You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 42: Prof. Steven Koonin - Climate Realism: A Sane Approach (with Tom Nelson)

Starting point is 00:00:00 What arrogance she has. I doubt that she's a scientist. Maybe she is. If she were, she wouldn't say we own the science. What kind of nonsense is that? Sit her down on the stage with a real scientist, or let her have it written back and forth with a real scientist, and some of the stuff that Google suppresses,

Starting point is 00:00:21 and let's see how it all comes out. The media have a responsibility to inform, and it's not only that they promote one particular point of view, but they suppress legitimate divergent points of view, which are based on data and the science. It's organized propaganda. That's really the only way to say it. I hate to say it like that, but I think it's the truth. It's just terrible. Those of us who understand some subject, and see how long the newspaper gets it, you should be very suspicious about the newspaper and other information at every point.

Starting point is 00:01:01 hello and welcome to a special episode of you're the voice today i'm honored to collaborate with my friend the legendary tom nelson host of the tom nelson podcast and together we host steven Kunin. Hi, Stephen. Hi, Tom. Hello. Thanks for being with me, guys. In a moment, I'll introduce both Tom and Stephen. Just before I do, please help this important conversation reach audiences by liking, sharing, supporting us and subscribing to our channels. Quick intro about Tom and his work just before we start. For those of you who don't know, Tom Nelson is a podcaster who has been deeply examining climate debate issues for almost two decades on his highly successful podcast he interviews many climate skeptics on climate and energy realism reaching by the way

Starting point is 00:02:08 i checked i saw that you're reaching two million views on youtube alone which is amazing tom says on his youtube channel there is no climate crisis the earth isn't too hot the weather isn't getting wars carbon dioxide is not the climate control knob tom recently produced the viral documentary climate the movie that steven took part in as well directed by martin durkin and we'll put a link in the show notes in case you haven't seen that documentary we highly highly recommend you watch it how many people watched it tom uh we don't know for sure but definitely millions on Many different platforms, yes. Yep.

Starting point is 00:02:50 All right. And now for our guest, Stephen Coonan. Stephen Coonan is an American theoretical physicist and former director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at NYU, as well as a professor in the Department of Civil and Urban Engineering at NYU School of Engineering. In the past, he was the chief scientist of BP's Oil and Gas Division, served as undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy in the Obama administration, and was the vice president of Caltech, one of the most prestigious scientific institutes in the world. Steve is the author of the book Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't,

Starting point is 00:03:30 and Why It Matters, where he argues that while there are some basic facts about climate change that experts agree upon, the meaning of those facts is not so settled, and mainstream scientific studies do not support the notion that there is any kind of climate crisis at all. All right, Tom, do you want to take the first question with Stephen? Yeah, just the first one might be a short one. Stephen, what are your thoughts on the use of the term climate denier? Oh, you know, I always say to people when they call me that, first of all, you know, my great-grandparents were involved in the holocaust and there were some several hundred people who were lost as a result of that so the term is offensive to me to start with but you know more substantially i ask people

Starting point is 00:04:23 what am i denying right because everything i'm telling you is right out of the ipcc co2 enhances the absorptivity of the atmosphere it's human caused but beyond that the ipcc really sense, no transit extreme weather, uncertainties about sensitivity and so on. So I like to refer people to the primary literature or the IPCC reports and ask them, what am I denying? Yep. Yeah. Also in the movie, you say that it's crazy to see that people say that. The problem in the whole business, and I'm sure Tom is seeing this, is people kind of make stuff up because they've not read the actual science or looked at the data. And so it's very easy to, you know, imagine your own climate science, which is only very vaguely reminiscent of what the actual science says. Right.

Starting point is 00:05:24 And Stephen, if we're on the same thread, you used to work for BP as chief scientist for five years to develop their renewable strategy. Critics claim your background at BP creates a bias as well as in the government. What would you say to that? You know, it's absurd to dismiss anyone who actually has working knowledge of the energy business. If you want to change the energy systems, as many people aspire to, you really better understand them because you can't come in naive and expect to be able to effectively change things. So it's people like me, other folks who spent time in the real energy system that are perhaps best suited to talk about how to change it. And so I find it counterproductive. Also, the prominent names on the other side, if you like, the consensus, Ernie Moniz, Steve Chu, they all have experience in certainly advising the big energy companies and I think are wiser for it, even though we will disagree, those guys and I, about the magnitude of the crisis and so on. okay so i have a follow-up question uh i've listened to you on several podcasts steven and

Starting point is 00:06:47 uh lately especially have you spoken to lots of other scientists who are skeptical of this whole climate catastrophe narrative privately but they don't want to say that publicly yeah it's um both scientists who've spent some time studying um the material even though they are working in the field themselves and and other scientists who just hear me and i think a lot of people are appropriately questioning of the crisis narrative. But you get covered if you stand up and say that. And by the way, it's not only the scientists, but it's decision makers in business, decision makers in government. You have a private conversation. It's a very different conversation than what they'll be willing to say. Do you think there might be some dynamic

Starting point is 00:07:37 happening here where this whole thing could crumble pretty quickly once people like you start speaking out, and then more people say, well, he spoke out, and now I'm more comfortable doing that? Yeah, and I think that, using the words crumble, I like to say starting to fall apart, but it's the same sort of thing. I think not only because the people are starting to become aware of the science, but the difficulties that we're seeing in the energy transition are causing people to say, tell me again why we're doing all of this. And when that happens, I think, as you say, it opens the door to having a more realistic conversation

Starting point is 00:08:16 about what the actual threat is and what the challenges are in trying to change the whole energy system for the world. With great pleasure, I'd like to introduce my sponsors. They helped me fulfill my mission of spreading truth, freedom, and sovereignty. You're the Voice is brought to you by Trezor, the original Bitcoin hardware wallet company pioneering the development of self-custody for crypto assets since 2013, empowering individuals with an open source device, enabling beginners and experts to easily and securely hold their coins. I find my Trezor super easy to use and recommend it to my friends and family. Enjoy my 5% discount on Trezor products by clicking the link in the show notes and using the code FLAT. Stephen, any thoughts on how speaking out against climate narrative can be a career killer for young working scientists today?

Starting point is 00:09:13 Yeah, I'm glad you add the word young in there. Yeah, the younger generation. Right. If you're at the later stage of your career, as I am, and many of the other folks I talk with are, you have a bit less fear about what it will do to your professional future. I think for the younger folks, the funding agencies are all bought into the narrative, and so it's difficult to get funding, it's difficult to get published. And so you see it sometimes in the subtle ways in which they write their papers or give their talks and somehow manage to talk around the crisis narrative while still talking reasonable science. And so I think for the younger folks, you have to be really careful. For me, professionally, you know, I don't think I've ever actually been canceled. I don't get invited to some conferences or give particular talks that I might have otherwise.

Starting point is 00:10:11 But I find actually it's connected me to a whole other set of people and disciplines that I would not have had had I not spoken out. Just to add, I'm going to talk publicly about it. You mentioned I'm at New York University these days. I'll actually be resigning New York University in September and joining the Hoover Institution at Stanford. So there's at least one quality educational institution who's happy to have me, even if I'm maybe not quite in line with what the consensus is. okay i have had saw an interesting quote from you steven in your book unsettled quote i began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe since then i've evolved to become a public critic of how the science of climate science is presented end quote can you talk about how that evolution happened for you and when that happened um some of it happened when i convened a workshop for the american physical society that looked at AR5, the Fifth Assessment Report,

Starting point is 00:11:26 which was just new in 2014, I guess, January of 2014. And I was tasked with helping draft a statement for the Physical Society about climate science and global change. And we dug deeply into it. And I had three divergent scientists, Dick Lins and Judy Curry, and I think John Christie, and three consensus scientists, Ben Santer, Bill Collins, and

Starting point is 00:11:57 Ike Held, Isaac Held. And we sat in a room and we talked for a day with a presentation about the science. I started to realize this is not as solid as I had imagined. It got a little bit more real for me when I had occasion to look at the National Climate assessment a year or so later, and realized that what was in the front of the report was a lot more alarmist than what was in the back of the report. And that pattern continues, of course, in the IPCC reports as well. So I think we started to ask questions, and people who were writing these reports did not get satisfactory answers. And once you become attuned to the misrepresentations,

Starting point is 00:12:41 It just kind of jumps out at you almost everywhere, whether it's the media or the reports themselves or statements by politicians. It's a disgrace for the scientific community to let that kind of misrepresentation go on. And then I had a follow up here. I think your evolution was very important in Joe Rogan's evolution. On his podcast, he said about the climate catastrophe narrative, until I read your book, that's all I had ever heard. So it seems like you were pretty instrumental in helping him wake up on this. Yeah. So I had, I don't know, a couple of years ago, a wonderful couple of hours talking with Joe about time and science. He then had Andy Dessler on a week or so afterward. And Andy and I have debated and we can go into that dynamic if you want.

Starting point is 00:13:28 But I think it's not only Joe who said that. There were many other well-meaning thinking people who were just ill-informed about this. And they pick up the book and they see I've referenced everything in the primary literature or the data or the IPCC reports. And eyes get opened up. You say, wow, I didn't know that. I've been likened to one of the best introductions I've ever had was from Benny Peyser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. And Benny, in the introduction, compared me to Tyndall, who in the 16th century was the first guy to translate the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. And it's all made evident to everybody what the Bible actually said.

Starting point is 00:14:19 And so I'm in some ways the Tyndall of climate science, perhaps. So since you mentioned it, do you want to talk a little bit just about your debate that you had with Destler and maybe the one also with Pilkey Jr. on net zero? Yeah. So I've done six or seven debates now, Oxford style, where there's a proposition, formal voting before and after and so on. And the first one that I did was for the Soho Forum in Manhattan, not many, two and a half years ago. And it was Andy against me. And the proposition was we've got to reduce greenhouse gases rapidly. That's what the science says. It's the first event.

Starting point is 00:15:02 It's always a little bit nervous. Of course, you get more comfortable with these things as they go on. But I think I presented a pretty cogent argument. Andy was all over the place. But I was kind of really annoyed with Andy because he was one of a dozen co-authors on a Scientific American piece that Naomi Oreskes had organized that wound up calling me a shill for the oil company, a crank.

Starting point is 00:15:28 Nobody pays attention to them and so on. And toward the end, I confronted him with that article and said, Andy, do you really think I'm a crank? And he denied having seen the article first. having written it, and so on. So it's just a symptom or signature of the quality of the scholarship and integrity that we've got in this discussion. I was really annoyed and disappointed. One of the more recent ones I did was with Roger Bilkey Jr. It was kind of almost a non-debate because Roger and I agree on a lot of things. I have a lot of respect for him as a scholar and

Starting point is 00:16:09 a scientist. But he took the other side, and we had a great interaction, one with the other. And I hope we're able to do it again, because these debates are enlightening for people. They've got a little bit of a, you know, an attraction that they're kind of a competition, so it distracts more people to watch them. But I think they're kind of informative, and I hope we'll be able to do more. Do you have any elevator pitch, maybe, about what you think has caused the Earth's climate to change since maybe 1850 or since 1975, or how much we know or don't know? Before I try to answer that, for me as a scientist, it was a bit of a revelation as I started to look into this. First of all, the changes that we're talking about in the temperature, let's say

Starting point is 00:16:54 three degrees, are a 1% change in the temperature, because the right temperature that you should be using is the surface temperature in Kelvin, which is 300 degrees or 288. So we're talking about a 1% change in the temperature. That means, you know, that the human influences that you expect would correspond to that are also 1%. And so we're talking about tiny perturbations on this enormous system. And when you're at that level, there's all kinds of other stuff that you could imagine. So aerosols we know are important beyond greenhouse gases, natural variability, the long-term cycles in the Earth's climate, solar insulation changes. You have to have all of those things under control before you can say, aha, it's CO2. Now, if you look at the global

Starting point is 00:17:52 temperature anomaly record, you can see right away it can't be only CO2, because as you probably know well, it's not monotonic. It goes up from 1910 to 1940. It goes down a bit from 1940 to 1970. And it goes up again from 1980 to the present. CO2 was going up steadily during that time. So there have to be other things going on. And you have to have those other things under control. And I don't think we do. Who knows what the aerosol load was in 1920, right? Or what the solar insulation really was, or what the natural variability was. So, you know, we don't have all those things under control. For example, last year or two, we've seen strong warming, as you probably know.

Starting point is 00:18:40 And that can't be CO2, because CO2 acts in a longer-term, more gentle way. Maybe it's the aerosols going away because we've cleaned up the fossil fuels a bit. Or maybe it's the water vapor in the stratosphere from the South Pacific volcano eruption a year or so ago. There's all kinds of this stuff. You're just in the weeds to try to untangle all of this. So that's my take on what might or may not be causing the warming over the last century or so. I think you may have described it as a game of telephone where you have a bunch of science at the bottom and then it gets changed as it goes all the way up until finally it gets to the media. Where do the biggest errors happen in that game of telephone?

Starting point is 00:19:25 Well, I blame the journalists, all right? I mean, they are, in the end, the final arbiters of what gets written and communicated. And, you know, at one level, you can't blame them because almost all of them are never scientists. They're trained in journalism. And all they can do is to take what the press releases say. They don't have the inclination or the training to dig a little deeper. and it's easy to do if you have the training. And so I'd say that journalists play a big role in the misinformation. The scientific community, by not correcting the misinformation, I think is

Starting point is 00:20:04 also deficient. I can take almost any kind of article, and you'll look into it a little more deeply, and there's so many problems with it. Let me just give you one example. I think this happened maybe two summers ago. We had terrible floods in Pakistan, right? And the Pakistani environmental minister stands up soon after they happen, a day or two, and says, this is all due to global warming and pollution, and you in the developed world owe us money for that. And of course, she also said it was the worst flooding we've seen since 1960, I think. And of course, the scientists in me and the way I train my students is, well, go ask what happened before 1960. And of course, we have records of monsoons going back to 1850. And while this monsoon is

Starting point is 00:20:57 among the stronger, it's by no means the strongest that we've seen. And what really happened was that somebody cut down all the trees in Pakistan. And so the mountains didn't hold the water. And we had a lot more people living on floodplains where they shouldn't have been living. Well, maybe they had to lose that because of the population of the country. Anyway, yes, it was human-caused, but it had nothing to do with CO2. It's the way that the Pakistanis banished the hydrology. So that kind of misrepresentation, it's rife in the media. And scientists need to be standing up and saying, that's just not right.

Starting point is 00:21:37 Right. Right. I want to follow up on that great entry into the next topic, which is media and journalism. And I want to start by showing you a short clip and then we'll talk about it. You know, we partnered with Google, for example. If you Google climate change, you will at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled climate change, We were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we're becoming much more proactive.

Starting point is 00:22:15 You know, we own the science and we think that the world, you know, should know it. And the platforms themselves also do. Right. So this lady, her name is Melissa Fleming. She's the director of global communications for the UN. and she's sitting there in november 2022 saying that we the un or ipcc we own the science and we need the world to know it and we collaborate with google in order to put the true climate change results in the search results when people search climate change because before it was a mess right so what's your take on that well i'm tempted to use some words that you would have to bleep out

Starting point is 00:22:57 um you know what arrogance she has i doubt that she's a scientist maybe if she were she wouldn't say we own the science what kind of nonsense is that sit her down on the stage with a real scientist or let her have her written back and forth with a real scientist and some of the stuff that google suppresses and let's see how it all comes out all right one of the problems by the way, is getting engagement with people who credibly support the consensus. And people like me or Dick Clemson or Will Happer or any one of a number of other people that I'm sure you could name, they won't talk. They will not risk or demonstrating that they have been misleading.

Starting point is 00:23:47 So, you know, you just got me really mad, all right, by showing that. I'm sorry. It's terrible. and there's nobody who can stand up in that forum or others and say that's nonsense we own the science a lot of the material that i see on the web that google puts this banner up um it's just honest reporting of what the data is or what the literature is saying and google is spreading misinformation, why not letting that come through? Right. And so that takes me to an organization such as Covering Climate Now, which is an organization that collaborates with journalists

Starting point is 00:24:33 and newsrooms to produce more informed, I'm quoting them, more informed and urgent climate stories to make climate a part of every beat in the newsroom, from politics and weather to business and culture and to drive a public conversation. I took that from their website. So what's your take on the media role in that kind of involvement? Yeah, look, the media have a responsibility to inform. On the editorial pages, you can try to persuade, but there's a clear separation between those in quality media.

Starting point is 00:25:12 Yeah. Covering climate now blurs that distinction terribly. And it's not only that they promote one particular point of view, but they suppress legitimate divergent points of view, which are based on data and the science. And so in that sense, it's organized propaganda, all right? I mean, that's really the only way to say it. I hate to say it like that, but I think it's the truth. And that's just terrible. It makes you worry about other spheres of human endeavor and what the media are saying there as well. I tell a story.

Starting point is 00:25:50 I'll tell an anecdote from it. Michael Crichton, who was a wonderful science fiction author after he stopped being an MD, spoke at Caltech and got to know people at Caltech pretty well. And he got to know one of the distinguished faculty there, Murray Gellman, the guy who invented. the word quark. He tells a story about what he calls Gell-Mann's amnesia. Crichton says, I'll read a paper, a newspaper, and I come to a story I know, let's say, in his case, show business.

Starting point is 00:26:22 And he says, I realize how wrong they got it. And Murray might read the same paper and come across a physics story and realizing how wrong the article is. But then we both go on and read The other guard goes in the paper and assumes that they are perfectly informative. And he calls that Gilman's amnesia. And so I think, you know, those of us who understand some subject, and see how long the newspaper gets it, you should be very suspicious about the newspaper and other information at every point. And I'm just following up on that.

Starting point is 00:26:58 And do you have a clue of why it would be so aggressive, this propaganda? Is it to do with the funding? Part of it's the funding. Part of it's fear of getting canceled. Part of it is playing to the audience. For better or worse, a good fraction of the population, particularly the younger people, have been convinced that climate is the most important thing that we've got to do in the next 30 years. And so that's what people want to see, clicks and eyeballs. And I suspect some of the journalists really do think, again, misinformed, that they are really saving the planet by trying to promote the story. Yeah, and speaking of cancellation, climate the movie. There we go. When Tom and I spoke before the movie came out, we were preparing for it because we knew that the moment they will release it, it will be canceled.

Starting point is 00:27:49 And lo and behold, when I put a tweet a few days before the movie went out, I then got a follow on Twitter from the BBC correspondent of climate change fact-checking or something like that. And that bloke, that guy, decided that I need to be monitored the moment I put the teaser for Climate the movie. And so I put a big screenshot of his profile on my profile and just called him out and said, welcome to my profile. Let's see what you're going to do. And then it started and the movie went viral. So, Tom, I would love to hear from you if you can say a few words about how the launch went and what kind of results and reactions you had from the film.

Starting point is 00:28:37 Yeah, it was a very interesting rollout. We had in-person premieres in London and Amsterdam and in the D.C. area. Hundreds of people attended those and we rolled it out online. And I think the mainstream folks would like to cancel it, but we had it in so many different locations that they couldn't get rid of it. So, right now, I think there's over 100 copies of the whole movie up all over the place on social media. There's lots of full copies on X, and it's on Substack and Rumble and all over the place. A lot of different people have downloaded their own copy onto their own hard drive, and then they've uploaded it to their social media. And they've done that with clips as well.

Starting point is 00:29:13 So, as we look around, we can just see millions of views of the full movie and of the clips and a lot of people talking about it. It's been very good. But I want to give a shout out to the Clintel people because they've been working hard doing subtitles. I think they are just hitting their 30th language of subtitles, just Hindi. They had a guy work 10 days doing the Hindi subtitles. And that's a huge kind of a win for us because so many people will want to watch it with those subtitles. So it's been a really good rollout. It's great that X lets us talk freely about it.

Starting point is 00:29:45 Facebook does not. They think it's misinformation and they might threaten to take you or take action against you if you share a link on Facebook or Instagram. But X has been OK. YouTube has left it up. We're wondering if they would actually just delete it, but it's still on YouTube and they're getting views there. So, yeah. And I think Martin Durkin deserves huge credit for the work he did on this movie. He did all the interviews and he wrote the script, did the narration. He really knows what he's doing. And his Great Global Warming Swindle stands up to this day from 2007.

Starting point is 00:30:19 I think this movie is still going to stand up 10 years or more from now. So it's been fun. I'm glad I had a chance to be involved in some way. Yeah, I think the movie is very powerful. I've shown it or had my many friends, colleagues look at it, including many who are not scientists. I think it's interesting and powerful, not because it gives an alternative to the consensus, but it indicates that there are several plausible alternatives and just gives people enough uncertainty in their minds to want to go look for themselves at some of the things that the movie raises. So in that sense, very powerful. So congratulations to you and of course to Martin for getting it out. Thanks for being in the movie. I have a follow up question. In the movie, here's a quote from you.

Starting point is 00:31:16 You said, if you want to qualify for money that's labeled climate, you take whatever it is you're doing and add a little bit of climate speak to it and away you go. Can you talk about that funding dynamic? Yeah, you know, in the U.S. in particular, I can't speak for the U.K. as well, but certainly in the U.S., this administration has made climate the centerpiece of everything it's doing. And so I saw a paper recently, Climate Change and Migraine Headaches. all right um you can do it's climate affects everything of course and so it's wonderful that you can hook it up to all these other things and get your funding that way again it's just disgraceful okay i want to touch on a topic which i hope um you'll have some answers for me it's about geoengineering which is a topic that i started covering last year a little bit

Starting point is 00:32:17 when there was a formal report that came out from the UN. It was a report about SAI, stratosphere aerosol injection technology, as well as different SRM technologies, solar radiation modification technologies. And I read the whole paper, about 40 pages, and it was basically an admission from the UN that these kind of operations projects are happening around the world without saying where exactly they're happening. And in parallel, at the same time, we're seeing citizens all over the world

Starting point is 00:32:55 uploading images to social media all day, every day about, you know, spraying in the skies and people are noticing that something's happening. plus there are some uh past evidence about these kind of projects back from the 70s and there were really old operations about it but for some reason it feels like it's all being hidden from the public and lately we saw the dubai flood floods there were there was really heavy rain there and i was really surprised to see that the mainstream media reported that that was due to geoengineering to um to cloud seeding in dubai that has been taken place for years and and then i started seeing many other mainstream media channels also reporting about cloud seeding as if

Starting point is 00:33:49 they received some approval to start talking about it which was very different from what i have seen until now so can you share from your knowledge on that topic any projects or plans that you are aware of in this field? So just to go back in history a bit, my own involvement, I got interested in the mid-2000s because I realized that the world was not going to be able to reduce CO2 anywhere near what it was trying to do. I think that's even more true today than it was 15 or 20 years ago.

Starting point is 00:34:25 And so I started to look into this. I think it can be effective if one really wants to lower the surface temperature of the gold. It's technologically feasible. It's not that expensive to inject. But the big question, of course, is what are the collateral effects, the unintended side effects? And once you start it, you have to keep going unless you can draw down the CO2. So I sort of have educated myself quite a bit about him. When I first raised the question, you couldn't even talk about it in a polite company.

Starting point is 00:35:09 And my first couple of months in the Obama administration, the president's science advisor, John Holdren, got his hands clapped for actually mentioning it on a radio program. No, we're not going to put dirt into the stratosphere, he eventually said. My own sense is if you're a credible alarmist or a consistent alarmist, you have to be in favor of at least exploring this, because after all, it is one way you could avert a crisis, if there really were a crisis. with respect to whether it's going on or not I think you have to distinguish between weather modification which happens in the troposphere the lower atmosphere and is designed to get clouds to dump their moisture

Starting point is 00:35:54 by the way not only Dubai but I think Beijing during the Olympics were engaged in that and climate related interventions which involve the stratosphere are much higher up and are meant to last a long time, rather, and to be global. In point of fact, when we look at the global reflectivity over the last 20 years, it's actually going down.

Starting point is 00:36:23 So it's like anti-SRM is going on. And presumably that's a natural phenomenon. We don't understand exactly why, but it's contributing perhaps to the stronger warming we've seen over the last couple of years. So we see no indication that people are putting aerosols intentionally up into the stratosphere. I happen to live, and I'm now in my house up in New York State,

Starting point is 00:36:49 and we're on a flyway for all kinds of aircraft, and so I routinely look up and see contrails. But I think the fact that this is being done deliberately is an urban myth, at least as far as I know. you never know what the government everything the government is doing but i've never heard the government seriously talk about doing they are not there well actually after sorry after this un report the biden administration did talk about it and they said i did i also covered it and they said that they are going to invest a lot of money in those kind of projects going forward

Starting point is 00:37:27 so that the UN report was kind of a knob that was turned and after which some public discussion started happening so you know it's funny because most people that are talking about this subject are being called conspiracy theories while the UN is releasing information the White House is releasing information and now the mainstream media is releasing information and the last thing I've seen was a an um tv uh item i think it was a cnbc about marine cloud brightening mcb technology and they're so proud of this mcb uh pilot project right and so they're revealing all of that to us while calling us conspiracy theories oh yeah right i you know you can go back to the report that I catalyzed in 2009.

Starting point is 00:38:20 It was funded by a foundation called NOVIM, N-O-V-I-M. It reports on the web. And we asked the question, if you were going to try to do an experimental program, what would it look like? What would be the elements? What would you do first and so on? Not at all secret.

Starting point is 00:38:36 It was publicly released and so on. And the answer, of course, is you do a lot of modeling and then you do a lot of monitoring with very small amounts injected to see what would. And subsequent reports by the U.S. National Academies, by the Royal Society, maybe the U.N., pretty much say the same thing.

Starting point is 00:38:57 So, you know, it's there. It's been a subject of open scientific discussion, but not as much in the public consciousness as perhaps it's been over the last year or so. I really hope that's going to change, because we need to know what kind of risks And we are taking by, you know, inhaling those substances that are being sprayed. Well, so again, you know, I teach this stuff in my course, so I know some of the numbers, right?

Starting point is 00:39:26 So if you were to do it with sulfur and make SO2, the amount of sulfur you'd have to put up in the stratosphere is only one-tenth as much as we already put up in the troposphere. So it's a small increase in the amount of stuff up there that's already up there. What you worry about most is that not only will it change the temperature, which is what it's supposed to do, but it will change precipitation patterns.

Starting point is 00:39:59 And so China will get a little bit wetter and India drier or whatever, right? And one has got to decide whether you really want to take that risk or not. And if you did, you know, the viability lawsuits would be tremendous. So I'm not in favor of deploying at all. But, you know, I think a good scientist, you want to know, do we have this in our back pocket if things should go really bad, which I don't think they will at all. But nevertheless, you know, people talk about insurance. This is one kind of insurance to have. Do we really need this?

Starting point is 00:40:36 I mean, aren't we? You spoke about hubris before. is this not hubris are we not playing god here by trying to tinker with the weather yes but you know we already we're doing that already anyway you know we're dumping aerosols and sulfates into the atmosphere i'm not in favor of this at all but with very low probability you could imagine a situation where gosh i wish we had explored that right so i think it's more question of prudence than anything else okay tom did you want to add anything not on this i have a couple other unrelated questions if we have time yeah go ahead steve steven you mentioned uh i think uh red team

Starting point is 00:41:22 blue team approach back a while back is there any chance of that being revived in a potential new term of a new president um i i think of course it depends on on who the president is There's no way that the Biden administration, either this one or the next one, if there is one, would touch that. Just no way. The ethos is do not engage with serious critics. And by the way, the critics are not so much necessarily of the science, but the way the science is presented and discussed as much as it is about the sciences. I think the first Trump administration was mostly favorably disposed to try to do an adversarial review. In the end, it never happened.

Starting point is 00:42:09 But I think if there is a second Trump administration, they'd probably be open. So we shall see. I would, independent of who the next president is, I would be pushing for that. Let's hope that we can do that. You know, Delcoff, more than a few people who would be willing to fund, support a non-governmental red-blue exercise, I mean, Kandel did something like that. The problem is, you can line up the red team pretty easily. It's very hard to get a credible blue team, namely someone who would respond to the criticisms

Starting point is 00:42:48 in a substantive way. That's the problem. When we had gotten close in the first Trump administration, I had lined up the National Academies and got them to say, if the White House came to them and said, please tell us what's wrong with this criticism, that they would respond. But as I said, we never quite got to do it. But that's not a pie-in-the-sky thing, right? It's something that is done on other subjects. It's a great way to approach the subject. You know, I'd like to think about it most in the context of engineering.

Starting point is 00:43:20 If you're, and I know this from my exposure to JPL and NASA, if you're going to build a billion-dollar spacecraft that's going to go to Mars and bring back a sample or whatever, right, you have a design team, an engineering team that creates the design. And then you bring in three or four experts, and you ask them, tell me what's wrong with this. and they'll write a detailed report and then the home team will respond and so on. And so the decision makers get a pretty good sense of just how solid everything is. That's never been done with respect to these assessment reports at all.

Starting point is 00:44:01 The establishment argues this happens in the peer-reviewed science and to some extent it does, of course. But the assessment reports is very different than writing a research paper because the adjectives matter. You emphasize one thing versus another. You leave things out. You hide things in the back of the report and so on.

Starting point is 00:44:22 So I think it would still be very productive to do that. But there are organizational and human difficulties in trying to bring it about. Okay, I have an unrelated question I really wanted you to weigh in on. On a podcast recently, Gavin Schmidt said that the ice cores have annual layers until about 50,000 years ago, something like that. Is he correct? Because I thought the whole idea was that we have ice cores going back 800,000 years, and we can tell how much CO2 there was out there 800,000 years ago. Yeah, we do. He may be referring to the fact that when you go deeper, the layers get compressed, and it becomes hard to resolve at the annual scale.

Starting point is 00:45:04 And so maybe you can get decadal averages are difficult to get year by year. That may be what he means. Do you believe in this idea that you can trap a bubble there and leave it for 800,000 years and compress it and still has the same composition it had on day one? Yeah, of course, people worry about that. You or I are not the first person to worry about that. They try to do as good a job as can be done. So maybe it's not year by year or even century by century when you get back 800,000 years, but it's some indication of what was going on back then. By the way, there's a wonderful word called bioturbation, which when you do the same thing with seafloor sediments, you worry about the worms churning up the sediments and destroying the annual record.

Starting point is 00:45:51 And that's called bioturbation. I did not know that. My last question was, what was it like hanging out with Richard Feynman? I think you said in your book, maybe, that you played bongos with him. Yeah. So when I first came to Caltech as an undergrad, I took a course in the first year or maybe second year, I can't remember, with a guy named Bob Layton. Bob was a wonderful experimental physicist at Caltech, many achievements to his credit. And his son, by the way, Ralph Layton, is a guy who wrote the Feynman books, Surely You're Joking, and so on. So Bob felt it being the kind of place it was, would sometimes have the class, there were only about 15 or 20 of us, over to his house for a barbecue or something like that. And on one occasion, this guy Feynman walks in, and after a couple of drinks, I'm not sure we were all allowed to drink, but anyway,

Starting point is 00:46:51 He starts throwing out the bongos, and of course, I had a chance to see. Great fun. Later on, when I was a faculty member, Dick lived two doors down from where we lived in Altadena. So I would see him occasionally. One more finding story I'll tell. I was an undergrad at Caltech and was sent away to MIT to go learn nuclear theory. And then the expectation was I would come back as a junior faculty. And of course, when you get hired, during the hiring process of a faculty member, you kind of give a talk. You got to give a seminar. And so January of 1975, I'm a grad student at MIT in my third year, and I come back to Caltech to give a big weekly physics talk.

Starting point is 00:47:40 this is in a big room it holds a couple hundred people i had often sat there as an undergrad way up in the back and then now i'm down in the front giving this talk and of course all the old guys are sitting in the front as usual dick finding among them and i get about 10 minutes into the talk and i'm explaining something and says dick says i don't understand that can you explain it I try. Five minutes later, he puts up and he says, that's wrong. I still don't understand it. Okay, I figured I'll sunk at that point.

Starting point is 00:48:15 So I managed to get through the rest of the talk. And when the talk is over, the audience is dispersing. Dick bounds up out of his front row chair and says, I was just testing you. You did fine. So he was that kind of guy. And you helped out. Yeah, I helped out. You know, we have physics, and to some extent, many of the sciences have lost, in my opinion, that kind of pungent character.

Starting point is 00:48:51 We have become too genteel and polite. We're afraid to challenge one another the way we used to, particularly the younger people. Maybe that's a societal shift, but I think we have lost something for it. Right. So that gracefully leads me to my last question. In the film, in Climate, the movie, you said, I see my job as a scientist as just laying out the facts and letting people decide what they want to do. When you can't talk about the facts, things become corrupt. You speak about integrity and truth-telling in an era where we feel the world is becoming more and more corrupted.

Starting point is 00:49:33 So can you please leave our audience with a message of hope? Yeah, you accurately and repeatedly relayed what I've said. I think the hope, and it's kind of funny, hope at least with respect to climate and energy, is that we're going to find, we the world, are going to find this energy transition that people are attempting, motivated by climate science, allegedly, so difficult and so expensive

Starting point is 00:50:05 that they're at some point going to say, please explain why we're doing this. And I think at that point, the science will start to shine through much more strongly than it has in the past. So it's hopeful in the sense that the science will eventually prevail, but it's a little bit pessimistic because it says we're going to have to see a lot of things squandered, broken, before we get to the point where people will want to look at the real science again. A bit of darkness before the dawn. Yeah. Mm hmm. Tom, you can only hope that it doesn't get too dark before the dole breaks, right? Of course, I'm with you. Tom, any last comments?

Starting point is 00:50:49 No, I think what you brought up there about people being too genteel, it made me think of the Steve Jobs story I just saw about maybe it was his grandmother and polished rocks, that it was important to run the rocks through the polisher and they could become more beautiful. And you can have a great result if you run through some hard times first. I think that makes some sense in what you said. Yeah. You know, another way to say that is bad experiences make for good judgment. Yeah. So I think we're going to have some bad experiences first with respect to energy cost, reliability. People who are energy poor are going to suffer more.

Starting point is 00:51:23 But then hopefully they'll get a bit more polished and we'll get to a better place. I hope so. And Stephen, I want to thank you for setting an example to the younger generations of scientists, but also to people around the world who are sometimes afraid to be critical or to show critical thinking. So thank you for being an inspiration. And it was my honor, and I'm sure Tom's honor, to have you. And thank you very much for your work. We're going to put all the links in the show notes. Yeah, I would say, you know, you're welcome.

Starting point is 00:51:58 But all I'm doing is just doing my job, right? I mean, this is the way I was trained and it's the expectation of what a scientist is supposed to do. Yeah, I guess it's not that obvious anymore these days. Yeah, sadly, it's true. Right. Thank you so much for being with us. We appreciate your time. Great to chat.

Starting point is 00:52:25 Thanks for watching!

You're The Voice | by Efrat Fenigson - Ep. 42: Prof. Steven Koonin - Climate Realism: A Sane Approach (with Tom Nelson)

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