Joe Rogan Experience #1776 — Steven E. Koonin Transcript

Transcript

0:00 the Joe Rogan experience 120,000 copies. Yeah, right. Well, you would think, right? Okay. CNN, nothing. And I think people are just You went to MIT. Pretty extraordinary. 15 years later, starting to be realized. But once you say you work for BP, there's a certain listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where I had to go back they have over-egged the custard. Now, why do you think this has happened?

5:40 Now, one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way So this is the height of the Nile River from 640 A.D. up until 1450 A.D. you can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down. Yes. So climate changes on all timescales. It changes on thousand-year timescales. It Because most science, you have a hypothesis, you run tests, you get results, and then you do these experiments, and that's how you get your data.

9:58 certainly physics. I have published about climate science. I published a paper in August where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how you need 400 square feet, I'm going to ask him We work for all government agencies, but a lot of what we do is for the national security parts of the government. The albedo, it's called technically, whiteness of the Earth.

13:19 Anyway, that sort of got me interested in climate science. When I moved into the private sector, I was more concerned with energy technologies and So they asked me, you know, Steve, recommend a new statement. in early 2014. because it gives ammunition to the deniers. You say, this could be, this may not be, here are the You know, you're cherry-picked.

17:03 with it in time in a graceful way. or they would say sometimes, you know, Kudin said that and it's true, but it's not important because of A, B, and C. universities. I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who was firmly meat of these reports, they have some problems and, you know, we can go into them. But by and the alarmist perspective and the people that are looking at it that have maybe a less extreme point of view are criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough.

21:40 first translations of the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. The Council of Trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about church dogma, We do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft, other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments. So we need that. It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.

25:09 agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes. everybody's going to read, you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is going to it's going down? Yep. Do you have an image of that? Yeah, I think I do, actually. Hang on. Yeah, right. There it is. All right. So it's real similar the whole record, which is the next picture. There it is. One paper says yes.

28:41 Yep. And this is one I think I'm going to go public with pretty soon in an op-ed. influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, there are a lot That's an excellent question. And the answer is this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the North Atlantic. And what are the other ones?

31:44 Does anything have to do with where the sun aligns with the earth and the cycle procession or do they just assume that there's this series of factors? that's the one that makes the headline? Is it because of the green energy industry? So the non-expert reporter with an agenda, in order for him to print something that's You know, the most recent UN report, okay, which is 3,949 pages, almost 4,000 pages. It took several hundred scientists a couple years to write. You can search that report for the words existential threat, climate catastrophe, and so on.

35:32 Did any of those come true? You know, apart from the fact that the globe is going to continue to So naturally, when a hurricane hits, there's going to be more things there to damage. So how do they come to these conclusions that are different if they're basing it on data? there's an issue that as you go back in time, you haven't seen all of the hurricanes, and you've got to correct the observations for that.

38:25 You know, the Earth, there are two reasons. One is that the Earth is subject to external we understand. For example, El Nino happens every few years, takes a couple years. We kind of understand Let me, I'm going to do another one for you. And so I've gotten very interested in sea level at the battery, which is the tip of Manhattan. And then in 1980, it was down in two millimeters a

42:08 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about 8 millimeters a year, You should ask them. As a scientist, how frustrating is it when ideology and dogmatic thinking, And many of them, like you said, who will talk to you privately, my mouth. I helped guide the National Academies in some of the reports they did, do JSON, I advise Affordable Care Act, Obamacare. Now whatever you might think about Obamacare,

45:56 By over-hyping the climate threat, we've taken away from non-experts the ability to make that, I was like, oh my God, here it comes. Because, and then, I mean, I should say before no one can hear you trying to confirm its accuracy because my googled it wasn't When you find it, I want to talk about economic impact a little bit because that's another

48:21 human impact on the climate. Al Gore's movie. I think the Obama administration heat wave which resulted in poor air quality across Nelson, British Columbia in late June. So she's in a trailer. Of course. not her diagnosis But he doesn't really know what he's talking about. So that's the C-level itself, not the shorter-term trends. up more rapidly, right? Right. So, that black line I showed you on my chart is the trend,

52:09 No, 400 feet. So a lot of this is post-ice age. do they measure all that? Well, it's complicated. So what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases? So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2. How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth? Transportation, which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases,

56:30 40%. Let's see. Electrical power. Nuclear certainly doesn't either, right. Right? Yeah. So let's talk about economic impacts. It's a U.S. chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade. that's a wonderful question. There's what would And this is the economic impact as the way things stand today without any major interventions in terms of... something like that in 2100.

1:02:00 Okay. And so let's talk about cars, okay? So here, Governor Newsom announced California phase-out gasoline-powered cars drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel. It says there the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California's carbon pollution, The more CO2, the more plants grow, all right? And then when I saw, it's actually in your book as well.

1:05:13 their electricity rates go up. They're going to see the grid becoming less reliable, certainly changes. Is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's And there are many things that go into making that's not enough. And what I've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab, to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long,

1:08:00 And that depends upon the technology as well as how much is there. And so as the So you can't just look at it in terms of what you want to see. by, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of academics, okay? No. is in the atmosphere? Right now, it's about $500 a ton of CO2 to extract suck out 10 billion tons a year of CO2. And to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass

1:11:57 All right? So 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember. And when you pointed this out in your book, you were talking about the study of green That's inconvenient because we don't want to think about it that way. We want to think Okay? Because it's getting warmer. we're getting better at agronomy, and there's more CO2. At what cost? billion people, and we have high energy use, and we have a pretty good standard of living. There are 6 billion

1:16:52 if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it. But what are you going to do Well, we can't implement restrictions slowed down the rate at which the amount in the atmosphere accumulates. Right. Let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now. We'd have to go to zero by 2075 if we wanted to stabilize at two degree rise.

1:20:54 I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first So they're not met, but what if they were? We said that's a subject of some debate right now. Not going to change that. We don't have 100 years worth of data in many variables. Humans are certainly having an influence. Well, you know, it's our best guess. Kerry Emanuel at MIT. I'll tell you an interesting story about Kerry in a minute, have all spoken

1:24:49 know about climate? I can't answer those, all right? But I can try to rebut the specific facts And I had my 10, 15-minute presentation, and I went through some of the things we've talked The Amazon dries out and so on. I would love to be on a stage with some of these scientists. Have somebody else on and you can have them say where that guy Kunin is wrong,

1:27:42 What is the best one that you've seen? Like, how do they construct them? layers of cubes, and then down into the ocean, 20, 30 layers. Are there thunderheads? Is it raining? And so on. And so you have to make assumptions human influences are physically very small. For example, one of the models changes the way in which marine organisms on the surface

1:31:54 right? that for local or regional predictions, like the sea level in the battery or the drought in Texas, But they'll point to the temperature rise. Yeah. Well, we know changes. It's easier to know changes. And you can see this graph of changes first of all, you can see that the rise has So that's a great question. not measured temperatures. We have crop diaries and so on. And then ice cores, of course, can tell us at particular places what the temperature was doing.

1:36:36 From coarse apples. when what the surface temperature was. There's a lot more techniques to look even further back. Koonin's not up to date. Well, in fact, most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the book. I'm still, I believe, very accurate and very fair and balanced in the way I talk about the science, What has shocked me, not so much that particular incident, is that I think there really are two media universes in the country.

1:40:17 But he just went off. It's just, you know, really bad. Well, the problem is if anybody hasn't read your book, and they would make an assumption based on the idea that you are a climate denier. So it starts with that, which is very clear from the very beginning of the book, And the consequences of it for ecosystems and society, right? you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption. You know, 8% of the US GDP is oil and gas production. You also deploy immature technology,

1:43:29 and to mitigate the effect that human beings are having on the climate. all the drivers, is we're going to adapt. Adaptation is local, and so it's much more palatable politically. right? Now, what is the worst case scenario if it does go over this one and a half degrees? But then there are other parts of the globe as you move north that will become more temperate. And on a timescale of 100 years, society learns how to adapt to that, at least in the developed world.

1:47:08 temperature-wise than it is at the same time as it's warming. And also, the warm parts of the globe, the tropics, are warming not as rapidly as the polar regions, particularly the Arctic. because the ice is reflective, whereas the seawater is not. And I would say the southern parts of the U.S. are going to be winners and losers. And I would say the southern parts

1:49:07 And that makes us more capable of adapting. I've tried to portray it accurately, certainties and uncertainties. And I think what people have done in the political and popular discussion is overhyped the threat in order to move the discussion one way or the other. the tides have risen and where the coastline is has shifted. But if I had a bet, I would.

1:52:06 and people started to get the data from ice cores for the first time than it is currently. And the sea level was thought to be 20 feet higher than it is currently. North Pole. If and when that happened, it would, of course, There's a suspension All right. So we'd have to keep doing it. And would it change the way the sky looked? would say, hey, you know, it was rainy the last two years and much more rainy than it

1:57:26 And so? creating mist near the ocean surface, low-lying clouds. just from the diesel exhaust that they have. You can see them on the satellite and can tell you deployment of it. But we should know whether we have it as a tool that we might take out someday All right. If I were younger, I'd say you're triggering me. I know that just this episode getting out there is going to do that, especially in this day and age where everybody reacts sort of signaling to their tribe almost before they analyze the science.

2:00:39 Well, other than Bill Maher criticizing it, was there anybody else that criticized I and many other people I know have stopped reading it over the last 20 years because Well, Steve, is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up? Is there All right. Well, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate it. And thank you for