Your unwavering desire to understand weather and climate started why climate well I was uh I think it was more like 10 years old when I was fascinated with them some unusual weather events that happened in my uh home area of California and so that began a Fascination for me and I wanted to
Try to figure out why things happen the way they did why did one year have more rain that’s a big story in California does it rain or not and another year would be very dry why were the mountains covered with snow in one April and not
Another fact I have here April 1967 that I recorded as a teenager this has been a passion of mine forever and uh as it turns out now that I’m uh as old as I am I still can’t figure out why one year is wetter than the other
Well you seem to be getting a lot closer than most people would I think it was in 1989 when you and NASA scientist Royce Spencer pioneered a new method of measuring monitoring temperature records via satellites since that time up until now why did you feel you needed to develop a
New method to begin with and how did it differ in terms of the readings of established Methods at the time well the uh issue was we only had surface temperature measurements and they are scattered over the world they don’t cover much of the world at all actually mainly just the land regions
And Scattered places on the ocean and the measurement itself is not that robust uh the stations move the instruments changed through time and so it’s a very difficult thing to me in fact a small little change in the uh area right around the station can really affect the temperature of that station
So Roy Spencer and Dick mcknighter came up with an idea about looking at some satellite data and this is the temperature of the deep layer of the atmosphere so this is like the surface to uh 8 000 meters you know something like that and so if we could see the
Temperature of that bulk atmospheric layer we would have a very robust measurement in the microwave sensors on the NOAA Polo orbiting satellites did precisely that and so we were the first to really put those data into a simple data set that had the temperature then for uh month by month uh since
Um about November 1978. okay and how to do readings differ from the climate science at the time well uh first of all they differed because we had a global measurement we really did see the entire Globe from satellite because the orbit of that satellite is polar and the Earth spins
Around underneath so every day we have 14 orbits as the Earth spins around underneath we see the entire planet so that’s one big difference and the other one is that the actual result did not show as much warming as what the surface temperatures showed and we’re doing even more work now to
Demonstrate that a lot of the surface stations are spuriously affected by the growth of an infrastructure around them and so there’s kind of a false warming signal there you don’t get the background climate signal with surface temperature measurements you get a bit of what’s happening in the local area
Your research has to do with tasting the SE posited by climate model forecasts so you don’t actually do any modeling yourself but what criteria do you use to test these theories that’s a very good question because in climate you hear all kinds of claims and theories
Being thrown out there and for a lot of people who don’t really understand the climate system it’s a quick and easy answer just to say oh humans caused that you know it’s global warming something like that is the answer when the climate system is very complex so we look at
These claims and we Roy Spencer and I when I say we are just a few of the people around the world that actually build data sets from scratch I mean we start with the photon counts of the satellite radiometers or the you know the original paper records
Of 19th century East Africa we do all this from scratch and so that we can test the claims that people make and what we find is that once we build the data set and we make sure we have confidence in the data set that it’s telling us a truth about what’s
Happening over time and we can uh determine that as well or test it then we check the claim so for example on a surface temperature data sets that we make that go back to the 19th century someone will say well this is the uh hottest decade or more
Records happen this decade than in the past and we can demonstrate in the United States especially that that’s not the case that you would need to go back to the 1930s if you want to see real record temperatures that uh occurred at that time and for climate models we like
To use the satellite data set it’s a robust deep layer measurement so it’s it’s measuring lots of mass of the atmosphere the heat content really and so that’s a Direct Value we can get out of the climate model so we are comparing what we say Apples to Apples what the
Satellite produces and observes is what the climate model also generates and we can compare them one to one and in a paper Ross McKittrick and I wrote a couple of years ago we found that 100 of the climate models we’re warming the atmosphere faster than it was actually
Warming so that’s not a good result if you’re trying to test your theory of how the climate works with the model against what actually happens with the models how much do you think of the deeply over exaggerated predictions that Doom and Gloom have to do with the fact that the methodology is
It’s substantiated by confirmation bias well uh you know that that’s a interesting question because we’re a bit confused as well is we have been publishing these papers since 1994 that have demonstrated models warm too much relative to the actual climate and yet we don’t see an improvement in climate
Models and trying to match reality with uh their model output now I think a number of modelers understand that yes the there is a difference there and it’s uh the models are just too hot uh but what is the process that’s gone wrong in the models
To make that is a difficult question for these folks because models have hundreds of places you can turn a little knob change a coefficient and that will change the result now it’s not a physical thing it’s not based on physics it’s it’s the model parameterizations we call them uh the
Little pieces of the model that try to represent uh an actual part of the atmosphere like when do clouds form that’s a pretty big question is how much humidity in the atmosphere is required to create a cloud because once the cloud forms that reflects sunlight and cools
The Earth so that’s it that’s one of the big questions there is uh so uh in testing the models we like to use the bulk atmospheric temperature that’s a very direct measurement that models produce in the atmosphere produce and so we can then say there’s a problem here with climate models
To what degree did your observation on data differ from their forecasts well generally it’s about a factor of two at times it’s been more but the latest models on average the models for the Deep layer of the atmosphere are warming about twice too fast and that’s
A real problem I think when now we’re looking at over 40 years so we can test these models with and they’re already that far off and so I will we should not use them to to tell us what’s going to happen in the future since they haven’t
Even gotten us to the right place in the last 40 years but given that you your real world data it’s refuted what the forecasts were every time for decades why then and I I recognize that this is conjecture we can’t really be sure but on let’s say 97 99 of scientists
So firmly behind climate crisis narrative yeah I don’t know how many are really fully behind that crisis climate narrative I saw a recent survey where about 55 percent might have been of the opinion that the climate warming was going to be a problem uh warming itself is not a problem I
Mean the Earth has been warmer in the past than it is today so the Earth has survived that uh before and uh I don’t think putting extra uh you know plant food in the atmosphere is going to be a real problem for us to overcome I do think
The world is going to warm some from the extra CO2 but there are a lot of benefits that come from that by the way um you’re you’re dealing with a question about human nature and funding and so on and I think we all know that the more dramatica story is especially in the
Political world uh the more attention you will get and therefore your work can be highlighted and that helps you with funding and attention and so on and that’s kind of part of what’s going on here then there’s the other real stronger political narrative that folks um
There are groups and uh in the world political Elite that like to have a narrative that scares people so that they can then offer a solution and so a simple way to say elect me to this office and I will be able to solve this problem that you are facing People
Like Us who actually produce the data and look at uh you know extreme events and so on say well you know there isn’t any change in these extreme events so what’s the problem you’re trying to solve and then we look at the other side of that issue and say okay if you actually
Implement this regulation or this law it’s not going to have any make any difference on the climate end so it’s a you kind of lose on two ends on that story your distinguished professor of and spheric science and also director of Earth Sciences also at Alabama in Huntsville
These are not prominent positions how have you managed to hold on to them with climate views that are so Divergent from the norm well the environment in the state of Alabama is different than what you have in Washington and as I like to tell people
That one of the reasons I like to live in Alabama and I’m from California way across the country is that in Alabama you can call a duck a duck that you can just be flat on about what’s going on and and you’re not going to be given uh
The evil eye or cast out as it is now in the climate establishment you know saying that all the models are warming too much and that there is not a disaster arising that causes great consternation because of the narrative that has been built over the last 30
Years that we are supposed to be in a catastrophe and to come out and say well here’s the data and the data show there is no catastrophe looming we’re doing fine the world is doing fine human life is thriving in places it’s allowed to so uh what’s the problem here you’re trying
To solve did you ever manage to get your findings to policy makers that have influenced to do something about it well you know I’ve been to Congress uh 20 times testified before hearings uh so the information is there and available but I can’t force um uh Congress to make legislation that
Matches the real world uh the Congressional world is a political world and things happen there that are kind of out of my reach and ability to influence I suppose according to your research you’ve also said that the climate models underestimate negative feedback loops so can you explain to me what this
Mechanism is and the effect of overestimation of the loops on understanding climate for what it is right now that’s a very complicated issue and I don’t understand it all for sure but we can say just from some general results and general observation what’s going on here and one of those General observation is
That when a climate model warms up the atmosphere one Kelvin one degree that it sends out 1.4 watts per meter squared so the air atmosphere warms up and energy escapes to space 1.4 when we use actual observations of the atmosphere when the real atmosphere warms up one Kelvin it sends out 2.6
Watts of energy almost twice as much so that tells you right there that the climate models are retaining or holding on to energy that the real world allows to escape when it warms so that’s kind of a negative feedback that as the atmosphere warms for a bit the real real
World knows how to let that heat Escape whereas the models don’t and they retain it and that’s why they keep building up heat over time yeah the state climatologists I deal a lot with um very practical questions that people ask they want them is it getting hot or is it getting wetter are
There rain storms getting heavier and so are the Hurricanes getting worse and so I actually wrote A booklet called a practical guide the climate change in Alabama but it covers a lot of the country as well so it’s not just this it’s free you can download it from my
Website uh the Alabama State climatologist is on the first page and I answer a lot of these very practical questions and one as we go down the list there aren’t any more droughts droughts are not getting worse over time heavy rainstorms are not getting worse over time here in the Southeast in fact
Ross McKittrick and I also had a paper on that where we went back to 1878 and demonstrated that the trends are not significant uh hurricanes no they’re not going up at all in fact 2022 is going to be one of the quietest that we’ve had in a while
Tornadoes are not becoming more numerous heat waves are not becoming worse so one after another though the weather that people really care about that if it changes could cause problem or catastrophe we find those events are not changing they’ve always been around some of the biggest critics of climate Skeptics
Say okay yeah it’s not fair one extreme weather event doesn’t say much but they argue that they are very particular trends that have been on the increase like recently have you observed this at all that’s exactly the kind of thing we build data sets to discover for example
There is a story and there is some evidence for it that in the last hundred years there’s been an increase in in heavy rain events in part of our country not all of it just part of the country so I built a data set that went back to
The 1870s in fact back to the 1860s and so on and we looked at that very carefully and found that well when you go back far enough there were a lot of heavy events back then and so over the long time period of 140 years or more we don’t see an upward
Trend that’s uh unusual in that sample of time 140 years that we don’t see a change in those kind of events so that’s why you know one of the real uh things I think has great value to it is to build these data sets so you can specifically
Answer the question and the claim that is being made um I think one of the worst ones was made by the New York Times when they were talking about how many record high temperatures occurred in a recent heat wave around the country and so I looked at
That a little bit more carefully and they were allowing stations to be included that only had 30 years or less of data even less than 30 years so some had a hundred years but a lot of them just had 30 years well when you become very systematic and say okay I’m only
Going to allow stations that have a hundred years so that every station that measured in 2022 can be compared with the entire time series and then their story falls apart because the 30s and the 50s were so hot in our country that they still hold the records for the
Number of high temperature events just the scary thing for me is that as much as it completely falls apart there’s no logic to it it’s still firmly stand as what most people believe you have to give credit to those who in the climate establishment and the media or whoever
Is behind all this that they have been successful in scaring people about the climate um because now you find that even in grade school textbooks and uh almost every new story that comes out will try to throw in and this is where this establishment is very good is they make
Sure every story has some kind of line in it about climate change and they don’t ever go back and talk to someone who actually builds these data sets and says is that really the worst it’s been in the last 120 years uh they just make those claims and so
Um other than the fact that sea level is rising a bit uh the extreme events are just not uh there to to really cause problems now we are in a problem of having greater damages occur because of extreme events and that’s mainly because we’ve just built so much more stuff and placed It
In Harm’s Way our coastlines are crowded with Condominiums and uh entertainment parks and uh retirement villages and so on there’s so many more of them that when a hurricane does come well it’s going to wipe out a lot more and so sir sure the damage is the absolute value of
Those damages has gone up but the number of hurricanes their strength and so on the background climate has not caused that problem it’s just that we like to build things in places that are dangerous we have you know records of sea level rise and it’s
On the order of about an inch per decade except in places where the land’s sinking uh uh pretty rapidly and you can find that on the Louisiana Gulf Coast and places like that but otherwise it’s about an inch per decade and I tell folks that an inch per decade you know two and
A half centimeters A decade is not your problem it’s 10 feet in six hours from the next hurricane that’s your problem if you can withstand a rise of sea level of 10 feet in six hours then you’re probably going to be okay but if you can’t then a hurricane can really cause
Problems and so we just have more exposure to that kind of his situation now than we’ve had before what about the trend with sea level rise or should we be worried about future Generations having to deal with issues that might not affect us in our lifetime but eventually will threaten their lives
I think your listeners would you know need to understand that seed level is a dynamic variable it goes up it goes down uh it has been over a hundred meters lower than today just in the last 25 000 years and there was a period from
About 15 000 years ago to 8 000 years ago where the sea level Rose um you know about uh 12 centimeters per decade for you know seven thousand years now that’s a lot more than two and a half centimeters a day as it’s doing now
So uh the world has managed to deal with sea level before and uh if we go back to the last warm period about 130 000 years ago the sea level then was higher than it is now by about five meters or so and so just naturally we would expect at
Least another five meters of sea level it won’t happen tomorrow it won’t happen this Century but slowly it will likely continue to rise and so that should be placed in your thinking if you’re building a dock for say a military port or something if you want it to last a
Long time just put a cushion in there a way to manage to uh handle another half meter so seat level rise in the next hundred years and you should be okay you your temperature records but how much has the Earth warmed let’s say over the last four years
Yes we have about I think uh with this November we finished to 43 years 43 years of measurements and in that time the temperature has risen half degrees Celsius and you might want to look at other things about the world the world has expanded agricultural production tremendously nations are now exporting
Uh grain where they had before because people are pretty smart and they figure out how to do things better all the time and uh growing food is one thing they figured out how to do better as time has gone on so the climate has not been a
This warming of a half degree has not been uh anything that caused a a major catastrophe at all wealth has increased around the planet now some governments are trying to prevent you from growing your wealth but uh it that’s a hard thing to stop people like to have food they like to have
Conveniences in their life and that’s hard to uh you know pass laws that say you can’t enjoy the life the way you want to how much of the you reliably able to able to say is as a result of human activity okay uh the answer is none in the sense you said
Reliably and I I can’t come up with an answer for reliably the work we have done that just assumes all of the warming is that warming that is not due to El Nino or warming that’s not due to volcanic uh suppression of temperatures earlier in the record uh
Comes up to about a tenth of a degree per decade if it’s not due to human activity reliably let’s say are there other factors that we can say for sure let’s say geothermal cooling heating those kinds of things that we can say for effect have played a role in the
Incremental warming of the planet over the last few decades yeah what we see is that we’ve had a couple of volcanoes in the first half of that period LG Chone and Pinatubo and those cool the planet in the first half of that 40 years and so that tilted the
Trend up so if you add the warming early back end then that tends tilts the trend on the back down and that’s where I come up with a one-tenth per decade is the warming rate which means the climate is not very sensitive to carbon dioxide or greenhouse gas warming as the popular
Ideas about it are it’s probably half or even less uh but about half as sensitive as models tend to uh report so if CO2 exposure or insertion into the atmosphere were to double what would the results be okay well I actually had a little paper on that um and we’re kind of expecting
Maybe about 20 70 20 80 it will be double from what it was back in 1850 and uh the warming of that amount uh will be about a degree 1.3 I think is what I calculated um but that was from that earlier period so you would say that much of the
Warming was due to humans about 1.3 degrees C and the general rule I found of people is they don’t mind an extra decree on their temperature in fact if you look at the United States the average American experiences a much warmer temperature now than they did a hundred years ago that’s because the
Average American has moved South the average American has moved to much warmer climates California Arizona Texas you know Alabama Florida and so on because cold is not a whole lot of fun you know skiing in snowmobiling and ice fishing and so on that’s fine but the
Average person likes it to be warm and so that’s why the many people in our chameleons in our country have moved to warmer areas and uh so I don’t think that one uh 1.3 Kelvin or whatever I said it’s going to matter much in terms of the weather
People really care about those extreme events and so on what do you your temperature records tell you about previous hotter temperatures since what was it 1978. what we see you know there is an upper Trend in the in the global temperature uh uh that I think is manageable
Uh but it goes up and down the 1998 El Nino was 17 1997-98 the El Nino was a big event uh 2016. El Nino was a big event so we see these ups but we also see the Downs that come from a volcano that might go off
And cool as a planet those are bigger effects than that small Trend that’s going up um the global temperature can change by two tenths of a degree from month to month and so uh when we’re talking about a tenth per decade uh then we’re talking about you know a
Month to month we can handle and we can’t handle 20 years worth of a small change just doesn’t make sense and and the evidence of the real world is pretty clear that that humans have done extremely well as a planet has been warming a little bit whether it’s natural or not
Can you tell me about the milankovic Cycles malikovic Cycles are the orbital cycles of the earth the earth orbit around the Sun and its tilt of the axis and the distance from the Sun that that is not a perfect circular orbit around the sun it’s kind of an ellipse and it
Changes through time and all those factors work together to put a little bit more solar energy in certain places and less than others and what we talk about in Ice Ages which uh these Cycles are likely related to is that if you can melt the snow in Canada
In the summer then you won’t have an ice age so the snow falls in the winter you melt it in the summer no ice age you can’t melt the snow in Canada in the summer for some reason the Earth is tilted away a bit in July and August and
So on and the snow hangs around all summer long the next winter more snow piles up the next summer it doesn’t melt the next winter more snow so you get this mechanism that adds snow and then you can come up with an ice age and so the tilt of the axis and other
Parameters I just mentioned can moderate how much sunlight comes in in the summertime in Canada and it’s up to 100 watts per meter squared which is a a lot of energy uh difference over time and that’s probably the biggest theory that has a pretty good amount of evidence with it that those orbital
Changes can cause huge changes in the climate from Ice Age to the current interglacial when I spoke to Dr Curry she said in the long term a negligible influence that humans have on the planet but what we seem to forget is that the climate’s going to do what the climate’s going to do
You conquer uh yes you just mentioned the ice ages but those are huge swings in the climate that the humans of course didn’t have anything to do with so maybe if if your listeners thought about it this way that the sun sends down on average about 160 watts per meter squared 160. the
Atmosphere itself sends down about 340 so you know heat comes from the atmosphere above us that’s 500 watts per meter squared when you add it together so you’re looking up about 500 watts are coming down on average for the globe the extra carbon dioxide and so on is about 2 Watts
So you can see that this 500 watts that’s natural and it can go up and down and vary and so on the extra two is not going to have much effect that’s why it’s hard we’re trying to find what is the impact of that extra two watts per
Meter squared and it’s pretty tough it might be found in the in the oceans is a little bit more joules of energy going into the oceans than before but was that due to just a change in clouds that was natural or is it due to the extra carbon dioxide
Now extra carbon dioxide does send down that two Watts I’m not saying it doesn’t uh but the atmosphere and the ocean can respond and release a lot of that extra two Watts evidently that’s what’s happening because the Earth isn’t warming up as much as the models suggest there’s claims that
The way that humans are living is causing daily Extinction of two to three hundred different species is this a natural course of Evolution you know 99 of the species that have ever lived are extinct so Extinction is is Pretty Natural obviously have humans cause some extinctions well certainly you know when
You destroy the environment of a small place and that was the only place that particular species lived then yes you know humans caused that Extinction did the climate change that humans caused cause cause any extinctions I think that jury is still out because most uh species love the extra carbon dioxide
Plants do specifically and then everything that eats plants loves that so you might want to say the extra carbon dioxide actually helped in some sense the whole biosphere but I I think that uh what humans do to the surface and uh to water if it’s not clean
Properly and if you just uh really poison the surface in the air then that can cause some uh real problems for the species that are living out there and that’s why we have rules about making not putting poison in here or in the water does that qualify as climate change no no uh
To say carbon dioxide as a poison is you know you really have to scratch your head on that because plants love the stuff it invigorates the biosphere um when did all of this Greenery evolve and the corals you know occur and grow and develop it kirkwin there was two to four times five
Times as much CO2 as the is in the air now so carbon dioxide invigorates the biosphere so we’re just actually putting back carbon dioxide that had been in the atmosphere earlier and I don’t think the world is going to have too much problem with that in terms of its biosphere the
Issue about is the climate going to become so bad that some things can’t handle it and I don’t really see the evidence for that happening critics of your views on climate have argued that you undercut your credibility by making claims for that exceed your data and that you’re unwilling to agree with
Different findings how do you respond to that uh show me a finding and let me look at it and if it’s a valid finding fine I’ll agree with it uh but uh you know you can find anything on the web these days about claims that someone might make but
You show me the evidence let me see what you’re complaining about and uh we can have a discussion about that but I what my publication show I just had one published last week on snowfall in the western states of the United States that shows for the main snowfall regions
There is no Trend in snowfall the amount of snow that’s falling right now is the same as it was 120 years ago so snowfall is still falling out in the western mountains of the United States that’s evidence that that’s data and so when someone has a claim that oh snowfall is going away
Out in the west I said well well here look at these the evidence from real station data that people recorded back in 1890 to now and uh and so I can answer that question with real information and and you don’t see many of people like me in debates because they’re not offered
Uh in fact I’ve been Uninvited you know someone on a particular panel would say hey let’s get this guy to come here and speak to us and then I receive the D invitation because it was not going to go along with the theme of their climate change as a catastrophe uh presentation
On those occasions that you referred to in the past that CO2 levels were significantly higher than they are now do records show any negative effects as a result of such high CO2 well when you say negative you’re that’s almost a moral question the good or bad that the dinosaurs went extinct
Well as the dinosaurs and I think they’d have an opinion about that um let me rephrase if it had to be on those levels today would it negatively impact that would mentally impact human Humanity okay what we see is um as carbon dioxide event has increased in other words humans are producing energy
So that their lives can be uh enhanced I mean there’s a direct relationship between how much carbon or energy you’re able to use and carbon is the main source today and your thrivability it’s basically one to one you know think about it we didn’t leave the Stone Age because we
Ran out of rocks we left the Stone Age because something better came along you know Iron bronze and so on and in terms of energy we didn’t leave the wood and dung age because we ran out of trees or excrement we found a better source that was carbon
Coal oil and so on and transportation you know we didn’t leave the horse and buggy age because we ran out of horses it’s because Henry Ford made a vehicle that was cheap and affordable my great grandfather who was a destitute poverty in Oklahoma in the 1930s had a Model T
And so uh and another thing about Henry Ford he didn’t go around getting the government to kill all the horses so you’d only have to buy his car horses were still available for the poorest people you know and the government didn’t uh he didn’t make the government go out and
Build gas stations or drill for oil you know that was done at the market for the private level but today we have a government that says this is what I want for the energy structure and so we’re going to be uh using your taxpayer money and we’re going to put out all these
Charging stations and force you to buy electric cars or at least subsidize them tremendously and put up all these windmills and so on uh at Great expense and great environmental wreckage and I can assure you that without energy life is brutal and short and so energy is a thing that has caused
Uh our lifespans to double and so children no longer fear about or we don’t have to fear for uh diseases that used to wipe out Millions because of the advances that energy has brought out through electricity and experimentation and all the sciences that we have developed now that’s based upon that
Access to energy um and so yes uh developing countries and and here’s my I mean I I’m not making this as a prediction I’m just using this as an observation they’re going to get their energy they’re going to find the energy and right now it’s carbon that’s the
Cheapest and most effective and very high density and so we will see these countries use carbon to advance and we should not stand in their way because they want to live like us who already have pretty big carbon Footprints uh but if you want to have some comfort in that
Is uh the carbon dioxide we’re putting back into the atmosphere is invigorating uh the biosphere and it also represents people living longer and better lives just no question that is energy is made available and affordable people live longer and better lives and I think that’s going to ultimately be the uh the
Inertia that’s going to carry forward this uh issue kind of past all the preaching about carbon dioxide problems environmentalists would argue that they’re not against electricity and prosperity they’re just advocating for a better cleaner way to do it it’s a tremendous misconception that a windmill or a solar panel can somehow give you
Cleaner and reliable energy than what you have now that’s just not true to build a windmill the environmental wreckage that you have to go through is tremendous in terms of all the minerals you have to yank out of the earth and process and process takes energy by the
Way and building all these transmission lines I mean the energy is so diffuse it is so weak in wind and solar that you have to gather up huge amounts of land to put it together I think Robert Price said it well I think he called it the
Iron law of power something like that that the weaker the source of energy the more stuff and material you need to gather it to concentrate it to make it useful and so you find out you have to spend huge amounts of dollars in environmental cost to make a windmill or
Make a solar panel which by the way doesn’t last forever and uh and so this carbon that already has a tremendous amount of energy in a very small dense space means that the environmental footprint is much much smaller than what you have with a solar or wind
In fact you know it’s about one to a thousand or two thousand in terms of uh the square footage you need and I like to tell people you know I I ran five miles this morning so and there was a little bit of wind it was cloudy so if
You had a solar panel would have helped you anyway but think about sun and wind you can go out and enjoy them the breeze which tells you they don’t have much energy if they don’t you know bring you great harm this wind is so energy poor that you can stand out in
The wind not be bothered you could stand out in the sun and not be bothered but go try to stand in the boiler of a natural gas fire power plant you’d be burnt to a crisp that’s the kind of energy you need to push electrons and
That’s the amount of energy that can be done or that process can be done in a very small environmental footprint that then allows the rest of the environment to to not be interfered with by this energy production but look at a windmill and solar panel farms uh not only are
They just ugly but they do cause tremendous environmental damage in their construction and maintenance what are the long-term effects I’m talking decades from now if we just continue to get our energy from fossil fuels how bad can it get well let me start how good can he get you’ve
Talked about people that will have access to Affordable energy so they’re going to live longer and they’re going to live better lives you have access to this the impact on the climate I think is what is about the only thing you can think of is uh well the sea level is going to
Continue to rise it’s been rising for several hundred years so it’s it’s going to continue to rise and at a manageable rate by the way um and the atmosphere it might warm some more uh but certainly not in terms of that catastrophic effect that will cause
Us to uh lose our ability to thrive um I I’m just very I’m pretty optimistic you know people are clever and they can figure out how to adapt to whatever is going to happen the real issues I deal with as a state climatologists are the extreme events that you we know are
Going to happen that you’re not ready for I mean that flood that happened uh you know 50 years ago is going to come back again and it’s going to cause some real problems if you don’t build your infrastructure and and put your houses where they can be safe or industry if
You don’t build up on the coast too much so that you won’t be clobbered by a hurricane or something like that so it’s these kind of natural extreme events that we’re far more vulnerable to right now than some small and gradual change that the climate system might undergo hmm
I did read somewhere that someone has Austria and I’m sure you must get it a lot whether you get any funding from the fossil fuel industry do you no I do not and I made that decision way back in the 19 early 1990s so that uh
You know someone can come to me and and a fossil fuel I might make a fossil fuel company mad by some of them uh information I would produce but so be it if I can then put my head to bed at night and not be worried about did I uh
Accommodate some agenda somewhere I’m just after What observations say can I build the best observational data set to answer the questions of climate that we have and uh and that’s that’s what I want to do I suppose one of the biggest tragedies about it would be that it would
Discredit the real science and the the fundamental research that you’re doing just that it’ll be a non-starter because people will immediately just yeah and that’s unfortunate because the perception then is that well if a fossil fuel company paid someone to do some research they really wanted to know the
Answer about something and this person was completely honest did the work properly and provided the answer to the fossil fuel companies is as you said is well that answer would be tainted because it came from a fossil fuel company well hello think about what environmental advocacy groups and
Pressure groups do all of the time they pay tremendous sums to people so they can come up with an answer that gives them uh their leverage in claiming this is a catastrophic problem but so I can take that at least perception off the table lastly are you aware of any ways in which
Geoengineering could possibly be affecting the natural balance of things is it being done more than we’re aware of and could it vampire anytime humans do something they’re going to have an impact uh there’s just no question about that so you could call that geoengineering but inadvertent we have made some desert valleys cooler
Because now we irrigate crops so we you know uh taken water that fell someplace and moved it to another place and so that’s a bit of Geo engineering there and uh that by the way a lot of those places feed a lot of the world so you
Can’t say it’s bad I suppose uh but uh the other question about geoengineering is can we do something to prevent a perceived problem here and that’s the real danger I think because you don’t know the consequences of when you start tinkering with a very complex and dynamical system and so I would say
Stay away suppose someone did a big Geo a geoengineering experiment and it was and something bad happened somewhere well that country would sue the world and say look you made this bad thing happen to us you are liable and so then we’re getting nowhere in terms of uh
Preventing some problem on the planet
