in the engine that had caught on fire. But then you had to go back through the wall. Well, yeah, that's not good. Except we have to do it all again. Yeah, you barely made it through in four inches. Now you got to get out on three.

And we looked over and not much. There wasn't much room because the eye was only about 10 miles in diameter. And a big plane like the P-3 needs about a seven-mile circle in order to circle. And as it turned out, we weren't really sure where we were in the eye. And we saw a wall of clouds in front of us. And we had to turn to avoid that thinking it was the eye wall. Well, we were off to one side and the pilot turned us right into the eye wall again. And he was able to bank us over at a really steep angle, like a 30 degree angle. So we stayed out of the eye wall. But, you know, we're sticking one wing in the eye wall, one wing out.

The plane's bouncing around. We're like going, oh, crap. And the engine needle on the one good engine on that wing is going into the red. But fortunately, he was able to pull us out of that sharp turn, level us out in the eye. And then for an hour, we circled inside the eye trying to gain altitude to get out of the eye at a calmer spot. Wow. So that was that? You said enough of this nonsense? Yeah, that was my last flight. And yeah, we managed to exit out of the eye thanks to some help from the Air Force Hurricane Hunters who actually sent a plane in to find a soft spot for us.

They penetrated in and out of the eye a bunch of times for us. We finally followed them out where they found the comma spot. Why are there two sets? Why don't they just have one, the NOAA? Why does the Air Force also do it? They were there for the National Hurricane Center for operational data, you know, to help them with their real-time forecasts. And we were doing a research mission. So we were doing a non-standard flight pattern going in and

out of the hurricane to take data to better understand how they work and to, you know, help hurricane researchers make better forecasts in the future. Have you ever flown commercial again? Did you say no more flying ever, or you just said no more hurricane flying? No more hurricane flying. No, I was happy to fly commercial again, but to this day, I don't like getting on a roller coaster. I bet. The ultimate roller coaster. So then hung up those wings, so to speak, and started Weather Underground. Well, I went back to PhD school back at the University of Michigan, and I was majoring in air pollution science. And while I was in PhD school, this was back in the early 1990s, I found out about, hey, we got this cool thing here called the Internet, which I'd heard of but didn't know much about. And so I found out we had a satellite dish in our roof

that brought in all the world's weather data. And there wasn't really any good way to look at it. So as part of a graduate program. University of Michigan, you're saying? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So as part of a course I was taking, I wrote a little C program to take the incoming data,

format it, and make a nice little menu-based text system where you could type in a three-letter airport code and get the latest National Weather Service forecast. So you type in, you know, ORD and you get the forecast for Chicago from the National Weather Service. And that was cool enough that, you know, we launched it as a service available not only just to the university, but we figured out how to make it available worldwide. Just because of the magic of Unix, you can have anybody on the internet access your computer. So we did that. And within a few months, it was going viral basically back in 1991, 92. And we were getting people from all over the world accessing this this little it was called a telnet session for weather so from that humble beginning you know my phd advisor perry sampson said hey you know i bet i can get a grant proposal from national science foundation to take this idea and expand it and

over the course of the next few years yeah from that humble beginning, we made an educational project called Weather Underground that did K-12 weather education based on the Internet. And it was kind of the perfect marriage of science education and the Internet because, you know, what better way to do real-time science than to do weather stuff on the Internet? And the National Science Foundation was very enthusiastic about it. And we got several million dollars worth of grants up until 1995 and started doing graphics. And in 95, when the commercial web came along, we said, hey, let's make a business out of it. And the university and National Science Foundation were both very supportive of that. In fact, you know, that's kind of one of their missions is to, you know, spin off companies like that. And that was the genesis of the Weather Underground as a company. It was a university-based project that got its

start from a little program I wrote. Pre-date the weather.com and black skies and all this stuff. Yeah, we were there before the Weather Channel was online. In fact, they sent, you know, some of their people up to the University of Michigan campus to talk to us to figure out, you know, how did these guys do that? And, you know, we ended up probably giving away more than we should have because they ended up founding a very successful website that was then our competitor. Right. And then they ended up buying you, right? Yeah, I mean, that was the ultimate tribute to your opponent is to not only imitate them, but actually take them over. And they did buy us back in 2012.

And then, so somewhere in there, you started writing the Category 6 blog. Was that from the beginning or that was just always part of Weather Underground? I don't remember exactly when I first started coming across it, but yeah, loved all the deep dives on everything to do with, which I would call hurricanes, would you call them tropical cyclones? Yeah, sure. I mean, blogs weren't around back when we founded the company. Really, that didn't start until the early 2000s. And in 2005, some of my coworkers said, hey, you know, Jeff, why don't you start writing a blog? And I'm like, what's a blog? That sounds really dumb.

I hate that word. What's a blog? And they said, oh, you know, you just, you know, write online about, you know, current topics and people comment on it. And it's social media. Well, I thought this was a dumb idea. And my first few posts showed very low effort. I think my second post was only two sentences. I basically wrote about the atmospheric phenomena like rainbows and halos. And I didn't know what to write about. So who cares about this stuff. Yeah, right and then finally I figured out Oh, hey, I know a topic to write about because back then Our competitor AccuWeather tried to pressure the legislature to pass a law to basically make it so only private companies could issue weather

Forecasts outlaw the National Weather Service for making weather forecasts and I thought that was a horrible idea And so I use the blog as a platform to agitate against that. Yeah, which is, that was the genesis of our blog back in the day of complaining about regulators missing some frauds in our industry and whatnot. Like when you have a bee in your bonnet, so to speak, the words just flow out, right? Yeah, I mean, that was a great platform because, you know, a lot of people were interested in that. It was very politically explosive and it really got me into writing for an audience. And then the hurricane season of 2005 came along, you know, a few months later, I started that blog in April. And then by June Iune i was talking about okay we got arlene and now you know then a whole cascade of uh you know the 2005

hurricane started coming we had cindy we had dennis we had emily and then eventually katrina came and rita and wilma it was just nuts so i spent the whole rest of the year basically blogging and didn't do much else and it seemed over time it seemed to become more data-driven more and maybe it was always that way but in my mind it seemed to become more data-driven and you started getting more into heat content and wind shear and all the rest like was that from the beginning or did it become more data-driven as time went by? It became more data-driven as time went by. I mean, I was not trained as a tropical meteorologist. My background was in air pollution. So I was kind of feeling my way along very carefully, not knowing exactly what I was doing. And I focused mostly on putting

storms in a historical context, which is something I really like doing. And to this day, that's kind of my forte is putting extreme weather events in historical context. You know, how unusual is this? How extreme is this? So, yeah, as time went on, I gradually learned more and more and got more technical because I wanted to share with people just what I was understanding and, you know, make it so they can make their own forecast, draw their own conclusions. Right, which I've always appreciated. I felt that. So you succeeded in that because I would read the stuff and make my own conclusions of, you know, not from a weather standpoint, but like, okay,

this could build and you kind of had that probability as well function of this could become something much more dangerous than currently getting credit for. And what I like to do is I like to take people to other sites. I mean, what you see typically back in the day, weather sites would only showcase their own stuff. But I wanted to really take people, okay, here's, you know, this researcher with the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA and what they're doing. Here's what the National Weather Service says. Here's what a colleague at a university is doing. Really tried to make it to show you, you know, the cutting edge stuff that was happening in all of meteorology to get people excited about research going on and get people to understand about how climate change was affecting storms. So let's talk about that a little bit of the research that's going on in the modeling.

I saw your post a while back on how successful were the 2019 models and kind of analyzing the tracking error, so to speak. So maybe first just give us a general overview of what those models are doing, who came up with them, and we can dig in from there. Okay. We've got about five or six main computer models that are used by the National Hurricane Center to generate their forecasts. They're singular. So is it an ensemble of those five you're saying? Well, typically, if you look at the National Hurricane Center forecast they put out, it's never all that different from if you average together four or five of these top models. It's called a consensus forecasting technique. And it's one of the things that they learned over the past 20 years as to how to make a better forecast. Don't rely on one model. Take a combination of models, average them together, maybe throw out one that's

kind of an outlier. And if you go with that, then you can make a really successful forecast. And over the past 20 years, NHC has cut down their forecast error by over a factor of two, and that sort of ensemble consensus forecasting technique is a large reason why. The other reasons why are computer power has improved massively over the last 20 years, and also we've learned a lot more about how to make models of the atmosphere and more about what's going on inside of a hurricane. So improved understanding of the storms. Also factoring into that is improved data from satellites and buoys and ground stations, things like that.

So a lot of factors have come together to make these successful forecasts. So better processing, better inputs, and better modeling equal better outputs. Yeah, and you were asking about what these models are and where they come from. I mean, there's one that comes from the European group. That's the best model out there, the European Center model. The American model is not quite as good, but still pretty top-notch. It's called the GFS model. And then we've got some labs run by NOAA, like the GFDL lab, which does two of our top intensity models, one called HWRF and one called the – they keep changing the acronyms on me. The name escapes me now. We're masters of acronyms.

Yeah, we won't write it down. And so how many inputs are going into these models? Is it hundreds or thousands, or is it relatively simple? What's it look like? I mean, you've got millions of points of data to start out the model. So you subdivide the atmosphere into a grid, a three-dimensional grid, and each of these grid cells is a few kilometers on a side, say 15 kilometers on a side, covering the entire globe. And then vertically in the atmosphere, you've got

like 50 or so layers too. So if you multiply all that out, you're talking somewhere, I can't do the math right now, but we're talking millions of different grid points. And each of those different grid points, you have to solve the fundamental physical equations that govern the flow of the atmosphere. So you're doing these calculations every few seconds and pushing them through time out to seven days or so. And at the very start, you're taking data from satellites, from ships, from aircraft, aircraft from ground stations from buoys and come make up with an initial picture of what the atmosphere is And that's really a hard problem and it's something the Europeans are doing the best It's called data assimilation because you've got all these heterogeneous sources of data that aren't being taken all at the same time. And you have to get all that together and come up

with an initial point for your model to start making its forecast from. So that's kind of an internet of things type of problem, right? Of like, yeah, you have all these connected devices and connected things, but how do I bring all that data into one repository and model it? That's right. It's interesting that a big part of that data source is data from commercial aircraft. And ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we have fewer aircraft up there flying, taking vertical soundings of the atmosphere. And that has degraded the quality of our models over the past six months or so. Really? That's something you don't think about every day. So how does that work? The airplanes are logging that and then it gets downloaded when they land or it's real time going to some.

Real time. They send the data real time. They've got sensors on. The most important data they take are takeoff and landing sounding through the atmosphere. And probably we're seeing, you know, a few percent degradation in the models, maybe as much as 5% in some situations due to that lack of data. And then the data's all free? Anyone could build a model and use it, right? Or everyone's putting it out there? Or is it government by government? How does that work? Mostly it's free. If you're making your own model, certainly it'll be free. But if you're a commercial entity, then you usually have to pay for the European center data. The US data is always free. Any hedge funds reaching out to you saying,

hey, can you build a model for us so we can do this on our own? Right. That's a big thing in our space of alternative data is what they call it. Right. There's a satellite counting how many cars are in a target parking lot, things like that. But it seems this would be right up their alley of, hey, we're going to build a model that's better than any of them. Yeah, I mean, the data is free and out there and the techniques are well known. Certainly you could build a better model with the investment. And it's so funny to me. Why is it called the European model? There's a bunch of Europeans in a room or it's like their European weather service or something? Right. It's a consortium. It's called the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting. And all the countries in the EU got together and provided funding to have this

laboratory that goes and runs supercomputers and makes modeling efforts. And this is for the entire climate and weather patterns, not just for hurricanes? That's for the whole world. It's not. And the cone of uncertainty, all that is just part of their normal model that's saying there's going to be rain in Frankfurt tomorrow. Yeah. I mean, it's a global model that's got grid boxes, 15 kilometers on a side. So all you got to do is look at the 15 kilometer grid box over New Orleans where they expect to see a hurricane. And there you've got your forecast. Right. But we're talking, so are those different things though than tomorrow's forecast and the intensity models and the hurricane track and the cone of uncertainty, all that? You know, yeah, there are specialized hurricane models. Okay. There are two kinds of models that the National Hurricane Center uses

for their hurricane forecasts, what are the so-called global models? Okay, that includes the European model. It includes the American GFS model. Those models subdivide the entire globe into a 3D grid. And those models are also used by everyone to, you know, make forecasts for wherever they happen to be in the world. But there's also a specialized hurricane model that only zooms in on the

hurricane itself. For instance, this HWRF model, it's got a nested grid that goes down to, I think, like a kilometer and a half, zoomed right in around the core of a hurricane. And then it's got another grid of course resolution going out a few hundred miles from the hurricane, and then a third grid at even course resolution covering you know most of the globe so that's very specialized and they use very special techniques to initialize what the hurricane is doing the European model doesn't have any of that it's not specialized it just runs a forecast for the whole globe and that is and some of these hurricane owners are dropping instruments into the into the eyewall

That's right. The uh, the one specialized hurricane model Hwrf takes data from the hurricane hunters and puts it into its model and that data Some of it will get into the european model and the the global Gfs model but not all of it. So the hurricane hunter data is absolutely critical for making a good intensity forecast. And the best source of intensity forecast we have is one or some of these specialized models that can utilize the hurricane hunter data. And let's talk about that intensity for a minute. Seems to me from reading your stuff there in my naive view of this all it used to just be all about the wind speed and at least as I've

become more educated on it that's just one of you know three main factors which is the surge, the flooding possibility. I think we've seen more and more recently, right? If that storm's just stalled over Texas, it seems, but any area, the flooding is the worst. The rain is the worst threat. So do we need a new scale instead of cat five or right? That takes all these pieces into effect. Cause it seems like you could have a fast moving cat five that might hurt a little teeny place on the landfall, but then it's rather a non-event for everywhere else,

whereas you could have a Cat 1 that dumps tons of rain and is a way bigger issue. Absolutely. Yeah, the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Saffir-Simpson scale we use to rate hurricanes is based only on wind and doesn't take into account some of the chief hazards, which can be storm surge and flooding rains. So it's wholly inadequate. We really need to go away from rating 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 just based on winds. Because as you noted, well, for instance, during Hurricane Harvey, I mean, that stalled for days over Texas and dumped up to 60 inches of rain and caused a hundred plus billion dollar disaster. Most of the time while it was doing that,

it was just a tropical storm. So catastrophic impacts and just a tropical storm. Hurricane Florence back in 2018, similarly, only a category one at landfall, but it also set all-time rainfall records in multiple states, 20, 30 inches of rain in some of the Carolinas, and over $20 billion in damage. Again, very slow moving, dumped a lot of rainfall. There really should have been a different warning put out for it. I was saying in my blog, hey, it only says Category 1, but this is a Category 5 flood threat. We really got to come up with a better system of making that known my yeah my vote would be basically average the three threats and give that it's a cat four because it's only a cat one win but it's the cat five flood event so we're calling it a cat four whatever um yeah i mean the europeans have a simple system

that maybe we could go to they just got got yellow, orange and red alert. And basically, red alert is unprecedented. So for Florence, we would have given a red alert for North Carolina said, you know, this is going to be unprecedented rains. You're going to see a rainfall flooding event like you've never seen before. there's these hedge fund world catastrophe bonds are you familiar with them so yeah um so essentially the insurance companies don't have the balance sheet or the desire to write all this insurance on all this high price real estate in coastal regions. So these financial gurus came around and said, hey, we'll help you sell catastrophe bonds, which basically the investors in those bonds, if there's no hurricane damage,

well, they'll get a yield and they'll get a return. If there is, they could lose the whole value of the bond. So instead of a company going bankrupt, there's a catastrophe, their bond goes bankrupt. But the fine print there, so in a Florence or a Harvey, it was flood damage, not hurricane damage. And so the bond doesn't pay. So it seems like a pretty big mismatch between what's trying to be done there. And you've been very good at quoting the financial impacts. Do you see that growing dramatically? Like, is that because just inflation overall? So I, I threw a lot at you there, but

let's start with the financial impacts. What are you seeing over time then? Yeah, it's a difficult problem to figure out just how much of the increase we're seeing in financial damages is due to storms getting stronger and how much is just due to the fact that more people live by the coast, they have more stuff, and therefore the losses are higher. I think that's the dominant influence, the fact that we're more prosperous, more people are in harm's way. But storms are getting stronger. I mean, it is an expected consequence of climate change. You put more energy into a system, you're going to get stronger events. And particularly with respect to hurricanes, that means higher winds and bigger storm surge and more flooding rains.

So yeah, we're already seeing an increase in damages, and that's going to continue, particularly with respect to storm surge, because not only are the winds that are going to pile up the storm surge get stronger, but we got sea level rise going on too. I mean, it's only about three millimeters per year now, but it's accelerating. And I expect by mid-century, we're going to see sea level rises on the order of a foot, maybe a foot and a half over most of the coast, and stronger storm surges are going to be coming in on top of that, causing incredible amounts of damage. I remember seeing a study by Lloyds of London on Hurricane Sandy's damage in New York City. They found that if it hadn't been for sea level rise over the past century, the storm surge in New York City would have had $2 billion less damage.

So a storm surge can make a big difference in your damages. And how are they calculating these damages, or how do you get those numbers? That's insured losses or just total estimated damage? That's total, because insured losses, a lot of people don't have flood insurance and they aren't required to carry it for places, for instance, behind levy systems where they supposedly have one in 100 year protection. So the National Flood Insurance Program requires you to carry flood insurance if you're going to get a mortgage, if you're in a one in 100 or greater risk area. But those risk areas are not very well delineated now.

Those maps are old in a lot of cases. They haven't been updated for multiple years, even though they're required to be. And they don't give you the true risk because climate change is continually adding to that risk. So there's a lot of flood insurance that isn't being carried. So I always just look at total damages, not insured damages. It gives you a truer picture of what's going on. Nobody really knows what the total

damage, right? It's still some sort of estimate? Yeah, it is. I mean, the rule of thumb that the Hurricane Center always uses is that total damage from a hurricane is double the insured damage. So that's probably within a factor or two, but in some cases it won't be, I'm sure. Do you personally have issues with like the insurers not covering, right? Oh, that was a flood caused by a hurricane. Still seems like it should be covered by your hurricane insurance. You want to weigh that? I mean, with these sort of multi-threat storms, I mean, it should be made clear what the insurance is for. I mean, yeah, if you're not getting flood coverage as part of your damage, then it invites abuse of the system. Yeah.

What about you living in Michigan, and we see 10 years of increased activity on the coast and the federal government has to keep rebuilding and bailing these people out? Like, yeah, you know, we're subsidizing these people to live in risky areas along the coast, us in Michigan. We don't have hurricane exposure here, yet we're taking our tax dollars and paying for people to build on barrier islands, paying for people to build in floodplains, paying repetitive less lost properties. I mean, I remember reading about one place on Dauphin Island in Alabama, a barrier island offshore, where some of these properties, which are rental properties, the owner doesn't even live there, had been rebuilt four or five, six times over the past 20 years. And the amount of money that taxpayers have put into it are

several times the value of the property. It just doesn't make sense. We should be retreating from barrier islands, not rebuilding. That's probably an unpopular opinion in the developer world, right? Yeah, well, it's very unpopular. I mean, politics is king and money talks. But what's going to be happening is pretty soon, we're not going to be able to spend the money to defend everywhere along the coast that's going to need it. We're going to get storms hitting over wider stretches of coast at higher intensity, causing more damage. And

there simply won't be enough money in the pot to rebuild everywhere. I mean, the National Flood Insurance Program is already over $20 billion in debt, and that's after multiple debt forgivenesses over the past few years. So to protect or to rebuild, you're saying, or both? Both. We're going to need to do a lot of protecting. We're going to need to build a lot of seawalls in the future. We already have a few. I mean, New Orleans, they spent $14.6 billion after Katrina to rebuild that levy system. There are several in New England as well that were all built in response to hurricane disasters in the 1950s. Providence, New Bedford, for example. We're going to need one in

Galveston. We're going to need one in Tampa Bay. We're going to need some in Florida. There's going to be a lot of coastal defenses that are going to be needed, because if we don't do it, we're going to suffer astronomical losses. But is that even realistic, right? So let's take New Orleans. So they spent $14 billion. What can it withstand? It can withstand a Category 3 hurricane. So basically, it's something that's got a 1 in 100 chance of happening in a given year, which means over a 30-year period, it's got about 1 in 100 chance of happening in a given year, which means over a 30-year period, it's got about a 26% chance of happening. So not great protection, but better

than it was. So it's questionable whether that money was worth it. I mean, so far, it's worked out good. I mean, New Orleans has withstood a couple of storms since the rebuild, but it's not going to last forever. I mean, it's going to get overwhelmed at some point and we're going to have to abandon New Orleans. Right. And like I grew up in Vero Beach, Florida, which was that 05 or 04 when they had two hits right there. 04, yeah. Yeah. So every year they add sand to the beach, every get swept away and they right they kept trying to defend the boardwalk there i don't know what the cost of taxpayers was there but it was like it's just insanity it seems like of keep adding sand keeps getting washed away

um and whole houses our house was on the beach we eventually sold moved awake and it's it was maybe 300 feet between the front of the house and the boardwalk down to the beach now is maybe 50 feet, which is just natural erosion. But that seems insane. And I wanted to touch on one in 100 year storm. That gets used a lot in finance. And I think incorrectly, perhaps, usually when someone's saying, oh, we could have never foreseen this loss this month. There was a one in 100 hundred year, you know, move in XYZ asset. Do you feel like that's a true thing in the weather and climate, or is it kind of used in the same thing of just kind of meaning unlikely?

You know, a better way to look at it is that it's a 1% chance of occurring in a given year. So in a hundred years, odds are it'll happen once. But you have to understand that if you keep on adding together that 1% chance each year, it accumulates. Like I said, over a 30-year period, a 1% chance yearly event is going to happen at 26% of the time. So that's probably a better way to look at the risk. And the risks aren't stationary, they're shifting. I mean, a one in 100 100 year storm due to climate change is going to be more like a one in 20 year storm maybe in 30 years from now. It's going to be that bad that the risk will increase because you're making stronger storms.

Sea level rise is happening. So the damages are going to go up and we're going to see a lot more damaging storms, one in 100 year storms in the future. But do you think even extreme weather hurricanes are normally distributed? So one in 100 year probability is based on a normal distribution, right? So if we're talking about the height of people, right, that works. If we're talking about financial markets, it doesn't work, right? One in 100 year things happen way more frequently. The tails are fatter. So I guess,

is weather, are the tails fatter than what we would expect and what we're building levies based on a one in a hundred year storm? Yeah, the fat tails are the big issue here. It's not the everyday, you know, sort of somewhat extreme events. It's the tails that are going to kill us. And those tails are a lot fatter than we think and there's synergistic effects that we don't understand that are going to bite us that are making those tails fatter let me give you an example okay this this summer we had a just insane wildfire event in california and oregon we had you know yeah still going on. Really intense drought, intense heat waves, some of the hottest temperatures ever recorded, and bad fires. Okay,

well, you'd expect to see that with climate change warming up things and drying out vegetation. Okay, yeah, we're going to get worse fires. But these were so much more worse than even those expectations brought us to believe because of the winds that came. Now, why was it so windy? Well, we had a really unusual jet stream behavior during that event. The jet stream kinked into this position where you had a really intense ridge over the western U.S. and a deep trough over the Rockies. So intense, in fact, that two days after Rapid City, South Dakota recorded 102 degrees Fahrenheit, they had snow on the ground. So we're talking weather whiplash of the most extreme variety

you can imagine. So, okay. They don't do climate change in Rapid City, South Dakota either. No, they don't. Colorado also, they had, you know, five, six inches of snow two days after getting 100 degrees. And that extreme event, what it did is generate this really powerful once in a generation sort of wind event over Oregon, where you had incredibly strong tropical storm force winds blowing offshore, fanning these fires, causing the firestorm that we saw in this ridiculous air pollution episode, catastrophic losses. Okay, so why did the jet stream do that? Okay, well, now here's where we get into the synergy between what climate change may be doing to us to fatten the tails of these distributions, these extreme events.

For one thing, Arctic sea ice was at its second lowest value on record this year. We saw a massive heat event in Siberia over the summer, ridiculous temperatures. It got to 100 degrees in Siberia for the first time on record this summer, north of the Arctic Circle. All that heat caused a lot of melting and made the Arctic sea ice coverage the second lowest next to 2012. Now, there's a lot of research showing that when you take away that much Arctic sea ice, it has a synergistic effect on the atmosphere and climate that causes a jet stream to do weird stuff. Could it have caused a jet stream to do the weird thing we saw in South Dakota and drive

this offshore wind event over Oregon? Perhaps. The jury's still out on that. But what we do know what caused the jet stream to behave that oddly was the fact that there was a huge typhoon that hit South Korea three or four days before that. And that typhoon moved all the way up into Russia and it caused a ripple effect on the jet stream. So it made the jet stream kind of go boing and cause this oscillation. Okay. Well, typhoons do that all the time. But what was unusual about this typhoon is it was at near record strength because of near record warm waters. In fact, record warm waters off the coast of Japan and Korea.

Japan had its hottest temperature on record this summer in August, they hit an all-time high over 105 degrees, and those record warm waters caused a near record strength typhoon, which then jumped into the jet stream, causing it to go buoying, causing this weird oscillation over North America that drove this offshore wind event in this catastrophic firestorm that we saw. So you're saying it's a complex system. It's a complex system that we're pushing hard in really unknown ways that are going to combine together to cause crazy things that we didn't know could happen. In the financial world, when we talk about these complexes, we're increasing

the fragility, right? So the more complex it is, the more little things can cause something else to break elsewhere, essentially. Yeah. And the complexity is also in the human systems that we have. Now, if we've got, for instance, a pandemic going on, right? That changes our response and our risk and our vulnerability. Where we didn't see the pandemic coming, that's caused a lot of troubles that we didn't anticipate in some of these natural disasters that have come

at the same time as the pandemic. There are all these interlocking systems that have failure points that we don't understand, and they're going to come bite us. So how do you, so climate change, we've been touching all around it. So you're obviously, I, with you, I don't think there's camps that anyone should be in. It's, it's real. You see the data every day. Like how, how do you think about it personally in terms of what we can do, where we're headed? What are your what are your thoughts overall? And it seems you joined Yale because they're kind of furthering that mission.

Yeah, I mean, the big issue is communication. We understand the science well. The scientists are all on board unanimous that we're risking our civilization by putting so much heat trapping gas into the atmosphere to cause extreme events like we're already seeing. It's only just beginning. I mean, we're seeing about one degree centigrade of warming so far over pre-industrial. The rate we're going, if we're lucky, it's only going to be three or three and a half. I mean, and we're already having trouble handling one. So basically our civilization is not going to be able to withstand the type of global warming we're pushing onto it. So we have to understand the risks and we have to start preparing and we got to stop, you know, building in vulnerable areas. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to be building in floodplains and on coasts and out west in the,

what we call the WUI, the wildland urban interface next to trees that are going to burn. So all these high risk sorts of activities. Say that one again. What's it called? WUI, Wildland Urban Interface. Large reason for the loss, as we've seen in recent years, is too many people are living next to forests because, you know, it's nice to live next to a forest and they're vulnerable to fire. And so, but from your view, it's not a catastrophic, six years from now, we're all going to die. It'll be this, we're kind of the frog boiling in the pot, right? It's going to be more extreme weather, but also talk through that a little bit.

It's not just going to be more extreme. There might be periods of relative calm, right? It seems involuntarily we're going to have both sides of that effect. Yeah. Yeah. There are years where things are not going to be so big a deal. And then there's going to be years where like 2020, where things just kind of go nuts. And we've had a number of those years. 2010 was the first one I noticed with the

Russian heat wave and drought that caused a spike in food prices because the Russians stopped shipping wheat due to the drought. And it caused the Arab Spring revol prices because the Russians stopped shipping wheat due to the drought and it caused the Arab Spring revolts in the Middle East where you had multiple governments toppling. So you're gonna have years like that and then in between you'll have years where it's not that big a deal and you'll go on like oh yeah this is kind of what it was like in the 20th century. But you're gonna see a few years that things are going to get really broke. I mean, we haven't really had one yet where you're going to get, I mean, we saw Katrina in 2005 that

kind of gave us a wake-up call, but there's going to be multiple events happening worldwide that are going to cause a collapse or partial collapse of the food system is my concern, where now we can't feed everybody because, okay, we had a massive drought in Russia and Europe that knocked their wheat crop down. They can't ship out wheat anymore. At the same time, maybe we had a ridiculous flood in the U.S. that flooded all the fields, and you can't grow crops there either. And in Brazil, they can't ship soybeans because fires or floods there cause the closure of their road system, which is vulnerable. You're going to have a synergistic collapse or partial collapse of the food system that's going to cause a big, oh, crap moment globally where everyone in the financial sector is going to say, oh,

we should have seen this coming, but didn't. And how do you trade that, for lack of a better term? How do I trade that? Trade it, right? Like what if that's a possibility, what do you put in your portfolio? Or what do you how do you view protecting yourself against those eventualities? Yeah. I mean, gold is always the hedge, right? But gold didn't do that well this year, surprisingly. Right. I'm not a gold person, but sure.

I was just wondering if you think of it, and I'll come back to the food issue. Do you see actual, do you tie in your research into actual crop yields and things of that nature or you're just speaking in generalities of there could be drought no i do write about the the fragility of the food system and there have been a number of studies coming out you know talking about just what i did about synergistic they call it multi-breadbasket failures where you've got multiple grain area grain areas that

have a crop failure that cause a partial collapse of the food system and you got to think about when that happens you're going to see mass migrations okay you're going to see people leaving these areas where it can't sustain them anymore coming to the borders and in fact uh a big reason that the u.s southern border is having such a big crisis down there is because of a multi-year drought that happened in Central America, particularly Guatemala, Honduras, those nations of Central America. The drought has driven a mass migration, and a lot of those people have showed up at the southern border. We're going to see a lot more of that. That is just beginning. There's going to be millions, maybe hundreds of millions of people that are going to be turned into refugees due to chaos in the climate

system, crop failures, that kind of thing. And what would the solution be so everyone should grow their own crops? Like so it's not so globally, you know, so you're not relying on it coming from one of these areas that could have an issue. Problem with there is if you're Guatemalan and there's a drought and you can't grow your own crops, what do you do? Yeah, I mean, it's a big problem. I mean, certainly urban agriculture makes a lot of sense to me where you grow things indoors with solar powered greenhouses. They could certainly do that in Central America, but water availability would be a problem in a lot of areas. When you get a drought or you get water to grow your crops,

you can't do it. Drought has been the single biggest cause of the crash of civilizations in Earth's history. When the crops dry up because they don't have rain, when there's no water to drink, people leave. You can't do anything else when there's no water to drink, people leave. You can't do anything else. There's no water. You can't live without water. Speaking of water, they're just launching a water futures contract, I think. Views on water, are we running out of it?

Is it going to become more and more scarce for resource? Are us on the Great Lakes going to have to start putting up defenses? What do you think? Yeah, investing in water is probably one of your smarter things you can do. Actually, one of the smart things I did as far as my personal investing goes is I bought property in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Very wet up there, I got a river running through my property. So, you know, land where there's water is certainly a really smart investment. The Great Lakes.

It's going to get warmer there, right? Yeah, it's certainly going to get warmer. I mean, there are going to be winners and losers. There's a great document put out by our government called the National Climate Assessment, which talks on a state-by-state level how we expect climate change to unfold. And that's worth reading for your particular area to see, you know, what the stressors are going to be and what we can do in our particular area to defend against it. And was it your blog or did I read somewhere else of that people, you're not seeing people vote with

their money yet, right? That the people aren't moving to these more climate protected areas. I can't remember if that was your work or not, but there was someone outlined in Upper Peninsula as one of them of like, if you're worried about climate change, here are the few areas that would be ideal to live in, but there's not an influx of people going there. So it kind of says people aren't worried about it yet. Yeah, it's true. It's not happening yet. It's going to happen. We're already seeing near coastlines where property values for low-lying properties are not going up as fast as they are for ones at higher elevation. And we're going to see some areas, Miami comes to mind, where there's a risk

that a big storm coming in could cause a crash in the real estate market, cause people to move away, no more money coming in to support the state government. And you could see a mass exodus from someplace like Miami sometime maybe sooner than we think, 20, 30 years down the road, maybe even 10 years down the road if you get a massive hurricane come in and flood a large section of the area. Did you read, there was an article in The Atlantic about a year ago, they sent a reporter down there to pose as a condo buyer. And it's hilarious because eight out of 10 of the people just lying through their teeth of like, no, it's not a problem. We put in these pumps. And the guy was well prepared. He's like, well, the pumps can only handle so many gallons per hour. If it rises, it's going to fail. And then there was one guy who was honest. He said, yeah, this is a huge problem, but you're going to flip this thing in two years. It's not going to be your problem. But it was scary,

entertaining and scary at the same time of there's just, you know, they're still chilling it down there. Yeah. There's a great book by Jeff Goodall, the Rolling Stone reporter called The Water Will Come, where he talks about Miami and some of the real estate, you know, stuff going on down there. It's pretty crazy. It's the idea is to build as fast as you can to bring in more money to keep the system from going underwater, because you can spend the money to, you know, raise the rows, put more pumps in, that kind of thing. Now what? Someone should do the Lex Luthor, right? And like buy up the middle of Florida and then it'll become the new coastline, right? Yeah, that's not a bad idea, right?

Yeah. Anything else we need to cover here? We've gone wide and far. Well, you know, you and I live in the Great Lakes. We were talking about them. We got a high water problem here too, but it's not due to rising sea levels. It's due to too much rain. And strangely enough, it was due to a lot of ice cover not this past winter the winter before because it didn't allow the lakes to evaporate but that's

not gonna be forever I mean back in 2013 we saw record low water levels so a lot of variability in the system and that's something in general we expect to see more of worldwide is variability it's a high energy energy system. Like I said, we're putting more energy into the system, and that means more energy to power stronger storms, but at the same time, when the storms don't happen to be coming, more energy to power warmer temperatures, cause more evaporation, drop in water levels, that kind of thing. I'm also concerned about groundwater levels in the U. We're over pumping our groundwater, and that's a problem worldwide as well.

We're gonna see what already happened in India, day zero, where you don't have any groundwater. You turn on the tap, and there are a lot of big cities in India where you turn on the tap, and it doesn't flow for multiple days per week. So we gotta manage water smarter. That's a really big thing. Water, I think you're coming

out from this, is kind of the key to everything. Too much of it or too little, we need to learn to adapt. And what the issue is, it's not very transportable, right? So you'll have way too much water in one area, not enough water in the other area. How do you, you know, everything else in our world now that's instant. Amazon can move it from one place to another, all the logistics, but water is too heavy. And that would be a key, at least in the United States. In theory, you're in trillion dollars and get the water from where it is to where it's needed. Well, it's not an issue in China. They're building massive multibillion dollar conduits to ship the water around.

It's not working out so great for them. So I don't think they're happy about the results. But in the U.S., it's a political non-starter. You're not going to take away our Great Lakes water. It's too politically hot. That's what I mentioned the other day or a few minutes ago. Do we need to start putting up our defenses around, around the, when people start coming for our water?

Oh, it's happened multiple times. Yeah. What's the big reservoir, like Texas, Oklahoma, that's almost at zero, right? Isn't there a big groundwater?

Yeah. The Ogallala, the Ogallala aquifer. Yeah. Yeah. And in California, it's bad too. They've been over pumping there.. And in California, it's bad, too. They've been overpumping there.

And certainly the Colorado River watershed's in dire trouble. It's going to be tough to maintain the population increases in the desert southwest because of the lack of water. Great. Let's finish on some positive so we don't all – Okay. What do we have positive takeaways that we can do it? That when we all work from home, our heat output went down, right? Yeah.

Certainly technology is something in our favor, and the clean energy revolution is really remarkable. It's gone a lot faster than most people expected, and even despite four years of government interference this past four years, it's really pretty unstoppable. The move to solar and wind is really coming along well, and it's gonna keep going. And it does give me some hope that, you know,

with proper intelligent management, we can do this. And we've shown in the past with great challenges that worldwide, the governments of the world can come together to solve problems. We did this with the ozone hole in the 1980s. Back in 1985, we found, oh no, there's this giant hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. This is a big, oh, crap moment here. We better do something about it. And we did. The nations came together. They signed the Montreal Protocol.

Restrictions were put in place to no longer emit ozone-destroying gases, and the ozone layer was saved. If we hadn't done that, we would have been really in deep trouble now because the gases that also attack ozone will cause global warming as well. We would have been seeing, you know, 2050 levels of global warming right now. So there is precedent. We've done it in the past. We can do it in the future. There are a lot of very smart and hardworking people working on this. So we have the resources. We just need the political willpower to do it. We need the ability to store solar power, right? That would be a big plus. And let me ask you,

being somewhat of a wind expert, I have this pet theory that wind farms in your, you call it synergistic, but it seems too polite a word, right? The complex system, like it seems more antagonistic of this happens and it causes a bad effect elsewhere. But aren't they taking something out of the system and then there's going to be an effect somewhere else? Absolutely. How does that work? Well, there have been modeling studies done where you look at a giant wind farm over the U.S., say, and it's extracting energy from the atmosphere. And you look a couple days down the road and the low pressure system that you expected to be, you know, in this location

with this intensity is off by maybe 50 miles and it's a 5% different intensity. So yeah, potentially you could cause a situation where somebody who wasn't going to get nailed by a storm is now going to get nailed by a storm because the wind turbine area caused a change in the atmospheric patterns. There's no free lunch. Right, right. It seems that there's a hidden side to that we're not expecting. But at the same time, if you could put it right, if you put it out in the middle of the ocean or something, i've always thought in the middle of lake michigan would be a good spot for a big wind farm but that's true in the summer there's hardly ever any wind out there being a sailor um yeah you got to worry about ice because the lakes ice over and ice is bad for structures true and we need to

run a public service announcement that they're not windmills. They're not milling anything. They're generating. They're wind turbines. Great. Well, let's go on. We finish out all the pods. I was asking a few of your favorites. So favorite Michigan Wolverine of all time. asking a few of your favorites so uh favorite michigan wolverine of all time you a sports fan i am a sports fan favorite wolverine of all time boy that's a hard one uh there have been so many i think anthony carter the wide receiver because when i was an undergrad uh he caught a pass with no time remaining to win the game,

a 45-yard reception with the score tied. I'm going to look that one up. All right. Favorite hurricane, if that could be such a thing. I don't know. Well, my least favorite was Hugo, obviously, since it nearly killed me. You know, hurricanes are fascinating. And certainly, the stronger they are, the more fascinating they are. And the one that kind of

boggles my mind is Hurricane Patricia of a few years ago, 2016, off the coast of Mexico, 215 miles sustained winds. That's like, if there were a category seven, it'd be a category seven. So that's what we have to look forward to in the future or plan for in the future. More hurricane patricious because eventually one of those is going to form and hit the coast and it's going to be a real eye opener. I mean,

that's we're talking once it comes in, that's like EF for tornado damage over a path, 30 miles wide, something like that And then oh in the Gulf of Mexico No, no in the eastern Pacific off the coast of Mexico Okay, and it turned out that it weakened right before a landfall it only hit with 150 mile-per-hour winds But still caused a lot of damage, and it didn't hit a very populated section of coast

but something like that could have just as easily formed in the Gulf of Mexico, hit Tampa Bay or Houston. And the day is coming when we're going to see a half a trillion dollar storm hitting the coast of the U.S. It's a lot of dollars. Well, it's going to cause a recession. I mean, the day is coming. I mean, Hurricane Katrina was 1% of GDP, and that was a $150-ish billion storm. So think about maybe a 5% GDP storm. That's going to come. And you can't solve that with debt, right? The Fed can't solve a hurricane. The Fed can't.

What about some people's idea to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the Earth? or right the fed can't you know solve a hurricane the fed can't what do you is what about uh some people's idea to detonate a nuclear bomb inside the earth you know it seems to me like you'd get a lot of radiation spread all over the world probably a bad idea plus the fact that hurricanes generate like 100 nuclear bombs of energy per second the hurricane's just going to look at that and go huh huh what's that it's a little pinprick. It's nothing. It's not going to do a thing that cause a mass catastrophe of nuclear contamination. And what, is there any way to cool down the waters? There is. Yeah, you could potentially cause a hurricane to weaken by running it over an area of ocean where you pump up cold water from deep using

pumps at the surface. There have been some modeling studies done on it. It is feasible, but I worry about what's that going to do when there's not a hurricane or how's it going to affect weather patterns. Is it going to cause a drought? It could very well cause circulation patterns that cause drought. Drought is as big a deal as a hurricane, more so. Like I said, drought is the main enemy of civilization. It's caused more civilization to collapse than any other thing. Right, so you'd get the New Orleans people would vote for a complex system of underground, underwater pumps, but the Midwest might say, no thanks. We need our grain. We need no droughts.

Yeah. The day may be coming where we got to resort to the Hail Mary, and that's geoengineering, which we're talking about now, to deliberately modify the climate to reduce the impacts. We can cool down the climate. We can cool down the ocean, reduce hurricane strength. Should we do that? Oh, boy, we don't know what we're doing now. It's really risky to be deliberately messing with things on that scale. Maybe we'll have to do it to save ourselves, but I sure hope not. I am not an advocate of geoengineering, but I think it's okay to be studying it for now. There's a lot of research being done on it. And I mean, maybe one of these schemes will work out, spraying salt into the air over the

oceans to reflect sunlight and cool the planet, spreading sulfur in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight and cool the planet. These are some of the geoengineering ideas out there and they can work and they would work, but boy, we better know what we're doing and we better not have any other choice that leads me to my next your favorite climate porn movie for lack of a better term all these like uh movies about geoengineering and the day after tomorrow and oh the day after tomorrow was so hideous actually i've just finished a uh my own fiction novel called eye of the superstorm which if they made it into a Hollywood movie would just be Dynamite I mean it's got all the elements. It's got hurricane hunters going into storms. It's got a big flood on the Mississippi River

It's got tornadoes hitting Wisconsin is so cool I'll give you a copy You'd be an email you can you can read and decide for yourself and spread the word. I haven't looked for a publisher yet. I'm still working on the final details, but that's the one that needs to be made into a movie. Wait, this is your book? You wrote it? That's my book, yeah. Oh, send it along. Yeah. I mean, I got frustrated with trying to communicate via science on the risk we face from extreme weather and climate

change. So I decided to put it into a fiction story with characters. You really, you can make an emotional appeal through fiction on people, you know, via some of these movies you're talking about. And that's my little effort. Although, you know, I don't think they're making movies these days with the pandemic. So I don't expect to be happening anytime soon. And be a little more accurate than the day after tomorrow? Oh, please. That was a travesty. I mean, what horrible science.

Actually, I thought Sharknado was probably one of the best. Sharknado more realistic than Day After Tomorrow? I think it was a little more, well, except for the sharks, of course. But it was a more entertaining movie. I like to review weather movies on my blog. I've reviewed a bunch of them. And actually, Sharknado was one of the highest rated ones on Rotten Tomatoes of all time. Much better than Day After Tomorrow.

So what are some of the other ones on there? You know, the highest rated one was one that came out last year, a year before, Crawl, about the woman who goes to rescue her father in a Category 5 hurricane, and he's trapped down in the crawl space with an alligator. There are actually multiple alligators. Uh-oh. Yeah, right.

Trapped in the crawl space of a house during a Category 5 hurricane coming with alligators. What could go wrong? In Louisiana or Florida or where? It was Florida, yeah. All right. But, you know, it's a problem. Most of these movies are just awful.

Their science is awful. Their melodrama, the writing's awful. The acting's terrible. I mean, Twister was just so bad. We did an event where all the people from my school, my grad school, went to see all those meteorologists. And we were laughing so hard at how bad the science was. The people in front of us had to leave.

We'd be going, ho, ho,, whole stratocumulus, no way, you know. Do they, but they actually drop those droplet things into the hurricane hunters? Like Twister? Those little mini... No, the way they did it in Twister was not the way the hurricane hunters do it. The hurricane hunters, they have a cylinder with a little probe that falls on a parachute, and it radios back information as it dangles on the parachute. It's about a, I don't know, $800 probe or something with GPS on it. Pretty sophisticated piece of equipment. All right.

Cool. And then we'll finish up. We ask all our guests' favorite Star Wars character. Oh, it's got to be Yoda. Okay. He had the force so strong with him i had a guess you were gonna say this is nice uh airpods holder but yeah oh perfect yeah yeah he would have been at one with the climate making sure it's all you know synergistic as we said right that's right use the force that's what we need to do.

We need to use the force. Use the force to defeat the weather force. We use our force of our intellect, of our morality, of our creation, of our civilization. We have all the tools we need. We just need to band together to do it. Just do it. I love it. All right, Jeff. Thanks a lot. It's been fun. Okay. Likewise. You've been listening to The Derivative.

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