Understanding Climate Change with Bill Nye - StarTalk All-Stars

StarTalk All-Stars Series Premiere: Host Bill Nye the Science Guy and co-host Chuck Nice answer Cosmic Queries about humanity’s major challenge, with a little help from climatologist Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is StarTalk.

• 0:09Bill Nye?

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

• 0:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. I was looking around. Who's he talking about? Yes, that's me. Yes, indeed, that's me, Bill.

• 0:30Bill Nye?

  Dr. Gavin Schmidt is the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I guess that's the NASA Goddard Institute. That's the NASA Goddard Institute, yes. And you are one of the world's foremost authorities on climate change. So they keep telling me. Well, you've probably published a few papers. I have, yes. You've looked at thermometers. Occasionally. The occasional barometer. It's great to have you here, but this is Cosmic Queries.

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Indeed.

• 0:56Bill Nye?

  So these are questions from out there.

• 0:59Chuck Nice?

  From out there?

• 1:00Bill Nye?

  This week on All-Stars with Dr. Schmidt, it's going to be all about climate change.

• 1:04Chuck Nice?

  That's what it is, and we have...

• 1:05Bill Nye?

  Climate change all the time.

• 1:06Chuck Nice?

  We've solicited questions from the Internet, and we have quite a bit. People are really interested in climate change. And we have, from Facebook, Twitter, and every other place where you will find StarTalk, we have people who are writing in, and they are asking us about climate change. So I'm going to start off with a question from one of our Patreon patrons.

• 1:29Bill Nye?

  Patreon is yet another outlet.

• 1:31Chuck Nice?

  Yes, Patreon is another outlet where you can find us.

• 1:34Bill Nye?

  You can go in and let us know on the outlet.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:39Bill Nye?

  Brilliant.

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  It is, and the great thing about Patreon is they actually support us financially, which is why we take great pride in reading their questions.

• 1:48Bill Nye?

  So let's do that.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. This is from Dylan Hallahan, who says, "Sir William..."

• 1:57Bill Nye?

  Ah.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  "...in my area this year with 70 degrees outside on Christmas. Not only that, but it didn't get cold until mid-January, and now we seem to have daily changes between 60s and 70s and snow. While I know that weather and climate are different, do you see this as a sign that everything we're trying to warn everyone about is coming even sooner?"

• 2:24Bill Nye?

  Uh, it's reasonable. Let me ask, where does he live?

• 2:26Chuck Nice?

  Uh, Washington Township, New Jersey.

• 2:28Bill Nye?

  From New Jersey, right down the street.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So we have had some very exceptional weather here uh over the winter. Um, it's been very warm, except for that one little period when it was very cold. And a lot of that is weather. A lot of that is is tied to uh impacts of the El Nino that's going on uh right now.

• 2:48Bill Nye?

  Makes everything warmer, right?

• 2:49Speaker 03

  It does make everything warmer.

• 2:50Bill Nye?

  Oh, here.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  On average, and particularly across the north of uh the the US, uh all the way across to Alaska, you're seeing record warm temperatures. Um, but they're record warm, not because of the El Nino, but because we've had this long-term warming that is just going on decade by decade by decade.

• 3:06Bill Nye?

  Can I say superimposed?

• 3:08Speaker 03

  You can. You can say that the El Nino fluctuations and the La Nino fluctuations are superimposed on that warming trend. So, uh, a couple of years ago, we had very cold winters uh here in in New Jersey, New York area.

• 3:19Bill Nye?

  Now, I don't believe a word you say. There you have it.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Right.

• 3:23Bill Nye?

  There you have it.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 3:24Bill Nye?

  You just said it was cold a couple of years ago.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  It was.

• 3:26Bill Nye?

  So it's over. I'm sorry.

• 3:27Speaker 03

  But if you if you look over the global picture and and you average everything, you average the cold areas and cold areas and the warm areas, uh, what you see is that there's this steady uh march towards warmer temperatures. Uh, last year was the uh warmest year on record globally. Uh, January was the warmest January that's that we have in that record.

• 3:49Bill Nye?

  So this was one hundred and eighty years back, something like that?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Uh, it goes back to the mid nineteenth century, yeah. And uh, we don't think it was warmer just before we started. So so in fact, these are these are the warmest decades that we're seeing uh in in maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of years.

• 4:03Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So now, um, with the specific um respect to the question, as we see this proliferation, does that mean that things are getting worse? Or are are these just anomalies within the occurrence itself?

• 4:19Speaker 03

  So there's no obvious reason why that particular pattern of weather should be associated with the trend that you're seeing. So they're mostly just oscillations on top of that long-term trend. But that's what you're gonna see. You're gonna see winter periods getting shorter. You're gonna see more exceptional warm weather in January and December and February. You're gonna see earlier springs. And you think, oh, that's great. But actually, it's not so great. What's happening is that around here, you know, things are budding very early. And then we're still gonna get variability. We're still gonna get frosts in, you know, in March and in April, which is very variable. And actually, you can do a lot of damage to crops and apples and things like that.

• 5:01Bill Nye?

  The big problem in farming is the pests, the parasites and voracious insects are showing up sooner and sticking around longer, which means more insecticide, more herbicide, just more work.

• 5:15Speaker 03

  Right.

• 5:15Bill Nye?

  If you can do it at all.

• 5:16Speaker 03

  I mean, in the West, you've got the issue with the pine bark beetles, where there's a six-week window while they kind of prepare themselves for winter. If it gets cold enough in that six-week window, then they won't be able to breed again until the next season. But if it doesn't get cold enough, they harden themselves to the winter and they're ready to go, you know, two or three times as fast as they would have done. And so part of the huge mountain pine bark beetle outbreak that they've had in the West, all the way up through Colorado, up to British Columbia, has been tied to the fact that it just hasn't been getting as cold.

• 5:49Chuck Nice?

  So the warming trend is kind of like Barry White music to these pine bark beetles. It's, you know, kind of sets the mood for them. Little wine, little...

• 6:02Bill Nye?

  But he says, "You'll never find," but I think he means you'll always find. "A place to keep warm."

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm English. We don't quite share the same cultural touchstones. I'm not quite sure what you're talking about.

• 6:14Bill Nye?

  It's like, I'm English. Barry White. Exactly. Who is this Barry White? You shock dice British accent.

• 6:23Bill Nye?

  But Dr. Schmidt, Gavin, you said... We don't think it was warmer before, let's say, uh, the middle of the 19th century.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 6:33Bill Nye?

  But we kinda do, we kinda do know it wasn't. We look at ice cores and so on.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  So you can look at ice cores, you can look at tree rings, uh, you can look at where the glaciers were. We have actual records of those.

• 6:43Bill Nye?

  They leave imprints for crying out loud.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if you, if you look at, uh, you know, the, the glaciers that are melting now, and you can see, okay, well, what's the stuff underneath them? How old is that? Right? And that gives you an idea of when that glacier first kind of went forward, right? And so now it's receding, but it went forward at some point.

• 6:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I got you.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  When did that happen? Right? You go back and you date these things, and it's a thousand years ago. It's 4,000 years ago. Otzi, the iceman that they dug up in Austria, was 5,000 years since he'd been covered in snow. Uh, there are places in, uh, Baffin Island, up in the Canadian archipelago, where we think that the stuff that's being uncovered is 120,000 years old.

• 7:19Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 7:20Bill Nye?

  So it's been cold there for the last 125,000 years.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  And now it's warm.

• 7:24Bill Nye?

  And now it's warm.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:25Bill Nye?

  Let's take the next question.

• 7:26Chuck Nice?

  All right, man.

• 7:27Bill Nye?

  Time has changed. Talk all stars.

• 7:29Chuck Nice?

  You know what I like about this conversation? It's so terribly uplifting. Um...

• 7:33Bill Nye?

  You've got three kids, right?

• 7:35Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Welcome to your future, kids. All right.

• 7:38Bill Nye?

  Well, we're working on it. We're gonna change the world here, people.

• 7:41Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so...

• 7:42Speaker 03

  We are changing the world.

• 7:42Chuck Nice?

  We are.

• 7:43Bill Nye?

  Yes, for the better.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:44Bill Nye?

  I'm specified.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  Juan Carlos Ruiz from, uh, Facebook says, "Dear Mr. Nye, given that the Earth experiences ice ages periodically, what will happen to the next one, given the current state of our climate?" So, we've had ice ages before.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 8:06Chuck Nice?

  Does this mean that we will not have another ice age? Or will it mean that this will precipitate an even greater ice age? What, what will it do? What will it do?

• 8:15Speaker 03

  So, so we have had ice ages before. So the, the, the peak of the last ice age was about 20,000 years ago. Here in New York City, that was pretty much the edge of the, uh, of the ice sheet. Uh, it actually stopped in Brooklyn. I'm not quite sure why it stopped in Brooklyn, but, uh, probably for a latte or something. But the, uh, those, those ice ages.

• 8:33Bill Nye?

  Very fresh.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Ice ages.

• 8:35Bill Nye?

  Thousand years ago.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the ice ages are driven by, uh, the wobbles in the Earth's orbit, which, which are slow, but kind of persistent. Is this Milankovic? Milankovic cycles, that's exactly right.

• 8:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay, guys, I'm sorry. Uh, please expound it because I have been left out. Milankovic?

• 8:51Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:51Chuck Nice?

  The only Milankovic I know is Donald Trump's wife, so.

• 8:55Speaker 03

  Uh, this was a different, this guy, this guy was a, was a Serbian and he did all these calculations while in jail for, for political activities in Serbia back in the nineteen, back in the nineteen twenties. Um, and so what he worked out was that, uh, the, the orbit of the Earth a- around the sun, as, so we all know it's an ellipse, but the, but the eccentricity of that ellipse moves in time, uh, basically because of, uh, the influence of Jupiter and Saturn. It wobbles. It does, it wobbles and, uh, the tilt of the Earth, that wobbles a little bit and the procession of the Earth. So kind of where it's spinning around.

• 9:29Chuck Nice?

  Like a warp record, do you wanna?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  That's it, or like a, like a.

• 9:32Bill Nye?

  A wobbling tumbler is what I was.

• 9:33Chuck Nice?

  A wobbling tumbler.

• 9:34Bill Nye?

  Take a drinking glass and give it that.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Uh, we're in, we're in New York, it should be a dreidel, right? So if you look at a dreidel.

• 9:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so like a dreidel.

• 9:43Speaker 03

  So that, that wobbles around, so these things wobble on twenty thousand, forty thousand, a hundred thousand year frequencies.

• 9:50Bill Nye?

  And they interact, these three effects.

• 9:52Speaker 03

  And they interact and they, they change how much, uh, sunlight gets to the poles, how much sunlight gets to the tropics, and that helps the ice ages grow and, and, and recede. But the interesting thing is that they haven't, they haven't always happened, right? They've only been happening for about the last two and a half million years. And the reason why we think that they've started happening in that relatively recent period is because the carbon dioxide level dropped to a, to a level that allowed ice, ice glaciers to expand.

• 10:18Bill Nye?

  In other words, the wobbling was going on in the past, but there was.

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Wobbling has been going on forever.

• 10:21Bill Nye?

  It was overwhelmed by the greenhouse effect.

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Well, it didn't, it didn't make a difference because the planet was so warm. In the Cretaceous, the planet was really, really warm and.

• 10:29Bill Nye?

  Dinosaurs running, ancient dinosaurs running around in Antarctica.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Swamps and, uh, crocodiles up in the poles.

• 10:34Bill Nye?

  Inland seas.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

  Giant creatures.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  Sea level was about eighty meters higher than.

• 10:38Bill Nye?

  Eighty meters?

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:39Bill Nye?

  That's like, that would go from, we're on the east coast of the United States, that would go where to? Chicago or something, oh.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Well, so a lot, a lot of the Mississippi Basin was, it was an inland sea at that point. The, the sea level in the Playa Seine, which was not quite so far ago, about three million years ago, there's, there's a, there's a, right in the middle of New Jersey, there's the old Playa Seine cliffs, but they're a long, long way from the coast now.

• 11:05Bill Nye?

  Yeah, uh, yes.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Yes. So, so let's get, let's get to this guy's question. The answer is no, we're not going to see any more ice ages. The next one would have been due in about thirty thousand or maybe, maybe fifty thousand years.

• 11:20Bill Nye?

  Sorry, I'm gonna miss it.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you are, you are gonna miss it, but it's, it's not gonna happen. It's not gonna happen because the, the timescale for the carbon that we put into the system is hundreds of thousands of years and so no more ice ages.

• 11:33Bill Nye?

  No more ice ages. That is really a striking thing, everybody, no more ice ages. Yeah. Cause we, we make hilarious jokes about the ice ages. I went to school in the Finger Lakes, which were carved by glaciers in the South. It's not gonna happen anymore. Those were the days. Are the glaciers, all the glaciers we know gonna go away?

• 11:52Speaker 03

  So almost all the mountain glaciers that we know are receding, some of them quite dramatically. The only part of the planet where ice is pretty stable is East Antarctica, which is the, the biggest chunk of ice and that's very cold, very stable. And so that's the part that's, that's gonna stick around the longest. But the other bits, the ice on the Antarctic Peninsula, Greenland is losing mass at about two hundred and fifty gigatons of, of water a year. The, the West Antarctic ice sheet is losing mass.

• 12:23Bill Nye?

  So everybody, if you wanna see Glacier National Park, Forest Mudslide National Park, get going. You're watching and listening to StarTalk All-Stars. I'm your guest host, Bill Nye, here with our beloved Chuck Nice, man about the world, insightful provider of insights. And our special guest, our all-star this week is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the, from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, right here in New York City. The town's so nice, they named it twice. And this week on Cosmic Queries, it's all about climate change all the time. We'll be back right after this.

• 13:02Bill Nye?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. This is not just StarTalk, everybody. This is StarTalk All-Star Edition. And I'm here with Dr. Gavin Schmidt from NASA's Goddard Center for Space Studies, right here in New York City. New York, New York. The town's so nice, we named it twice. And Chuck Nice, who's pretty nice, a man about the world.

• 13:23Chuck Nice?

  Seems so convinced about that.

• 13:24Bill Nye?

  Doing my best here. You have a family.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 13:27Bill Nye?

  But we're talking this week is Cosmic Queries, your questions from all over the electric social media out there on this planet. And this week is all about climate change, which, as you may know, is a subject deeply important to me.

• 13:41Chuck Nice?

  Simply not just because you have a book called Unstoppable about climate change, not just because of that.

• 13:48Bill Nye?

  What we're gonna do about it, and because also Dr. Schmidt has a book, Climate Change: Picturing the Science.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes, it's got lots of pictures in it.

• 13:56Bill Nye?

  How long have you been compiling pictures having to do with climate change?

• 14:00Speaker 03

  So I talked to actual photographers, and it turns out that my pictures really aren't very good. So we had to throw out all of those and just use theirs instead. But they're great photos. And these people have been traveling the world, finding interesting stories. And they're stories that you can't tell in the news, and they're not being told in magazines.

• 14:20Bill Nye?

  For example?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  So how do you talk about changes in, you know, plants as they move north as it gets warmer? Right? You know, trying to track the kudzu, which used to be like a deep south thing, but now it's right here. It's like it's on Long Island, it's in New Jersey.

• 14:43Bill Nye?

  My father was a very good Boy Scout, and the joke that they had, this would be in, what, pick a number, 1920? 19, what's it called, 1928? The joke was, "You put your ear to kudzu, you could hear it growing." And that was 100, oh, but 90 years ago.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  That's not so funny anymore.

• 15:00Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 15:01Bill Nye?

  And so stuff has taken over everything.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so they're taking pictures, and they're doing great art and great journalism. And we, the scientists, are kind of helping them put it together, give it context, and explain, you know, what the big patterns that you're seeing are, not just in ecosystems, but on, you know, in sea level rise, or in technology changes, or, you know, just how people go about finding out what's going on in the world.

• 15:28Chuck Nice?

  Awesome.

• 15:30Bill Nye?

  Well Chuck, I was just gonna say, I'm really, this is a very serious topic and we talk about it scientifically, but the big thing that I'm always wondering is what are we gonna do about it? What are we gonna do? So Chuck, we have a question.

• 15:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes we do, we do have a query and speaking of what are we gonna do about it, John P. Garrett from Facebook wants to know this. "How effective are the policies for dealing with climate change proposed for the immediate future? Are we doing anything about this? Are we really doing anything?" And by, not just "we", I mean-

• 15:58Bill Nye?

  Not the three of us.

• 15:59Chuck Nice?

  Not the three of us. I mean, our government, worldwide government. What are the policies in place right now that will help this?

• 16:08Speaker 03

  So, there's actually a few things that are making a difference. So, restrictions on coal power plants, those are making a difference. Coal is the worst fuel that we can have for putting out carbon dioxide.

• 16:19Bill Nye?

  And here's the bad news, everybody, we'll never run out of coal. There's just, it's limitless. No, seriously.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Not limitless.

• 16:26Bill Nye?

  No, there's so much coal-

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Way too much.

• 16:28Bill Nye?

  All over the world, it's just too easy.

• 16:31Speaker 03

  Things like the CAFE standards in the US. Things like the renewable standards for-

• 16:36Bill Nye?

  CAFE is-

• 16:37Speaker 03

  The fuel emission standards for cars.

• 16:40Bill Nye?

  Complete emissions.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  That's right. The increasing amount of electric vehicles instead of internal combustion engines. The renewable standards at the state level for, you know, making like 5, 10, 15% be produced from renewable sources. All of those things are actually making a difference. Now, the question is, are they enough to take us to-

• 17:01Bill Nye?

  So, the way I like to describe it, after COP21 in Paris, this big conference on climate change in Paris, you could say we've taken our foot off the accelerator. But we haven't really gotten around to putting our foot on the brake.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  No.

• 17:14Bill Nye?

  And we're getting closer and closer to the cliff and we're gonna go rebel without a cause right off it. Now, why this is obvious to everybody, but nobody's doing anything about it is this is a big philosophical question, a deep question, why wouldn't humankind get to work on this?

• 17:31Chuck Nice?

  Why wouldn't we?

• 17:32Bill Nye?

  Because it seems to be too big a problem and just to get all conspiratorial on you, there's no question that the fossil fuel industry has worked very hard to obfuscate things, to make it hard to understand what they're doing and to defeat, to derail laws. Like, the President of the United States tried to have this- Restricting carbon emissions from coal-fired power plants, it was derailed and...

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Well, but these things are ongoing. Like, anything that EPA does is always litigated. And that was true for the mercury regulations, it was true for acid rain. Eventually, it will come through, but it's a slow process.

• 18:05Bill Nye?

  And we're getting closer to the cliff.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Well...

• 18:09Chuck Nice?

  So, speaking of the cliff, and Thelma and Louise and all of us going off, holding hands over, you know, with the cop lights flashing in the background. Is there an actual tipping point where we can say, "Goodnight, people. That's it."

• 18:30Bill Nye?

  Well, the number you guys like to throw in is two degrees Celsius, is that right?

• 18:33Speaker 03

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

• 19:02Bill Nye?

  Oh, that's great, we can make it worse.

• 19:05Chuck Nice?

  That's our new motto. That's our new rallying cry.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Don't make it worse. Don't make it worse. Uh, and, and so, you know, thi- this talk of like, you know, the cliff. I like the metaphor, but actually, it's a little bit better. Like, we're driving in the fog, and perhaps we're taking our foot off the accelerator, but we have no idea what's going on. We don't know if it's a cliff, we don't know if it's a boulder, we don't know if it's rough ground, we don't know if the road's gonna run out. We don't know, right?

• 19:33Bill Nye?

  We have a pretty good idea, that the sooner we come to a stop, the better it would be.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  So, yes, we know that, we know that.

• 19:39Bill Nye?

  Just driving in the fog like crazy, you know, is probably not gonna work out. It's a curve in the road.

• 19:45Chuck Nice?

  Very James Dean of us.

• 19:46Bill Nye?

  Exactly, let alone a turtle that's going across.

• 19:49Chuck Nice?

  Cool. Alright, well, there you have it.

• 19:51Bill Nye?

  Let's get another query from the cosmos.

• 19:53Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this is from Richard Martin, also coming to us from Facebook, who says, "Hello, Mr. Nye." And Mr. Schmidt, an awesome guy reading this.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Why?

• 20:03Bill Nye?

  I don't know.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  Awesome guy reading this.

• 20:06Chuck Nice?

  But see, did he really know that I was gonna be the, the, the, the guest host?

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Otherwise he wouldn't have said it.

• 20:13Chuck Nice?

  Maybe, maybe, exactly.

• 20:16Chuck Nice?

  Here's what he says, uh, Richard says this, "I've heard the sun expands and uses its hydrogen fuel. Is there any evidence that this has had an effect on climate change? Or does it happen over too long of a time to measure?"

• 20:32Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's very measurable, yes.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  It is measurable. So, so the sun is, uh, is a main sequence star, so, um, over the, the last four billion years that the earth has, has been around, the sun has got brighter by about thirty percent. Um, and in another two billion years, it will get large and brighter still, and in fact, it will evaporate.

• 20:50Bill Nye?

  But the time scale is big.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  But the time scale is big. The time scale is, is billions of years. And there is evidence that it's affected the climate. So if you go back in, uh, in time, you go back to, to the oldest rocks, the, the, the oldest evidence that we have, there is evidence that, that we went through periods that were called Snowball Earth, where the ice caps expanded, uh, pretty much all the way to the equator. And there were, you know, obviously that was not particularly, uh, helpful to life. Uh, but for periods of, you know, many, many millions of years, uh, the planet was a snowball. Now, that can't happen now because the sun is brighter. Uh, but the, but back then it was dimmer and so things were a little bit more fragile. And so when you had wobbles that would put you into an ice age, those ice ages, uh, could potentially cover the whole planet.

• 21:37Bill Nye?

  But that's not happening now.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  That is not happening.

• 21:39Bill Nye?

  And so, uh, the eye, the sun is getting, is still getting brighter or not? Is it going through one of its cycles?

• 21:45Speaker 03

  It's getting brighter on a very, very long time scale, but actually, uh, there, there are other things going on.

• 21:50Bill Nye?

  Over eleven years.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  We have sunspot cycles, uh, there's activity in the sun that kind of waxes and wanes over about eleven years. Uh, right now, we're just kinda coming off, uh, a solar maximum, but in fact, uh, this was a smaller solar maximum than all, than many of the previous ones, so in fact.

• 22:07Bill Nye?

  How do we determine what happened in the past on the sun, uh, with respect to the sun and its, uh, maxima and minima?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Physics.

• 22:14Bill Nye?

  But is it in the rocks?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  So there are, uh, so the solar activity also modulates the cosmic rays that come in from all around the cosmos. Those cosmic rays, very high energy, they come into the atmosphere and they create isotopes. Carbon 14, beryllium 10, chlorine 36, that don't occur any other place in the Earth's system. And they'll just keep creating it. And so when you have something that's made of air or made of carbon, that's how you can do carbon dating, right? So you're not part of that. But if you go back, you can actually see that those...

• 22:52Bill Nye?

  For those of you who are listening on the podcast, his hand's going up and down.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  My hand's going up and down.

• 22:57Bill Nye?

  Like a wave.

• 22:58Chuck Nice?

  Visually showing us the ebb and flow.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the up and down, yeah.

• 23:01Bill Nye?

  These cosmic rays will make some protons become neutrons, some neutrons become protons.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  That's right. So they'll hit a nitrogen and they'll make a carbon 14.

• 23:09Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Or they'll hit a...

• 23:11Bill Nye?

  Nitrogen 7 will become a carbon 6 plus an extra neutron.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 23:15Bill Nye?

  That's fabulous.

• 23:16Chuck Nice?

  You see, this is why you gotta pay attention.

• 23:19Bill Nye?

  Well, it's science.

• 23:21Chuck Nice?

  Science people.

• 23:22Bill Nye?

  Here's the thing, what I say to everybody, because I deal with a lot of climate denial people. Okay, these isotopes are created in this special way. There's no other way to make these isotopes. So there's nobody running around with a hypodermic needle making isotopes for kicks to fool people. So when you have this evidence, it's incontrovertible. It's like, let's go, people. Let's get this done. Let's get to work, Chuck.

• 23:49Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 23:50Bill Nye?

  Give us another query.

• 23:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so this is Russ Ismailov.

• 23:54Bill Nye?

  Ismailov.

• 23:56Chuck Nice?

  Ismailov, thank you.

• 23:57Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 23:58Chuck Nice?

  Ismailov? No, it's not.

• 24:00Bill Nye?

  No, it's on.

• 24:01Chuck Nice?

  Thank you.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Do you know how many times he's heard that joke?

• 24:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm sure right now Russ hates us.

• 24:11Chuck Nice?

  I included us, but you know it's me.

• 24:14Bill Nye?

  I was gonna say it's me.

• 24:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so Russ wants to know this, and he's coming to us from Facebook. Does oil production affect the climate change directly or indirectly? Kind regards from Kazan, Russia.

• 24:28Bill Nye?

  Well, if you're in the, I can tell you this, if you're producing oil, what they call synthetic crude oil, in the tar sand region of Alberta, the province of Canada, in Western Canada, you are, just to process to produce this synthetic crude, takes a tremendous amount of energy. Thirty percent of the energy in the crude oil is used to produce this synthetic crude oil. And it's just pumping carbon dioxide in the air. And then when you burn the crude oil, the synthetic crude oil, you pump even more. Thirty percent. It's extraordinary. And what they've done, just to whine and complain in Calgary, I was there in end of August, beginning of September, they've created this boom and bust cycle in the economy.

• 25:11Bill Nye?

  Put all their eggs in the synthetic crude basket, if I may. And the place was not deserted, but there was very, there were very few people working. And it's just, it couldn't be worse.

• 25:23Chuck Nice?

  That is fascinating, what you just, I can't believe I've never heard that before. Thirty percent.

• 25:29Bill Nye?

  Oh, man. It was discovered in 1884, geologists run around the Athabasca River, Athabasca River runs through there, and it cuts a swath through the layers of soil. And you can see this layer of tar. And it's sandy, tar sand. And the oil companies have had a campaign to call it oil sand. But you pick up a handful of it, it is goo, it's tar. And this guy said, boy, if you could exploit this, it'd be fantastic. So in the 1970s, some chemical engineers came up with a process. To make it into very usable crude oil.

• 26:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow, so you're creating a crap load of pollution so that you can create a crap load of pollution.

• 26:14Bill Nye?

  Yes. And, and accidentally just mess with the economy of this otherwise lovely province.

• 26:21Chuck Nice?

  Wow, fantastic. Hey, Russ.

• 26:24Bill Nye?

  But Gavin, you're gonna chime in.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Uh, so just to answer his question, it's indirect. Like, it's not, you know, the, the, it's the burning of the oil that causes the carbon dioxide and all the other pollutants which, which have the.

• 26:37Bill Nye?

  But I can tell you, in oil field production, you're, you burn a lot of oil running pumps and generators and compressors.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yes. Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna argue with that.

• 26:48Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 26:48Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I was looking forward to the argument, but I guess we won't.

• 26:51Bill Nye?

  We're not.

• 26:55Chuck Nice?

  All right, let us, uh, let's move on. Um, and this is from, uh, from Pete Nagy from Facebook. Pete wants to know this. Hey, Pete here from California, the sun is lauded being near limitless as a source of energy, but it isn't, uh, technically limited by solar collectors. After all, the sun isn't always shining down here on the ground. What are some of the possible solutions to this dilemma? Wow, um, could we not tell these people and could you guys just write it down for me so I can go, uh, you know, make a fortune and retire?

• 27:28Bill Nye?

  No, you can make a fortune. I tell all the, everybody this.

• 27:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay, good, then let's do that.

• 27:32Bill Nye?

  A better, if you had, we had better batteries. And we have very good batteries, but they could be better and better energy storage systems, whatever that might be. It could be these great gravity, these giant pistons that go up and down.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Molten salt is very useful.

• 27:45Bill Nye?

  Salt, we love that.

• 27:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, sorry, guys, uh, as, as the, uh, non-scientist in the room, can we please have a little lesson on molten salt? Because I know Morton's salt.

• 27:57Bill Nye?

  So what we do, it's not that hard, giant mirrors, and, uh, you can see them from airplanes here in the US. Giant mirrors concentrate solar power. Beam it up to a big black ball. Full of, it's largely sodium chloride, table salt, right, with a little calcium chloride, this other, the salt you melt snow in front of your.

• 28:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 28:17Bill Nye?

  On your sidewalk. A mixture and it gets liquid, so freaking hot, it gets liquid. And so when the sun's not shining overnight, the stuff stays hot. It's so massively, it holds so much heat. Its thermal capacity's so high. So you can continue to run a steam turbine all night long. Gotcha. If you have it worked out. Alright. We're just scratching the solar, concentrated solar power surface on this. Unbelievable. Potential for this is enormous. And the place that also ironically has huge potential for it is in the Middle East where all this oil's produced. They'd have these concentrated solar power collectors. Yeah, here it gets hot, there. That's right. So you are watching StarTalk All-Stars. We're here with Chuck Nice and

• 29:02Bill Nye?

  me, Bill Nye, your host. And this week, our All-Star is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City. We'll be back right after this. Welcome back, welcome back to StarTalk All-Star Edition. I'm your host, Bill Nye, here with our beloved Chuck Nice, man about the earth. Yes. And speaking of the earth, our All-Star this week is Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Center for Space Studies, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies here in New York City, which is part of NASA, right? It is indeed. You're a NASA employee ultimately. I am. And this week on Cosmic Queries, your queries from the cosmos are all about climate change. And here to read the next query, or do you want to talk about salt some more? Molten salt?

• 29:46Chuck Nice?

  Well, no, I just found that to be a completely fantastic idea.

• 29:49Bill Nye?

  Oh, it's cool.

• 29:50Chuck Nice?

  I don't understand why these...

• 29:51Bill Nye?

  Or it's hot.

• 29:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's hot. Very hot.

• 29:53Bill Nye?

  That's hot.

• 29:53Chuck Nice?

  Uh, you know, I just don't understand why these type of alternatives are not put forward in such a manner where there's a public awareness.

• 30:01Bill Nye?

  Well, if you live in Las Vegas, there are three solar, huge solar plants out there. And in, it ends with a "paw" sound. In California, there's a big... Ivan Paw. Thank you. Yes. Ivan Paw, Ivan Paw. Ivan Paw. Ivan Paw, California, there, thank you, is a huge concentrated solar collector system, CSB, concentrated solar power. And this is the thing, we're just getting started on this, Chuck. Now, just speaking as a political commentator and guy who's thought about this a little bit. When you have a standing army on the other side of the world to protect oil fields.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 30:40Bill Nye?

  That is effectively a subsidy for that form of energy. It costs billions of dollars to maintain a military on the other side of the world. If we were to encourage concentrated solar power, photovoltaics, wind energy at that same, a tenth of that scale, we would have all of these systems in place in 30 years.

• 30:59Chuck Nice?

  Yes, but then how would we destabilize the Middle East?

• 31:03Bill Nye?

  Great question. I think that's not that hard.

• 31:07Speaker 03

  With podcasts and Facebook.

• 31:08Bill Nye?

  Right, exactly. No, it seems... No, that thing's been going on.

• 31:14Bill Nye?

  It's called the Bible. Absolutely. The conflict's been going on a long time.

• 31:16Chuck Nice?

  They don't need any help, is what you're saying, right?

• 31:18Speaker 03

  No, they actually do need a lot of help.

• 31:20Bill Nye?

  I was gonna say.

• 31:20Chuck Nice?

  No, I mean to destabilize.

• 31:21Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, we're all being hilarious.

• 31:23Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 31:24Bill Nye?

  Read on. A cosmic query.

• 31:25Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. This is from Benjamin, who is at Benodd3 on Twitter. Gavin said, "I wasn't given Twitter any love, so let's go to Twitter." Here's what he says. "People emphasize negative aspects of climate change, but are there any foreseeable positives?"

• 31:45Speaker 03

  Well, so let me, let me give you one.

• 31:47Bill Nye?

  Please.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  So, so I'm English and...

• 31:50Bill Nye?

  Do you know?

• 31:52Speaker 03

  I do, yes, yes, yes. We're, we're, we hang out all the time at the palace.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  And, and for many years, many years, I, you know, there was, there was such a thing as, as English wine. And there was an old joke in Victorian...

• 32:07Bill Nye?

  English wine?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Yes, in the Victorian period, that it would take four people to drink English wine. One to drink the wine, two people to hold the person down, and another person to pour it into their throat.

• 32:18Chuck Nice?

  Pretty funny.

• 32:19Bill Nye?

  Very troubling.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay, but now, it turns out that there are more vineyards in, in England than there have ever been in history. And in fact, that the champagne...

• 32:29Bill Nye?

  You say history, you're talking about over 500 years, 1,000 years.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Thousands of years, yes.

• 32:32Bill Nye?

  1,000 years.

• 32:32Speaker 03

  We have, we have records of vineyards in England going back to the doomsday book, over 1,000 years ago. Um, but there's more now. And the wine they're producing in blind tastings against champagne actually wins. So, so wine quality in, in England uh is actually now on a par with the best that the French can produce.

• 32:53Bill Nye?

  Why they're gonna, the French people are gonna be unglued about that.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  I, I, absolutely. So, so, so in fact, uh, the champagne companies are buying up uh swaths of uh what are called the South Downs in, in the UK because they know that, that the temperatures in champagne are now at the limit. So if it gets much warmer in champagne region, uh, they won't be able to make as good champagne there. And they're thinking about moving their production to the UK. So they, that will be a foreseeable benefit for English wine drinkers.

• 33:22Bill Nye?

  UK is a little cooler.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Yes, it's a little bit further north, but it's very similar soils, very similar terroir. Uh, and uh now it's uh, it's actually happening.

• 33:31Chuck Nice?

  So there's your answer, Benjamin. Uh, the positive will be you get to piss off French winemakers.

• 33:36Bill Nye?

  Well, what it means, but writ large is agriculture is gonna change.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  That's exactly right. So, so you're seeing the same thing in the US, right? So uh Napa Valley, where we're producing a lot of great wine now is at the limit of how hot it needs to be. If it gets much hotter, it's gonna be hotter. So production is moving to Oregon, uh Washington State. There's some excellent, excellent wines that are really emerging there. And that's part of, and British Columbia even, yes. So I mean, I tasted wines in British Columbia maybe 20 years ago and the, the same joke would have been true then. Uh, but now they're actually, they're actually.

• 34:08Bill Nye?

  So agriculture is gonna change. The whole problem, everybody, the way I see it, is it's how fast it's changing. We have an interstate highway system. We have trains in Britain for uh carrying produce to market or carrying produce to the the winery where you're gonna make the grapes into wine, for example, or the oats into oatmeal, what have you. But we're not set up to have that's all that production move farther and farther north or farther and farther from the equator and rain patterns are changing.

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, for for niche things like vineyards, you know, they're pretty much on the ball and so they they they pay attention to these things and move things along quite quickly. But your bigger problem is is the staples, not not the luxury goods, you know, wheat, corn, barley, soybeans, all of those things are affected by.

• 34:56Chuck Nice?

  Better known as food, for most of the world. Straight up food.

• 35:01Bill Nye?

  Let's try another one, Chuck.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay, here we go. Let's let's just very quickly in that same in that same vein, Tobias, who is at Miko on Twitter, on Twitter, wants to know this. Does animal agriculture have any impact on climate change? So the way we grow and raise our food, you know, our livestock, does that hurt or help climate change in any way?

• 35:25Speaker 03

  So, you know, if you run a farm, you can integrate the the animals in the farm so that they eat a lot of the waste and, you know, so that's that's that's okay.

• 35:34Bill Nye?

  By waste, you mean silage?

• 35:35Speaker 03

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

• 36:01Bill Nye?

  Natural gas.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's it's basically the same stuff as natural gas. And since we've.

• 36:06Chuck Nice?

  Believe me, I know.

• 36:07Bill Nye?

  Because you have three kids.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  Whoa, yes, yes.

• 36:10Bill Nye?

  And your wife has pointed out, so on and so on.

• 36:13Speaker 03

  Okay, well, that's too much information.

• 36:15Bill Nye?

  It comes at their burping. This is a myth. It's not coming out their tails.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Mostly mostly cow burps, yes. And and we've increased the number of cows and sheep enormously in the last century. And that's certainly contributed to the fact that levels of methane are more than double what they were 150 years.

• 36:33Bill Nye?

  Methane or methane is a more powerful.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  It's all about me, Bill.

• 36:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah. Euthane is a euthane is much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide even.

• 36:43Speaker 03

  Pound for pound, but there's much less of it. The carbon dioxide is a much more powerful thing because there's more of it, but.

• 36:48Bill Nye?

  So raising livestock has a huge effect, Chuck or Tobias, to answer your question. And the other thing just writ large. When I was young, there were three billion people in the world. When my grandfather was young, there were one and a half billion people. Now they're over seven, 7.3 billion people. And everybody wants protein, everybody wants to eat, and here we are.

• 37:09Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:10Bill Nye?

  Going through this stuff, and the farming and the agriculture and the animals. And we're adding methane to the atmosphere.

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  So when they say.

• 37:18Bill Nye?

  Gasoline on a fire.

• 37:19Chuck Nice?

  When they say one day vegetarian actually helps the world ecology.

• 37:25Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Chuck Nice?

  That's actually true then?

• 37:26Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, that's actually true. So, so if you take a diet, that's a vegetarian diet, compare it to a diet that's, that's got a lot of meat in it. Uh, your environmental footprint, not just in, in methane, but also in the fuel that's, that's used to, to transport and create these things. The amount of fertilizer that's being used, the amount of nitrate runoff that's going into the rivers, which is creating the dead zone. You know, in the Gulf of Mexico.

• 37:51Bill Nye?

  It all adds up.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  It all, it all adds up, so.

• 37:54Bill Nye?

  You have a number, you felt like you were building to a number?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  I, I may, I could have made up a number, but I didn't actually have the number.

• 38:01Bill Nye?

  It's big.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Yes, it's a big, big number.

• 38:02Bill Nye?

  So, as we like to say, Chuck.

• 38:05Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 38:05Bill Nye?

  If you don't like regulation now, just wait till it gets to the point where they, we, or somebody has to regulate the amount of protein. Uh, rather, animal protein you take in.

• 38:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 38:17Bill Nye?

  And we're actually regulating farmers and to produce less of livestock protein. That's, that's, could be a big deal, everybody. Uh, so if you like to worry about things, you're living at a great time.

• 38:30Chuck Nice?

  There you go, take a, yes, and, and believe me, that's gonna be a tough fight, uh, just ask Oprah. So, um, Paul Bunyan wants to know this, and this is, he, that's what he says his name is, and he is at Matthew, uh, Birch.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  With the rising ocean levels due to polar melt, how soon before the Hudson River becomes the Gulf of the Hudson? And and let me just add an addendum, you know, to the, how soon will this have a verifiable and measurable effect on our coastal regions? Because when you look at all of the world, most people live on the coast of wherever.

• 39:13Speaker 03

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

• 39:51Bill Nye?

  So they have an expression in Florida nuisance flooding.

• 39:54Chuck Nice?

  Nuisance flooding.

• 39:55Bill Nye?

  Nuisance flooding. Now, everybody, when you think of floods, you might get into some biblical thing where everybody's underwater and enormous hundreds of feet underwater, 100 meters underwater. But the nuisance flooding, which is inducing insurance companies not to provide insurance to where you park your car. Because saltwater is getting in your wheel wells. It's just a few centimeters, a few inches deep. But if you put a few inches of water on the floor of your house, you ruin almost everything.

• 40:27Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 40:27Bill Nye?

  You ruin the stove, you ruin all your furniture, you ruin your carpets, you ruin your bedding, you ruin everything. And so this expression nuisance is kind of shorthand for.

• 40:38Chuck Nice?

  You're not in good hands, you're on your own.

• 40:41Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. And so I said to this guy, Mr. Hill, who's a legislator in Florida, I said, what are you gonna do? He represents Pensacola, Florida, and they have nuisance flooding continually. I said, what are you gonna do? And everybody moves. You know, they're gonna move, he says. Where are they gonna move to? How are they gonna displace themselves? If you're a middle-income or lower-income person, how do you pick up everything? And where do you go to get a job? And so on. And that's in the US, which is civilization. Way to you're in the developing world where you just don't have resources.

• 41:14Chuck Nice?

  Jeez. God. Man.

• 41:18Bill Nye?

  Let's get to, let's raise awareness, Chuck. Read another query.

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna raise awareness. I'm gonna, God, this is, this is really serious stuff.

• 41:25Bill Nye?

  Well, man, yeah, yeah. Yes.

• 41:28Chuck Nice?

  All right. Here's something that...

• 41:31Bill Nye?

  Gavin, he's giving us, he's giving it the right smile. It's upbeat. Take it.

• 41:36Chuck Nice?

  Here's a little something that I wanted to get, and you know, since you have Unstoppable and since you are a...

• 41:43Bill Nye?

  He's got climate change picturing the science.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  I do, yes.

• 41:47Bill Nye?

  How many books in a carton? Twenty? They make great gifts, everybody. Sixty. They make great gifts. The Equinox is coming up.

• 41:55Chuck Nice?

  So can we have three, just major points, three major talking points, three tips that we can put out to kind of silence the climate-denying arguments?

• 42:13Bill Nye?

  Well, my big thing is why, do you really think that your intuition about weather and about your whole life is more accurate at predicting the future than the world's climate scientists? And then to follow that up with, do you think the world's climate scientists are in a conspiracy? Gavin, are you in a conspiracy where you guys text each other?

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Yes, well, we get, we get signals from the vegetarian overlords.

• 42:38Bill Nye?

  Really?

• 42:40Chuck Nice?

  When he said texts, I was thinking, you know, dick pics, but I'm sorry.

• 42:44Bill Nye?

  Whoa.

• 42:45Chuck Nice?

  Sorry.

• 42:47Bill Nye?

  Hard talk is the best time in the show.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  That escalated quickly.

• 42:52Chuck Nice?

  I've been hanging with Brett Favre, what can I say?

• 42:54Bill Nye?

  Wow. It's unexpected. But are there three tips? We have just a few seconds left before break.

• 43:02Bill Nye?

  Gavin, you got any ideas?

• 43:04Speaker 03

  Look at the evidence. The planet is warming. One. We understand why. Two. We're not stopping our emissions, so it's gonna get worse.

• 43:13Bill Nye?

  There you go.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  It's that simple.

• 43:15Bill Nye?

  So Chuck, Gavin, the answer to this problem is the evidence is overwhelming. Let's get to work.

• 43:22Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I like that.

• 43:24Bill Nye?

  This is StarTalk All-Star Edition. I'm here with Chuck Nice, a regular man about the universe, and Dr. Gavin Schmidt from the Goddard Center, Goddard Institute for Space Studies, part of NASA, right here in New York City. And this show has been about climate change. I've been your guest host, Bill Nye. Tune into StarTalk every week and turn it up loud. We'll see you next time.