Saving the Earth, with Al Gore

It’s now or never. Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with environmental activist, Nobel Prize winner, and former US VP Al Gore to investigate ways to combat climate change. Joined by co-host Chuck Nice, journalist Andrew Revkin, and climate scientist Kate Marvel. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/saving-the-earth-with-al-gore/ Photo Credit: National Geographic.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and beaming out across all of space and time, this is StarTalk. Where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to the hall of the universe. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And tonight, we're going to discuss the science and politics of Earth's climate. Featuring my interview with Nobel Prize-winning environmental advocate and former Vice President Al Gore. So let's do this.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got with me my comedic co's Chuck Nice. Hey Neil. Chuck, your baby. How are you? Love you, man. Love you too, man. Tweeting at ChuckNiceComic? Thank you, sir. Yes, I am. Very nice. I follow you. I follow you too. Okay. To the ends of the earth. Also joining us is environmental journalist Andrew Revkin. Not your first rodeo. No. Third or fourth time back on StarTalk. We'll be tapping your expertise tonight as we discuss my recent interview with one of the most recognized leaders of the environmental movement, former Vice President Al Gore. He held the first congressional hearings on climate change back in 1976 as a freshman congressman.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in 2006, the film Inconvenient Truth was an Oscar-winning production. And that alerted us all to the dangers of global warming, people who might not have thought about it. I had the occasion to sit down with Al Gore on his last trip to New York City. It was just after the release of his follow-up film, an inconvenient sequel, Truth to Power. Here's my first clip. Check it out. So I'll just relax. I know it's an interview and you're unfamiliar with this kind of thing.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You too. Okay. It's been 10 years.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  11, actually.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  11, more than a decade.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you just back in it. You couldn't leave it alone.

• 2:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were you thinking you needed a sequel all along? When did this sort of hit you?

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Well, over the last decade since the first movie, there have been two big changes. Number one, rather obviously, the climate-related extreme weather events are way more destructive and more frequent. Tropical diseases moving into our latitudes, more floods, more droughts, more mudslides, more strong storms. It's a parade of horribles. And the risk to the economy is very great as well. But the second big change is very positive. We have the solutions now, and they're affordable. They're getting cheaper all the time. They're spreading around the world much faster than anybody would have dared hope. So that was worth telling people that, yeah, it's worse than the scientists predicted,

• 2:52Speaker 01

  and it's getting worse still. But we're on the way to really having a chance to effectively solve this crisis.

• 3:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So that's Al Gore, really pissed off.

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Andy, is it true that extreme weather events have been worse than predicted? Because that's what, for a lot of climate change, they're not skeptics, they're deniers. They often would cite whether the models were accurate. They wanted to know, is it going to be an extra two inches of sea level?

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Six storms at such a level? And if it didn't match it? So what does it look like now?

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I hate to use the word complicated, but it is a little complicated. Heat waves, the hot thing, the warming part, is absolutely measurable in the data, and it's linked through modeling to... Greenhouse gases, but things like tornadoes, for example, are kind of a counter example. No one really understands tornadoes yet and how they form. And in that area, there's no statistical relationship to what's been happening in the climate. And even with things like flooding, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric. Oh, I thought you meant the Bible, dude. No, right, flooding. NOAA, yeah, okay.

• 4:15Chuck Nice?

  You said flooding and then you said NOAA.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  I was just, you know.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, what else could he mean? Right, right, right.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Built me an ark.

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but are they more severe or not? Or you're saying we don't know?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Flooding, flooding.

• 4:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We had Hurricane Harvey and Irma and Maria. Devastating.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  Hurricanes are the hardest thing. When I wrote my first article in 1988 about global warming, Carrie Emanuel, the dean of hurricane climate stuff at MIT, I quoted him and he said, you know, at that time, it was thought to be a 50% increase in the intensity of hurricanes and warming planets, sort of like in 2050 or so. And now, the science, the best science, is this murky thing where it says there'll be fewer hurricanes overall, but the ones that form have a higher chance of getting to a stronger category.

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that manifested in the hurricanes of the 2017 season?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No? And how about wildfires and the mudslides in California?

• 5:12Speaker 02

  Rainfall, oh, we could do a whole show on wildfires. In the sense that there's many things contributing to what gets hammered in a.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I understand there are many things that factor in. We just want to know that is what we are experiencing? The drought and extreme heat waves across the globe and the wildfires and mudslides in California and Mondo hurricanes plowing through the Caribbean? Can we blame any of that?

• 5:43Speaker 02

  On climate change.

• 5:44Chuck Nice?

  Links. We need links.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Well, as I said, heat waves, yes. The heating of places like California that dries out the landscape so it's more flammable, yes, but the thing that's driving the losses. What we care about, right, is if things burn up or get flooded. There's other things we're getting in the way. There's a guy at Villanova, Stephen Strater, he said it's important not, it's important to remember that we are changing too. Where we live, how we live. I've written about around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, epic flood. That storm, the drop of rain of 30 or more inches is very consistent with what you expect in a greenhouse-heated planet. But the losses were these houses.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  There's a house, I wrote this piece, where there's a house that was built in the colonial era on stilts. Because back then, they knew you need to keep your house up if you don't want it to flood. And there's these houses, there's a picture of that one, a guy at Louisiana State gave me. And then he took a picture of like a 1980 ranch house, completely flooded. And if they had just raised it. So the answer to climate change, you're saying, is stilts? Well, no, no. The answer to climate vulnerability Okay. is acting now in places where we know that we're vulnerable. California's wildfires. And the decarbonization thing, which is essential if we want to avoid centuries of climate change, is a long-term imperative as well.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  But you can't like get away from the need to do the other thing too. Chuck, have you seen Al Gore's latest film?

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  Uh, I did. I saw, no, I saw Inconvenient Truth, which was the first film.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:22Chuck Nice?

  The second film.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  Inconvenient sequel.

• 7:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, if you're gonna make a film 11 years later, it shouldn't be called Inconvenient Sequel. It should be called An Inconvenient, "Hey, I can't believe we're still talking about this. Seriously, guys, come on, let's do something about this." What the [bleep]?

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, as a journalist, what's the upshot of this?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Well, to me-

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's working and what doesn't?

• 7:50Speaker 02

  A lot of what has been tried has failed. The, uh, there, there, I wrote about this first back in 2006 when The Time Magazine had a cover, the cover image is a polar bear with some open water and it said, "Be worried, be very worried." And it turns out that was the scariest science of all. See, but that's scary if you're a polar bear. Well, no, no, no, here's the deal. Someone telling you to be worried, these psychologists say that just... What are they thinking? We have peer-reviewed science that says that's, you don't, you can't impose-

• 8:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you can't say, "Tell someone to be worried." You have to have something in front of them that convinces them on their own that they should be worried.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Right. And that, that, there was, uh, that's hard because, you know, we all, those who really understand the system have this desperate urge to-

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have consensus. There is scientific consensus. And there's also consensus that human activity, I mean, not just recent, but like over the entire century, has contributed to climate change. But there remains a powerful movement to deny this fact.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? So, I asked Al Gore what he might think is the source of that denial. Let's check it out.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  In Tennessee, where I live, there's an old saying that if you see a turtle on top of a fence post, you can be pretty sure it didn't get there by itself. And the same thing is true of this persistent climate denial. A hundred years ago, one of the great muckraker journalists, Upton Sinclair, wrote, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something if his salary depends upon him not understanding it." And I think that's very much at play here. I think that the coal industry, oil industry, certainly the tar sands industry, and now to some extent the gas, uh, natural gas, methane industry.

• 9:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fracking is all part of that as well.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  Fracking is all part of it. They have seen this, um-

• 9:46Speaker 01

  Rising awareness that we face an existential crisis as human civilization. They see it as an existential crisis for their companies. And just as the tobacco companies delayed for 40 years the translation of the scientific consensus on smoking and health into appropriate public policy. Their whole plan is to delay the recognition of what the science really is telling us for long enough that they can squeeze more profits out of using the sky as an open sewer.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Andy, is... Will objective evidence win out eventually?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Well, scientists and journalists like to think so.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what would you say is your responsibility as a journalist? There's a conflict. You know this. In your journalistic ethos, we have to give both sides equal time. You were trained this in journalism school.

• 10:55Speaker 02

  I think the first rule for a journalist, and if you're writing a story about climate change, is what kind of story is this today? If it's a story about a paper that just came out on sea ice trends in the Arctic, you talk to people who study sea ice. You don't call Greenpeace, and you don't call a think tank that's paid for by fossil fuels.

• 11:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know that all journalists follow that.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  No, they don't.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. You know, I asked Al Gore if politics failed in addressing the root of American climate change denial. Let's check out his response. We're a capitalist democracy. This is not some secret that people care about money, that corporations care about money. So can... Is it... Am I allowed to say that these companies were not handed a political solution, political economic solution, to that very problem? To their own existential...

• 11:50Speaker 01

  I think they actually were handed a solution. They just fought against it. By putting a price on carbon and fully integrating the environmental and climate consequences of... What this industry and all of us do. We could have seen a an appropriate and gradual transition. But but back to your your question. The premise of your question is that somehow our democracy failed in not handing on a silver platter to the large carbon polluters. An easy plan to transition their business to to something else.

• 12:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would say that a little differently. I would say.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I'm putting a top spin.

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I got you. Let me put a side spin on the top spin. Sure, but, you know, I'm a scientist.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so I I don't spend much of a day thinking about how people react politically.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when I go to Washington, I can say something like, gee, this would be great if there weren't so much politics in the air. But you, as a senator, go to Washington. You can't then complain, oh, there's so much politics. How am I going to get work done? Politics is the currency of action in a democracy. So to be surprised that a company doesn't want to die, rather than having a built in solution that satisfies the political checkboxes.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't I make such a goal, an obligation of elected officials?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's fair. But but you're you're, I don't know how to say this, but I I sense that your mental model of our democracy is aligned with the model our founders gave us two centuries ago. You correctly called our system a capitalist democracy. But what's happened in the in the last 50 years is that the capitalist side of that sphere has encroached upon the democracy side of that sphere. And our democracy has been hacked. Long before the Russians hacked our democracy, lobbyists and big contributors hacked our democracy to the point where.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Actually, a lot of the proposed laws and regulations are literally now written by the lobbyists themselves and by, in this case, by the polluters. And that has corrupted the process to a shocking degree. I know this may sound like a radical analysis. Look, I've lived through it. That's why I'm asking you. I saw this happen when I went in the mid 70s. The horse's mouth, right here. When I went in the mid 70s to the Congress, it was not that way. And I watched it degrade over time. And since I've been out of politics, it's gotten much, much worse. But it needs to change back to a point where ideas and the best available evidence and

• 15:02Speaker 01

  rational discourse can actually play a role again.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Andy, how do you reconcile the needs of capitalism, which is like maximize profits, with safeguarding the planet?

• 15:14Speaker 02

  You spur innovation and invention. We all pay attention.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, just innovate and invent?

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Well, no.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  You had me at innovate.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  No, like Elon Musk gets a lot of credit for all of his inventiveness, but everything he builds is based on technologies that came out of the space race or the Cold War, realistically, that government did the basic heavy lifting on. So if you're not putting in that fertilizer and we're not building an education system that where in which science matters.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you can do that, but then politicians have to sort of be on board.

• 15:48Speaker 02

  Oh, I know.

• 15:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what would you do to motivate politicians to do something about this? Because they're in charge.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Well, no, yeah.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Scientists are not in charge.

• 15:55Chuck Nice?

  Scientists are not in charge. And I think you'll agree that climate change disproportionately affects people who are poor and disenfranchised. And politicians are none of that. And so what you got to do is make them feel like those people that it affects, which means, like, for instance, they have to live in uninsured houses next to coastlines. Like, that's a good thing to make them, or...

• 16:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the storm will take them out?

• 16:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. Or how about they have to drink water only from fracking sites?

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 16:25Chuck Nice?

  You know what I mean? Or make it rain on them. And I'm not talking weather. I'm talking what they understand. Okay? That's right. Just make it rain. That's right. Back it up, Senator. Back it up. Back it up, Senator. Back it up.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, we assess the risk that civilization poses to life on Earth when StarTalk returns. Get your stuff done tonight.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  Unlocking the secrets of your world and everything orbiting around it, this is StarTalk.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History. We're featuring my interview with environmental activist and a former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. We discuss the politics of solving Earth's climate crisis. Check it out.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Our democracy is not working the way our founders intended it to work. And in order to solve the climate crisis, we have to spend some time fixing the democracy crisis.

• 17:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Maybe we should stop thinking federally about this and then look locally. Because locally, there's very big differences in how people vote and how people act and how people think of the environment. And so you go to places where they're kind of on board with this green thing and then let that transition to 100% renewables and watch jobs go to those places. And then all of a sudden, the economies are rising in states that embrace this. And if you're a state that has had not, the money then just drives it like a flowing river.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's happening now.

• 18:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in your film, you showed cities that went 100% green.

• 18:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, including Georgetown, Texas, 65,000 people. In the heart of oil country with a conservative Republican Trump-supporting mayor, who happens to be a CPA, ran the numbers and figured out that his citizens' electricity rates could come down if they went 100% renewable. They've now done that and everybody's thrilled about it. And it's kind of a pleasant side benefit that they're helping save the future of humanity. Now, states like California have led the way. New York State, a lot of other states. After President Trump announced his intention to pull out of the Paris Agreement,

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I worried that that would cause other nations to use it as an excuse to do the same. Didn't happen. And the next day, every other country in the world said, "No, we're still in." And all of those states and hundreds of cities and thousands of business leaders said, "No, we're still in." And it looks pretty clear now that the US is going to meet its commitments under the Paris Agreement. And by the way, legally, the first date upon which the US could withdraw from Paris is the day after the next presidential election in 2020. So if there's another president, excuse me a moment, then a new president could give

• 19:59Speaker 01

  30 days' notice. God, are you paying attention to this? And we're back in. Interview.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Al is pulling God into the equation. So Andy, could you just remind us what the Paris Agreement is, the stipulations?

• 20:17Speaker 02

  There was a treaty way back in 1992. There's only one climate treaty, and then there are all these like addendums. And the latest one was in Paris. And it's basically the first time in this treaty process that all these negotiators realized, if you want to get everybody of the 200 countries basically at one table agreeing on something, it can't be binding. It cannot be. It has to be soft. There's this thing called soft diplomacy. I didn't know. And so it's soft, and everyone comes together every five years and will build momentum toward a decarbonized world. That's the idea.

• 20:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, how would you convince Trump to not withdraw from the Paris Agreement?

• 20:54Chuck Nice?

  It's super, super easy. You just got to rename it, you know?

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, seriously.

• 21:01Chuck Nice?

  Put a spin on it.

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A spin.

• 21:03Chuck Nice?

  He's a little xenophobic, so Paris Accord. No, no. Like, you know, just rename it like the most bigly awesomeness negotiated accord accord. And he'll do it. Or just like the huge hands accord, you know? Or the big beautiful wall accord.

• 21:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, then he's on.

• 21:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, he's on.

• 21:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's in. He's all in, all in. Well, here's more of my interview with former Vice President Al Gore. Check it out.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  We're now in the sixth great extinction. You know, some of these little critters like bees are actually really important to us, and a lot of others that we don't even fully understand why they're important are endangered now. We could lose half the living species with which we share this earth in this century. We're seeing-

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is the extinction brought about by the existence of human conduct and civilization.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the disruption of the climate balance, land use conversion, polluting of the oceans. The amount of plastic in the oceans by weight is about to exceed the weight of the fish in the ocean, literally. And there are many insults, but the biggest and most serious is the climate crisis.

• 22:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So just to be clear, we had 70% extinction from an asteroid. We could possibly approach that just by human beings being human beings.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, what collides with the earth now is not an asteroid, but it's us.

• 22:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 22:33Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:34Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Andy, Yeah. how bad are we making things for other species on earth? A third of all animals are now threatened with extinction at some level, endangered or threatened? Yep, and it- And it's us. Yeah, the only- So one day, we'll just be the only life on earth. Okay, that would be, hmm. Actually, I think I saw that on Netflix. Fine. But then what would you eat?

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Hey, man.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  All I'm saying is, you're looking kinda good, Neil.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, they already- It's people. It's people. Yeah, I saw that movie, yeah. So Andy, you've thought a lot about the influence of people on the climate. And we've heard this term anthropocene. Does I pronounce that correctly? If you're British. Oh, so how- There are two different, sort of competing, versions. Anthropocene. Well, there's anthropocene and- Anth- anthropocene. No, it's just-

• 23:30Chuck Nice?

  He anthropocene.

• 23:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was on the- So Andy, what is the anthropocene?

• 23:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Andy, what is the anth- anth- Anthropocene?

• 23:41Speaker 02

  We'll go with the Brits, Anthropocene, yeah. So Earth history is like, you know, it's split into all these eras and epochs and eons and we are in, we've been in the Holocene epoch, or epoch, as some people say. And it's the last 11,700 years, since the end of the last ice age. And in the 80s, leading into the 90s, scientists and I, just quickly as a journalist, I wrote that, I wrote a book in 1992 about global warming, that was part of an exhibit at this museum, 1992, that, which I said, you know, perhaps we've entered a post-Holocene era that should be named for the species that's creating it.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  In other words, we're jogged, we've jogged the system enough that we've moved out of that Holocene period.

• 24:31Chuck Nice?

  We have our own epoch.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:32Chuck Nice?

  Because of our actions, right?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, and they're all laid down in sediment.

• 24:35Chuck Nice?

  Right. So, so what is the sediment that causes this to be the Anthropocene?

• 24:40Speaker 02

  I was on this group for six years.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was sediment of us, that a later generation is gonna see.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  Please God, don't let it be what I'm thinking.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Should we ask you first?

• 24:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  I could think of, you know.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, stop leaving your sediment around.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  This Anthropocene working group, which I left when I went back to full-time journalism, they've been cogitating on that very point. The rules of geology, of stratigraphy, the layered part of geology, are that you have to have a signal that's synchronous and global. There has to be something laid down in the sediment that says something changed in the system in a big way. And so they've decided, basically it's the 1950s, and the big thing is the radionuclides from bomb testing. It's the best single indicator, because you find it everywhere.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  It's everywhere.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  But the good news about the Anthropocene, there's been a robust debate about whether you can have a good Anthropocene. Like, we're beginning something now, it's just beginning, and how fast we can sort of turn things around, the signature that will be left in sediment is up to us. Like, this has happened in history before. Cyanobacteria, a couple billion years ago, threw all this oxygen in the atmosphere, blew everything up, all the biology had to reinvent itself when that happened. And, but they weren't, but cyanobacteria weren't kind of looking up going, hey, wow, what did we just do?

• 25:55Chuck Nice?

  As far as you know.

• 25:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, they're microscopic things. So here we are, looking up and starting to realize something big is happening. So, in fact, the biggest climate changers in the history of the world were the cyanobacteria that turned a carbon dioxide atmosphere into oxygen. Right, killed off a bunch of things that were relying on having no oxygen.

• 26:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 26:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amazing. So it's not even us.

• 26:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a damn cyanobacteria.

• 26:18Chuck Nice?

  Can we get some cyanobacteria back here now?

• 26:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put some oxygen back. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, next, we're gonna take your questions on the science of climate change when StarTalk returns.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  This is StarTalk.

• 26:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're featuring my interview with environmental advocate and former vice president of the United States of America, Al Gore. And back in 1998, he, as a sitting vice president, secured funding from Congress to launch a new climate monitoring satellite. But it was canceled. And nearly two decades passed before it was finally resurrected. Let's check it out. So, let's talk about your Discover satellite.

• 27:04Chuck Nice?

  Great.

• 27:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great idea when it came out, but then, nothing happened.

• 27:08Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, again, I, when I see something not happen politically.

• 27:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know that I have patience for a politician to say, "It wasn't launched because the politics prevented it."

• 27:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a politician.

• 27:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get it launched.

• 27:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Figure out the political maneuverings so that it can happen.

• 27:31Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 27:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I don't do, should I have sympathy for you that you had political resistance to it? Or should I be angry with you for not knowing that you would have had that resistance in advance and trying to sort of navigate that path?

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  Is there any other option?

• 27:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, here's what, here's what happened. I mean, okay.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  I don't want, I'm upset that the present administration has taken all mentions of global warming out of the EPA website. Should you be angry at me for not preventing that? I mean, somebody else is in charge. And what happened in January of 2001, after I left the White House involuntarily, the new incoming administration canceled the launch of that satellite. And then it went into

• 28:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you weren't in charge?

• 28:23Speaker 01

  I wasn't in charge. But when Barack Obama was elected, I went to see him and I told him the story. He said, "Okay, well, let's launch it." And he did, and I'm very excited about it.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what are the spate of experiments that are on it? Or detectors?

• 28:37Speaker 01

  One of the most exciting is, for the first time, it gives us the ability to measure the energy balance of the Earth as a whole. We have been able to measure energy coming in from the Sun because it's a single-point source. But we have not been able to measure all of the energy radiated and reflected back into space because it's in 360 degrees. But by putting this satellite a million miles away, between the Earth and the Sun, and watching it rotate constantly underneath the satellite, we can get the second number in that equation. And energy in and related to energy out, that's what the problem is.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Global warming represents an indirect manifestation of the real problem, which is the energy, heat energy buildup in the planet, including in the oceans where 93% of it goes.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, the reflectivity prevents some energy from getting into the system, from clouds, from glaciers, even from oceans. And that's changing at all moments, moment to moment.

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Well, now we're in your wheelhouse. This is your area of expertise. You know planet science. But now, for the first time, we have the ability to measure the actual energy balance of the planet. It also has an early warning system for solar storms, which threaten electricity grids and all kinds of circuits, pipelines and all kinds of stuff.

• 30:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space assets are huge that are sensitive to this, yes.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Correct. And we also get 10 to 15 Beautiful blue marble type pictures every single day. As like the one on your tie.

• 30:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, joining our discussion now is an actual climate scientist. We don't have to keep handing climate science questions to Andy.

• 30:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got like the real McCoy in the house now. Join me in welcoming climate scientist Kate Marvel. Kate, thank you for joining us. You're an associate research scientist up at Columbia University, right here in Manhattan, at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Science. Wow. So NASA launched his satellite in 2015. And do we have one of these images? We can check it out so we can talk about?

• 31:03Speaker 05

  Wow. Wow. Can we get some applause for that?

• 31:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, applause.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, this satellite is orbitally parked, in a sense, between Earth and the Sun. It's at one of the resonance points where all the gravity balances. And so it is orbiting the Sun while we orbit the Sun, staying in that position. So what are you guys picking up on this?

• 31:27Speaker 05

  I mean, the first and foremost thing we're picking up is that the Earth is amazing, right? Like this is, I'm sorry.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the headline of your research paper?

• 31:37Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Earth is frickin' amazing.

• 31:39Speaker 05

  Right, this is the best planet. I mean, sorry, it is.

• 31:45Chuck Nice?

  That's a paper I want to read. This is the best planet. I mean, sorry, it is.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is, it so is.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  No, it's super exciting to have this new perspective where we have this satellite parked a million miles away and we're always looking at the sunny side of the Earth. Like, that's cool. But it's important to know that this is just one tool in this really big toolbox that we have. So we have been looking at the Earth for more than 30 years, since the late 70s, basically. And we're measuring all these different things.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Looking at it, but not with a satellite like this?

• 32:17Speaker 05

  Not with a satellite like this, but we have other satellites out there.

• 32:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  And so we're looking at clouds, we're looking at rainfall, we're looking at the temperature of the lower atmosphere and the upper atmosphere. We have satellites that can actually measure the mass of the Earth. And that means we can see things like ice melting in real time. We can see aquifers getting drained. So we have been doing this for a really long time. And we have this really comprehensive global picture. And that's really important, right? Because we're talking about global warming. We know it's gonna get warmer. But we don't know exactly how warm it's gonna get. And a lot of that is because we don't know what humans are gonna do. We don't know if we're gonna cut our emissions or if it's just gonna be business.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're a loose cannon.

• 32:57Speaker 05

  We're a loose cannon. But even if you remove that loose cannon, even if you cut out that uncertainty, there's still a lot of uncertainty in the climate system. And that's because as the Earth warms up, things change. And those things that are changing can actually feed back onto that warming. They can speed it up or they can slow it down.

• 33:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are feedback loops.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  These are feedback loops, exactly. So for example, I think Al Gore touched on it. When you heat up the planet, you melt ice. And ice is really good at reflecting sunlight that would otherwise reach the planet. And it exposes that kind of darker ground or sea underneath. And that's more absorbent. And so that is a process that speeds up the warming. So we call that a-

• 33:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the more ice melts, the more you expose absorptive Earth's surface, then the hotter it gets and the faster the ice melts.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 33:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that would be a positive feedback loop.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  So we call it a positive feedback loop, and I think that's terrible terminology, right? Because that sounds great. So it's more like a vicious cycle, I think.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A vicious feedback loop. Like medical tests. What's an example of a loop that goes the other way?

• 33:59Speaker 05

  So a loop that could go the other way, for example, is if warming the planet gives us more of those low, thick clouds that block out the sun, then we would get less sunlight and we have more gloomy days.

• 34:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that because you're warming the planet, you're putting more moisture in the air, and you have more capacity to make clouds?

• 34:14Speaker 05

  So we don't actually think this is going to happen. We have evidence that probably this is not going to be the case. But it is something that is not insane to believe could happen. So this is an example of a negative feedback loop, something that would actually slow down that warming.

• 34:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so more evaporation gives you more clouds, but now more clouds reflects sunlight and then reduces the energy budget.

• 34:36Speaker 05

  But clouds are incredibly hard. I spend so much of my day thinking about clouds, and they're really, really frustrating because clouds both block sunlight and they trap heat coming in from the planet. So clouds play this dual role, and it's really confusing.

• 34:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 34:50Speaker 05

  And for a long time, they were the big wild card. We didn't know what clouds were gonna do.

• 34:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you have every square inch of a cloud, and, you know, for half the Earth all the time.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So now, why don't you have an answer now?

• 35:03Speaker 05

  So discover-

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that? We give you the data.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  Uh huh. So Discover has only been up there since, I think, June of 2015.

• 35:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2015, yeah.

• 35:13Speaker 05

  And that's not long enough to really see any long-term trends. So we're not learning nothing, but we really need that long-term record. We need to see these long-term changes in order to attribute something to climate change.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, right now, we're gonna go to our crowd favorite part of our show called Cosmic Queries. Yes.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we take your questions about the science of climate change. If it's on astrophysics, then we don't need the guests, but I'm not an expert here, so we have the expert.

• 35:45Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bring it on.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Question number one from Lenny Seth Walden from Winchester, Tennessee, wants to know this. What can I tell people who do not believe in climate change and use the excuse, "Well, it's been cold this year, so global warming is a myth"? Living in the South, I get this kind of nonsense more often than I should.

• 36:05Speaker 05

  That's a good one.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you fix that? How do you fix that?

• 36:07Speaker 05

  How do you fix that? So I think it's okay to be confused by the difference between climate and weather. Like, climate is not an intuitive concept, right? We're talking about things that happen over a really long time period. So this is not my idea. I forget who I should be attributing this to. But somebody told me that climate is your personality and weather is your mood. And what we're doing is we're fundamentally changing the personality of the planet. We're still gonna have ups and downs. We're still gonna have weather. We're still gonna have mood. But what is really happening is we are changing that base state.

• 36:45Chuck Nice?

  So we're actually headed for a personality disorder?

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question, go.

• 36:51Chuck Nice?

  Mikey from Twitter, he says this. Is it possible that...

• 36:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know Mikey on Twitter.

• 36:55Chuck Nice?

  You know Mikey?

• 36:58Chuck Nice?

  Is it possible that the Earth could reset its own climate like in the movie The Day After Tomorrow?

• 37:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 37:07Chuck Nice?

  See, Mikey, I liked where he gets his science.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  So I don't know if this is gonna get me fired, but I have never seen The Day After Tomorrow.

• 37:16Chuck Nice?

  Okay, you have got to go. No, so in a movie, what happens is a climate event does the opposite of what we all think as global warming, and it causes a weather pattern where all of North America freezes over.

• 37:31Speaker 02

  The Gulf Stream shuts down.

• 37:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, it's Gulf Stream, right.

• 37:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it becomes like a snowball Earth, and you see the polar ice caps. And what happens in that is, all of a sudden, you have Americans running south trying to get into Mexico.

• 37:43Chuck Nice?

  Mexico. Right.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  Take down that wall.

• 37:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me re-pose the question. Is there... Does Earth have a restorative force that is bigger than ourselves?

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Not that we know of, not that we've been able to find. Unless you count us destroying our civilizations due to climate change and getting rid of all the humans.

• 38:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh! Here's your answer. The answers are out there, people. I hadn't thought about that. We just have to die. Oh! There you go. Earth says, "Let him keep going."

• 38:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just go ahead. Do your thing. Go right ahead.

• 38:23Chuck Nice?

  Do your thing, because I'm gonna be here. I'm Earth. I'm Earth.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's great. Kate Marvel, thanks for joining us on StarTalk. Coming up, former Vice President Al Gore shares a few cosmic queries of his own when we return on StarTalk.

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk from the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City. We're featuring my interview tonight with former Vice President Al Gore. And Al is a scientifically curious guy. And he had all kinds of questions for me about the universe. Check it out.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  So, we're in a multiverse, right?

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Likely. There's good theoretical reason to think so. Yeah. But not yet evidence.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there are other ideas that are working very well in our understanding of the universe. And if you extend those ideas naturally to where they will take you, you come up with the multiverse.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Could you imagine a system for creating millions of proxy points in our known universe? And when the computing power is available, measure for deformations that would give evidence of another universe?

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, there is a chance that in one version of the multiverse, you can have two expanding multiverses that know nothing of one another.

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But their expanding edges collide.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 40:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that would be revealed as sort of a signature in, I don't mean little.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying.

• 40:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the universe was here.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Like CSI.

• 40:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you would have a.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  CSI multiverse.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You would have a marking that was evidence of two universes colliding. And we would see that in our cosmic microwave background. But we've looked for what that signature might be, and no one has found it.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it would be intriguing if that were the case.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. So.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it would likely have slightly different laws of physics.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you don't want to be the first to visit.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the laws of physics that hold your molecules together could make them fly apart in another universe. So, you want to like bring a coin or something, flick it across the barrier.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  Do you assume that even in a multiverse, gravity is a constant?

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It might have slightly different expressions of the forces of gravity, but we have no reason to think... So the physical constants might be different in that universe. And so, so matter would manifest slightly differently to them as it does to us. But because the laws of physics permeate all of our known universe, we'll have no reason to think that their laws of physics wouldn't also permeate their universe, not only across time, but across space.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  So do you assume that life is ubiquitous in the universe?

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have no reason to think otherwise. When you see...

• 42:09Speaker 01

  But it used to be that people had no reason to think that it was anywhere but here.

• 42:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, so, here, but I have, but I have, I have reason, good reason to think that we're not alone.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you look at what we're made of, the molecules, the atoms. These atoms are everywhere. They're not rare, and they're not only found on Earth. They're everywhere on all planets across the galaxy.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you look at how quickly life manifested on Earth.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Even earlier now.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even earlier, right. So within half a billion years, out of five and a half billion years, we have evidence of single-celled life. And we think it probably would have started even earlier on Earth if it weren't for this period of heavy bombardment, because Earth is still accreting material from the nascent solar system. And if you're still getting slammed accumulating all this extra matter, your surface is very hot, and you can't sustain complex molecules. Let that die out, Earth cools, bada bing! Within like a hundred million years, we have life. So it happened quickly, in the only example we know. We're made of the most common ingredients in the universe.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  So it's gotta happen all over the place.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The list of exoplanets is rising through 3,000 now, and that's just in our little pocket of the galaxy. If you think we're alone in the universe, there's something else requiring that of you.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, Al Gore explains how climate change can cause war when StarTalk returns.

• 43:42Speaker 04

  Bringing space and science down to Earth. You're listening to StarTalk.

• 43:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. We're talking about Earth's climate crisis. We're featuring my interview with Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore. He's also an environmental activist. That's why he got that Nobel Prize. Let's check it out. Is there something that you can think of that could happen? That just wakes everybody up and said, "Oh, my gosh, I was wrong."

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to think about that.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think there is. And I think it's happening right now. These climate-related extreme events are getting way more intense, way more frequent. And every night on the television news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. And even those who don't feel comfortable using the phrase "global warming" or "climate crisis" are now saying, "This is getting a little bit out of hand. Maybe we really do need to do something about this."

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, of course, insurance companies and the military, they've been on board from the beginning.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You start displacing refugees from coastal places of impoverished nations. This is destabilizing international security.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And if you look at what happened in Syria, long before the civil war began there, they had the worst drought in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean centered on Syria. 2006, 2010. It destroyed 60% of their farms, killed 80% of their livestock, drove 1.5 million climate refugees into their cities. They collided with refugees from the Iraq War. And the gates of hell opened tragically.

• 45:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All hell did break loose.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. And there were other causes. The dictators and evil bad guy and their sectarian proxy wars and all that. But the baseline was the devastation of agriculture by the drought and the disruption of their whole country by the climate-related event there. So this is a political issue in the sense that many countries have a hard time governing themselves in the best of seasons. And when you overlay a crushing burden like the climate crisis, then they can get tipped over the edge into chaos.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Andy, are things gonna get worse before they get better? Because you have a long baseline of thinking about this as a journalist.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Longer than most people have been thinking about this problem.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  So true. Except Al Gore.

• 46:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except Al Gore. So, in this arc, can you see things getting worse before they get better?

• 46:26Speaker 02

  I think that's a good way to think about it. But I do see the prospects for a good outcome here.

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mean an accurate way to think about it, it's not good.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the... Okay, guys, let's just calm down.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  But there's no magic, there's no magic moment, either way, I think.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, when I interviewed Al Gore, he had just been releasing, he'd just released the film, or at least was in screening rooms, the sequel to his Oscar-winning 2007 film, "An Inconvenient Truth." And in this final clip, I asked, "What's ahead for the next 10 years?" On his mission to solve Earth's climate crisis. Let's check it out.

• 47:04Speaker 01

  I'm hoping that 10 years from now, we will be so far down the road to solving this crisis, really and truly, that there'll be no need for a third sequel. As for what I...

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then we'll just find you on the beach.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Well...

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you would have succeeded.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  If the beach is still there.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On the inland beach.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. I continue to train climate activists at the grassroots level. And I am so inspired by the millions of activists around the world who are really driving the sustainability revolution. That's where the real energy is coming from.

• 47:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I...

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm a scientist, I count myself also as an educator. And when I see this resistance to the consensus, the emergent consensus of scientists, and I try to understand that. I'm a scientist and I'm an educator, where are we failing here? And I've thought long and hard about it. I look back in elementary school. How do we teach science? Instead of beat the adult on the head, let me look back in the school system. And here's what I found. We teach science as though it's a satchel of facts. Here's this information. Learn it, we'll test you on it. If you do well, you keep going. We're not taught that it is a process of querying nature. We're not taught that it is the best system

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we have ever devised to establish what is objectively true in this world. And here are politicians who are also in denial of scientific truths. Yeah, you could beat the politician on the head, but what good is that? They're representing an electorate that thinks the same way. So the problem is not the politician. It's people who vote for these politicians, who don't know any science, yet have the fate of this nation in their hands. That's dangerous. It's worse than dangerous. You know what it is? It is the beginning of the unraveling of an informed democracy. And that is not the country I grew up in.

• 49:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't often appeal to this viewing public, but I can tell you now that without that, we're just gonna slide off the backside of the mountain while the rest of the world passes us by. And I don't even wanna know what that feels like. This has been A Cosmic Perspective. And you've been watching StarTalk. And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I bid you to keep looking up.