The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - We Weren't Expecting This: What Does a Super El Niño Mean For the Climate? with Tad Patzek

Episode Date: June 24, 2026

This year's projected Super El Niño forming in the Pacific could become one of the strongest climate oscillations in over a century. As regions prepare for the effects, and continue to adapt to extreme heat waves, intensifying storms, accelerating ice loss, and increasingly erratic rainfall, scientists and citizens alike are questioning what our new normal will look like under accelerated global heating. From climate basics to unfolding atmospheric research, what do we know about the trajectory our climate is currently on, and what gaps of knowledge still need to be filled?  In this episode, Nate is joined by earth scientist and thermodynamicist Tad Patzek for an exploration of the mechanics and mathematics of global heating itself. Tad explains why CO₂ has such an outsized effect in contrast to its small concentration, how water vapor amplifies the greenhouse effect, and why climate models sometimes get things wrong. His new research, currently under peer review at Geophysical Research Letters, identifies a declining Earth albedo as an additional accelerant of warming over the past 26 years. Combined with accelerating ocean heat absorption, melting ice sheets, and the dynamics of an approaching Super El Niño, Tad argues the warming curve itself may be bending upward. Is the projected Super El Niño a signal of more extreme climatic swings to come? What sort of research is being done to explore and predict climate feedback dynamics that are only partly understood? And if the warming curve is indeed bending upward, what does it mean to plan, prepare, or adapt when the system itself may be moving faster than our models anticipated? (Conversation recorded on June 18th, 2026)    About Tad Patzek: Tad Patzek is Professor Emeritus of Petroleum and Chemical Engineering at the Earth Sciences Division and Director of the Ali I. Al-Naimi Petroleum Engineering Research Center in KAUST, Saudi Arabia. Formerly, he was the Lois K. and Richard D. Folger Leadership Professor and Chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin. Additionally, he was previously a Professor of Geoengineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining Berkeley, he was a researcher at Shell Development, a research company managed for 20 years by M. King Hubbert. He is also a full Presidential Professor in Poland, which is the highest honor, and also served as a member of the DOI Macondo Well Advisory Committee. Patzek's current research involves mathematical and numerical modeling of earth systems with emphasis on fluid flow in soils and rocks that can be hydrofractured. He is working on the thermodynamics and ecology of human survival, and food and energy supply for humanity. His current emphasis is the use of unconventional natural gas as a fuel bridge to the possible new energy supply schemes for the world. Patzek is a coauthor of over 400 papers and reports, and most recently, he has cumulated his research into his upcoming book Thermal Power and Climate Change: A Data-Driven Analysis of Cause and Effect, 1800-2100 (Preprint available now)   Show Notes and More   Watch this video episode on YouTube   Want to learn the broad overview of The Great Simplification in 30 minutes? Watch our Animated Movie.   ---   Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future   Join our Substack newsletter   Join our Hylo channel and connect with other listeners

the planet is, let's say, one and a half degrees warmer on average than it was in the pre-industrial times. One and a half degrees doesn't sound like much. In fact, people shrug their arms. What do I care? But there are several phenomena which may justify a scientific conclusion that the rate of global warming is accelerating. The good news is that the oceans dampen the magnitude of that acceleration. The bad news is that heat. will stay with us for decades, if not centuries.

So even if we stop CO2 injection today, the ocean still will be warmer. You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagen's. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment and human behavior all fit together and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming great simplification. Today I'm pleased to welcome back, physicist and earth scientist and my friend Tad Patsik

for an exploration of the foundational physics behind our planet's climate system, including the currently forming Super El Nino, which could be one of the strongest events of its kind in the last 140 years. Tad Patsik is a professor emeritus of chemical and petroleum, engineering and director of the upstream petroleum engineering center at the King Abdallah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Prior to that position, he was the lowest K. and Richard D. Fulger leadership professor and chairman of the Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering Department at the University of Texas in Austin. Additionally, he was previously a professor of geoengineering

at the University of California, Berkeley, and a researcher at Shell. development, a company managed for 20 years by M. King Hubbard. He is also a full presidential professor in Poland, which is the highest honor and also served as a member of the DOI Macondo Well Advisory Committee. Tad's research focuses on the thermodynamics and ecology of human survival and the future of food and energy supply for humanity. Most recently, he has accumulated his research into his upcoming book, Thermal Power and Climate Change, a data-driven analysis of cause and effect, 1800 to 2100. He was recently on TGS to discuss that book, primarily about energy and materials and food and implications. In this conversation,

we turned the attention to physics and climate, and we do an Earth system speed round, and some of the core questions around global heating. We discuss how recent research on declining reflectivity has accelerated heating in the past 10 years. We do talk about the upcoming super el-Nino and the implications, as well as various future warming scenarios. If you're following this story, this is quite a sobering conversation, but right in the fairway of the natural science discussions we have on this platform

and an important one. If you want to dig deeper into the resources and information referenced in Tad's conversation or in any conversation on this platform, I encourage you to take a look at the show notes which are available for every episode in our catalog by visiting the great simplification.com, which is linked in the description of this episode. With that, please welcome back Tad Patsik. Tad Patsik, welcome back. to the Great Simplification.

Thank you. A few months ago, you were on the show talking about energy and the thermodynamic foundations of civilization, including power flows and material fluxes and overshoot and the fossil amoeba. You're a unique guest for me because I've known you for going on 20 years, and you are one of the smartest Earth's system scientist I know. And I've had a lot of climate scientist on the program, but I didn't know most of them personally. So I want to address global heating. And I'll ask you, which is probably how you treat me anyways all the time, to consider me as a earnest and curious high school student in this conversation. I really want to understand these things. If you don't

don't mind, I'm going to do a little bit of a climate basics speed round to kick off the conversation, but you don't have to give super short answers. You ready? Yes. So first, can you explain the role of CO2 in the atmosphere? And I've heard this a dozen times, if not 100, why should we care about a molecule that's only 400 parts per million total part of our atmosphere? That is a very good question. So let's first start from the basics. CO2 in the atmosphere is the effect of natural emissions and human emissions, anthropogenic emissions. And right now, the anthropogenic emissions increase its concentration, from roughly 280 ppm in the pre-industrial era to 435 ppm today. Doesn't look like much.

But it's there and it stays there literally forever exchanging mass with the oceans, land and what have you. Half of all emitted CO2 goes into the atmosphere. So the more we inject CO2, the more CO2, the more CO2, the more CO2. we have in the atmosphere. Also, because CO2 is such a dilute gas, its concentration throughout the lower atmosphere, up to the tropopause, let's say, is uniform. So you have the same 435 BPM here and there.

Okay? And that's very important. The atmosphere cools down very rapidly as you go up from the Earth's surface to let's say when you fly your jet. If you fly your jet and you look at the flight report, you will see that your temperature is around minus 40 degrees centigrade because that's what it is at the elevation you fly.

And so the main greenhouse gas on Earth is in fact water, water vapor and liquid water to some degree. But the concentration, of water vapor in the atmosphere declines very rapidly with height. Ah, so, so water is something like 4,000 ppm in the atmosphere,

so like 10x, uh, what CO2 is, but it's not uniform like CO2 is. In fact, it declines exponentially with elevation. Okay. So where at the elevation, at the where Earth

at which Earth emits radiation, which is kind of your tropopause, it's very cold and there's almost no water vapor. Okay, it's very dry. So at that elevation, CO2 dominates emissions of the planet. Okay. So that's one. 2.

So CO2 is the driver of the climate change and water vapor is the follower. It reacts to the change of CO2 concentration. So if I have more CO2, I warm up the planet and I have more water in the atmosphere. If I have less CO2, I dry up the planet and I have less water in the atmosphere. So tiny little changes of CO2 concentration

cause relatively large changes of water vapor concentration and a greenhouse effect from water. So when CO2 was pre-industrial levels, 280 parts per million, which was near the lowest it's been in... 800,000 years. Okay. Was it a dryer?

world then? No, because the CO2 fluctuated then and you had essentially Milankovych cycle driven, so very long-term changes of climate, which occurred really every 100,000 years over the last 800,000 years. And so the CO2 fluctuated between 280, 300 and 180 ppm. during this 800,000 years. And so why is the fact that it's 435 parts per million instead of 280 parts per million, like to someone that doesn't understand this at all, why is that so unbelievably civilization and biosphere changing? So CO2 has a pronounced greenhouse effect, causes, a pronounced greenhouse effect.

causes a pronounced greenhouse effect by regulating water and adjusting the temperature of the planet. It is the key controller of the climate on the planet. So now we have more CO2 and the planet is, let's say, one and a half degrees warmer on average than it was in the pre-industrial times. One and a half degrees doesn't sound like much. In fact, people shrug their arms.

What do I care? But that's just an average number over the entire planet. Is that the world average and it's actually higher than that on land or is that just land? Yes. It's the world average and it is higher on the land. You know, when the world is one and a half, let's say the land will be two degrees centigrade of increased temperature. Right. Okay.

So something you just mentioned, I've done so many podcasts, Tad, and I've asked this question four or five times, and I've still not gotten a good answer to it. So I'm going to try again. You mentioned that CO2 is the main knob for temperature. How do we know that CO2 emissions are leading warming and not the other way around? Because there's mechanisms in our planetary system that released more carbon dioxide as the planet, gets hotter, maybe you can explain the physics how we know this relationship is primarily CO2 leads the warming and not vice versa. When you release two trillion tons of CO2 in 140 years, that is a geological force. That's what we have done. We have released between 2.3 and 2.6 trillion or 1,000 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. That is. a huge effect on the planetary climate system. So there's

no doubt about it. Whatever other fluxes of CO2 there are, the Earth tries to keep them in stasis, in equilibrium. So whatever gets absorbed by the oceans and emitted by the oceans,

in general, cancels out. Same thing with the land and the atmosphere. What the different The differential is small and is caused by humans, but that differential accumulates in the atmosphere and in the oceans and on land. And so that is the driver of the climate change.

There's no doubt about it whatsoever. If there weren't human emissions, we would have had the same climate as we had over the last 800,000 years, and in the next 20,000 years, We would have had, or depending how you count, we would have had another ice age. But we won't. In fact, not for 100,000 years.

So I've also seen graphs and other research that show historical periods in Earth's history that had way higher CO2. And we didn't see runaway warming. Can you explain what's going on there? And if this is true, why are we so concerned about today's levels? Well, I mean, runaway warming, you know, during the perilsene-eocene thermal transition about 55 million years ago, the temperature on Earth was higher than palisine by about 8 degrees or 12 degrees relative to today. And that world had no ice and sea level, which was tens of meters higher, than it is today.

And it was a very different world. So it follows that high CO2 concentration causes high temperature. Run away is a loaded term. It is what it is relative to where CO2 is and all the reactions and rearrangements of global circulation, global oceanic currents, and whatever. That is the complex interlinked global climate system,

which is now changing slowly to a warmer one because we are driving it to that change. Now, my own research, which is a preprint in geophysical research letters now, is still in review, shows that that may be changing for all of us and the plants. We're going to get to your new paper in a moment. I just have a couple more basic questions. You mentioned the 2.3 plus trillion tons of additional CO2 that humans have added to the atmosphere. I hear repeatedly that the oceans absorb approximately 90% of the excess heat and a third plus or minus of the carbon emissions.

So how is that dynamic affected the impacts of greenhouse emissions and the warming so far? And is there a risk of a tipping point in that system? Again, as I said, roughly half of the emitted CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. And in the atmosphere, in fact, it controls the climate of the planet. It causes the global warming because atmosphere is our window to the universe. if you dim the window, you warm up the planet. That's as simple as that. Now, of course, the oceans will absorb more CO2

and will acidify, but they absorb as much as they can, and the CO2 in the atmosphere keeps on rising because we keep on emitting. So this segues into a topic that I'm most curious about and why I asked you back on the show so soon, is I'm reading a lot about not only a strong El Nino, but what some people are referring to as a super El Nino in the Pacific Ocean,

coming now this summer and into the fall and into the winter. So maybe you can first tell us what is an El Nino and how a regular El Nino affects the climate. Well, again, there are many excellent videos illustrating El Nino from a variety of sources, NOAA, NASA, PBS, are some of them. So very briefly, El Nino, Southern Oscillation, is a natural climate variability occurring in the equatorial Pacific. And it occurs every four to seven years, or three to seven years. and then the planet goes back to the normal state and if it overshoots it goes the other way

to Laninia, which is the opposite to El Nino. Now, in the normal state of the Pacific Ocean along the equator, the trade winds blow from the east to the west and they are very strong and continuous. And these winds drag water across the Pacific and push the water

towards Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. So after a while, there's a lot of very warm water gathered or piled up in the Western Pacific. And that water causes a lot of convection storms and a return circulation, Walker circulation,

back to the east, all the way to the west coast of Southern America. And so it goes on. And then that those disturbances of the atmosphere over Indonesia and Australia cause the trade winds to weaken. They become weak. and then that warm water that piled up there starts flowing back towards the Americas or South America.

And by doing so, in fact, it limits the upwelling of very cold water brought along the coast of Chile, the Peruvian current, and causes the water along the western coast of America. of South America to warm up. So now you have much warmer temperature along the South American coast and the pile of water in the Western Pacific in Indonesia is gone. So now slowly the reverse is happening.

The trade winds recover and the whole thing is repeated. But before they recover, cover, there could be a laninia which then causes the temperature of Western Pacific to be

cooler. Still warm, but cooler. Now, you can say, well, who cares? This occurs only along the equator. But that's not true. The convection from the warm water then spreading across the Pacific

causes disruptions to the Walker circulation, and moves up and down the jet stream by creating so-called rosby waves, meanders of the jet stream, that can go way north and way south. When they go way up north, they warm weather and climate way up north,

let's say, in Northern America or in Asia. When they go way down south, south, there could be actually a significant cooling as it occurs, let's say, during winter, with the big freezes in Texas and in Florida. So it's a very dynamic system in which these oscillations of pressure over the Pacific and movement of water go regularly back and forth have been for thousands and thousands of years. but the background temperature of the phenomenon,

which is the average temperature of water in the Pacific Ocean, is increasing. In fact, I have a graph showing how much it has increased. So each El Nino is an excursion up in temperature in the eastern Pacific, but relative to a higher background level. So there is another increased base temperature in which we have these spikes caused by El Nino and Lanninia. So the 1.5 degrees Celsius average on the earth is the background,

and then the El Nino or Super El Nino is an increase above that that already increased base. Okay, so what does it mean when something, as I've been, been told as a super el nino year. And what are the risks that come along with this? And should we be as concerned as some scientists are saying we should be? So there's a lot of warm water in the Pacific. And in fact, there are now images spread all over the web and X, which show animations of that water bubbling up and heating the surface of the ocean. That warm water then warms the atmosphere.

If it warms atmosphere, the atmosphere has more moisture in it. So the warmer the atmosphere, the more water vapor it has. In fact, there is a very nice relationship. It has just enough more vapor so that relative humidity, of the atmosphere remains constant. So higher temperature, more water, same relative humidity. But with more water, things are bound to happen. A, you have more, more powerful cyclones.

Actually, I shouldn't say more. You may have fewer, but far more powerful cyclones and hurricanes. You will also have terrible drought, on the western side of El Nino in Australia, Indonesia, parts of Asia, Equatorial Africa, and you may have terrible delusions on the western side of El Nino. When you said that with your very endearing Polish accent, I thought you said we would have more delusions on the western side. Okay.

Okay. Delusions we have too. So taking a step back, what is a super, I mean, there is going to be a super El Nino? Do we know that or not? We don't know that for sure, but all indications are that we might. It's quite probable. It means as temperature spike across your one and a half degrees and how high this temperature spike will be, we don't quite know, but it may be two degrees, it may be more than two. degrees. So if we do have a super el nino in the coming six months or so, can you tell us about the overall,

does that tell us anything about the overall stability of the climate system and the long-term forecasts of where we're headed? First, the good news. The climate system on Earth still appears to be stable subject to some things that may be changing in it, which actually is my GRO. paper. Okay. So when I say it's stable, it means it's going to go back to where it was before. So it's mean reverting in a way. It will revert to normal state or laninia. Okay. But since these oscillations occur at an ever higher level of global temperature, they will bring ever more extreme events, extreme temperatures, heat domes, droughts, extreme rainfall. I will not call it Deluge anymore, and so on. So it will impact lives of millions, well, hundreds of millions of people.

Thank you for that. So I want to move to your recent paper, and my understanding is a big focus of of your research of late has been to distinguish the difference between cumulative emissions and annual emissions and how these metrics surprisingly tell a different story. So can you explain what each of those are and which one we should be focusing on in order to understand the actual relationships between the different aspects of human activity and global heating? All right. So let me play a high school teacher now.

Okay. The temperature of the planet reacts to the cumulative emissions. In fact, the rate almost doesn't matter because what the planet sees is the cumulative effect of CO2 emissions. Having said that, they are very high and they're accumulating very vast. And so if you plot the temperature, the temperature. temperature change of the planet, not versus time versus years, but versus cumulative emissions since 1850, let's say, you will see that many of the curvature of the increase or kings in the curves will straighten up, will become straight lines. So every temperature on the planet

becomes almost linear with the cumulative CO2 emissions. and that includes extreme temperatures, the hottest and the coldest temperatures on the planet. I have a question, Professor. So does that imply that if we cut our emissions in half in a given year, that that doesn't really make much of a dent in the cumulative emissions to that point? No. that's not really what I said. It's kind of like you have a $100 balance in your banking account, right?

And each year you deposit $100, but you spend only $99. So the difference is very small, just $1. But if you do it for 30 years, where are you going to get $30, which is, let's say, a third of your principle. Okay. So the accumulating effect of small changes is what matters. But unless you reduce your rate each year, you're not going to reduce the cumulative. Got it.

So it does matter. Yeah. Well, how long does that, I mean, when we add one year's worth, how long will that stay in the atmosphere? It depends. It depends. So the CO2 that stays in the atmosphere, is not necessarily identically molecule for molecule, the CO2 we injected.

There's some that goes into the ocean, there's some that comes off the ocean, and there's some that accumulates from our emissions, right? But 46% of what we inject stays in the atmosphere, on average. Now, the lifetime, again, it depends where it partitions, is between, let's say, 17 and, 30 years of residents in the atmosphere and longer. But really, on average, the CO2 will come to an equilibrium

if we stop injecting it, and some of it will be transported deep into the oceanic water, and its concentration will decline from the 435 ppm to, let's say, 280, over centuries. over centuries. Okay, so getting back to something in your paper and something you just mentioned, you indicate that the rate of warming per year has been accelerating over the last couple decades. So how fast and why are things accelerating and do you expect that trend to continue? Right. So in the paper I propose a very simple model, which has a steady, tried component from the CO2 concentration, which is logarithmic, right?

So it's a logarithm of the current CO2 concentration divided by the pre-industrial value, let's say, 278 ppm. So that kind of keeps on increasing but ever more slowly as a logarithm, right? And in the plot, you can actually see that between 1880 and now, the increase

when plotted versus years. The whole increase can be approximated by two straight lines. One between 80 and 80 in 1970, let's say 70, and then another steeper one between 1970 and now. So that's kind of linear.

That goes back to my linear increase with cumulative CO2 injection. Another component that is forcing the planet now helping us are aerosos. and aerososos come from volcanoes, from natural emissions, and from human emissions.

There's also, and that component is minus 1.4 watt per square meter on average. But then we change the land use, and we melt the glaciers. So these two components are of similar. magnitude and they almost cancel. So aerosols plus land use change plus melting glaciers is about minus one watt per square meter.

So that dampens the world heating. Okay. And then there is another component which is clouds. Okay. And so that cloud component is not very well defined and we do not capture it in the global climate models. But you can approximate it,

and I did in the paper, with an average value. So from the rest of it, you separate the influence of albedo, of earth reflectivity, and you lump everything else into something. And that something is less than a watt per square meter. And it's an approximate value.

But in doing so, you actually approximate the real observed temperature of the planet extremely well. That's surprising. With such a simple model, and there you are, you know, 140 years of temperature increase, it's there. Okay. And you have two choices. Either ignore the change of albedo and fix other parameters so that you match the increase of CO2 concentration. and that's a pretty good model. Or you account for the albedo change

and you do statistics and that's a much better model. And if you account for the albedo change, you will see that the model does extremely well repeating the temperature observed on the planet of the last, let's say, 25 years, 26 years. So you said that the series these instruments on top of the satellites have been measuring the albedo, or we can infer the albedo

from them. How has the albedo changed in the last 26 years? So first, climate is controlled by the amount of heat or radiation sunlight absorbed by Earth and the amount of infrared energy emitted by the Earth. And if the two balance, there's no climate change. If there's more incoming sunlight than leaving infrared radiation, the climate warms. Okay. That's where we are right now.

And now, for the last 26 years or so, we have had very accurate measurements of that delicate balance of energy, radiant energy, at the top of the atmosphere. And this is done by the Ceres instrument flown on top of many satellites around the world. And Ceres means the clouds and Earth's radiant energy system. The clouds and Earth's radiant energy system. And it's an incredibly sensitive and well-calibrated instrument that tells us small fluctuating of this energy balance, which are of the order of 2510 watts per square meter of the planet. So for the last 20 years, we have a deep insight on a planetary scale what's happening with this balance of energy.

And so the planet, as you know, reflects some of the income. sunlight by clouds, from glaciers, from snow and whatever, and from other surfaces. And the overall effect of this reflection is called the albedo. So about 30% actually 29% of the incoming sunlight is reflected by the planet. So that's the earth albedo. And the earth albedo is a miraculous phenomenon. It is uniform around the planet. So the northern hemisphere, which has a lot more land,

has fewer clouds, which then reflect less, because the surface of northern hemisphere reflects more. The southern hemisphere has more water, and has more clouds. So water absorbs more of the radiation, but clouds reflect more. And this interaction of clouds and the earth surface causes the albedo to be preserved within, I don't know, less than a quarter of a watt or tenth of a watt per square meter. That's miraculous. If you do disturb that miraculous equilibrium, which we seem to be doing now, and again, the evidence is not full, is only 26 years of, it, then bad things will happen to the Earth climate.

And in fact, my paper deals with the acceleration of global warming. So Earth is warming and the warming itself is accelerating. And what I've linked that acceleration to is the decline of albedo of the planet. So albedo is now declining from, let's say, 0.29, 0.2 or so to 0.28. Something. But it keeps on declining with time. But you would say, well, 1% change of albedo is almost nothing. But if you look how much more solar radiation goes to the surface of the planet, That's a huge effect.

So that is concerning and it makes sense. I understood what you said, though if you tested me tomorrow in your high school class, I would probably get a B minus, and then the next day I would bring you some pierogies or an apple, and then I might get a B plus. But that all made sense. But there is a silver lining of sorts, if I'm understanding you, correctly, that changing the albedo, if in the unlikely but hopeful and possible case that humans get our act together and move towards some sort of ecological civilization where we champion

regenerative technology and our culture actually cares, changing the albedo if it were a globally agreed upon thing, we actually could reverse that decline. in the albedo, yes? Possibly, yes. However, so here's the good news and bad news, right? Okay. So the effect of this albedo would have shown in much, much warmer planet right now,

were it not for the oceanic water. And that absorption of heat, which accelerated very rapidly after 2014, and there are several independent conjectures, propositions that go along this line is actually accelerating

the rate of global warming. And you say, oh well, who cares? We don't have enough evidence, right? But, you know, there are some other things that are happening around the planet. One would be the accelerated melting of ice

in Antarctica which accelerated incredibly. The other one is accelerated ice melting over Greenland, which also accelerates. There is the change of the albedo. There is the warming of the oceans. So there are several phenomena which happen to be occurring at the same time which justify or may justify a scientific conclusion

that the rate of global warming, in fact, is accelerating. It's accelerating. So our curve is curving up, okay, and that's not good. So the good news is that the oceans dampen the magnitude of that acceleration and change a lot. The bad news is that they absorb 90% of all incoming disequilibrium by warming and warm up, and that heat will stay with us for decades, if not centuries. So even if we stop CO2 injection today,

the ocean still will be warmer, will have to lose that heat into the universe over a prolonged period of time. So you have argued that we crossed the 1.5 degree Celsius barrier in 2024 and that we're well on our way to crossing the 2-degree barrier by 2050. Lots of people agree with you, but other scientists say that we haven't crossed that threshold and using a 10 or 20-year average is more important to track rather than just one year.

Can you maybe speak to both sides of that discussion? Sure. And why is that relevant? Climate and weather are two different things. So weather can have extremes up and down. When you average weather over a prolonged period of time, 10 or 20 years, you get an average, and if that average changes, that's your climate change. So there's no doubt about it.

There's also no doubt about it that the global temperature keeps on increasing, and with the spikes from each anina, it will now be steadily above 1.5 degrees centigrade. And I agree that the average, when you average out the spikes, okay, will be lower. but if you live inside of that spike, you don't care. It's hot. Okay. So the prolonged warm periods or heat waves that will be part of our daily life do matter. And we can squabble if they occur at 1.45 or 1.55 degree of average temperature.

But the fact of the matter is that they're getting more. more extreme and more common. And that's where your life is impacted. So again, science is clear. Climate, long time average. Weather, no averaging. Something in between, you know, a couple of years of averaging, let's say,

five years will show you the, you know, maybe not very long-lasting trends, but still trends, and they're going up. So I'm going to put you on the spot. of course there's a lot of variables and a lot of unknowns but where is your Professor Tad, Patsik, Earth

scientists, midpoint of your distribution in your mind of how hot we will eventually stabilize at or get to like in coming centuries or is it a huge range

and you can't even guess? Well of course there's a range but I will say that range is centered at plus 2 degrees centigrade of heating in 2050 and a little bit more than 3 degrees in 2100 for the planet. But that means that the land will heat

by, let's say, 6 degrees in 2100. And 6 degrees is huge. In fact, it's so large that you will not be able to recognize the planet. And that's centigrade. That's centigrade. So multiply it by nine and divided by five, you're going to get your Fahrenheit's.

Yeah, so that's 11 degrees Fahrenheit-ish. Yes. As a global average. So some places at times would be 20 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That's, I don't think, I think a lot, of the viewers of this channel are well aware of that possibility. I don't think many humans have internalized the absolute magnitude of that. Right.

And I agree with you. And that's what makes the discussion so difficult. Because things, the climate changes slowly and we're not built to accept slow changes. We haven't evolved as humans to accept something that is changing relatively slowly. And in fact, the things that are changing, which are most dangerous to us, are changing invisibly. Invisible and slow, not a good combination for Homo sapiens. Right. So, for example, the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas, which is catastrophic, which may yield them melted mostly in the next 30, 50 to 70 years.

Well, those glaciers supply water to 2 billion people. Once that water supply disappears, those people have no drinking water. And that's happening in real time. You look at the pictures of the Himalayas from the satellites and you have thousands of melt lakes everywhere, literally dotting the landscape of the mountains. and then in the spring you get catastrophic flooding

when the rush of melt water goes down the slope in Pakistan and in India in Kashmir or in China in Tibet and then during the summer you have drought and those droughts will become bigger and more pronounced so that would be one

the other one is the melting of ice that land ice on Antarctica and on Greenland well Greenland and Antarctica Greenland merce much faster than Antarctica. Well, this melt adds to the average level of water in the ocean, sea level. And again, it's imperceptible. Well, it's 30 centimeters since, let's say, 1905 or so. But you can see if you live in Texas or in Florida or in Jakarta,

or in parts of Maine that water invasion on land is becoming more common and more severe. And if you live in Jakarta, well, a lot of time you sit in water in your house and in fact the city will be evacuated and changed to another city elsewhere.

So we neglect these changes and they keep on accumulating. And they cannot be reversed by a stroke of a pen or snapping fingers. And that's what's so dangerous about climate change. Let me then point out to another effect which affects everybody. That's heat waves. So heat waves come from heat domes and heat domes come from a rosby wave. that goes north, pumps hot tropical air up north,

then this hot air goes down by gravity, compresses while compressing heats up, like when you pump the tire in your bike, it becomes warm when you compress it, right? Loses moisture, and now you have a lot of hot air, and high pressure preventing cold air and moisture

entering a big area and you have your heat dome and heat wave. I'd never thought about it till this moment, but is a heat dome the inverse or the opposite of a polar vortex? Yes, it's the opposite. So the polar vortex is the Rosby wave bending the jet stream down south

and heat dome, hot air is bending it north. One way to summarize this then, as your high school student, the planet is warming and it's based on cumulative emissions. Your new research is saying that tiny changes in lower reflectivity or albedo is actually helping accelerate that warming. And so we're at 1.5 degrees Celsius and slowly increasing with some spikes in hotter times during el Niños or super El Nino's. And one of the consequences of that

is more warming or heating, but also a higher standard deviation of rainfall and heat. and heat waves and droughts. So the median and the mean become relevant because the whole thing is increasing, but the standard deviation is also increasing. Correct. So that's a very nice summary. That's an executive summary

for somebody who doesn't have time to think about this and wants to know what the consequences are. But there are many other consequences. So in 2022, officially 62,000 people died in Europe of heat waves in one year, okay? Mostly elderly people, vulnerable people. In other countries, these statistics do not exist. They do not exist in the US. So we don't know how many people are dying every year of heat exhaustion in Texas and in Florida,

Mississippi, Alabama, you know, whatever. Did you read Ministry for the future for Kim Stanley Robinson, the fiction book? No. Okay. It's a fictional book where we finally get our act together on climate, but only after a mass die-off from a heat wave happens in the Indian subcontinent in 2040 or something like that. Presumably that those type of events are probably likely in the next 30 to 50 years. Yes, very much so. And in fact, if you look at the effects of El Nino and changing monsoon patterns,

the subcontinent of India will be hitting far faster than other areas of the planet. So will, in fact, Western China, most of China. So will Pakistan. So will Bangladesh. Why is that? That's just a confluence. of everything that we've talked about. The Rosby waves, the jet stream,

the El Nina, Laninians, what have you. That's one. Two, the atmosphere has demonstrated, has demonstrated, beyond any doubt whatsoever that it can send massive amounts of hot air, hot, 40 degrees centigrade, above the average,

or 70 degrees Fahrenheit, all away from equator, to the Antarctic. 40 degrees Celsius above the average? Yes. And does that happen recently? Yes. It happened in March of 2022 in Antarctica,

where this was already the Laninia state of the, or still Lanina state of the Indian Ocean. But there were several big, storms which coalesce into a couple of cyclones and they caused a massive rosby wave which shot this hot air all the way to eastern Antarctica. And the temperature in eastern Antarctica became 40 degrees centigrade, 70 degrees Fahrenheit, warmer than average. Luckily, this happened at the onset of the Antarctic winter.

So if your original temperature is minus 47 and you add 40 degrees to it, it's still minus 7 in the interior of Antarctica. So you didn't cause massive melting because it happened in March, not at a different time. But on the outskirts of Antarctica, on the sea ice, the ice shelves, it caused massive damage and melting. of ice. Catastrophic. In fact,

one of the glaciers that collapsed was near Dome Sea where the venerable ice course were taken three kilometers deep that told us about the climate

of the last 800,000 years on the planet. And so those heat waves and those big Rosby waves will be happening more and more often and they actually have an incredible

power of due fast damage to the climate system and to the planet. So if you ask me, Ted Pacek, for my subjective, perhaps not fully still scientifically

justified opinion and that's just my opinion. Is the climate change accelerating? I will tell you by all means, yes it is. If you, if ask me as a scientist, I will say I did the Bayesian test and Petit test and that test and the other test, and it appears that it does. But I need more data, okay?

I always need more data. However, as an engineer, I will tell you, I have enough data to say, look out, watch out. So I have some wide boundary questions to ask you on your conclusions and the implications. but let me start here. One of the core themes of my work, as you're aware, is helping human civilization bend and not break. This is where as an intermediate phase of societal triage, civilization would bend and absorb unavoidable shocks

and that we would downscale our material consumption. And hopefully that we're somehow able to do that without fully breaking into chaos. So similarly in your work with the climate systems, these breakpoints or tipping points are highly consequential. So what are the breaking points for the Earth's albedo and other key areas that you'd like to highlight in our climactic system? So again, I have to be careful here

because it's not fully justified with enough time records. but it appears that the earth has entered a period of an accelerated decline of albedo. So albedo is declining linearly, whereas before it was constant. Do we have any idea what the albedo was pre-industrial times? No, because we couldn't measure it, but presumably there were more forests and other things. Not really. We can infer it from climate models, but they're very imperfect. But not really. It's the satellites that do the job. Yeah, that's one of my wider boundary questions. But stay on this one. Keep going. You say bending. And I say fracturing. And for the following reason. So think of the climate right now. You have, let's say, a prolonged drought in the summer, punctuated with,

very brutal, intensive rainfall in winter, let's say. Right. And so the soil, the clays, are shrinking in the summer, dewatering, dehydrating in the summer, subsiding, and then rapidly swelling as much as they can because water is running off to the ocean, right, in the winter. What does it do to your infrastructure, to the buildings, the roads, the bridges, the dams,

well, it breaks them. In fact, it fractures them everywhere, everywhere in Europe, everywhere in America, everywhere in Asia. What does it mean? That means that there will be huge associated costs with repairing on infrastructure when dams start failing.

In fact, they already are in many places on the earth. So that's fracturing. That's not bending. The other thing, which is not accounted for, is the melting of the permafrost in Alaska and Siberia, with a giant release of methane.

That will take a while. But on land, permafrosts, that's measured in decades, centuries, and even millennia for the submerged hydrates, methane hydrates in subsea. But it's happening. In fact, you have giant, methane craters all over Siberia

and you have sloshing coasts in Alaska and Siberia. That's bad. Okay. The hope, let me just reiterate what we're hoping for. We're hoping for that we have the same planet, the same ocean, the same gases in the atmosphere, the same behavior of water,

which is kind of linear with temperature. So everything is kind of nice and linear. and so the effect of what we do is still linear when plotted versus cumulative emissions. So a straight line. So that's actually as bad as it is, that's good. Now there are two possible outcomes in the future.

The straight light bends down or it bends up? Now, the optimists among us will say, well, there will be, you know, here to four unknown feedbacks that will bend it down. I don't believe that. What I do believe is that the feedbacks I suspect are occurring will actually bend it up,

which makes our reaction to climate change ever so more urgent. So you and I live in a very rich society for most people, or at least for the upper 10% of the people. In Europe, many more people live comfortable lives. So let's say you have one billion people who live in relative comfort wherever they live. And there will be mean societal means to displace them elsewhere

or to give them air conditioning or to supply them with food. But the remaining 7 billion people have no such means. So people who do not participate in our orgy, of emissions, an orgy of power use, you and I are, as you know, from my previous conversation, a 10-kilow-wad machine. Everyone in the U.S. is a 10-kil-watt machine. Everyone, that's right.

Well, I mean, on average, on average. On average, right. So you and I are less, but it doesn't matter. Yeah. And so what will happen, what is happening now is incredible social tensions between the global south and north and incredible social instability

across the global south. And in fact, it's spilling over to the global north. And so how, so the question that I'm asking, and that's where my biggest fear and sleepless nights lie, is how in this increased denial, social instability, we can still precipitate

actions that will actually decrease our impact on the planet. How is that possible? And I'm not a social scientist. I actually don't know the answer to that. I don't either. I do want to press you

on a couple other related questions. As an Earth systems scientist, expert on hydrocarbons and the Earth's system. It strikes me, and I think I might do a frankly on this in the near term, you look at all the conferences around the world. And this is the year of the triple cop conferences. There's one on land degradation. There's one on biodiversity and there's one on climate. There's planetary boundaries

and there's all these international conferences on all the aspects of the metacrisis. And it's basically a bunch of high status people attending a funeral for the way things used to be. And yet at the same time, you have the power structure of what's happening in Oh, Hormuz, and in Russia and Ukraine, and in Washington, D.C. And these people that go to these environmental earth system conferences are like cheerleading for their plan of action, but it's so far down the decision hierarchy in what is actually happening in the world, it almost seems farcical. As an Earth system scientist, what are your thoughts on that?

I agree. They're farcical. So there are two aspects to your question. One, is the science correct? Because people in the power structures are now actually telling everybody that the science is in The science is correct, as correct as it can be. But science is a process, right, of finding the truth. If one, just one observation, in a billion observations,

pointed out that something's incorrect, well let's say thermodynamics or climate science, the whole edifice of the science would crumble down. because that's the way scientists are. We have to make sure that everything we say is true and nothing but the truth, to the best of our knowledge. And when we make mistakes, we actually do correct them by peer feedback, by thinking more, and change our opinions. And so science is a long, tedious process of discoveries, corrections, mistakes, corrects.

again, but in the end we arrive at a product which is as true as it gets given the state of our knowledge. That's science. And this science says climate change is occurring and it can be accelerating. And there is no two doubts, a zero percent of doubt in that. Now where we can start differing and this is where different people start saying, well, but this, well, but that is, well, how rapid this change will be? Will it accelerate or decelerate? Will it be much worse or a little bit worse?

We can all do that discussion and come to different conclusions. But the basics, the fundamentals of this discussion are the same. You have the two figures in my paper, and that's a fact. You cannot dispute that. It's right there in front of your eyes. It's warming up, and the warming up may be very likely accelerating. And as a human being, who's not a scientist, you can say, I don't care, or you can say, well, maybe I should start caring. And our hope, yours and mine, is that conversations like this one and many others will actually get more people to think, maybe I should care.

So let me give you another anecdote. Just. Recently, I was at the Society of Petroleum Engineers meeting in Bakersfield, California, and it was devoted to the energy supply in oil and gas supply of California. So in my experience, petroleum engineers, as a demographic, are usually very skeptical that climate change is happening. Correct. In fact, most are not just skeptical, are in straight denial. But many present at that conference were not.

But I talked to a, I will not mention the name, a very prominent executive or retired executive from Chevron, who's now a professor at University of Southern California. And I kind of, and he understands, he knows, okay. He knows what's happening. And I tried to say, well, Paul, let's say, would you consider cutting your personal consumption, you know, not having an SUV, doing some other things a little bit differently? And he looked me in the eye and said, why? Why should I do that?

Others will not do it, and I have the means of not doing it. Okay. I will not change my customs. I will burn as much of everything as I can. and he said, and I'll give you one advice, become rich, because then you can weather any disruption. That's a microcosm of our whole global situation right there. Exactly. Why should I change if I can afford not changing?

And why should I care if I can afford not caring? That's exactly the maker cause. And I think the challenge is to carve out some percentage of that demographic that changes their priorities to be in surveillance. of life. Right. Yeah. But that percentage of the demographic has to organize

outside of conferences and outside just talking to the scientists like me. In fact, scientists like me should be talking a lot more to a skeptical demographic. Unless people organize, nothing will change, nothing.

You see the poster in the back of my room, that's solidarity. Okay. Okay. Well, solidarity has changed the world. Why? Because the whole nation organized. Yeah. Okay. And so if I have to give one advice to people, don't sit on your butts, stand up, and organize. So let me ask you about another phenomenon which I am also technically a scientist by my degrees. but I'm more of just a cultural observer, and I also host this platform.

Invariably, when we post this episode, the people who are very interested and aware and concerned about climate change will watch the whole thing, and they will learn some things, and they will like it, because I've learned some things from you. Many others, probably without watching it, or maybe watching three minutes, will post in the YouTube comments

because every time I do something on climate, I get dozens of emails from the same people saying, you're losing your credibility, Nate, by posting things on climate, and the other things are much more important, et cetera, et cetera. But I almost think that there's some sort of a homo sapiens antibody that happens when you have a civilization-altering topic like this.

It is by definition there will be a counterweight in our culture to it. What are your thoughts on all that? So climate change is explained by climate science, which itself is a mixture of physics, mathematics, geology, cloud physics, chemistry, and so on, so and so on. So you can think of the picture we are painting here as a puzzle that consists of 10,000 pieces. Right. And even if you are very well trained, it's very difficult to put together this puzzle. Yeah. And I spend years, years putting it together.

Okay. If you're not trained, two things happen. Many pieces of the puzzle are actually invisible. to you. You can't see them. Okay. So the picture that you have that emerges is full of holes. Well, it's predominantly the

five pieces that you've assembled that you can see. It's full of holes and the pieces that you think create a picture because you have the five pieces a little island in the picture. And you have no idea what they actually represent.

But then, because of your lack of knowledge, you assign, scientific value to those five pieces and the value of your beliefs to those five pieces. And you say, well, I did my research on the internet and this is true blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you, Dr. Higgins or Dr. Patz, you are losing your credibility. And there's no way to overcome this. I'm sorry, Nate. I've tried. I really have for the last 40 years. and I can see a cement wall which is between you and the listener and you will not overcome it. So to a person which says that you have to appeal to their greed and to their fear.

Because greed and fear are the two most powerful instincts that govern people. So fear is what the climate change is going to do. to me? What will it do to my house insurance? Will I be able to, in fact, insure my house in Florida or in the forests of California or along

the east coast of the United States and so on? Will I be able to withstand the next hurricane? Will I be able to withstand the next flooding at high tide and hurricane water brought on land?

Will I be able to drink water because my aquifer is getting contaminated with salt water from the rising sea level. Will the Everglades on Florida survive? If I have a major hurricane and the grid goes down

will I be able to live in the hot, humid weather where the bulb temperature approaches, let's say, 30 degrees centigrade and I'm barely able to survive. Those things, oh, will I be able to drive away from the climate

will I get gasoline? So the pump will will the pump be working and so on? Will I be able to get my groceries? These are the kind of the elementary things which appeal to people

regardless of their other convictions and their statements you're losing your credibility. So if I point out that parts of Texas will become hot desert, everybody will say, well, many people will say, well, but right now it's

wet in Texas. And I will say, yeah, that's amplification of the subtropical jet stream ahead of anina. What you're getting is, in fact, moisture from the Pacific all the way to Texas. So right now, be happy, it's wet, it's going to get dry and hot soon enough. Okay. And so those discussions will never end. And what we have to do is chip away, tiny step by tiny step, and enable people like this. to assemble seven pieces, 10 pieces, 20 pieces of the puzzle, and say, huh, maybe he had a point. I do want to give you some time before we close to talk about some strategies.

But let me ask you this as a scientist, and I don't want to get political here, though it's at times impossible to do that. But you and I live in the United States, which one could argue historically. had some of the best scientific instrumentation and websites and data and tracking of the planet in many different spheres, including the oceans and climate. And that's slowly with an acceleration disappearing. How do you see the global environmental, ecological, Earth, science project continuing with the leader kind of receding.

So you just mentioned the possibly largest tragedy in our understanding of climate, which is the shutting down of American satellite programs or other measurement programs, storage of data and public access of the data. And I am also on the receiving end to see how the various struggling agencies, NOAA and NASA, USDA, are coping with, you know, essentially shutting down all their websites, making data very difficult to get.

That's another one. Just make it difficult most people will quit. Right? And so other parties, most notably the European Union are stepping in. And the European Union has a very large program in natural sciences and our science called Copernicus. And Europe is launching more and more satellites, which will replace some of the aging and not replaced American satellites, such as Aquantera, with newer, smaller ones. but more of them.

Japan is also stepping in. So is China. But again, and I would want to say Russia, but even though they're stepping in, availability of their data is extremely limited. Everything is so secret. Thank you very much in these countries. Although China is changing for the better, I must say.

So the United States will simply be bypassed. It's actually being bypassed. And that's a real tragedy because we have been at the forefront so much so that right now there's this huge disturbance through climate science because our data gathering capability is declining. More than climate science, environmental science, right? Well, all sciences, except the science of making better weapons because that will always see an increase of funding. And right there is kind of an epitaph, potential epitaph for our species, is we cared about power and military more than our home. Yes. Correct. Yeah. So we covered a lot, Tad. This could have been a six-hour conversation to cover everything on climate, but I think it's a pretty good overview.

And will you be able to share your pre-print in our show? Show notes. Okay. The preprint is, in fact, publicly available, and hopefully it will be reviewed and published. Let's cross fingers. And absolutely, yes, because it's a nine-page paper, so most people will be able to get through it. Is there calculus? No, it's, no, it's hidden. But there are figures.

Okay. So given all this, what sort of actions do you think people, can take that are, in effect, no regret strategies for better human futures, regardless of what happens with climate and the 100% or less than that certainty you have on some of these things. I would say get less distracted with irrelevant things, which are jamming your head and your brain with irrelevant noise and focus on a few important things. because I do talk now that I lived close to my children and the young people in my milieu, so to speak.

I can see how overwhelmed and distracted they are with the onslaught of bad news from everywhere and essentially giving up on their agency and ability to react. I'm seeing that too. So when it comes to the... the election, do move your butts from your chair in front of the TV or whatever you watch and go and vote. Because how is it that at best we can count on two-thirds of all people

who are empowered to vote actually voting and actually trying to change something? But before you vote, understand that we'll live in an enormously complex system. I just went through the midterm elections in California, and I spent hours studying the ballots and the various aspects. Most people don't do that. And, oh, and trying to learn

who the candidates are. So democracy cannot work if you don't know what you're doing and you vote on the first name on the list. I'm sorry. So do a few things or ask others what they've done and together come up with an answer.

And so I'm not saying, saying anymore, just be happy and go, you know, just try to remain happy. Try to be more active, but active in one direction with a vector, not in every which direction, which then dissipates into noise and does nothing. That's good advice, that last bit, especially for me. So we're friends. I will have you back again on another topic. just out of curiosity, is there anything in the climate system or in the Earth system that right now you are

particularly curious about and are going to spend some of your energy and time researching and getting to the bottom of if you were to come back next year? What are you especially curious about right now? So of the highest importance is the rate of heat absorption by the oceans and the possible impacts of the absorption of heat on ocean dynamics on the oceanic currents and transport of heat between the equator and the mid-altitudes. And then is albedo moving,

the albedo change moving more north or more south? Because it has very different aspects of climate, droughts and floods for different important parts of the world. Is the ice melting faster, in Antarctica, because if it is, then that is your sea level rise by several meters within decades. Is Greenland collapsing in terms of the one kilometer or two kilometers of ice that it has in its interior?

Because that's another three meters or whatever of sea level rise. how fast are the glaciers in the Himalayas melting and what impacts does it have on people in India and China and Laos and Vietnam and Cambodia and Bangladesh? Why is climate changing so much and so violently in Europe? I mean, Europe is subject to more and more violent climate change than the US right now. What's going to happen to my home country?

Poland, which is not rich in water when it endures long droughts and deluges or violent rains. And so there's lots of questions I'm going to be asking. Yeah, good. Keep researching, my friend, you are a machine when it comes to cranking out papers and books and graphs. I've never been able to comprehend how productive you are. Thank you for your time today and your continued Earth systems research. Do you have any closing comments for people? Yes.

Thank you, Nate. And thank you for your hard work in making many of these things happen. And because without you, things would have been even worse. So you are in fact, in many ways, a focal point for many people like me to actually share their knowledge with many people out there. Thank you. To be continued, my friend. All right. Thank you. Take care.

All right. Bye. Bye. Thank you. If you'd like to learn more about this episode, please visit the great simplification.com for references and show notes. From there, you can also join our Hilo community and subscribe to our substification. newsletter. This show is hosted by me, Nate Hagen's, edited by No Troublemakers Media, and produced by Misty Stinnett and Lizzie Siriani. Our production team also includes Leslie Batlutz,

Brady Hyann, Julia Maxwell, Gabriela Slayman, and Grace Brunfield. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you on the next episode.