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In the spring of 2015, I went to Princeton University to interview Professor William Happer.
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When I interviewed him, I was aware that he was a CO2 and its impact on climate contrarian.
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Mr. Happer points out carbon dioxide is an important trace gas and an integral part of the carbon cycle.
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A biogeochemical cycle in which carbon is exchanged between the oceans, soil, rocks, and the biosphere.
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Virtually all of life on the planet requires CO2 concentrations to be above 150 parts per million.
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The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere over the past 500 million years has been as high as 4,000 parts per million
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and is lowest 180 parts per million.
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Since 1880 when CO2 was measured at Monolea in Hawaii, levels have risen from 280 parts per million to 413 parts per million as of April 2019.
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Mr. Happer, as you will hear, says the impact of CO2 on temperature rise has already taken effect
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and he points to the logarithmic scale, which is a non-linear scale often used to analyze a large range of quantities.
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According to Mr. Happer, it would take another 400 parts per million to affect temperature by one additional degree.
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Mr. Happer is also aware of the fally of predictions.
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And he, like Freeman Dyson, points to the inability of models to accurately predict climate outcomes.
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Then add in the length of day, which changes by milliseconds, transferring massive amounts of energy,
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mostly into the oceans, causing oscillations that, according to climatologist Judith Curry, are not considered in current climate models.
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It begs the question, is the science of climate really settled? Can it ever be?
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Now, Mr. Happer's position on climate, his scientific credentials, and his role in the Trump administration have made him a very large target.
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He is a physicist who specialized in the study of atomic physics, optics, and spectroscopy.
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He is the Sirius Fogg Bracket Professor of Physics, and he is the Davison Germer Prize winner in atomic or surface physics.
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He is not, nor could he be, a climate scientist, because that designation is so new that UCLA, for example, only just launched a degree program in 2018.
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Since this interview, Greenpeace outed him in a sting operation, and President Donald Trump recruited Professor Happer to be a member of a presidential committee on climate security.
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However, in September of 2019, the unflinching Mr. Happer quit. According to Science Magazine, while Happer may have been unflinching, Trump's White House isn't.
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So on September the 13th, 2019, Mr. Happer resigned.
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Professor Happer, as you will see in this interview, firmly believes the impact of CO2 has been misrepresented.
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Conversations That Matter is a partner program of the Center for Dialogue at Simon Fraser University.
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It's not very often that we get to talk to somebody with your level of scientific background about climate, because when it comes to discussing climate, you actually have a sense of what's going on.
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And I frame that by saying sense, because I think that the topic of the science of climate is very complex. Am I right about that?
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Oh yes, it's a very complicated system.
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Do you understand where we're at as far as climate is concerned? Are we changing as a result of human activity? Is human activity contributing? And if so, then what extent?
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Well, of course, the climate changes all the time. It always has. And it's warmed a little bit in the last 100 years, apparently.
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About 0.8 degrees Celsius?
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Yeah, nobody knows whether that's got a human component or not. I mean, most of the warming, for example, was over by 1940, you know, long before there was much additional CO2 in the air.
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But there was a period in the late 1980s where the temperature did spike.
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Indeed, there was warming of 3 or 4 tenths of a degree from 1980 to year 2000.
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But there were a couple of years in there where we had an El Nino and an El Niño effect.
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Right.
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Did that play a role? Do we know that for certain?
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Well, you see El Niño is very clearly on the temperature record whenever there's El Niño. The whole earth looks a little bit warmer.
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That's because the Pacific gets covered with warm water that used to be all pushed together against Australia and Indonesia.
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But during El Niños, it spreads back all the way to South America.
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Right. It reverses its flow across the Pacific.
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Yeah.
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And then radiates up and down the coastline of North America.
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Yeah. There was a monster El Niño in 1998, which sort of was the peak of the warming.
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So that was a bit artificial.
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But there are El Niños ever four or five years.
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You do work with the US government in helping people to understand climate.
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When you talk to them about the way that climate is presented, what are you telling them these days?
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The government doesn't normally ask me these days, but I do tell them that climate obviously is important.
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It does change. There's very little evidence that humans are making much impact.
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And as far as CO2 is concerned, which is the major focus, that's probably more good than bad.
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Now, I can hear people yelling at the screen right now saying, what do you mean CO2 doesn't make much difference?
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Well, I know a lot about CO2 compared to most climate scientists because we make CO2 lasers.
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And CO2 is a very interesting molecule.
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And the particular mode of CO2 that contributes to global warming, CO2 is a rod, and it bends like this up and down, up and down.
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And it's that bending motion that causes global warming.
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But that is such a strong absorption that it's saturated now.
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So as you add more CO2, most of what you can do has already been done.
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There's still a little addition, but not very much.
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Can you explain that to me in a little greater depth? What do you mean it's already been done?
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Well, if you have a barn and you want to paint it red, if you paint a red paint, it may not be quite red enough.
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If you put two or three, then it really looks red. After that, if you add more red, it doesn't make much difference.
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And so that's sort of what CO2 is doing now, that most of the easy absorption has been done.
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And so as you add more CO2, you get a little broadening.
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I don't want to get too technical.
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Well, no, I find this fascinating because, and the reason that I find it fascinating is that I hear that,
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okay, we've gone from about 320, 330 parts per million going back in the last 100 years now to just shy of 400 parts per million if we measure it in Hawaii.
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And along the way, we've heard predictions of different catastrophic outcomes as we push our way through different maximums.
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I haven't seen them happening, even though people will attribute some weather change to that.
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You're saying that if we push through 400 and get to 500, the difference between 350 and 400 is greater than that between 400 and 500.
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Yeah, there's an interesting thing about CO2, which is unique to CO2.
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It's not true, for example, of water, paper, or methane.
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It's just that if you get one degree of warming from doubling CO2, so going from, say, 400 parts per million for simplicity to 800, that doubles it.
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Suppose that causes one degree of warming, then to get another degree of warming, you have to double 800 so that you have to go to 1600.
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So you have to double it again.
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So it gets harder and harder to warm. Technically, they call that the logarithmic dependence of temperature rise on CO2 concentration.
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It was first guessed at, really, by Svante Arrhenius, who did some of the earliest work on global warming.
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He thought it was good. He was all for global warming.
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But he was the first one to point out this doubling property of CO2. Nobody quite knows how he guessed it. It's correct.
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Because he wasn't using computer models.
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Well, I mean, it was before quantum mechanics. You know, he didn't even know about spontaneous emission. It was before Planck.
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But nevertheless, he guessed it correctly.
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It's quite remarkable, isn't it?
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Quite a guy.
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Now, back to the show.
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So, CO2, you know quite a bit about it.
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Is it all negative? And if not, then what are the benefits?
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Well, I think the main benefit of CO2 is it's the food for plants.
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Plants really need three things. They need light for photosynthesis.
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They need water and they need CO2.
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Plants are made of carbon. You know, when I hear about carbon pollution, you know, we're all made of carbon.
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Plants are made of carbon. People made of carbon. You know, your hamburgers made of carbon.
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But CO2 is used by plants. If you go to a cornfield, for example, in mid-summer, and you measure CO2,
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it's about half what it would be at night because the corn plant has sucked so much CO2 out of the air
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that it's now limited on how fast it can make you sugar and grow by the amount of CO2.
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So, if you double the CO2, the corn can grow better. There's more of it there. It doesn't suck it down so quickly.
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So, that's number one, it's an essential plant food.
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And the other thing is it gives drought resistance to plants.
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Because a plant has this problem that when it gets CO2, it doesn't suck it up from the roots.
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It has to open up little holes in its leaf and so CO2 molecule bounces around and other air molecules gets into the hole.
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For every CO2 that goes into this hole, 100 water molecules may fuse out from the interior of the plant.
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So, the plant is squandering water as it's trying to, you know, make food, you know, from photosynthesis.
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So, if you look at, say, a gram of sugar, to make a gram of sugar takes 100 grams of water.
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So, there's huge amounts of water used in photosynthesis.
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Now, more than should be because we're essentially in a CO2 famine.
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We're in a CO2 famine.
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Famine, famine. We have too little CO2.
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So, it had 400 parts per million.
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Four hundred is still too small.
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If you look at the geological history of the world, we started getting good fossils about 550 million years ago, in Cambrian.
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Since that time, CO2 levels have averaged thousands of parts per million, not a few hundred parts per million,
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much, much higher, factors of four, five, ten even.
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And so, plants really evolved when there was a lot more CO2 to eat.
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You know, now they don't have enough.
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And you can see lots of evidence for that.
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There are certain plants, for example, that are called C4 plants that are adapted to the low CO2 levels.
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We have now, they typically are in hot regions of the Earth.
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Sugarcane is an example.
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Corn, American corn, maize is another example.
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But most of our agriculture plants use the old-fashioned photosynthesis, which is called C3.
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And that's a more efficient way to operate if you have plenty of CO2,
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but there isn't plenty of CO2 anymore.
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There's not enough.
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So, as CO2 levels have been going up, the old-fashioned C3 plants, and that includes soybeans and weeds and cotton,
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actually most plants are C3, they're doing very, very well.
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With an increase in CO2?
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With an increase in CO2.
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Very, very noticeable.
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It's a huge effect.
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You know, it's worth hundreds of billions of dollars every year in agricultural productivity.
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So when people talk about the social cost of carbon, it's absurd. The social cost is negative of CO2.
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Because it's a net contributor to agricultural productivity.
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You shouldn't confuse that with real pollution from a coal plant.
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A coal plant, if you don't build it right, scatters fly ash all over.
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Everybody may have sulfur, and all sorts of horrible things can come out.
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But the CO2 is actually good.
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We're not paying attention these days to that coal plant so much.
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So much of our focus seems to be on man-made global warming.
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Yeah, yeah.
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And do you think that we're missing the appropriate target right now?
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Yeah, I mean, it's another one of these sort of mass hysterias that have gripped humanity since it began.
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In our country in America, we had a sort of similar case of mass hysteria with prohibition.
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There were a few cautious people who said maybe prohibition isn't a good idea.
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It might increase organized crime, for example.
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Everything they said was right.
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And yet, when the amendment for prohibition was put to the vote,
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every state except one, Rhode Island, voted for prohibition.
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And one of them intended to honor it.
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It was just what everybody else did.
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How could you be in favor of demon-ram, demon-CO2?
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So these things happen.
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More sinister are these movements in Europe.
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The fascists, the communists, they were mass hysteria too.
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Well, and with true catastrophic consequences.
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Indeed, yes, yes.
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But they can be captured by thugs, and that's what's happened.
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So you've talked about the benefits of CO2.
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Is there a downside?
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Because there has to be.
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When we listen to the level of discourse about this, how can there not be some downside?
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I don't think there are any real downsides.
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I mean, if you look at the argument, the initial argument was there's going to be this rapid global warming.
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It hasn't happened.
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So it's very clear that the models have enormously exaggerated the warming potential.
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Why has that happened?
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What is it about the models that when you simulate, it works and you say, well, there it is?
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Well, I mentioned the saturation of CO2.
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If you paint the barn red, if you put another coat, it's not any redder than it was before.
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And they noticed that early on that CO2 has this problem.
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It's disappointing that it doesn't seem to make much difference if you had.
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So they invented all sorts of feedback mechanisms that would amplify the effect of additional CO2.
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Water vapor, clouds, all sorts of things were supposed to be triggered by the CO2.
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They don't seem to be happening.
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But water vapor is a dominant greenhouse gas anyways.
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Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas.
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Water vapor and clouds.
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It is the greenhouse gas, isn't it?
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70% maybe.
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I have talked to somebody else who is a climate scientist and said, no, clouds aren't in the equation.
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But how can they not be in the equation?
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Well, it depends on the model.
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I mean, the most professional modelers, those trying to do the most honest job do try to put in clouds.
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But it's very primitive.
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It's a rough estimate.
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There's nothing.
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My own journey with trying to understand climate science started when I watched Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth.
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Mr. Gore says that if you take water vapor out of the equation, and he says it rather casually,
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if you take water vapor out of the equation, CO2 makes up 30% of greenhouse gases.
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And I went, holy smokes.
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So I started to do some investigation and went, okay, well, he's right about that.
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But you can't take water vapor out of the equation.
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And if you do, are you then not negating the dynamic interaction between CO2, methane, water vapor,
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and the other greenhouse gases that are involved?
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Yeah.
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Of course, you can't take water vapor out.
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And you should always be careful to say water vapor and clouds.
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Clouds are a big, big deal.
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How come?
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What makes them a big deal?
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Well, if you just go to space and look at the Earth, you don't see the ground over big fractions of the Earth.
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All you see is clouds.
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But if you take a look at the Earth, that beautiful blue bubble or marble in space in-
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It's marble because the white part of the marble is clouds.
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But that image that's on Al Gore's book doesn't show so much cloud cover as a result of global warming.
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Well, that bothered us.
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We airbrushed a lot of the clouds out.
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If you look at the original papers, they have many more clouds.
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I mean, I could show you if you like.
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You say it's been airbrushed out.
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Yes.
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What about the ice on the caps of the Earth, both the Antarctic and Arctic?
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Antarctic ice is probably growing.
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It's a big, complicated continent.
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The West Antarctic, maybe there's a little decrease.
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But over most of Antarctica, it's increasing.
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Sea ice is increasing in rounds in Antarctica.
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That's not supposed to happen according to the model, but it is happening.
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And what's happening in the Arctic?
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Well, there's a good website.
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I think it's called Cryosphere or something at the University of Illinois.
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And if you Google on it, you'll find it.
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Cryosphere.
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Cryosphere.
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And they're pretty honest, I think.
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So you can look at the ice this year, last year.
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It fluctuates up and down.
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There's a lot of ice now because we're just coming out of the Arctic winter.
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And a particularly cold one, too.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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But the other thing to remember about the Antarctic, it's all water.
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It's completely different from the South Pole.
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You've got this Arctic ocean up there, which lets heat come in by warm water from the Atlantic in particular.
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And so much of what's happening in the Arctic is really determined by ocean currents,
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not by the air temperature or things like that.
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So over the course of the Earth's history,
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ocean cycles and flow have played a significant role in temperature.
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It still do.
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Yeah.
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So here's one of the things that I hear when people try to explain the pause in increasing temperatures.
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Ah, well, it's because the Earth's oceans are absorbing that extra heat.
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And of course, it is now circulating through the flow of the oceans.
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And this is why we're seeing melt not only in the Arctic, but in particular in Greenland.
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And yet, I read a report just last week released by NASA that said,
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nope, the deep ocean temperatures haven't changed at all.
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It's hard for the deep ocean temperature to change much because heat has to be convected down there.
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It won't conduct much too slow.
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So the only way to change the deep ocean is from water that is sinking up Greenland or off the South Pole.
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And those are very slow measured currents that slowly, slowly move.
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And so it's extremely difficult to heat all of the ocean.
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It's quite easy to heat the first few inches or first few meters down to the thermocline.
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But it's much harder to get below that.
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So that has to be done by currents, which the other answer you should give when people say that is,
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well, if that's the case, why is it all these 70 models or whatever it is,
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expensive computer models didn't predict that.
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They all promised they would predict what would happen to the temperature.
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None of them got it right.
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Not only did they not get it right, they got it wrong by a huge amount, factors three, four.
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Do you have any sense of why that, how they could be so many models, could be so far off?
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Yes, I mean it was group think.
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The models never looked at the world.
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They were all different models and so they used to say, look how good we are.
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We're all getting the same answer. It must be right.
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You know, we're agreeing with each other.
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But then if you look at the models, they've all got different parameters.
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They've all been coded in different ways.
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And the reason they're giving the same answers, they look at each other and say,
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oh, I'll adjust this parameter in this one.
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And now it gives the same answer.
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So as we look to the future, are you hopeful that the world is going to continue to be a safe place?
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That we will do the things that are necessary to protect this precious planet.
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But that climate is not going to be the overwhelming catastrophic event that some people proclaim that it might be.
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Yeah, I don't think there's anything to worry about from more CO2.
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I'll say it again that I think more CO2 will be good for the world.
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But our great, great children will look back and say, thank God we've got all this CO2.
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You know, what four-sided people our ancestors were.
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I think it is true that you can mess up the world very easily.
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You know, the American rivers used to be a disgrace.
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When I first went to New York City, Hudson River was an open sewer.
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It's clean now, there's salmon running up the river, a shad every spring.
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So that's the type of environmentalism that works and is good for us.
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And that's what we ought to be working on, cleaning up real things that make a difference.
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Well, thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate this. Thank you.
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It was a pleasure.
32412
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