https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=NepWELYn_9U
This is an exercise carried out by the UN roughly every six or seven years. They convene a thousand scientists from countries around the globe who are supposed to survey, assess the scientific understanding of human-induced climate change. That’s really important because they focus on what might be attributable to humans as opposed to natural climate change, which is an important part of the story. And so they split up into various working groups, write very detailed thousand, two thousand page long reports that actually, in my opinion, do a pretty good job of assessing the science. Those reports are then packaged, if you like, or summarized into summaries for policy makers where the scientists don’t have as much of a hand in writing those summaries. The governments intervene quite a bit. And when you compare the summaries, which is what serious people would read if they’re not climate scientists, to what’s actually in the reports, there’s lots of disconnect. And I can give you some examples at some point. And then of course you get the media where you have journalists who don’t know very much at all about the science. They’re on a climate beat in the newspaper, and so they have to provide climate stories that catch the attention. And then you’ve got the politicians who grab on to all of this. And so at the end of this long game of telephone, what comes through is very little reflective of what the actual science says. All right. So, okay, so now you hear very frequently that 97% of scientists agree that while global warming exists or climate change exists, but my understanding of that is the following. And so correct me if I’m wrong. So 97% of scientists agree that there is credible evidence that some proportion of the current trend towards warming is attributable to human activity, and more specifically to carbon dioxide. So it’d be some fraction of the 1.3 degrees that have… Yeah, right. Whether it’s a half or whether it’s whole, I think people would disagree on. Right, right. And there’s some disagreement about exactly the range of hypothetical temperature increase over the last 100 years or the next 100. Okay, so that’s the 97%. What percentage of scientists do you suppose actually take an apocalyptic view specifically in relationship to carbon dioxide? Do you have any idea, any sense of that? No, no, and the 97% number is a made-up number also based on an entirely flawed study. I think the scientists are not behaving as though it were apocalyptic. I would say 95% of them are not in that camp. But look, that’s just my anecdotal perception. I sit down and talk to these folks a lot. None of them are kind of jumping off the roof and saying, my God, we’d better do something or we’re headed for a climate hell. Climate highway to hell or something is what the secretary general of the UN said a couple months ago. Right, well, so that… No, we’re not. Okay, look, it’s an issue. It’s a long-term problem. We can deal with it, but there’s no reason to ring alarm bells. Okay, well, then I’m going to play devil’s advocate from another direction for a moment. So I would say of all the data points that I’ve encountered over the last 15 years investigating the nexus between energy and environment, the data point that’s leapt out at me most strongly is the fact that since the year 2000, the world has greened by 15% and primarily in semi-arid areas. So let’s just walk through that for a second. So 15% is a lot. It’s bigger than the entire landmass of the United States. And green is a lot different than brown or dead. And semi-arid means that plants are growing in places that are damn near deserts. And as far as I can tell, that’s pretty much the opposite of what the climate apocalypse prognosticated. And more than that, I can’t shake the suspicion, and I would love to be corrected on this if you can see somewhere that I’m wrong, why the hell isn’t that good news, especially when it’s also allied with the fact that our crops are much more productive as a consequence too. So I could say, hey, look at this. It turns out that there’s no more effective way of delivering fertilizer for plants worldwide than to burn fossil fuels. Yeah. So let’s back up on the science for a second first. So plants love CO2. We pump CO2 into greenhouses in order to get the plants to grow better. Right now in the atmosphere, the concentration is about 420 parts per million of CO2. We raise it to over a thousand parts per million in greenhouses to help the plants grow. The CO2 not only lets them grow faster, but it lets them use water more efficiently. They don’t have to open up the stomata and lose water as much. You’re 15% since 2000. If you’d asked me, I would have said it’s more like 40% since the 1980s. So yeah, things are growing better on Earth since 1980. Something called the leaf area index has gone up. NASA produces maps that show this. They write press releases that show this. But somehow it’s not really present in the media. So how come we can’t take the stance that carbon dioxide is a net good? Because that’s such an enveloping statistic. 40% since the 1980s. I don’t know of another set of data that has, well, let’s call that that scale. That’s really something. And green. That’s important, right? And if you look at the agricultural yields and so on, whether it’s in the US or India, has been going gangbusters on producing crops. This is certainly one of the benefits, and it’s a significant one. That has to be weighed against hypothetical detrimental effects from global warming. And the net of them is a few percent. Again, it’s in the noise. You can’t distinguish it. There are other factors about human well-being that are much more important than whether the climate’s changing or not. So if I were to be a little snarky, it’s almost a nothing burger. The science says that if you read the reports, but the detrimental effects get hyped up by various players. We’re facing the threat of government shutdown later this month. And yet again, the administration will ultimately deal with it the same way they always do, with more spending. More spending equals a lower value of the dollar. Protect your savings by diversifying into gold with the help of the Birch Gold Group. And here’s the best part. When you open a gold IRA with Birch Gold, for every $10,000 you spend by December 22nd, Birch Gold will send you a free gold bar. Just text Jordan to 989898 to claim eligibility before Black Friday. Birch Gold can even help you convert an existing IRA or 401k into an IRA in gold for no money out of pocket, and you still get the free gold bars. 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I mean, there are a lot of people, and although there’s a lot of greenery now and there’s more forest in the Northern Hemisphere, so those are powerful countervailing proclivities, but do you have any specific knowledge about our effects on the mass extinction front? No, like a senior academic as you and I are, you’re reluctant to talk about things you don’t know much about, and I’m very careful about that. I don’t know about the projections you’re talking about, but I’m a priori very suspicious because these are complicated physical, biological systems, and small effects can have a big influence, and so I’m skeptical. If I were to look at those papers, one of the first things I would ask is how well have you reproduced the past? Because unless you can reproduce the dominant changes that we’ve seen over the last hundred years, thousand years, whatever, I don’t have much confidence in your ability to predict the future. Well, okay, let’s talk about models some more. One of the things I want to point out to people, and you tell me what you think about this, is that it is perfectly possible to produce pretty damn good computer models that predict the behavior of the stock market in the past. And the stock market’s very complex, of course, because it’s an index of, well, the sum total of human economic activity plus political activity, so it’s a very dynamic system, and it’s full of weird feedback loops because as soon as you can predict it, you perturb the system. But in any case, here’s the fundamental point. It doesn’t appear to me at all that the stock market is more complex than the climate. And if you could produce a model that could predict the climate, then you could produce a model that would predict the stock market. And if you could produce that model, even if you only got, were right 51% of the time consistently, you would soon have all the money. And I don’t see anybody who’s developing these very complex models who has all the money, so I don’t think that they can make models that can model the behavior of systems that complex. And so let’s talk about models a bit. So let’s talk about models a little bit. Let me back up again and talk about some of the basics. The most used models for the climate system are what are called general circulation models. They cut the atmosphere and the ocean up into cubes, about 100 kilometers on a side, 60 miles on a side, and going up 20 layers in the atmosphere and then 20 layers down in the ocean. And we have a difference to the stock market is we have some underlying physical laws, laws of conservation of energy, mass, momentum, and so on, that govern how the air, the radiation, both sunlight and heat radiation, water vapor, flow through these boxes. Newton understood those, or Euler, back in the 19th century or even earlier. And we can build such models and use computers. So you wind up with, I’ve ordered 10 million boxes covering the earth, going up and down in the ocean, the atmosphere, and then you follow the flow of stuff through these boxes every 10 minutes, 10-minute time steps. And you do that for a century or so, and you’ve got some description of what you think is the climate. But there are lots of problems with that. One is that 60 miles on a side is not sufficient to describe the difference in climate between New York and Washington, D.C., or New York and Toronto, for example. So that’s one. And so the second is a lot of phenomena happen on much smaller sizes. Think about thunderheads, for example. They happen on a few-mile scale. So you have to make up some assumption about what’s going on inside each of these boxes, and different people make different assumptions. A third is that the boxes are not really cubes, but they’re pancakes, because the atmosphere is really thin compared to the size of the earth, and the ocean is also pretty thin. And so you have to make up assumptions about how things move vertically that are not directly tied to the fundamental physical laws. So all of those make a lot of trouble, and that’s why the world has 50 different such models, and to get predictions, they average all of them together. Okay, so let’s take that apart just so everyone understands. So the first is these models are not very high resolution, either spatially or temporally. So you have to use huge cubes, plus your only sample… Temporally, well, temporally is pretty good, 10 minutes. Spatially it’s terrible. But we also, well, perhaps on the temporal side, I mean, the thing is we’re looking at relatively small deviations in temperature, right? If it’s one degree over a century, this is not a huge effect. And what that means is that the models aren’t high resolution enough to be accurate to that scale. They’re simply not. That’s true. That’s true. Now that doesn’t, okay, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t model because our models get better and better all the time. But there’s a big difference between modeling something, even if you can make it accurate to predict the past, and being able to model the present. But there’s a walloping difference between being able to model the present and being able to model climate 100 years from now, because the errors compound as you predict out into the future. Well, yes, that’s certainly true, although you hope to be describing averages that are reasonably well predicted. You know, there’s several comments about that. One is, you know, human influences are small. They’re, as you say, a 1% effect. We’re concerned about a rise of 2 degrees, whereas the Earth’s surface temperature is about 300 degrees, so it’s like a 1% effect. The second is, we’re interested not in describing the climate, but in describing how the climate responds to those influences. That’s the big question. And that’s an order of magnitude harder job than describing the climate itself. The third thing is, we’re looking over time scales of 100, 150 years, and we have terrible data to describe what happened in the past. Yes, we have reasonable confidence about the average global temperature, but what goes on in the oceans, which is really where climate happens, the oceans are the long-term component of the system, we have terrible data until about 20 years ago, when we started putting out floats of various kinds. Well, how good is the ocean data? I mean, the ocean’s pretty damn deep, and it’s not like we can measure everything that’s happening in the ocean. I can’t imagine we understand long-term current flows from the depths well enough to be predicting climate alteration on the scale of a few degrees. That just strikes me as unbelievably preposterous. Right. Studies that have attempted to reproduce the warming of the ocean show that the ocean was warming at about half the current rate, even as the Little Ice Age started to end. And so, untangling this long-term natural variability from the effect of human influences has only really been significant for the last 70 or 80 years or so, is a very, very difficult problem, maybe the central problem.