StarTalk Live! Storms of Our Century (Part 2)

The climate heats up in the Bell House when Neil deGrasse Tyson and the StarTalk Live crew, including Questlove and Dr. Adam Sobel, look at the causes, politics and science of climate change.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  As an environmental advocate, professional climber Alex Honnold knows the most critical battles for our planet happen far from the spotlight. That's why he hosts Planet Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to the people finding real, hopeful solutions to climate challenges. Throughout season six, Alex brings together extraordinary change makers for powerful conversations about grit, determination, and the power of hope to fuel our fight for a better future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts. Curiosity is fundamental to progress, so why not take what you're curious about and

• 0:45Speaker 00

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• 1:28Speaker 00

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• 1:57Speaker 01

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  We are live at the Bell House, Brooklyn, New York, StarTalk Radio. I've got with me Adam Sobel, climate scientist from Columbia University. Questlove Eugene.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yes, and Michael Showalter, everybody.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yes. We're talking about storms, hurricanes, we're trying to get to the bottom of this. And I'm wondering, is it psychological?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Thank you for that answer.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Storms are real, go on.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  Can I ask a question?

• 2:54Speaker 01

  Yes, Quest, go for it.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'm really fascinated by all the facts you're telling me, and I have absolutely no reason to believe that you're feeding us false information. Now, having been very active on the campaign trail, why are, quote, "they" so hell-bent on proving otherwise? How does that personally make you feel?

• 3:17Speaker 04

  Proving otherwise, then what?

• 3:18Speaker 01

  You know what he's talking about! What? You know!

• 3:21Speaker 03

  No, no, no. When you're a political revisionist, denying that these things don't exist.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  The climate change is man-made.

• 3:30Speaker 04

  You're asking about the climate change issue.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Well, let's define "climate" first, because people get climate and weather confused. And everybody wants to take one incident and say, "That's climate change." And just give us the background on that, and then we can explore the politics of this. Yeah, so, climate, what is it?

• 3:47Speaker 04

  So, climate is the average over a long time of what the weather is, so...

• 3:52Speaker 01

  A week, a month, a year, what's a long time to you?

• 3:55Speaker 04

  As much data as you've got, we usually define it as the average over some long period of time, 30 years, 50 years.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  The trend's over long periods?

• 4:04Speaker 04

  Well, first, the climate is the average, and then a trend would be a slow change in the average. So if one period of 30 years is different than the 30 years before that, then we might say there's a trend in the climate. There's a change in the climate.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Is there a trend in the climate?

• 4:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Okay, that's my understanding as well. And it's also, I think, our life experience, looking at weather patterns, which, if you average, would make climate today versus when many of us grew up. So what's the challenge, then? Why are people still out there saying no?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Isn't the debate as to whether or not the reason for this change is man-made or not?

• 4:42Speaker 04

  So there's a couple different questions. So we started off talking about hurricanes. There's two different questions you can ask, because hurricanes are a very special, very

• 4:50Speaker 05

  Very special.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  unique part of the weather, right? They're not just any old weather, they're unusual.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  They're hurricanes.

• 4:56Speaker 04

  They're like, you know, the closest thing we have to a black hole in astronomy, if that. They're singularities, right? And so, you can ask, is the climate changing?

• 5:06Speaker 01

  Okay, if that's your best singularity, I got it beat. I just want to tell you.

• 5:11Speaker 01

  I got a singularity that'll eat the entire Earth, you know? But that's fine.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  We all do what we can.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  You'll do what you can.

• 5:20Speaker 04

  So you can ask, is the climate changing? The answer is yes. It's getting warmer. That does a lot of different things to the atmosphere and the ocean and all the systems on the Earth that depend on them.

• 5:29Speaker 01

  Can you quantify the rate of getting warmer?

• 5:31Speaker 04

  You know, on the order of a degree Celsius in the last century.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  So we'll all be dead in about 80 years?

• 5:37Speaker 05

  It's warming at an exponentially faster rate.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  Uh, well, exponentially is a little hard to measure.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  Since the Industrial Revolution, haven't things increased?

• 5:47Speaker 04

  Yes. The Industrial Revolution is the cause of it. Since the Industrial Revolution, we started burning a lot of carbon from the ground, and that goes into the atmosphere and makes carbon dioxide, and that's the main factor that's warming the climate.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  I must clarify, we're burning more complex chemicals with carbon in it.

• 6:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  And then the carbon separates from the rest of its molecule, leaving carbon behind.

• 6:08Speaker 04

  We're burning oil and gas, which is complex carbohydrates, and then those...

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Good, because if you actually try to burn carbon, you can't.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Unless you try really hard.

• 6:15Speaker 04

  Right, pure carbon.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  No, I think even if you try...

• 6:18Speaker 04

  The diamonds don't burn, right.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Diamond has the highest melting point of any...uh, carbon has the highest melting point of any element.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  So you can't melt a diamond?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  That's correct. Essentially, you can't.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  What if you threw it into the sun with something?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  It would vaporize.

• 6:30Speaker 05

  It wouldn't melt at just before vaporizing?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  No, some things go straight to gas, like dry ice. It doesn't melt, it just goes straight to gas.

• 6:37Speaker 02

  All right, you win this round, scientist.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so finish, finish before you get to the question point.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  So you can ask if it's warming because of humans burning chemicals that make put to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the answer is yes. Then you can ask, is that doing something to hurricanes? And the answer is, we think it will eventually, but it's too hard to see that clearly now, because the hurricanes are so rare, that you have to count a lot of them before you can compute an average meaningfully, right? And so, then if you want to see a change in the average, you have to wait even longer, because you had to have the average now and the average later. They're so rare, they're such bursty things, that from just the observations alone, it's hard to prove that the hurricanes are changing. Of course, we all in New York feel like they are.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I just want to put some emphasis on what you just said. So, this is true for any scientific study.

• 7:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Right? If you can get a set of data, you can get averages, that's fine. But now you want to see what the change in the averages are, you need more data than what you just got to get the same confidence in what's going on.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  So it doesn't mean they're not changing, it means we just can't prove it that way.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  But you're asking, if I'm not mistaken, why the need to refute your evidence?

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Why people want to refute it, I don't know. I don't have any particular scientific expertise to answer that.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  I have an oil company and I can answer that.

• 7:57Speaker 04

  Because it's a psychological, I mean, well, right, I mean, I think-

• 8:00Speaker 02

  I want 10 billion and not 9 billion dollars.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  It's a little easy to-

• 8:05Speaker 05

  But there's lots of people who don't own oil companies that feel strongly that-

• 8:10Speaker 02

  But they might one day, in the hope of owning an oil company.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  Oh, you comedian.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Let me get deeper into it. What is your frustration level? When they have their own scientists trying to debunk your wacky theories.

• 8:23Speaker 04

  My frustration level is very high.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, it shows, yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 04

  They're the-

• 8:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're totally freaking out.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Wait, that was Eugene joking, Eugene saying-

• 8:32Speaker 04

  And the fact-

• 8:32Speaker 02

  It shows.

• 8:35Speaker 03

  No, and the fact that they have, quote, "their own scientists", isn't there a fraternity, sorority of scientists? Sort of like, you know, with lawyers and doctors?

• 8:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have a few of those.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Don't you have your own oath of which you're not supposed to lie about these things?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  No, actually, we don't have an oath, but we all know we're not supposed to do it.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Wait, Quest, there is an oath. It's just not taken explicitly, and you know what it is? Thou shalt not lie, because if you do, your colleagues will discover it in you and you'll be exercised, ostracized.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  Ostrich-assized.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  But I will say that climate science is an interdisciplinary science, where you have to know a lot about a lot of different things. And some of the people who deny climate change have a specialty that doesn't look at the other factors, which is why they are wrong. Right? Is that part of it?

• 9:27Speaker 01

  Thank you, Eugene, for that expertise.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  It's a pretty good joke. No, is that true?

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the science is pretty much settled. Among those who study this seriously, pretty much everybody agrees that the Earth is getting warmer because of human activity. There's a few people who say that it's not. The situation is a lot like the cigarette companies trying to tell you that smoking didn't cause cancer. And I think it's for much the same reasons.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  Or that guns don't kill people.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, that they simply make them slightly heavier.

• 9:52Speaker 04

  That's another one, yeah.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Quest love, on the campaign trail, was it a big platform point that was made?

• 10:17Speaker 03

  There are people that were looking to the president for various things. His views on the economy, education.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  It's in the list, and they go down the list.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  And, you know, and I just happen to be around a lot of people that were kind of staring at their watches impatiently. Like, okay, when's he gonna get to the environment? Like, really stick his foot to the man? Which I personally thought that he was gonna wait until after he's secure in this term, and then he's really gonna stick his foot. I mean, just from having spoken to staff and what, you know...

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Sources, yes.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I'm in contact with some of them, so... I got friends in little places.

• 10:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I'm more, I'm not, you know, I'm not surprised about politicians that lie to get what they want and, you know, their hands in other pockets, but the scientists that they have to debunk these theories, like, how come?

• 11:09Speaker 04

  It's a pretty small number of people.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Like, where's the bully on your side of the fence, like the?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Al Gore.

• 11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's frustrating for us. I mean, the scientists in this field, and there's a lot of us, we feel that we've been saying the same thing for a long time. It hasn't really changed a lot. It's just become more and more certain.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  But wouldn't you think?

• 11:26Speaker 04

  There's some people that don't want to hear it. Most of them are in the United States.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Wait, wait.

• 11:28Speaker 04

  The rest of the world is better.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  Wouldn't you think that the people who are in denial, when confronted with the damage of category three, four, and five hurricanes, might just think differently about it?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we certainly could have had a Hurricane Sandy 200 years ago. It's, you can't say it's a result of climate change in the sense that it couldn't have happened without it.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  So for those who are still in denial, even among our colleagues perhaps, yes, they're the minority of the bunch, but they're out there and they get peddled forth by those who have politically different views. What will it take?

• 11:58Speaker 04

  Well, I think these catastrophic events help. I mean, even if you can't.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  The sentence of the night, people.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  Wait, do they, do they really? Because I thought like, well, it takes a tragedy for us to learn our lesson, but we tend to forget after.

• 12:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  You just rebuild and act like it didn't happen.

• 12:16Speaker 04

  We haven't forgotten this one yet.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  We were willing to forget about Colorado, and then Sandy Hook happened. It's like, oh, okay, yeah, we kind of have to deal with this situation, you know.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it fades, you know.

• 12:23Speaker 03

  I'm certain that it will take four or five more Hurricane Sandys to hit New York before.

• 12:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  You know.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  What, what, you were just gonna say?

• 12:32Speaker 05

  Well, I had, I had another random question, which is, let's say this warming continues, right? Could it get cold again? Like, because there was like the Ice Age, right?

• 12:42Speaker 04

  Right.

• 12:43Speaker 05

  Could it get hot and then all of a sudden, something else happens and then it starts getting really cold?

• 12:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's anything we have to worry about anytime soon.

• 12:52Speaker 05

  But is it possible?

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Could you quantify the word "soon" in your sentence?

• 12:55Speaker 05

  If it starts getting hotter, is that irreversible? That's my question.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  It's pretty much irreversible for the foreseeable future of our lifetime and our grandchildren's grandchildren. The ice ages in history come about because of the slow changes of the Earth's orbit due to the other planets pushing on it. Gravitational.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Neil, you know anything about that stuff?

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's almost... Give me a C+ on that one.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  You know, you have a singularity that could eat the entire Earth.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  But those take tens of thousands of years.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  It's worth saying a little something about. So, Earth's orbit around the Sun is not a perfect circle.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  What?

• 13:34Speaker 05

  Good band, though, "Perfect Circle."

• 13:37Speaker 01

  So, it's oval, okay? Which means sometimes we're closer to the Sun and sometimes we're farther. So, that's fact one. And by the way, that happens... It happens that in January, we are closer to the Sun than we are in July.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  And by several feet.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, by about... By about, uh, three million miles closer.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'm right. I just use a different measure.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. So, we're 94 million miles away. Uh, we'll get someone to convert to metric for you later. Uh, 94 million miles away in...

• 14:09Speaker 02

  He's from 1910.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  In our summer and 91 million miles away in our winter. So, that is one cycle. Another cycle is, the tip of our axis, which right now is 23 and 1/2 degrees, that bobs up and down. Okay, so it goes from like 22 to 24 degrees. The more it tips towards the Sun, the hotter the two hemispheres will get in their respective summers. So, if you cycle these two phenomenon, have you tipped down more towards the Sun? And closer to the Sun, you have a warming trend. You're tipped away and up, you have a cooling trend. And you cycle this through, you run the math, you run the numbers.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Because one can happen while the other one is not ready yet for it to combine. But when they combine, you run through these master cycles of climate on Earth. And you get the Ice Age, which enabled the early migrating humans to go from Asia into North America over the Bering Strait. Because when it's cold and it rains...

• 15:18Speaker 04

  It snows.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Thank you. When it's cold...

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I caught myself, but apparently not fast enough. So, when it snows under these conditions, the moisture comes from the oceans, which are still liquid. It snows on the land and it stays there. So, there's a systematic draining of the oceans that occurs during an Ice Age. And huge glaciers build up on the land masses and the oceans become lower and lower filled. And you start exposing land masses that were previously completely buried, like the land bridge that is the Bering Strait between Alaska and northwestern Asia.

• 16:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  So, right. So, that's just the little interlude there. Please continue.

• 16:08Speaker 04

  So, that's the past Ice Ages. I mean, there's times when, in the past, in the geologic record...

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Oh, can I add? Wait. So, watch what happens. No, this is... No, I can't stop there. Wait.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Start 10 billion years ago.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  No, no, watch, watch, watch, watch. Watch. No, no, this is important. It's irrelevant, but important.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  So, our early human ancestors migrate. They enter North America and they keep going through Central America and South America. And they're hanging out and making, you know, civilizations. Then we come out of the Ice Age. The glaciers melt back into the oceans. The oceans fill up again. It breaks the land bridge and strands an entire branch of the human species in North and South America where no one else in the rest of the world knew about them. And so, when Columbus came across, in some ways, that was the most significant event in the history of our species because two entire branches of the human species

• 17:08Speaker 01

  that had been separate and distinct for 10,000 years reconnected.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  No, I'm saying it's relevant but irrelevant but important.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  I would say it's not irrelevant.

• 17:19Speaker 04

  It's not irrelevant because some of the ice is still there in Greenland and Antarctica.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  That's leftover from the ice.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  That's leftover, and if that, as we warm the planet, as that melts, that is what's posing the danger of raising the sea level higher. And the sea level getting higher is what's gonna make us at risk for a lot more coastal flooding events, even if the storms don't change.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  And to think those two people liked the same bands. Wow.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  So Adam, do you expect more hurricanes as the temperature of the earth rises, or fewer hurricanes, or more that are more intense, or fewer that... You model this stuff, right?

• 17:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  So what does it tell you about hurricanes and climate change? Because I want to know the future.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  So it's actually a difficult problem that a lot of people have been working on, and there's still a lot of uncertainty, but we're starting to hone in on some general results that we think are right, in at least a rough quality of sense.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Can you buffer that answer any more than you just did? We're kind of sort of think we might have...

• 18:24Speaker 04

  I'm holding back, yeah.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  We kind of think we might be converging possibly on what?

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know why deniers don't believe you. You're like, I don't know, there's a 98 point, uh, well, you never know, really, it's, uh...

• 18:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're right, you're not the first to say that, yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 02

  We're all flooded.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  All right, so go, tell me.

• 18:44Speaker 04

  We think that hurricanes will get more intense in a warmer climate on average, and so the worst ones will be worse than what we have today. At the same time, we don't think that there will be more of them on average over the whole earth.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  We think there's more likely to be fewer rather than more, but they'll all be more, but they'll be more intense on average. So what the real question is, and I don't think we had the answer to this yet, is will there be more or fewer of the most intense ones? So it's like if you ask, how many kids took the test and got an A? And you let fewer kids take the tests, but they all study more. Will more get an A or will fewer? It depends which effect is bigger, right? If there's fewer hurricanes...

• 19:19Speaker 01

  That example didn't help me understand your hurricanes.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  I actually kind of enjoyed it.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  What?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  I think that's a good example.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  If there's fewer hurricanes, but the few...

• 19:28Speaker 02

  But they're all getting As.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  Wait a second, hurricanes are taking tests?

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Look, what you're saying is that if there are fewer hurricanes, but the hurricanes that remain are more severe, that could in fact be more devastating to us than more hurricanes that are, based on that Dante-esque descent into hell that I just...

• 19:49Speaker 04

  Because as you said, the...

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Give me 10 category 2 hurricanes, I don't ever want to see a category 5.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  That's right. The single, uh, each category, with each category, the damage goes up very, very fast. So, like, every category go up. It's not like a linear scale, right? It's not like, well, category 4 is just one more than category 3.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  When I read the one where there are no leaves left on any tree, that just freaked me out.

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• 25:04Speaker 05

  Is it possible to predict whether, right now there's a 10 day forecast? Is it even possible to, even with the best technology, predict it beyond 10 days?

• 25:13Speaker 01

  Are you limited by chaos?

• 25:14Speaker 04

  The answer is maybe a little beyond 10 days, but not much. There's a limit beyond which you can't go. And it is because of chaos. That's right. You want to explain that?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  No, you go for it. I got your back if you're.

• 25:28Speaker 03

  Chaos is. Is chaos an acronym? Chaos.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  I'm sorry.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  That was a get smart.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  What was chaos? I know, but it's an acronym for.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  Cannibalistic humanoid.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  Okay, go.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  If you have some kind of dynamical system, a dynamical system means something that has rules that govern how it behaves in time, then with certain types of systems, if they start from two different points that are almost the same but slightly, slightly different, as time goes on, the path that those two systems are on, the rules are exact. So if they started exactly the same place, they'll do the same thing. There's no doubt about the rules that govern the system. It's completely predictable in principle. But if you started two slightly different places, those two trajectories will diverge. So the two paths will become more and more different till after a while, they're as different as any other two states of the system that could reasonably happen. And you never know the state of the system now perfectly. We don't measure the temperature and the wind and all that everywhere

• 26:30Speaker 04

  perfectly. So there's always a little uncertainty in what the weather is now.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  There will never be a 20-day forecast.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  There will probably never be one that's any good.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  That means no, I think.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  I mean, 20 is around the edge. I mean, we think 10, 15 days.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Really?

• 26:44Speaker 04

  You know, 20 is probably beyond it. But you can predict the climate for longer. The climate is the average, and that can sometimes evolve in a more predictable way. So a perfect example is, you know that the winter's going to be colder than the summer. And that's because it's being forced by the orbit of the Earth so that the sun is shining at a different angle and all that. But it's a predictable climate change. But you can't predict the weather on any day in the next season. You can just predict the average.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  I checked the weather report avidly. And this storm was not being talked about a week ago.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  No, it kind of came out of nowhere.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Which one, the one tomorrow?

• 27:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  The one we're going to get tomorrow.

• 27:16Speaker 05

  Yes. I am addicted to the 10-day forecast.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Free beer all around.

• 27:22Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 27:26Speaker 04

  No, this came out of nowhere in the last couple of days. That's right. And that can happen. That's a...

• 27:29Speaker 05

  Chaos.

• 27:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Just add emphasis to your chaos discussion. So what you're saying is that because models are perfect in what they can calculate... Two models that are exactly the same will evolve the same forever. But an arbitrarily small difference in the initial conditions, given the forces of chaos, can have them rapidly diverge into a completely different thing that it could have gone ahead, you started the model from somewhere else.

• 28:00Speaker 05

  That's exactly right.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  And so, and weather is such a complex system, and you want to project it forward with all these dynamical forces.

• 28:07Speaker 05

  Back to the future.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Operating.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  I said sliding doors.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  You said sliding doors, and I went a little bit less obscure.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so when did we start first even understanding that we were limited by chaos?

• 28:23Speaker 04

  Sixties. A guy's name was Ed Lorenz. He died a few years ago.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  He was at MIT.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  I remember him, I remember him.

• 28:29Speaker 04

  He had a very simple model of the weather. It wasn't accurate enough for forecasting, but he had stripped it down to just a couple of equations that he could solve on a, what now would be considered a very primitive computer. And he did the same experiment twice to make sure he'd done it right, and he would get completely different answers. And then he would check back again what his initial conditions were, and they would look the same. And he'd check the program, and it looked right, and he'd keep getting a different answer. And it was only after he checked a lot of times that he realized that his initial conditions, which was just a couple of numbers, because he wasn't trying to do the whole weather, it was a much simpler mathematical problem. His initial conditions were different, far down, many decimal places down. So instead of 1.000001, it was 1.00002 or something like that. It was a difference so small, he would have never noticed it, but after a while, it became a huge difference.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  So he stumbled on chaos?

• 29:11Speaker 04

  He did, but he was smart enough to understand it.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  And this is the famous butterfly effect?

• 29:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. It says a butterfly today can cause a big difference in the weather.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  This is why I warn people about time travel. It really is very dangerous.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  And then there's the Fibonacci code, but we won't even go there.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Because I don't know what it is.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  One of the top reasons to not go there.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  We'll say Fibonacci for math show.

• 29:35Speaker 05

  Right, Tom Hanks was in the movie, that's all I know.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  That's all.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  So, do your climate change models also think about storm surges along with wind and rain and other kinds of precipitation? And are you including the fact that as water gets warmer, as it heats up, it actually expands? So that the ocean level will change simply because the temperature changed? And while meanwhile, back at the ranch, we're melting Greenland's ice caps, we're melting Antarctic ice caps, and so the water is returning to the ocean from whence it came?

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  So, most of the great cities of the world are on the water's edge because they were merchant-based, they were founded on shipping and trade. So, where's all this going?

• 30:26Speaker 04

  You're asking about the models or what's gonna actually happen to the planet?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Apparently, models don't have to be correct.

• 30:31Speaker 04

  No, they don't.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  But, we'd like them to be correct.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  What are your best models telling you?

• 30:38Speaker 04

  The best models are telling us that as carbon dioxide increases, the planet's getting warmer.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  It's a greenhouse gas.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  It's a greenhouse gas, so it traps the infrared radiation that the earth emits and reflects it back down. Like, the way a greenhouse lid traps heat, the greenhouse gases do that in a somewhat different way.

• 30:57Speaker 05

  Hydroponic.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  They keep the planet warm.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Would it help to chop down all of the trees in the world?

• 31:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:02Speaker 02

  Would that be helpful?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  No.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Uh-oh, uh-oh.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Wait, just to clarify, so, earth doesn't just radiate infrared on its own, visible light comes in from the sun.

• 31:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Gets through the atmosphere just fine. Carbon dioxide doesn't trap visible light.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  If it did, you wouldn't be able to see the sun in the daytime. So, the atmosphere is transparent to visible light.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  As obvious as that sounds, it's in fact, an important feature of our atmosphere and sun. So, visible light comes in, gets absorbed by the earth, the earth re-radiates that energy back, not in the form of visible light, but in the form of infrared, and that's how you can trap sunlight. Because we just transformed what that sunlight was, from visible light to infrared. Pick it up there.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, go.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  So, as we add carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the planet, we're warming the climate. Something like, as you double carbon dioxide, so it was 280 parts per million, pre-industrial, and now we're up to 380 something, I don't remember, maybe it's 390. We haven't, so double would be 560, I guess. So, we'll reach that sometime late in this century, and the climate models predict something like 2 to 6 degrees of warming Celsius, so it's about double that Fahrenheit, for the global average of the planet. And, we expect a lot of things to happen as a result of that. It's gonna be very hot, first of all. I think we talk a lot about hurricanes and all that, kind of exciting stuff.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  As extremes.

• 32:48Speaker 04

  But, the temperature is gonna be a big problem in places like New York City, where 100 years from now, the coolest summer is gonna be hotter than, the hottest summer that anybody now has experienced. So, it's a little bit disturbing.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't live for 300 years, because you're gonna be screwed, buddy.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. Not to mention Miami.

• 33:08Speaker 02

  It's gonna be real unpleasant.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. So, I think you implied something that you didn't say.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  You said, "In 100 years, the temperature will go up by 2 to 6 degrees." I can handle 2 to 6 degrees.

• 33:18Speaker 04

  Celsius.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Celsius, okay.

• 33:20Speaker 04

  So, it's double that in Fahrenheit.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Okay, so it's, you know, okay.

• 33:25Speaker 05

  What are we on?

• 33:26Speaker 01

  5/9ths plus 32.

• 33:27Speaker 04

  It's about double, just double it.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  I'm serious, though. What are we?

• 33:30Speaker 02

  Fahrenheit.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  What are we?

• 33:32Speaker 02

  We're Fahrenheit.

• 33:33Speaker 05

  So, that means...

• 33:34Speaker 01

  We are Fahrenheit creatures.

• 33:35Speaker 05

  So, then 100 years from now...

• 33:36Speaker 04

  So, make it 4 to 10, okay?

• 33:37Speaker 05

  Okay, so 100 years from now, it's gonna be, on average, 12 degrees hotter.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  That's the upper end of the range. Well, that's for doubling CO2. 100 years from now, we might more than double CO2.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  Why are you so angry with me? I'm just this guy who...

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Wait, wait, so, so, there's something else that went unmentioned there, and correct me if I'm wrong.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Everything rises, but not only that, isn't it true that under global warming scenarios, the extremes increase? So, on a heat wave, it gets more hotter than a hot heat wave would have been a century before.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I mean, the, the, the temperature oscillates up and down, and in some chaotic fashion all the time, but if you start, if the whole average is higher, those oscillations are gonna be on top of a higher average. So, the high points are gonna be higher, and the low points are gonna be higher than the low points used to be, too. So, we won't have as cold winters, we'll have hotter summers.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Alright, so, when should we move to Mars?

• 34:37Speaker 02

  Mars is very warm.

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Mars climate has got a long way to go to, to get to where...

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Mars is several hundred degrees below zero at the moment.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  I think, I think you should just first start with Quebec. And then, when that's too hot, then you should be like, "Let's get a spaceship."

• 34:51Speaker 05

  But if, but if, if people get their act together, can they slow the trend?

• 34:54Speaker 04

  We can slow it, but we can't stop it. We're committed to quite a bit of warming, because the carbon that's already in the system, that we've already put up there, the warming from that is gonna take a while to play out.

• 35:05Speaker 05

  Hundreds of years.

• 35:06Speaker 04

  There's a, there's a lag time, partly because the oceans take a long time to heat up, there, the oceans have just, only the top layer, the oceans has begun to warm, and the ocean's got a lot of water, and it's very heavy, takes a long time to heat it up. So, the, we're committed to quite a bit more warming, and there's almost nothing we can do to, to stop that, but we can stop it from speeding up more.

• 35:24Speaker 02

  Can we, I mean, in your, so, we can't solve this with just like, I don't know, like, say, like, four nuclear bombs? It would not slow anything down. If it was like, say, in Antarctica and Greenland, which is really icy, actually...

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Well, actually, I mean, it's, this is something people talk about, not nuclear bombs, but putting, putting, uh, dust up into the stratosphere, which would block the sun and cool the planet. It's a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but...

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Name two.

• 35:49Speaker 05

  So, you're saying that...

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I, I can imagine some, but what are two reasons bad to put dust up in the sky?

• 35:54Speaker 04

  So, one reason is...

• 35:55Speaker 02

  I can't believe I'm saying that, but I really want to know.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  One reason is that what that dust would do, you have to put it up very high, first of all, and it stays for maybe a year or so, so you have to keep putting it up there. And, and once it's gone, the planet will just warm up again to where it would have been anyway. So it's sort of a short-term fix that you have to keep doing.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  A Band-Aid, a climate Band-Aid.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  It's a Band-Aid, right? The other thing is that it, the, it wouldn't just stop global warming, it would have a lot of other negative effects. In other words, carbon dioxide is not just the opposite of dust in the stratosphere, right? It would change the rainfall patterns and do other things that are probably bad ideas. I think most of us in this, in any environmental field think that it's not a good idea when we're doing big changes to the planet to try to, it's usually better to try to stop doing those bad things than to try to do other bad things that would somehow patch them up.

• 36:43Speaker 02

  Right, right. No, agree. Okay, great.

• 36:57Speaker 06

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• 37:26Speaker 05

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• 38:37Speaker 01

  I did a calculation once. If you take the current rate of population growth and extend it into the future, the same amount of time as the time elapsed since Columbus. So a little more than 500 years. If we maintain that rate of population growth, there will only be enough room on the landmass of the Earth for everyone to stand up straight.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  By what, by when?

• 39:04Speaker 01

  500 years.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  From now?

• 39:05Speaker 01

  From now. Yeah, so...

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Sounds like climate change is so bad.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Make nice with other planets, or drain the oceans. These guys are good.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  How to make more beachfront property, right? It's just, you can do that with an Ice Age, sir, as we have established. So let me just put some closure on this. There's a period of time, some years ago. Theologists refer to it as the Carboniferous Era. This was a period... Why would they call it the Carboniferous Era? Because in that era, plant life, trees in particular, did not have the organisms surrounding them that would decompose their material substance.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  When a tree falls in the forest, and it makes sound whether or not you're there.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Right down to it.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Philosopher friend. So, a tree falls and then it decomposes. Well, it doesn't decompose by accident. There is a, there is a portfolio of fauna that dine upon the material that was once a living tree. And this decomposition of the tree returns the chemical composition of that tree back to the environment. It's a very natural cycle of life. During the Carboniferous Era in the history of Earth, such organisms did not exist. They had not evolved yet to exploit the fact they had a fat, dead tree in front of them,

• 40:44Speaker 01

  ready to be consumed. So, trees would die and they would stay there forever. Another tree would grow up, it would fall and die and stay there, and vegetation kept growing. And vegetation is made of carbon. That is the principal ingredient of the vegetation. So, every tree that grew took carbon out of the atmosphere, it fell, the carbon stayed with the tree. This continued and continued, and huge layers of dead vegetation gets submerged in the crust of the Earth. That vegetation became fossil fuels.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  And so, the balance of carbon in our atmosphere is disrupted when we take carbon from a place where it has been buried for millions of years and introduce it into the stable balance of carbon in our atmosphere today. So, the act of doing so changes Earth's carbon dioxide levels from what it is accustomed to managing in the balance of the atmosphere. So, here's the challenge to us all.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  We like energy, right? Especially here in America. We have come to demonize the consumption of energy. You see the Hummer and you, you know, at least if you're sort of liberal minded. That's the wrong attitude, in my opinion. Wrong attitude is not to demonize energy. It's to, if you want to demonize something, demonize that which alters your environment. The universe has limitless energy. I tweeted recently that I'd be embarrassed to tell an alien who just moved through the vacuum of space, bathed in limitless starlight,

• 42:47Speaker 01

  that here on Earth we kill one another to extract oil from beneath the sands. Because that's where we're getting our energy. So the goal here really ought to be, what are all the ways we can make energy? So that one day we'll have a future where there's actually limitless energy. We wouldn't even have to have these conversations. And we wouldn't have to be warming up the atmosphere and have Earth do things that it hasn't done in a million years. And so, I, I'm, I'm upset when I see people not thinking about these other pathways. Getting back to the point where, where solutions can rise up from unexpected places. Right, is the solution stop to stop burning fossil fuels?

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Or is there some other solution that comes along that doesn't negate this? It just renders it completely obsolete? As the car did to the horse? I mean, are there examples of this? What happens if you run out of silver to make your silverware? Oh, you discover aluminum. And now you can still have silverware made of aluminum, right? So-

• 43:52Speaker 02

  Airplane solved flying on pterodactyl.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  Just as one example.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  I saw that exhibit in- Nice comeback, nice comeback. Yes, yes.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Just to help out.

• 44:03Speaker 01

  So, I think the lesson here is, of course, it's, it's all interconnected. Every, you know, you turn the key of your car, some CO2 goes out and your climate models change. Our understanding of the climate for the future changes. And what we bequeath to our descendants is really the product of our foresight or absence-

• 44:26Speaker 04

  There are.

• 44:28Speaker 04

  Thank you all for coming.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 44:30Speaker 04

  This has been StarTalk Radio.

• 44:38Speaker 04

  We are funded in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation. They believe in what we're doing. Okay.

• 44:57Speaker 05

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