Climate Science, Explained

theoretical physics from Cambridge and does research at NASA. They could have had any job they wanted, but both of them chose to bring their talents to bear on climate change because, as Kate argues, if we don't fix that, not much else will matter. And yet millions of Americans still want to debate whether there's even a problem to solve. Whenever we have a cold day, people are always like, oh,

where's your climate change? Now? What do you tell? Sometimes I don't respond because you know, if somebody still believes that, what what are you gonna do? Um? But it's really important to note that weather is short term and climate is these long term averages. Right. I cannot tell you what the weather in Boston next year in January is going to be like, But I can guess that it's going to be cold because I know what the climate

of Boston is. I don't know if it's gonna be snowing, if it's gonna be sunny, but I know it's going to be cold in January in Boston. Where that gets complicated is that weather doesn't exist independent of climate, and by changing the climate, we're changing everything about the Earth, including the weather. Um. And I think of this kind of like bear with me here. I think it is kind of like Lance Armstrong. Right, So lands Armstrong is really good at riding his bike. He would beat me

in any bike race ever. Um. But lands Armstrong was doping. And when we find out that lands Armstrong was doping, we don't go back to every single race he's ever written in and say, okay, well that one he would have come third, that one he would have been fifty seven. No, Like, we know he was doping, and we know what doping does. So a lot of times when we ask how much did climate change cause this particular flood or drought or heat wave, that's not necessarily the right question because we're

doping the weather, and we know what doping does. How much of it is some cyclical geologic history. And even if the contribution we're making it just the one straw that breaks the camel's back, isn't that enough to get you don't want to curtail our behavior. I think that's actually a really good question. I'm glad you asked it because people keep telling climate scientists like, oh, the climate has always changed, and we're like, we know, we told

you that. We are essentially the people who study that. We figured that out. What percentage of the warming right now are humans responsible for? Over humans are responsible for more than all of the warming, because if it wasn't for us, the Earth would be cooling very slightly. It would be because of what the Sun is doing. The Sun is getting ever so slightly weaker. So yeah, if it wasn't for us, tiny variation in the Sun's output

would be making a cold. Peter I think studied geology, so he can put this really in the context of the entire Earth history and the climates that we've experienced over the entire history of the planet. And actually, many people have talked about climate cycles, and this is often

one of the discounts on what's causing global warming. So as part of some natural cycle and Indeed, in the past there have been geological cycles of warming and cooling that have been driven by orbital variations, variations in the Earth's orbit around the Sun, which are very gradual. The shortest of these cycles is about twenty tho years long, and that's what's caused the pacing of the ice ages. In the past. We've had ice ages, we've had warmer times,

ice ages, warmer times, and what those resulted from? What when the Earth froze and you've had an ice age that was the result of what? So, what the orbits do is they change the amount of sunlight you get during a given season. So I'll say northern hemisphere summer, where we're further from the Sun. It's the Earth's sun geometry. In other words, what causes the summer. This is great.

Half of Harvard undergraduates get this wrong. What causes the seasons is the tilt of the Earth the sun towards the Sun. We're closer to the Sun in our winter exactly point the years ago. We were closer to the Sun when we were pointed toward it. And what I see now is that the fall is gone and the spring is gone. You're not wrong, um, and sort of the The earlier arrival of spring actually has implications for

things like growing seasons for crops um. It also has implications for things like pestborn diseases, and so scientists have checked these things, and there's a whole rigorous area of attribution science where people look at long term trends and people do statistics to answer these questions. So is this a fluke or is this something that's really happening? And changes in the seasons, not just in New York but all around the world are something that we expect and

we see actually happening. I'll ask this question to Peter. Do you feel that people are always talking about some radical solution. I was reading online and they talk about dimming the sun was the article. The other day They're going to spray the clouds and the atmosphere with a chemical. Does that concern you that that kind of attitude and there's some quick fix that can happen. Absolutely, that concerns me.

I mean, first, it just begets this kind of hubrist that humans can control everything, and we're far from that. I mean, there's nothing more humbling than trying to solve the climate problem. The work that Kate does for example,

and the climate modeling. It's an incredibly hard problem and you know, the the amount of intellectual horsepower that has to go and just to pose the question to understand what the attribution story is, how much of the global warming is due to human activities and natural factors, that's a tremendously complicated problem. Describe for me, Kate, what exactly

is the work you're doing now? So? I work on climate models, which are computer simulations of the climate, and those allow us to do projections into the future, but they also let us do experiments that we couldn't do in the real world. So you know, what if a volcano went off in London? What would that do? Um? What if humans didn't exist? What would the earth look like? Um? So I work with climate models. I work with an incredible amount of data that comes out of those models.

And because I sit at an office of NASA, I work with satellite data sets to try to see what are the models telling us what's actually happening and are those the same thing? And what about you, Peter, what kind of work are you doing now? So? As Kate mentioned, I'm a geologist, so I'm a marine geologist, and I use ocean sediments, which are the ultimate repositories of sediment. And so they are these encyclopedias of Earth history that accumulate very quietly and in a very hidden way in

the bottom of the oceans. And so we take sediment course and we can read these like a book, and so we can see how climate has changed in the past, what caused those changes, and more importantly, it allows you to put what's happening today and into the future in the context of the geological past. You go to the yield the most information. Fortunately, the Earth is mostly covered with ocean, so there's a lot of places we can

do our work. Uh For me, in particular, I do work off of West in East Africa, so I study how the North African climate, the Saharan Desert has changed over time. The Sahara Desert was once completely vegetated region, filled with crocodiles and hippopotamus and people, and then it transitioned. What happened. What happened was because of this variation in the Earth orbit that I was telling you about, this wobble of the Earth that changed the intensity of the

African monsoon, which brings in rainfall from the ocean. Into the interior, it got weaker, and so the place became drier and drier, and suddenly the sands took over. And one of the instinct discoveries we made was that that transition from wet dry happened within a couple of centuries, so it's just really rapid transit. And Kate, what about you. Have you always been in this field and has it always been weather and climate related for you? No? Actually? Um?

So I did my PhD in cosmology, so specifically string theory, which is the physics of the entire universe. Um. And I kind of realized midway through my PhD that you know, the universe is great, but but really this is the best place, Like the Earth is by far the best planet. Um. And so I was able to use my physics background to study the physics of the Earth's climate and it's so fascinating. What would be I'll go with you first, Peter, what would be some of the things that you would

do right now to address this problem? Right? So, if I was king of the world, the thing that I would do right now is support the Green New Deal, which is this investment in UH infrastructure and resupplying REPO owering the planet. It's a shift towards renewables, it's adopting wide scale battery storage. It's basically building up in this country national climate resilience as a way of addressing the climate problem, because there's, in my opinion, there's no solution

towards this other than an economic market based one. We can't drive the world into poverty. We can't drive the world into uh, you know, a dramatic way of of living relative to where we are now. Certainly in the time scale we're talking about, which is my lifetime. This is not even my children's full lifetime. This is at the end of our lifetimes, we're gonna be seeing these impacts. We can see this, for example, in real estate prices, so in houses that are right next to each other.

I let's say the Long Island Coast or in Florida, and which is to most recent examples, these are neighboring houses. One is more susceptible to flooding because it's slightly lower, the other one is less. The one that is more susceptible to flooding and selling at a five to fift discount relative to its neighbor. So this is happening Now, this is not the economic really, yeah, you know, this is billions of dollars that are moving, that are evaporating

from the economy as we speak. The fires in California. There's a paper that just came out just just a couple of days ago that estimates the economic impact of the California fires alone at four billion dollars. Just put that in context, that's half of that's a little bit more than half of the U. S Military budget per year. Um, what about you? What would you do if you were the I don't want to. I want to get it right gender wise. If you were the king, I can

be whatever I want. Um. Right now, emitting carbon dioxide is free. We don't charge anybody to do that, And I don't think it should be free because there is a cost to it. We're all paying that price. And so I would put a price on carbon dioxide. I would say, you cannot do this for free. You actually

have to pay the social costs. And friends of mine who work in related fields teach me that domestic usage, all the cars we drive round that even those are significantly less than what industry does that causes air pollution. That industry itself is a far greater polluter than individuals. Do you agree with that or no? That's true, but I think it's important to keep in mind that industry

is making products that we then consume. Um. So there's This is why climate change is such a hard problem to talk about, because it's an individual problem, but it's also a social problem. So you can lower your personal carbon footprint. You can eat less meat, you can make your home more energy efficient, you can drive less, you can fly less, and that up your appliances in your home, upgrade your appliances. You can do all these things and

that will lower your personal carbon footprint. But if everybody only does a little, will only do a little. And that's because climate change is fundamentally a large scale problem. We need action at a very large scale to address this problem. And so when people ask me what's the number one thing I can do to combat climb to change, it's a vote. Is there anything the two of you disagree about? Almost certainly. I mean this is the thing. Scientists don't agree on anything. We fight all the time.

If you go to a scientific conference, you will just see knockdown, drag out fights about stuff like how fast dirt drives out on the sun. You would not believe it's a really big problem. It's a huge Maybe we can start a fight about this right now. Um. And so for science, for there to be a scientific consensus on something that's a really big deal. And I think it's also important to not confuse the word consensus with

meaning that everyone agrees on exactly the same thing. The consensus is on the fundamental question of whether the observed warming we're seeing today, the weird weather we're seeing today, can be linked to human activity, specifically carbon emissions, and the vast majority of the scientists, basically everyone agrees on that central topic. Does it infuriate you the major oil manufacturers have been obscuring the facts of climate change so that they can make money. What do you say to them?

I mean, what do you say to their scientists that are on their payroll? Well, they know, Um, you know, the scientists who work for Exxon know that climate change is real. They know that it's happening, and they know that it poses a major threat to their business. Um. What I would say to not necessarily an oil industry executive, but you know your uncle who doesn't believe in climate change? Um, I'm a scientist right. So I'm tempted to show graphs and charts and be like, read this paper and and

that doesn't work. That never works because a lot of this isn't about the facts. It's not about the science, and if we just give people more facts, that almost never changes their mind. Something that has a narrative that has really worked for some of my conservative family members has been first, the military. The military takes climate change extremely seriously. They view it as a threat multiplier and all of the naval bases are at sea level, so

they are very very concerned about this. Um. The insurance industry. Um, if you were an insurance executive or reinsurance executive, so the insurers of the insurance industry, and you didn't believe in climate change, you could undercut everybody else by coming along and offering lower rates. And if climate change isn't real, there's no incentive to take it into consideration. And yet the entire reinsurance industry takes this really seriously. So people

with an economic motivation to take this seriously take it seriously. UM. And that's something that's worked for my family members, Like you won't listen to your daughter who is a scientist, but you'll listen to the reinsurance industry. Um, And I think it's just it's about the messenger, it's about the narrative, it's about the language that we use. And there's no one thing that's going to work on everybody. Not to

pile on to you know who. But it's safe to assume that the voice that would collate all this information and present two disparate sections of society should be the President of the United States, as far as you're concerned in an ideal or LEAs, so that that's correct, I think, um, you know, it does need that kind of leadership. Indeed, the kind of transition we're envisioning for the future that

will happen in our lifetimes requires that kind of leadership. Now, in the absence of that leadership, and there's this great expression that's called we're still in, which is that the United States is still part of Paris. The United States still committed, committed to the goals of pairs despite the right So yeah, so despite what you know who has said about pulling out of pairs, that's that's that's just artifice. The reality is that the large industries, statewide coalitions, large

emitters have gotten together and said we can do. Was there something in your community where when Trump was elected you just thought, oh god, this, it couldn't be any worse in terms of political leadership for this issue. The guy that comes up in cit because we're gonna bring that coal. We know so much coal, he said, so many jobs in coal, And you're like, uh huh, really what you know? Yeah, exactly, And that's um, well, it's amazing is that I think certainly. I'll speak for myself.

I mean I was. I was shocked at the implications I thought it would have for me at that point, and I am just so much more shocked now. Um, just in terms of the multiplication of the problem as

times as progressed. I mean, beyond the president who said we're all in for Paris and we're all in with these goals, do we need to look like, for one example, I'm someone who's thinking we have to have real action on a number of levels, so that we would have a federal order that all fleet vehicles that would be used by institutions in the country had to be hybrid cars and electric cars every school. Where's the government program? When you just order that, you just make that? So

is that an answer as far as your concerned. So here's the problem with talking to scientists. Um, okay, my dream is to be completely irrelevant to the climate conversation. Um my dream is just to to do science and to learn about the planet. But all the fights we're having are about policies, are about should the government just mandate this or is there another way to do this? And I feel like that's an issue that reasonable people can disagree on. But we're stuck in this conversation where

it's is climate change real? Yes, it's real? Is that us more than is us? And so you know, what you say sounds like a great idea. I'm on board. I'd vote for you. But I think reasonable people could probably disagree with that. But I don't think reasonable people can disagree that that this is happening and that this is a problem. I would agree. I mean, I would love it if I became obsolete. I really think that's Uh, that's really my life's ambition is to have made a

difference to the same way about my Trump impression. Yeah, so, um, you know, I do think you know, one of the things that society can really galvanize around, or at least American society can galvanize around. Is that climate change is costing us. Now it's real dollars. I mean last year it was roughly three billion dollars in climate and weather related damages. This year, with with the California fires, it looks like it's maybe even more than that. These are

real dollars. This is, and this is so regardless of whether you believe in climate change or not. Imagine you're in some deeply read state and a deeply red county in that state. You are paying for this. You may not like it, you don't want to call it climate change or whatever, but you for sure someone is paying

that bill, and it's us. Well more of California experience longer droughts and therefore be susceptible to what happened what was happening there now on our current traductory, the answer, unfortunately as yes, that we're just getting a taste. How can be about to use film analogy, I'd like to pan left to another world where we've adopted a much

more widespread uh sourcing of let's say, renewable power. We've come up with ways of of storing that power and allowing capacitance to the grid when you imagine a United States that's generating much more of its electricity supply from non fossil fuel related sources. There's been this quiet revolution that no one knows about, which is called grid parity, which is at state by state, there's been this toppling of renewables becoming cheaper per unit of what created than

fossil fuel sources. And so now there's a majority of states where it's cheaper to build out renewables and and deploy that energy than it is to build a fossil fuel plant. If you look at the price of solar panels, they're getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper every year, um. And that gives me a lot of hope that eventually it will just be nuts to use fossil fuels, and we can do things to make that day come way sooner. But eventually maybe it'll be a hobby, right, like riding

a horse. It's it's not the way you get to work. That's crazy. The coal industry in the US employs fewer people than Arby's, and you wouldn't destroy the planet to save Arby's. World renowned Columbia climate researchers Peter Domenical and Cape Marvel. One thing climate scientists, environmentalists, indigenous activists, and tourists all agree on is the importance of protecting forests. A pioneer on the business side of that effort is

conservation biologist Charles Mutton. I'm a big believer in creating parks and Indian reserves and as and protecting them. Tom Ecotourism has to be part of the mix, because you only need to have one lodge in partnership with local Indians at the mouth of the river of a million acre rainforest park. And yet that one small lodge can have turnover maybe one or two million dollars a year, and it protects a million acres behind it because it

keeps people from getting in behind it. So it's a It's a very inexpensive way to protect enormous pieces of forest, and anything you can do that can slow down deforestation will help slow down climate change. The rest of my conversation with eco tourism innovator Charles Munn can be found in our archive that Here's the Thing dot org. When we returned Peter Domenico and Kate Marvel on having kids in a warming world and on walking the line between

despair and complacence. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing this week. I'm talking to climate science researchers Kate Marvel and Peter Domenico. When you really understand the implications of climate change, some common life decisions take on extra weight. Do you have kids? Twin girls? You have kids, Kate, I have a child? How old? Three? So you had your kid more recently, you had your

kid fully inside the consciousness bubble of global warming. When you were having a kid that you where you're like, you know, bringing a kid into the warmed world. I mean absolutely, um, And there's nothing that kind of makes those projections concrete like having a kid. You know, I used to think about um. You know, like you you run your computer model, you look at what it says, you look at the conditions of the planet in and

you're like, oh, that looks bad. But then you realize like, oh my gosh, like that's when my child is going to be an adult, that's when he might be deciding whether to have kids of his own. And that really personalizes it, that that makes it not an abstract thing anymore.

I remember years ago the New York Times Science section had an article about this topic, and they had bands going to south and northward on the North American continent, and they basically said that these bands of meteorology are going to shift northward, so that the weather in Miami will become the weather in Atlanta, and the weather Atlanta will become the weather in Washington, and Washington will become

New York and so forth. Is that what you're seeing? Yeah? Um, And the scary thing is that in the tropics, in the countries that are already really hot, they're moving into a climate that we don't have an analog for. So, you know, a country on the equator, you know, what's what's that climate going to look like. It's not gonna look like anything we've seen before. The thing that really freaks me out, the thing that really scares me is

this combination of heat and humidity. So there's something called the wet Balb temperature, which is literally just you take a thermometer and you put a wet washcloth on it and you see what it measures. And that measures a

combination of heat and humidity. And that is a really critical thing for human health because that reflects your bill city to cool yourself off by sweating, and if that gets too high, then a healthy young person who's naked in the shade will be dead because you cannot regulate

your body temperature by sweating. And we expect this to reach dangerous levels, especially in South Asia regions of India, Bangladesh, UM by the by the middle or the end of the century, and that has major implications for people who work outside. Could climate change lead to actual adaptive changes in the human genome and what might that look like? Oh, my god, I am not. That's a perfect question for you. The thing about climate change is that, as you pointed out,

natural climate change has happened before. We've seen little wobbles in the Earth's orbit, and that happens on the time scale of hundreds and thousands of years. And what we're seeing right now is climate change that is quicker than anything that we have ever seen. And that it's not the wobbles, it's not the sun, it's us, and it's so quick. It's not even quick and geologic time. It's quick and actual time, like we have seen changes in

our lifetimes. Um And so I don't even know how the human genome can keep up with that because if you look at the time scales over which evolution operates and the time scales over which climate change is happening, climate change is just happening so so quickly. It's happening much much faster than something like evolution. You think God wants to evict us, he wants us out of here. No, I believe. I believe that the Earth is some self policing,

self maintaining system. So human beings are going to get killed off. So the animals get they'll build their birdeness inside the Chrysler building and it's Disneyland and everything, and then they'll take over the world again and it'll be fine and we'll be gone. I mean, like, the Earth's a rock, right, It's it's a really special rock. But the Earth doesn't care about climate change. It's still going

to be here. Um. And I actually I'm not sure that climate change is an immediate threat to human existence, but I know that it is an immediate threat to human happiness and human civilization and so a lot of times an immediate threat to the way we live now for sure. Um. And a lot of times people ask me like, oh, our human is going to be extinct?

Are we doomed, and I kind of feel like, I mean, we're probably not doomed, but like I have higher standards, you know what I mean, Like, if that's the best thing you can say after a day, you're like, I didn't go extinct today, then it wasn't a good day. That I mean that. That's what sometimes people say is that, well, it's not really a problem unless it's going to kill everybody.

But if your community offers evidence says we're at the point now where we are actually seeing the possibility of human extinction, are you going to have the Trumps of the world and his support turn and go, no, we're not, like do do do? Do? Do? Do? People you know who are opposed Give me an example. If you have one of people that you knew, scientists who quote unquote worked for the other side, They helped to tell the

side of the story of the major petroleum companies. They were on the other side, who then changed and came over to your side. Have you seen any of those? Richard Mueller at Berkeley was someone who was in charge of the best program that Berkeley Earth Surface temperature program.

So this was actually a project funded in part by Koch Brothers and others as a way to go through all of the Earth's weather data and say, is this hockey stick of warming that's been spoken about so abundantly in the I p c C Reports, is that just a manufactured curve by these leftist scientists. And so they established this group, and Richard is somebody I've known for

a long time, and he's a very good scientist. He's a physicist, and he brought on a very good team of statistician and they went through this one i think, with a billion points of weather data and put together their own temperature record to great fanfare, and they said, we've got the new gold standard. We've you know, where this unbiased group and such a great fanfare. They announced this saying it was a cover of the wall of

the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. Match the record that Kate generates the one from NASA to it, then a hundredth of a degree, it's exactly the same thing. And so in the process of this they were asking him, so what do you feel about climate change? Said oh, yes,

going on. So it was you know, we wasted though five years for this guy to get his funding, to get his team together to reanalyze all the data to build this whole story to only end up with the exact same story that four other groups around the world have done. So it's you know, we're back right where we started, but we've lost ten years. You have this program where you bring climate scientists and to talk to investors at the Columbia Business School. What were you hoping

the outcome of that would be. So, as Kate mentioned, there are things that we can do as individuals, but what really matters is a societal shift in behavior. And in my opinion, the only way that's going to happen, both in the developed world and the developing world, is if it's led by the wealthy nations and in particular

wealthy individuals wealthy companies. So one of the biggest challenges is how do we move to a world where we have embraced more renewables, where we have sufficient battery storage on the grid. That involves see changes in investments that are way beyond what any individual can do. I really believe in the power of institutions to effect change, and you just have to look at um genomic technology, for example, that was largely led by venture capital folks investing in

in university research for example. So imagine now if we look at this energy problem, which is essentially what the global warming problem is, how do you repower the planet? Well, you come up with a way of developing developing this so that there are investible projects, that there are things

that can be done tomorrow. Um aggre culture for example, one of the biggest risks of climate change is that agricultural yields for the four main commodity crops decline with every degree of warming, on the order of about five depending on the commodity crop. That's a huge thing is you're trying to feed a growing world. Your ability to do that with known crop strains available today, that's a

challenge that's going to require investment. And you're only going to get that investment when you get large finance institutions to recognize and see the opportunity in there for them. I work with the United Nations Environmental Program and I went to Paris to host the Equator Prize for them. You know, one of the things we talked about is is about indigenous peoples in the stewardship of rainforest and everything.

Do you think that that's a factor planting trees to remove carbon dioxy from the atmosphere is a factor that that's going to make a difference. Absolutely vegetation around the world. Absolutely. I mean, trees provide so many valuable services for you can't plant enough trees? Um. Well, I mean we can stop cutting them down, um, and we should plant more. Um. We're not going to be able to keep on as

we are and just plant our way out of this problem. Um. But just because it won't solve everything doesn't mean it's not part of the solution. What is your opinion? Each of you have nuclear power? Because when I've been a very uh carry me out in a box anti nuclear. In terms of the utility reactors, the military application is

a separate one as far as I'm concerned. But the utility reactors I fought, you know, um, Millstone and Oyster Creek and all these ones are the closing BNL on Long Island and so forth, and uh, you know, beyond the latest in the last couple of decades issues about terrorism and the vulnerability of Indian Point Proximate to New

York City in terms of terrorism. I just think that first of all, they're they're not as cost efficient as they were advertised years ago, there are these monsters in terms of cost fracking, killing them and putting them all out of business. But my other biggest argument was the lie that the nuclear industry would tell habitually about it being a clean source of power, as if nuclear fuel

rods came off the nuclear fuel rod tree. And you know, mining urmanium and processing uranium is one of the dirtiest and most fouling processes in the industrial world. So you know, other than that, they were like, well, other than the way we make these rods, this things, this stuff is great. It just isn't polluted anything. Do you agree? Do you think nuclear we need to maintain nuclear? Do we need

more nuclear? I am agnostic on nuclear power. I'm actually willing to be convinced one way or the other because it is true that in the course of generating electricity, nuclear does not produce carbon dioxide emissions. UM. I think you're absolutely right that you have to take into account mining and enriching the uranium, both of which our energy intensive processes. And then the fact that once you turn on a nuclear reactor you have a ten thousand, hundred

thousand year nuclear waste problem. Um. And you have that too, and you have to figure out what to do with that decontamination, decommissioning. All those companies are going to turn around. They're gonna sit there and they go, Wow. You know, we thought we had set aside enough money, and we thought we had government supervised supervised funds where we set uside enough money, but we really don't. And then we can wonder. We can have a lot of handfords all

around the country. One thing I do want to point out is there hasn't been a nuclear reactor built in this country in my lifetime. Um, and that is not because environmentalists have been mean to nuclear. That's because it's not cost of it. It's not if it made money, people would do this. And so I kind of think that how I feel about nuclear doesn't matter. What about you, Peter. My My viewpoints are not that different than yours. But actually I'd like to also ride this, uh, this middle ground,

which is that let's put it on the table. Let's put it on the table and and have people decide and what, and the decision inevitably comes to don't build it near me, and then it comes to where we're gonna put the storage. I actually got a master's degree in nuclear waste management and and you know, one of the results of my study was that we had no place to bury these you know, the idea was to try to do pursue underseas stories, leaving in in the tanks,

in the water on the site exactly. And so it's a mess that's not cleaned up. And you know, are the failed Yuckum mountain Um storage facility is a classic back right exactly. So here we gave our absolute best effort. Our top sciences is trying to figure out where to put this stuff and they couldn't agree. But if you asked me, do you want a nuclear plant built next

door to you or a coal plant? Um, I'd choose the nuclear plant every day, because if if you are interested in harming people, killing people, the best way to do that is to build a coal plant. Under the umbrella of this idea of how much power do we need and how we're gonna where we're gonna get it from. Aren't there parts of the world and aren't there even big European countries where they consumption of powers going down?

It's correct? Yeah, I mean, well, certainly an emissions and you know the UK is actually now emitting less carbon than it was during Queen Victoria's reign. It's incredible. Uh. And there are other you know, countries that are are producing more electricity with much less emissions. And so this um per, this per capita emissions trend is decreasing for a lot of the um What did they do that

we should be doing well? So, for example, in Germany, there's this widespread adoption of solar and wind to the extent that's really unthinkable here. I mean, it's just a fraction of our energy, or of electricity supply in the United States is provided by renewables. You know, it's amazing

to think about this. If if you want to power the entire nation of the United States with solar, for example, you need to cover an area roughly the size of Delaware, a little bit smaller than the solar power for the entire nation. I have this analogy, and it's like we're in a lifeboat and there's somebody on the lifeboat who's having a panic attack, who like, while we're sleeping, Larry over there is drilling a hole in the bottom of a lifeboat. And the question becomes, in the lifeboat, what

do we do about Larry? What do we do in our society about people who don't get it, And I'm wondering what your thoughts are on that. I think, first off, we don't let Larry be the president. That would be That would be a good first thing, UM. But I think very few people care deeply where their electricity comes from. You flip the lights, which you want the lights to come on, You're not like, oh, I really want that

to be from coal. Another thing that gives me hope is, UM, if you look at the generations, if you look at what younger people think about climate change, the incidence of climate denial or climate quote unquote skepticism is so much smaller in the sort of eight group among the students that we work with, the young people that we talked to. Young people understand that this is going to be a

problem for future generations. And young people have ordinary, normal, healthy instincts which they don't learn how to kill to the end of their thirties. Where that's all about denying reality. Who were some of the heroes in government preferably so. Right after the election, the Big Conference and Earth Sciences was in San Francisco and UM the featured speaker was Jerry Brown UM and he took the time to come and talk to an audience of climate scientists and tell

us that California takes this very seriously. California is going to be at the forefront of not only research science. Okay, um, I've never been pandered too before as a scientist. It was amazing. I loved it. That was something that gave me hope and what was kind of a dark time, what California doing is kind of thrilling where they've always been ahead of the curve in terms of all kinds of things, you know, auto emissions and stuff with what

about you? That would have been my choice as well, Jerry. I mean, he's an absolute hero, absolute leader. And Sheldon white House is really very strong as a Senator from Rhode Island, very brave in terms of getting his voice out. He's taking on the administration and but he's a lone voice out there. And I think so much of what needs to be communicated to the American people right now as unity, it's really missing in all of our discussions as we are one country. What is the language, what

is the narrative that's required to bring us together? And that's why I like this Green New Deal articulation, which is that it's something that really embraces the combined wealth, the combined goodwill, the common purpose that exists in this country. That did for FDR. The same week as we recorded this interview, The New York Times ran this headline, Trump Administration's strategy on climate try to bury its own scientific report.

That report discussed the huge human tragedy facing us if we don't take action, poverty, starvation, and even more refugee crises. We owe a debt of gratitude to people who dedicate their lives to preventing these tragedies. So thank you to my guests Peter Domenical of Columbia's Earth Institute, and Kate Marvel of Columbia and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to Here's the thing