Orrin Pilkey, Duke University geologist, exposes mathematical modeling’s flaws in predicting climate change and nuclear waste storage, calling long-term containment assumptions "ludicrous" while advocating adaptive management. He warns of rising sea levels—1.5 ft/century in North Carolina but up to 10 ft in South America—threatening freshwater supplies and coastal communities like Bangladesh, despite legal suits against polluters failing due to political resistance. Pilkey acknowledges human activity’s role in CO2 increases since 1850 but dismisses precise quantitative models as unreliable, citing oversimplified assumptions and ignored field data. Rapid environmental shifts, like the Gulf Stream’s potential decadal-scale changes, remain unpredictable, yet qualitative trends reveal recurring risks, such as New Orleans’ levee vulnerabilities and Memphis’ rising flood threats. [Automatically generated summary]
From the high desert and the great American Southwest, I bid you all good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you may be in the world's time zones, prolifically covered by this program, Coast to Coast AM.
It is a Sunday night in this part of the world.
Soon to be Monday morning.
Great to be here.
I'm Art Bell, escorting you through the remainder, albeit a little bit of the weekend.
Many of you facing a return to work tomorrow.
Tomorrow is my Friday, as is Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
And Friday, for that matter.
Anyway, listen, tonight's ham cams is not as good as I thought it was going to be, but it's pretty cool.
Now, next week, I will endeavor to get a color shot up.
I've got a, remember I told you my wife Erin got an ultrasound of Baby Asia.
It's a girl, folks.
And so that's what's up there tonight.
Not color, though.
I got one of the black and white ones up, 2D.
I will endeavor to pluck a still copy of one of the better parts of the 30-minute DVD they gave us, which was way cool.
If you haven't seen a modern ultrasound, they are something else.
Anyway, you've got a 2D black and white one up there, if you can make anything out.
See if you can spot the vital organs, the face, the feeding material for Little Asia, the spine, and, well, just see what you can spot.
Anyway, there'll be more about that here in a few minutes.
U.S.-backed Iraqi treaty, it's a bad day.
It was a bad, bad day.
On Sunday, attacked insurgents allegedly plotting to kill pilgrims at a major Shiite Muslim religious festival.
Iraqi officials are now estimating about 250 militants died in a day-long battle near Najef.
A U.S. helicopter crashed during that fight.
Now, it's about three helicopters recently, killing two Americans.
Mortar shells, meanwhile, hit the courtyard of a girls' school in a mostly Sunni Arab neighborhood of Baghdad, killing five pupils, wounding 20.
U.N. officials deplored the attack, calling the apparent targeting of children an unforgivable crime, and it really truly is unforgivable.
I don't care what war you're fighting.
I don't care what war you're fighting.
When would you target children, no matter who you are?
Military aims to cut back on stop loss, or you could retitle that military aims to avoid the draft.
In an action-branded backdoor draft, there you go, by some critics.
The military over the past several days has held tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines on the job and in war zones beyond their retirement dates or enlistment length.
My God, you can't imagine what that's like.
I can tell you, when you're in the military, no matter how much you may or may not like it, it's like you're counting the days and the hours.
There is no military guy who can't tell you the days to get back to the world, which is what we call here.
And to have them stop that, Renee going to promise to bring you home, keep you in a war zone, really, I can't use that word.
It is widely disliked that the Pentagon now under new Defense Secretary Robert Gates is trying to figure out how to cut back on.
It's just, you know, they just have got to stop doing that.
It's about the biggest morale killer you can possibly imagine.
You're literally counting the hours till you're back in the world, and some guy comes to you and tells you, you're not going home.
It's just unbelievable.
Military officials on Sunday released the identities of four sailors that were killed when a helicopter crashed in the ocean off the San Diego coast.
Three of the bodies yet to be found, northern Los Angeles County.
I guess everywhere.
The Reverend Robert Drinian, a Jesuit, who, over the objections of his superiors, was the only Roman Catholic priest elected as a voting member of Congress, died Sunday at 86 years of age.
He had suffered from pneumonia and congestive heart failure during the previous 10 days, according to a statement at Georgetown University, which said he died at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington.
Saudi Arabia's king urged Palestinian rival factions Sunday to hold talks in the holy city of Mecca as fighting between Hamas and Fatah movements persisted in Gaza, with no clear winner emerging, will there ever be?
Early Monday, Hamas fighters mobilized around the main Fatah stronghold, the preventative security headquarters, and threatened to attack.
Information minister there, that would be a Hamas, warned the two sides were close to civil war and called on the president to order his forces back to their bases.
And this is not something I'm injecting.
It's part of the five-minute summary.
New climate report too rosy, experts say.
Later this week in Paris, climate scientists are going to issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures, but that may be sugar-coated somewhat, or the sugar-coated version.
Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises than were projected in 2001 in the last report.
Many top U.S. scientists simply reject the rosier numbers.
Those calculations don't include the recent and dramatic meltoff of the big ice sheets in two crucial locations.
All right.
Since I'm beginning to get a little long in the tooth, and I think I mentioned this last night, and since I've got a picture of Little Asia on my website tonight.
I thought I would sort of include this as my theme song.
Chuck in Portland, Oregon, fast blast me the following: A art.
I think this ultrasound picture of your daughter is going to be the first picture that Richard C. Hoagland looks at and doesn't see a face.
It's been a while since I talked to Richard.
Oh, boy.
You know, we are in the middle of a UFO flap.
We've got, you know, things hovering above O'Hare in Chicago.
We've got what's going on in Greenville, South Carolina.
It's talk the town there and beyond on radio and television and by internet across country.
The question of the day has been, so what the hell was this strange light in the sky last night?
Hundreds of people across the region called and emailed media outlets and the National Weather Service.
This goes back a little now to report streaks of blue or blue-green light in the sky Wednesday at about 8.15.
The weather guy said something like, well, I guess it was WIFF4 chief meteorologist, said that most likely it's a group of meteors streaking into the Earth's atmosphere, but he jokingly would not rule out the possibility of alien spacecraft.
You can't really call meteors until you find a rock on the ground, right?
So he sort of acknowledged that, which is a first.
By the way, we're going to do a lot of open lines.
I'm going to squeeze quite a few into the first hour if I can.
So if you know the portal numbers you'd like to call now, we will try and slide you in quickly.
The Ministry of Defense, this is from England, from the Guardian in England, where a lot of news that we don't get comes from.
Ministry of Defense there went to extraordinary lengths to cover up its true involvement in the investigation of UFOs, according to secret documents revealed under the Freedom of Information Act files show that officials attempted to expunge information from documents released to the Public Records Office under what they call the 30-year rule that would have revealed the extent of MOD's interest in UFO sightings.
Actually, we had a guest on this subject, and they really did go out of their way to cover it all up.
Hey, a NASA astronaut and former University of Hawaii solar physicist Edward Liu is calling for a new spacecraft that would divert asteroids on a path to slam into Mother Earth.
He's got something he calls the small space tractor, which would cost between $200 million and $300 million, a drop in the bucket compared to what it would cost if something hit.
Anyway, it had hover near an asteroid to exert enough gravitational pull that the space rock's orbit would change and a collision with our planet would be averted.
Lou said before a crowd packed into a 300-capacity auditorium at the University of Hawaii on Monday night that we're only trying to get really a tiny change in the velocity of the asteroid to prevent impact.
Lou was part of a panel of scientists, including three Hawaiians, who characterized the chances of an asteroid colliding with Earth as rare, but deserving of the same level of attention as major earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes.
A report on the appearance appeared on the Honolulu Star Bulletin website Tuesday.
The asteroid 99942 Apophilus is going to pass within about 20,000 miles of Earth on Friday, April 13, 2029.
Now, it is going to come so damn close to Earth in 2029.
The orbit might change.
In other words, Earth might actually draw it a little closer.
So next time around, in 2036, kabang!
So I think this is a pretty good idea, and I hope somebody comes up with $200 or $300 million, whatever they need, to avoid something like that.
A highly contagious form of stomach flu sickened hundreds of passengers during a worldwide voyage on the famed Queen Elizabeth II cruise ship in what health officials called an unusually large outbreak.
More than 300 people got sick on the cruise, but just four remained ill by the time the Queen Elizabeth II dock Wednesday.
In recent months, the norovirus has hit more than 1,000 cruise passengers.
Pretty weird stuff.
It's been really hitting cruise ships.
Now, this is for me.
It's for many of you.
Smokers who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habits easily.
A discovery, now I don't want brain damage to be able to quit.
Anyway, a discovery that might open new avenues of additional research.
A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage in various kinds of stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were, in many cases, able to quit smoking quickly and easily, saying, in fact, they had lost the urge to smoke altogether.
The study was inspired by the experience of one man.
He had smoked 40 cigarettes a day before his insula was damaged in a stroke.
He quit smoking immediately after, telling researchers his body forgot the urge to smoke.
He forgot the urge to smoke.
Now, how cool is that?
But of course, as I mentioned, you don't want brain damage to go there.
But still, having learned that, they probably, the insula is in an area of the brain that is not particularly operable.
But maybe they can come up with a drug or something that will go to the insula area.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could just forget that you even had the urge?
I continue on many fronts to avoid smoking, best I can, but I'm...
You know, as I mentioned to you, I'm down to four or five a day.
Some days more, mostly days I'm on the radio.
And I'm trying Shantex.
It's a new prescription thing.
And I'm trying the nicotine gum.
Boy, I'll tell you, this is one bad mama of a habit.
There's simply no question about it.
All right, let's go to the lines.
Let's take some calls.
Alan in Texas, you are on the air.
Hi.
unidentified
Hey, Art.
Thank you so much for taking the call.
A quick thing.
On the bumper music that you do for the Moody Blues, where you do the reverse face shifting, were you possibly the DJ that helped them get a start with one of their songs on the West Coast years and years ago, back in the 60s?
One other thing, the guest you had on would have been last week, Mr. Harper.
And if you could just elaborate a little bit.
Everyone seems to be focused on America.
You focused on the Philippines as well.
I would like just a little bit of input, if you would, south of the equator and what ramifications could possibly be involved with a scenario that you guys were talking about last week.
A solar flare probably would have larger implications, I would imagine, anywhere near the equator.
Of course, it entirely depends.
A solar flare can be Earth-directed and generally affects the...
The northern latitudes generally get slammed harder than any other.
I'd have to look into it.
The radio conditions around the equator are totally bizarre.
They really are bizarre.
They're amazing.
It's a complete opposite situation.
Here, in America, North America, one generally has the expectation that the shortwave bands open up during the day, the higher ones, around 14 megahertz and above, open during the day if they're going to open, and then close promptly when the sun goes down.
It's exactly the opposite down there near the equator, and they actually open up once the sun goes down.
It was the damnedest thing I ever saw.
I thought that radio propagated the same way just about all parts of the globe, but ooh, that's not true.
Not even close to being true.
All right, Jason in Tulsa, Oklahoma, east of the Rockies.
You're on the air.
unidentified
Thank you, Art.
This is Jason listening in on 1170 KFAQ here in Tulsa.
You said at the beginning of the show that some of the troops in Iraq were having to stay past their enlistment times.
And being in the Navy myself, whenever you sign up, it definitely says that you have to stay as long as they need you in certain situations.
So I think a lot of the guys may not, they're totally aware of what's happening and they may be needed for longer.
I'm not sure how it applies to being out at sea, but I can tell you from the time I have in the Far East, Vietnam, Okinawa, the Philippines, that when you're in a war zone, buddy, and they tell you you're going home on a certain date, you're counting the hours.
unidentified
I have no doubt, sir, that they're definitely counting down to the time that they get to come home and see their families, but I don't think it's in a negative way if they get asked to stay, especially with grass.
You're away from your family for, if it's, say, a year, and you know the date you're coming home, and they do a stop-loss trick on you, and you're there for another half year.
I just, I can't even begin to tell you how much that sucks.
And I would have other words for it, but it just, it's awful.
I understand, I guess, that they have to be doing what they're doing because the alternative to that is going to be a draft.
And I guess nobody wants that.
The quality of people you get with a draft is just not what we've got right now.
So I'm not totally in disagreement with what they're doing at the moment, but the stop-loss part of it, yikes.
Happy to take your call and get you on the air in the next half hour or so if we can.
Coming up at the top of the hour, we've got Dr. Oren Pilkey, and he's going to talk to us about modeling, about mathematical models.
He thinks they're really out to lunch with the mathematics, and we'll find.
In fact, he's going to talk not just about climate change modeling, but about the modeling that helped them decide to put nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, just up the road from me a little bit.
On my kitty cats.
They caught a cold, which became a very serious infection.
We almost lost our little Filipino immigrant kitty, and then my other cat caught it.
And, oh, it was a wild week, you know, going to the vet for shots and all kinds of shots and then antibiotics and getting them in my steam room.
I think I told that story last night.
I've got a steam room here, and so it's being used at least for something.
And their poor little kitty faces and noses were pressed up against the glass as we watched them get their steam treatment.
Anyway, they're all nursed back to health.
So nobody passed, and everybody's sort of on their way back to health and running around.
All is well in the Bell household.
We'll be right back.
All right, as promised, let's go directly to the lines.
I just recently learned that there had been some giant ice blocks that fall from the atmosphere down here in San Diego, and I had learned one that fell up in Florida today and demolished a car, totally totaled it.
I was wondering if you had heard anything about this.
I've heard a lot of stories, Mike, of blocks of ice falling from the sky.
Most people think it's airliners, that kind of thing.
That might not be it.
It might be something else.
You know, the way the weather is changing right now, nothing would surprise me.
unidentified
It's amazing.
Yeah, they had called the airport down there in Florida, and they'd said that there was no aircraft in the area, was the other thing I was going to bring up.
They said they've been hearing things that are going on about this North American Union and the way they're doing things over here that they just don't approve of it either.
Yeah, somebody had redone it, and the real Quran, they've even had this on the Christian radio station or TV station that they said the original Quran said it's a peaceful religion.
And this other one that this other guy was supposed to have redone it, this is the one that's radical.
You know, if they were not actually wanting to attack us, as they did, you know, the World Trade Center buildings, Pentagon, and so forth and so on, and they were going to leave us alone, I'd be all in favor of pulling back and letting them stew.
But I think that we'd see them right in our face if they had the chance.
unidentified
You know, it's about 9-11.
It was in the Bible in Jeremiah 30.
God said he allowed this to happen because we have turned from him.
And he says, I gave you a grievous wound that medicine could not even heal.
He had detail that I've never heard from anybody else.
Pete in Omaha, Nebraska, you're on the air.
unidentified
Hi, Art.
Good to talk to you again.
Welcome back.
Thank you.
It's good to hear your voice.
Just had brought up a little bit of what the gentleman earlier was saying about the weather and the shelf of ice that fell on the car and whatnot.
I think it was a forecaster just a few weeks ago that was saying it was more of observing the weather patterns rather than forecasting.
Like we've gotten into just being able to notice these changes in some places so rapidly that it's an observing with the constant changes.
And like several of noted in the past that these, like Red Elk would say that these changes would start getting more drastic as the Earth is reacting to everything around it.
And almost like it feels the pain of the people here on Earth.
And that, you know, it itself, he mentioned, would be like a dog flicking off the fleas as it scratches, that we would much be like that when the Earth decides to kind of reclaim what it has been.
Let me tell you, there was a time when I would have laughed at all that.
That time is not now, Pete.
I kind of believe it.
unidentified
Yeah, with what you've, you know, all your past interviews with the Hopi tribe, and, you know, I think people are starting to realize there's a few that have taught, you know, other people how to look for things that what happened in Indonesia two years ago with the tsunami, all the natives that fled to higher ground, just like the animals.
I think people as a whole, by the way, I want to say hello to all the troops, and we love you.
And, you know, there's a lot of us that still know what's going on.
And I have a question for you, But I was also wondering, now that you're back in the States, are you going to be continuing on with the screen call format?
We have such an incredible situation going on with the climate right now that it makes nuclear power look more attractive, even with the extreme difficulty that we're facing right now of what to do with the waste.
And they're going to put the waste very near me, Yucca Mountain.
We've got a piece of equipment here that I think I mentioned to you that Bill Hickey came up here and redid everything.
And unfortunately, it looks like we've got a piece of equipment failing, which is not unusual.
When you put in new stuff within a day or two or three, you usually get a failure.
China is going to eventually take possession of Taiwan.
I think there's very little question about that.
And when that happens, I suppose we'll make noise and we'll bluster, but I have very serious doubts that we'll get involved in some negative way with China over Taiwan.
I'm commenting about the ice chunks that have fallen in three places across the U.S. The most recent one here in Florida near Tampa subsequent to a hailstorm.
I saw it on WESH in Orlando here.
It was huge.
It was absolutely huge.
It nailed the car, and I heard that another one nailed the house somewhere else.
So they showed a picture of it, and the car was completely nailed.
Bill, if you're out there, pick a break and call me.
Dr. Oren Hilkey is a James B. Duke Professor of Geology, and he's a director of the Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines, that's PSDS, within the Division of Earth and Ocean Science at Duke University.
Currently, PSDS research focuses on beach replenishment and other forms of shoreline stabilization, evaluation of the validity of mathematical models of beach behavior, hazard risk mapping on barrier islands, sedimentary processes on shore phases, migration of hurricane property damage on barriers, and principles of barrier island evolution in Columbia, South America.
His research in recent years has been funded by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Geographic Society, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the National Science Foundation, WOW, as well as a variety of private foundations.
He doesn't think much about mathematical modeling.
Apparently, he doesn't think a whole lot of the modeling that decided that they will put so much nuclear waste right next to me at Yucca Mountain, where, well, gee, you know, I've heard there's earthquake fault lines at 100.
I've heard that there's some water that runs under it that they didn't anticipate and all kinds of things.
So I'm just not really looking forward to that.
And it'll be interesting to see what he thinks of the mathematical models that say, put it there.
We've got some equipment problems, so I hope that all hangs in, but I am hearing you.
All right.
Now, you to sort of put a cap at the beginning of this, you think a lot, if not most, of the mathematical modeling done on various projects is horse-pucky.
There's modeling where you're expected to be accurate and precise.
This is modeling your earth processes.
And we just, in my view, we cannot be accurate.
Accurate models are not possible with natural processes.
However, we can learn a lot, like we have about global change and so forth, using the models in a more qualitative way, where you just look at trends or orders of magnitude or directions and so forth.
But I think our society is depending very heavily on what we think we are told are accurate models, and they're just not accurate.
Well, I think the models, the mathematical models that are used to predict global change are, I mean, I agree with the general picture that the UN committee, which is about to come out with a new report in the next week or two, with their general conclusion that, you know, we're going into global warming.
Global warming is a fact.
We can measure it.
And global change is a fact.
But the problem is, just the way you stated, when the models say that we're going to go up so many degrees and the water temperatures are going to go up so many degrees and sea level is going to rise so many inches or feet, we have to take those numbers with a grain of salt, a large grain of salt.
We can't quantitatively predict.
But we can look at these models, and the models have been valuable in telling us that global change is upon us, and we can't ignore it.
Let me read you what's in the current five-minute Associated Press news.
It says, later this week in Paris, climate scientists will issue a dire forecast for the planet that warns of slowly rising sea levels and higher temperatures.
But that may be the sugar-coated version.
Early and changeable drafts of their upcoming authoritative report on climate change foresee smaller sea level rises and were projected in 2001.
In the last report, many top U.S. scientists reject these rosier numbers.
Those calculations don't include the recent and dramatic meltoff of big ice sheets in two crucial locations.
Now, I take it all of this forecasting is being done by modeling, right?
Modeling is a good way to handle a lot of data, and God knows they've got a lot of data to handle, and you're dealing with a global phenomenon here, a global change.
And I agree that the initial, that the 2001 report was pretty sugar-coated.
And for example, very recently the UN panel there said they expected that more snow would start to accumulate on the Antarctic continent.
And as a result of the warming of the oceans, there'll be more evaporation.
Therefore, there'll be more snow.
But just the opposite happened.
Recent measurements, all short-term, of course, but recent measurements have shown that the Antarctic continent is losing ice, losing snow, losing volume.
And the same thing is happening in Greenland.
It is melting faster than has been expected or predicted.
And so they've been wrong.
These are the two points I think that that article talks about where they have been wrong.
And all of which indicate that sea level is bound to be rising a lot faster than anticipated and that it's almost bound to accelerate.
But putting it into, so this is where models are valuable, where you can, and by the way, these modelers, the UN panel are quite honest and quite straightforward.
They evaluate their, they say these are the problems we have with the model.
And they give all the bad and the good.
And they say, this is a pretty weak assumption here.
And this is a strong assumption here.
And this is very different from most mathematical modeling that goes on in our society.
These guys really, really worry about their inaccuracies.
Among the types, the areas of modeling that we looked at in our book, we think that the climate modeling is by far the best, by far the most straightforward.
They recognize they have lots of weaknesses and are straightforward about it.
I'd be a bit more pessimistic than they are, and quite a bit more, in fact, about some of their precise statements.
But yes, I consider them to be the best, to be the best type of modeling among these things that we looked at, these various fields.
Okay, well, then there's a difference between you and, of course, you know, the administration is very anti-global warming, or at least they certainly have been until very recent days.
And, of course, what they do is attack the modeling.
Yeah, that's one of the problems is that the models, I mean, for example, there's one group out there that is saying that, well, if we don't change our CO2 output within 10 to 12 years, we only have 10 to 12 years to change it and to actually turn things around.
Well, they don't know the 10 to 12 years.
Maybe we can't turn around, or maybe we have 50 years.
That's the kind of thing that is being said by some groups, and this makes them vulnerable.
I mean, the administration can say, well, that's nonsense, and they're right, you know, about some of these very quantitative and precise pronouncements.
But basically, the Bush administration, for purely political reasons, is ignoring a major, major phenomenon that's going on globally.
We are, you know, it's really, you know, this is an exciting time for science, for global science, I think.
In my lifetime, which I've been around a while, I've never seen the scientific community so galvanized on any public issue.
And I'm very proud of the scientific community on this issue.
We are getting out and telling people about this.
Instead of sitting in our offices with our green eyeshades and our computers and arguing amongst each other about little details, we are really getting out there.
The scientists are getting out there, and that's good.
But we have to be careful of what we take of their modeling.
And we have to look at their, lift up the flap and look carefully.
Although I'm not sure, although it certainly would impact what we do to mitigate it if we decide that we're part of the problem.
However, it may go on no matter what we do.
In fact, I believe it will.
If you look around the world right now, China and Asia, Eastern Europe, the rest of the world, you know, they want a couple cars in every garage.
Basically, they want what we have, and if they get it, and they're probably going to get it, I just, I don't see how we're going to change anything, do you?
It looks so hopeless in that sense, because, you know, for us to be standing up there and telling the developing world that, hey, you know, you can't use gas and oil like we're using it.
You know, boy, that just doesn't wash.
And so, you know, so the solution may lie eventually in another kind of technology besides burning of fossil fuels.
But no, we, yes, you're absolutely right.
It's really kind of almost depressing to look at the task before us if we're going to really make a change.
Oh, it just, everybody wants to be like us, and we're producing much of the world's carbon dioxide, excess carbon dioxide.
You will be custodians, or Nevada will be custodians for, well, for essentially a million years or a little bit more, where that's the timeframe over which some of this radioactivity will still be hot.
Some of the waste will still be hot.
And yes, yes, you will be the custodian of that.
Somebody has to be.
And our fathers in Washington have decided that that will be the place to go.
Unfortunately, it has been our fathers in Washington that have decided this and not the scientific community looking for the very best site.
It's been a very political thing.
And this of all things in our society is of this kind, is totally controlled, is totally involving mathematical models.
Hundreds of mathematical models are being used to predict the fate of the waste at Yucca Mountain.
But the problem is, it's complex, but the problem is that we scientists 20, 30 years ago, when we got computers that we could sit at our desk and do so much with, we told the bureaucrats that, yes, we can predict what's going to happen 10,000 years into the future.
And so the requirement has become, wherever we're going to put that nuclear waste, we must know what's going to happen for the next 10,000 years.
Well, that's nonsense.
Of course we don't know what's going to happen in the next 10,000 years.
What's going to happen to the climate?
Are we going to start another ice age?
Is there going to be a volcanic eruption?
But even worse than that is the fact that recently the federal court said, no, we have to move that up to 300,000 to 1 million years.
We have to know what's going to happen during the next million years.
Now that is so ludicrous.
10,000 years was ludicrous, but a million years, I can't find an adjective to describe it.
You know, we're going to go through several ice ages, and Yucca Mountain will be maybe a tropical rainforest during that time.
The groundwater will be right up to the, you know.
And, you know, they may as well have said, they may as well have said, the federal court may as well have said we must put all the nuclear waste into the second ring around Saturn or something like that.
It was an absolutely impossible requirement.
So do we want to say that the federal courts are made up of idiots or are we scientists at false?
And I think we scientists have to take some of that blame that we didn't tell them, that we have convinced people that mathematical modeling can really predict what's going to happen and therefore go ahead and say a million years because we have these sophisticated state-of-the-art mathematical models that can tell us what's going to happen.
And of course, I mean, it's just a million years is just indescribably bad, you know, just indescribably impossible.
Well, yes, that's a very good question because what are we going to do?
Say, well, let's just hope for the best and throw in the waste.
Well, of course, we can do this in a much more qualitative way.
And in fact, Yucca Mountain on the surface of things is quite a good place to be in the sense that it's not far from where all the atomic testing went on, so there's a lot of already contaminated land.
And the drainage, we know this for sure, the drainage of the groundwater and the surface water is not going to go to Las Vegas or to your town.
It's going to go basically into Death Valley.
Excuse me.
And the groundwater is going to be a full thousand feet, I think, below where they're going to store the radioactive waste.
So, you know, on the surface of the thing, it's pretty good.
But I think that I was fascinated, by the way, in a recent magazine article that interviewed people who are in the area where the groundwater will eventually flow if the repository fails.
The mathematical modeling used for weather is perhaps, in some ways, the best kind of modeling there is, and it is inaccurate very often.
That's because what we call a persistence time of things that make up the weather is very short.
And so you can't, usually, you're lucky to get three days.
Sometimes you get five days.
Sometimes you get less than that.
How many of us have failed to bring an umbrella to work and it rains when you come out?
And that's a very important point, that this very good modeling, where they look back all the time, they look back to see if they can't try to improve their prediction.
They still can't be perfect or anywhere close to it.
But I think the weather service is still very valuable to us.
Well, we have to use, we have to simply accept a qualitative world.
We have to simply accept that we can't model something, that we can't accurately predict the outcome of most natural processes on Earth.
And so we just have to step back, and we're just going to have to live with it, that we can't predict these things.
So what do we do, for example, at Yucca Mountain, if we can't predict with a million years of certainty, what do we do?
Well, we can take another approach, which other countries are doing, and that is bury your waste and watch it, see what happens and change as technology changes, change your, you know, we call it adaptive management.
You would change things as you go along, see what happens.
Is the titanium drip shield that they're going to use at Yucca Mountain, if that starts to deteriorate, well, we've got to do something different, you know.
And so there are ways, in all these things, there are ways of, we can plan, we can look at contingencies.
What's going to happen if the following things happen?
And then say, okay, if A happens, we'll do this.
If B happens, we'll do that.
But it does require us to step back and accept that we live in a qualitative world.
We can't predict with accuracy where we're going in so many things on the Earth's surface.
We can certainly look, as an example, at the North Pole, and we can see that over the last several decades, I don't know, 40 or 50 percent of the ice that was there isn't there anymore.
That's getting to be a very serious situation.
And as the ice melts, it seems to be a process that is accelerating itself, because, of course, the water absorbs more heat than the reflective ice with snow on it would.
And so the process seems to be speeding up.
But again, you think that modeling won't tell us where we're going with that.
Oh, qualitative modeling is going to help us in that a lot.
For example, qualitative modeling, just looking at what might happen without giving time on it, without giving volumes, without giving temperatures.
We know that big, big changes, changes I think that you talk about in your book, can happen to the circulation of the ocean, of the Atlantic Ocean, because of the changes that are going on in the Arctic.
And we know that these things can happen.
We know that Europe can become very quickly, in a matter of a few decades, can become much colder.
And there are many, many things that could happen.
Good things can happen.
We can have shipping across.
We can forget about the Panama Canal for a lot of our routes and so forth.
There are winners and there are losers in all of this.
But I do want to point out that it is very important for us to study these things.
We need more oceanographic data on what's happening to that meltwater in the Arctic.
You're familiar with what might happen to the Gulf Stream.
Yeah, the horror stories about the cooling of Europe are potential cooling of Europe are valid.
Boy, it's going to change a lot of things.
You know, speaking of that, in Sweden, they take their nuclear waste and they bury it at more than 1,000-foot depth, and they bury it in water.
And the reason they do that, one of the reasons they're doing it is they assume, the scientists in Sweden assume and they know that someday the ice ages will come back and that will happen before the radioactive waste is dead and Sweden is going to be covered with ice.
And I thought that was very, very long-term thinking.
It may not be as long-term as they think, but they assume that Sweden is going to be covered with ice and any burial of radioactive waste right close to the surface might very well spread the waste all over to the south.
So people are thinking in these terms.
We know ice ages are going to occur again with or without the CO2, perhaps, but the additional CO2 that we're putting in.
But we're probably greatly increasing the rate of this occurrence, the rate of change.
Okay, well, minus modeling to let's say that you're a scientist, which you are, and you're called in front of Congress or the Senate to testify on what you think is going to happen, whether it's Yucca Mountain, whether it's climate, whether it's AIDS or fisheries, and I know you've got something to say about all of that.
How do you go in front of these politicians and say, look, we need X number of dollars and we need to do the following without modeling?
Well, I can point out in most of these things that we need, you know, with more field data, both in AIDS and in fishing and so forth, we need more data and we need more field data.
We need more observations in the oceans, in the atmosphere.
And I wouldn't say to the Congress that we do this without modeling.
I would say that we would use modeling to investigate the directions in which things are going, to look at the order of magnitude that changes might occur.
So modeling would still be a central part of any investigation as to global change and all these other things.
I wouldn't throw out models by any means, but I sure would throw out the quantitative models.
We just simply have to accept that we're not going to be precise.
We're not going to be accurate with these projections into the future.
Oh, yes, a number of times, especially with regard to beach nourishment, which is becoming a big thing on all of our coasts, where we're pumping up artificial sand to replace sand that's being taken away because of sea level rise.
And, you know, I am very critical.
This is bad modeling.
This is really bad modeling where they predict how long a nourished beach will last, and that's all part of a cost-benefit ratio.
We've got to have a cost-benefit ratio according to the law.
And in order to have a cost-benefit ratio, you've got to have an estimate of how long the beach will last when you pump it up.
Well, you know, who knows when the next storm will occur?
That's how long the beach will last.
And you don't know that, obviously.
But the Corps of Engineers, when confronted with this, says, well, look, we can't go to the Congress and say we want $12 million, plus or minus $5 million, to pump up a new beach.
So therefore, they say we must come up with an accurate estimate, which you can't do, an accurate prediction of how long a beach will last.
Well, that's, you know, the Corps of Engineers or we scientists shouldn't be giving Congress inaccurate numbers.
I mean, Congress is going to have to live with the facts, too.
And they're going to have to live with the fact that we can't predict how much a beach is going to cost.
And we're just going to have to live with that.
And that's true in other fields as well.
But that's a particularly obvious one and one that's rather important here along the coast of the U.S. Speaking of coasts, here's another one.
With the melting that clearly is going on, well, I guess it's clearly going on, certainly at the North Pole, and a lot of glaciers now are beginning to retreat severely.
Eventually, particularly if it begins to occur at the South Pole, the Antarctica, it's going to begin to cause sea levels to rise.
And as we all know, there is a lot of very valuable, very occupied shoreline, and we've got lots of it in the U.S. And are these people going to be at risk?
Modeling says.
Probably they're going to be at risk.
And even looking at the world right now says that, I guess.
We don't need modeling to know that sea level rise is creating a huge risk to the world.
We have so many coastal cities.
And we know now, for example, Along the east coast, well, we have a very good tide gauge in North Carolina on a concrete pier at Duck, North Carolina, and it shows the current sea level rise is about 1.5 feet per century.
We know it's much, it's less in some places, like in Juneau, Alaska, it's dropping, and in Columbia, South America, on the Pacific coast, it's rising at 10 feet per century.
But in any event, globally, the sea level is rising, and the worst hazard for global change and sea level rise are in the atoll nations, like in Tahiti and some of the French and Polynesian atoll islands.
Tahiti isn't an atoll, but some of the other islands.
And even worse yet is Bangladesh, where millions of people live within a meter, within several feet of sea level.
And in these places, it's not going to be the flooding by the sea level rise.
It's going to be the destruction of the fresh water supplies.
Long before the land is actually flooded, the fresh water will be gone.
The salt water will have intruded into what they're using for their freshwater.
And so what are we going to do with these millions of refugees from Bangladesh?
It's fascinating.
And there is a movement afoot, interestingly enough, by some native communities, even in Alaska and Siberia and the atoll nations.
They're trying to get together to sue the United States and Western Europe for producing all the CO2 that's causing the crisis on their shoreline.
I don't know how far they'll get with that, but it's an interesting little issue.
I guess 10,000 people had to move off this island.
I'm trying to recall where it was, but there was a story about it, and they had to actually leave the island, and it's going to be the beginning of more of that for a lot of people.
Your suspicion as to whether we can really pin down how much would be a point that I would make, that we can't really pin it down how much we are responsible.
But what makes me think that we are at least partly responsible is the correspondence of the increasing carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere, and that's as measured on Mauna Loa.
The longest measurement of atmospheric CO2 is on Mauna Loa.
And that increasing CO2 content just corresponds more or less with the global warming that we're seeing.
I mean, we see about, for example, a sea level rise.
We see sea level rise beginning about 1850, the middle part of the 19th century.
And it more or less corresponds to the increased in CO2 by humans.
And so I think that's probably a qualitative indication that we're part of the problem.
We're a major part of the problem.
And then the question is, you know, what can we do?
And I share your pessimism about getting the world to change its fossil fuel habits.
But I don't think because we're pessimistic, and I am, I don't think we shouldn't try.
I don't think we should throw up our hands and walk away.
Well, if I was king of the world, I would be putting all kinds of resources into looking at alternate sources of energy.
You know, everybody knows there's all kinds of potential sources of energy.
One of which, by the way, enemies.
One interesting source that you haven't heard too much about is energy from within the Earth.
And it's been suggested that we could be drilling at the mid-ocean ridges and getting huge amounts of energy where the hot magma is very close to the surface.
And we could be producing steam that could go all over the world.
I think that's a little ways away, but I find that to be a fascinating possibility.
I think I would be, if I was king, I would be funding all kinds of research into other ways of driving around, other ways of transport, get us out of fossil fuel.
And unfortunately, we, the nation that is producing most of the CO2 in the world, excess CO2, or a good part of it, we're the nation that's dragging our feet.
There was actually a story, Doctor, I'm sorry, there was actually a story saying that in 50 years, if we don't change, there's going to be no more fish left.
No more fish left.
I couldn't believe it, but it was a legitimate story.
of Oregon as well and there was a very very worrisome story saying that if we don't do something to change what's going on in 50 years we won't have any fish in the sea now maybe that's somebody's modeling that has told us that or maybe it's real in a moment we'll ask once again dr. Oren Pilkey doctor had you heard that story I'm curious about all the fish being dead in 50
The way I interpreted that story was that we're going to lose our – there's a possibility of losing commercial fisheries very quickly, and I think it's partly due to the dead zone, but I think it's also due to the overfishing.
And I think the greatest overfishing story of all is the Grand Banks off Newfoundland and Labrador, where the Canadians using mathematical models –
as figleys I call it figleys because I do believe as I read what happened there there was a great deal of skepticism about the models but the politicians said well you know look we got 40,000 people here depending upon this industry this fishing industry we're not about to stop the fishing just because of you know we've got to believe these models and so forth and so and so they just kept right on fishing right until the last cod for
all practical purposes was gone and then they stopped it it was it was so amazing and and and our models have to be have to be blamed for a good part of that loss and in the rest of the u.s we're still using in the rest of the world we're still using models and and in in in the u.s we we we control the fishing by uh by panels and committees of local local people but it's it's so much into politics that it is very very
difficult.
That's part of the problem of democracy is it's difficult to stop really stupid things that we're doing when so many people depend on it for their living.
It's one thing to sit back and academically talk about all this, but when you're depending on a paycheck from what you go out and get in your fishing boat, it's a good story.
Recently in North Carolina, my state, the federal government, marine fisheries uh has suggested that we stop fishing for two or three species and let them recover but our our the speaker of our senate uh mark mark bassnight got up and and gave a ringing uh.
speech about how we must support our poor fishermen, and he will do everything he can to make sure that this doesn't happen.
And the same thing happened in the Grand Banks.
Senators, congressmen, the Canadian equivalent, got up on their soapboxes and said, hey, we'll save you.
We're not going to let this happen.
And they kept on going.
And the Grand Banks was the world's greatest fishery.
There's no question about that.
It's been fished for 450 years, starting with the Portuguese and the Spanish.
And it was still healthy at the beginning of the 20th century.
In fact, it was healthy by 1950.
But then we began to, with the help of the government, with the help of the government, we began to get, the Canadian government, began to get more efficient fishery methods.
We began to devise better nets, bigger ships and all that stuff.
Everything led to the demise of this really great fishery.
And it's going to happen in other parts of the world.
That 50-year estimate might not be bad of a time when we no longer have big fisheries, big fishing industries around the world.
I mean, when you look at what's going on with the climate and you look at what's going on with the oceans, and I guess it all relates, it's beginning to really scare me.
We're increasing in population, but more important, we're increasing the amount of pollutants, both not only carbon dioxide, but we're increasing what we put in water.
We are getting better at that in some ways.
I think we're reducing the amount of oil spilled, perhaps.
But there's still so much stuff coming in, like all the stuff that's coming into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River that's causing that dead zone, the big dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
It is frightening.
It's kind of discouraging.
It may be disgusting is a better word for it.
We could do something about it, but it takes politicians with backbones and so forth.
Almost certainly it's some kind of pollution, be it nutrient pollution, too much nitrogen and phosphorus from sewage of some kind, or is it industrial pollution?
There are all kinds of pollution.
And so I guess, yes, it has to be some kind of pollution, which means then that it could be stopped, not cheaply and not with ease and not with political ease, but it could be stopped.
whether we have the willpower it to do that is another thing and another problem like in the Mediterranean there's so many countries involved who's gonna who's gonna tell Morocco and Spain and Italy and so forth, all these countries to suddenly behave themselves?
If the fate of the world is dependent on nations working together, I could just let it trail off there.
You know, if the average person listening to the program right now is bombarded by story after story after story about mathematical models predicting this and that, should they pretty much just disregard what they're hearing, just not pay attention to the news anymore, or what?
We are bombarded, and models are talked about, we just hear that, well, the models have said such and such.
They should be very skeptical.
And that's a little problematic because sometimes the models, you know, if the models, if someone says, well, the temperature is going to increase, the models say that, well, I believe that.
But if they say the temperature is going to increase by such and such, well, I won't believe that.
You know, qualitative versus quantitative answers.
And that's one of the problems with mathematical models is that they really, the mathematical modeling community is sometimes looked upon by people who have to work with them as an unassailable priesthood, something that you can't, you know, that have a, they almost look at themselves as being holy and that criticism is blasphemy.
The problem lies, even if we understood every aspect of a process on the surface of the earth, like let's say in my own specialty, how much sand is being transported on beaches by ways, you know, we can write down a list, which I did in the book, of 40 or so things that affect the amount of sand being transported.
Even if we really totally understood that, we still would not know, we would not know when such and such a process is going to occur.
We don't know what direction it's going to come from.
We don't know what magnitude, for what duration.
So in terms of quantitatively estimating the amount of sand that's going to be transported on the beach during the next decade, that's impossible.
It's virtually impossible.
No matter how good the models are, no matter how much data you have, no matter how much field studies you have undertaken, you can't make that prediction.
It's what we call ordering complexity.
It's a fatal flaw in all mathematical modeling of Earth's surface processes.
So we can't do it.
But we can, very easily and very neatly, we can determine whether a given shoreline, for example, is going to have a lot of sand transported or not much sand transported.
We can do that.
We can do that really nicely.
So it's all a matter of what you're trying to get, what you're trying to get out of the model.
And I think, and so what can people do, what can you do if you're a John Q citizen and you're trying to, and you're confronted with a mathematical modeler who says the following is going to happen?
Well, I would ask that modeler what his assumptions are.
You don't have to worry about the arithmetic or the mathematics.
I would ask, what are the assumptions?
What are the fundamental assumptions behind what you've just said, what you've just told me?
For example, if you have a modeler who is telling you about the amount of sand being transported on a beach by the waves, and you could ask him, well, how do you estimate, what do you use for wave height?
That's what controls the amount of sand.
Well, you know, if you've been on a beach, you've seen high waves on Tuesday and low waves on Wednesday, and then you see waves come from the south on Thursday, and waves come from the north on Friday.
And so how do you put that all together?
And the answer will often be rather appalling and make you rather skeptical of the model.
So that's one approach.
If you're a citizen, you don't have to understand the math.
And I urge that people not be flummoxed by the math, not be completely overtaken by that.
And look at the assumption, and then use some common sense.
And then look at previous applications of that model.
Down the road, did they estimate the whatever accurately?
Ask for some examples of where the model has been applied.
They're not necessarily false, but they're ridiculous.
In the sense, for example, in waves, we say, how do we, we take the one-third highest waves for a given period of time, and we say that's what the wave height is.
And, well, come on.
So that takes out the big storms, which are, you know, which are much less than one-third of the time.
And it takes out the long periods of calm weather, which are also important.
So, you know, so we have simplification after simplification, which are necessary to put into the model.
So in the case of the waves, we can tell whether a beach has got a lot of sand moving or not much sand moving, but when you have to use a simplification like one-third the highest wave, you are not going to be quantitative about it.
Coming back to Yucca Mountain, since it's so close to me, if the modeling is incorrect, and if Yucca Mountain fails, whether it's due to some sort of earthquake, and I understand there is a fault line there they didn't think about, and it's awfully early for things they didn't think about, what are the likely consequences?
I assume they've looked at the worst-case scenarios for Yucca Mountain.
Whether they looked at them accurately or not is another question, but what will happen, the worst-case scenario basically is that this radioactive waste would flow out into the groundwater and into California, actually, but not into Las Vegas.
And it would, of course, destroy the groundwater for anybody who's living in that area.
That's one reason why Yucca Mountain is not a bad place in a sense because there aren't very many people there.
And if I was king, I would say we should buy up all the houses and all the ranches that are in that zone where the radioactivity might leak and get them out there.
I don't know.
It's not very large.
That doesn't help you very much, does it?
But it's a fairly narrow zone, a few thousand square, probably a few hundred square miles that you could do a lot of, if you purchase a property, that you could do a lot toward reducing the hazard.
And the hazard, if it is going to occur, is likely to be several hundred years down the road.
That's a qualitative statement.
But see, the thing we don't know how fast the groundwater is going to flow, and we don't know how much groundwater there will be if the climate changes.
There's going to be a lot more flow.
And we have greatly underestimated, as you've probably heard, the amount of water that's flowing at the present time into Yucca Mountain.
Not too long ago, they discovered radioactive chlorine, or they discovered chlorine-36, which is a compound that was formed in the Bikini bomb blast in the Pacific.
And it's globally in the atmosphere.
And they discovered that in the tunnel at Yucca Mountain, which indicated then that the groundwater had flowed, some groundwater, at least along fault zones, had flowed all the way down into the chambers.
And that was 10 times the rate that they had assumed in their mathematical models.
So here's a case where the mathematical models were wrong because their database was wrong.
That's a very common problem.
But it's called a percolation flux problem.
And it's really an example of how they just kept going and going on their models with that incorrect number.
And instead, they should have tried to find this chlorine 36.
They should have made an effort.
Well, they did.
They eventually found it, but they should have been doing that right at the very start.
But that's so common with modeling.
You know, they're under pressure to show that Yucca Mountain is a good place to...
It's so political.
Well, you know better than I, if you've been involved in it, the policy is not.
If the scientists were going to take charge of this thing, I think we would probably put the radioactive waste into salt in some places in Kansas and in Texas.
Because the salt deposits that we have there are millions of years old.
The very fact that the salt is there indicates there has not been any water flowing through them.
Otherwise, the salt wouldn't be there.
And so this is a real natural place for radioactive waste disposal.
But that politics has a lot to do with it.
Yeah, unfortunately, politics has everything to do with it.
And we have messed in our nest in the sense that we have required, we have as a requirement, now it's a million years, it was 10,000 years of certainty that nothing will happen.
And so the modelers have really messed this up.
We scientists have messed this up because we made this requirement an impossible requirement.
And so the state of Nevada has an infinite amount of scientific directions they can go to show that this thing can't work, that we can't possibly know what's going to happen for the next million years.
But I don't think that's going to matter.
I suspect that the state of Nevada will be overwhelmed by politics and the nation will be overwhelmed by the, you know, Yucca Mountain will be chosen because of politics.
Now, are they absolutely certain, Dr. Pilkey, where the groundwater goes and that it does not meet groundwater elsewhere and percolate into different areas?
In other words, if it all went wrong, California would be at risk?
And I believe one thing they can tell quite accurately is where the groundwater will flow just based on the slope of the land and the slope of the formations, the geologic formations.
I believe that that's I don't think California, except for parts of Death Valley perhaps, is in any problem.
There are no major centers of development like Las Vegas or like your town that are threatened by this waste.
And I think we could learn from, well, you know, all this goes back to a decision in the Ford-Carter administration that we would not recycle radioactive waste.
And one of the reasons we said we don't want to recycle radioactive waste is because we didn't want India and Pakistan to do that, and they would get the bomb.
Well, of course, India and Pakistan now has the bomb.
So we decided, if I've got this straight, not to recycle radioactive waste because we didn't want India and Pakistan to do it.
I'm going to think about that during the break.
We'll be right back.
To repeat.
Dr. Pilkey said the United States decided not to recycle nuclear waste because it would be a bad example for India and Pakistan, which of course went ahead and did it anyway, and they both have the bomb now.
So since that's already the case, I think we'll ask Dr. Pilke why we're not recycling nuclear waste now and whether it's really efficient to do that at all.
We'll ask in a moment.
On the face of it, Doctor, it seems to me ludicrous that we would not recycle waste as an example to India and Pakistan.
But let's go ahead and assume that that's why we did it.
Well, India and Pakistan, as you mentioned, already have the bomb.
I'm concerned with the mathematical models in this, but recycling waste, radioactive waste, will produce plutonium, which is a bomb component.
And I think the answer is that why we're not doing it now is because of the cumbersome bureaucracy that every nation has.
We have started down this path.
We have spent $5 billion looking for the right site.
And we have a large bureaucracy dependent upon this.
And these things don't turn around fast.
And it would be, you know, but I think we should.
I mean, it seems to me it makes perfect sense to go back to recycling.
And I understand in Britain they do recycle.
There are still waste, however.
There's still waste, but it would be much less.
And that's something to consider.
And we are going to need, probably, we're going to need more recycled uranium because I think we can assume that nuclear power is going to become more important again in this country.
It was first pointed out by an article in a British newspaper by Rian Milan.
And Milan is a very interesting person.
He is a guy who, he is the last of the Milans who they, five generations ago, began apartheid in South Africa.
And he was a, but he was an anti-apartheid activist, a very powerful one because of his name.
Anyhow, he was looking at the UN AIDS numbers.
They had back what we call hindsight, hindcast, and went back to 1999 and said that 250,000 South Africans died of AIDS.
And I, by the way, don't want to in any way belittle the horror of AIDS.
Mandela's son died not long ago from that and so forth and so on.
But anyway, and then he saw, he knew that in southern Africa, only South Africa has records telling how many people died, period.
And he found that 350,000 people had died in 1999 in South Africa.
And if 250,000 people had died of AIDS, that would mean that two-thirds of all the deaths in South Africa would be AIDS, and that was impossible.
And this was, and the model that was used, it was called UNAIDS model, I guess, was clearly incorrect because it was not true that two-thirds of all deaths in South Africa are from AIDS.
And what this illustrated was that the, and something, there was a huge sympathy bias.
You know, nobody's going to really lift up the flap on a statement like that because everybody knows AIDS is terrible.
But in reality, it was probably closer to 60, 70, 80,000 people died of AIDS in 1999.
You know, we know AIDS is terrible, so let's just go with that number.
And we can get more money if we make it look worse.
And it's the same number that they use to estimate, the same model they use to estimate the amount of AIDS all over southern Africa.
And it's important because Africa has other problems.
Africa has serious malaria problems and deaths from malaria and serious tuberculosis problems.
And we've got to put all this in perspective, in an honest perspective, to, you know, what should we hit first?
Tuberculosis, AIDS, or how much money should we put in which one and so forth.
So it's an example.
But one of the more interesting aspects of this, he found that people were angry at him for pointing this out.
Again, this is because there's so much sympathy with the AIDS problem, so much concern about it, that when he pointed this out, he talked about ruined dinner parties, losing friends, and all that because he insisted that the AIDS numbers were wrong.
And I've kind of seen it in my own experience, that people don't, in something like that, they just don't want to have the truth pointed out.
It's painful.
And so, of course, that keeps the model results going.
Although now I think the UN has come to more realistic modeling now about aid, but they're still very fuzzy numbers.
I've always wondered about this, and maybe you have some response.
In the United States, we frequently quote people as saying we have 300,000, 400,000 smoking-related deaths in the United States every year.
I forget exactly what the number is.
It might even be higher than that.
However, I've always wondered about the sampling that ends up with those statements being made.
For example, if a doctor signs a death certificate and somebody died of, I don't know, one thing or another, and that person was a smoker, I have a feeling they put down smoking-related death and that we get these strange numbers.
That's a real problem with all kinds of modeling, but especially in health.
Health modeling, AIDS, for example, is probably underestimated because for all kinds of reasons.
For one thing, people die of many things.
They're very weak, and their immune system is shot, and so they can die of many things.
And sometimes for social reasons, people don't want it known that family doesn't want it known that AIDS is involved, and so forth and so on.
But the tobacco thing, the most fascinating aspect of that I found in researching this book was the secondhand smoke lung cancer thing.
The EPA declared that 3,000 people every year die of lung cancer.
And in order to do that, in order to come up with that, they had that number first, and then they began to model it.
And they looked at a bunch of studies.
And in order to come up with to support their 3,000 number, they had to change the acceptable margin of error in that model.
So basically, they suddenly loosened their standards in order to come up with a number that agrees with their preconceived number of 3,000.
And in a federal court case on this, I don't know who brought who for what in the court.
In the federal court case, a judge sued out and said that the EPA had cherry-picked their numbers.
But then the head of EPA said, well, we know that we all know the secondhand smoke causes lung cancer.
And so they basically, they just declared that the models were valid and that we have 3,000 people dying of lung cancer due to secondhand smoke every year.
Well, you know, so they just declared it and they ignored the model, ignored everything.
And so that's another example of a problem.
The modeling was bad, and the federal court found that the modeling was bad.
It was that obvious.
And yet the EPA continues to insist on that.
There's no question that secondhand smoke creates all kinds of problems.
For example, in asthmatic children and on and on and on.
You can put up a whole list of things that secondhand smoke does, but there's no indication, no statistically valid indication that it's a very big cause of lung cancer.
Yeah, her name is Linda Pilke Jarvis, and she is an expert on oil spills.
But she did work in groundwater for a while, and she became convinced of, she saw the problems with models in groundwater, saw that they really weren't predicting what they thought they were predicting.
So we discussed that, talked about it, and we found a lot of common ground in that.
A lot of times, Doctor, when you write a book like this, before you release it to the general public, you get it to some colleagues and other scientists who allow them to sort of proofread it for you.
And I wonder if you did that and what kind of reactions you got.
You've got a lot of open pit mines, and the problem with open pit mines is that when they're abandoned after 20 or so years, they fill up with water.
And that water, if it's the right kind of rock, or I should say the wrong kind of rock, it's going to fill up with terribly acid water.
And like the big pit, Berkeley pit in Butte, Montana, where a few years ago a flock of 300 or so snow geese landed on the water and never took off because they were instantly killed by the acid water.
And the company at that point claimed that they had eaten some bad grain, but then they changed their mind after a while, changed their tone.
But at any rate, the BLM was, for years, was claiming that basically, well, first they were just saying you have to have an environmental impact statement when you begin a mine.
So they were saying, well, it's going to be swimming water, you know, fresh water in 50 years.
You have to come go for 50 years.
And then they began to be criticized for that because it's obviously not true.
So they went into mathematical modeling.
And there, the modelers, the bureaucrats in BLM, don't understand modeling for the most part.
In the Corps of Engineers, they do understand modeling.
They still do it wrong.
But in the BLM, they didn't understand modeling, but they were happy as long as they came up with fresh water and with a conclusion that 50 years from now the water is going to be fine and you can go swimming in it and catch lake trout.
Well, so finally, a geochemist named Robert Moran kind of blew the whistle on that.
It's really impressive.
This guy is a consultant.
He's not an academic, so he did it at some risk to his own livelihood.
And he blew the whistle.
Now the models are coming up with more accurate numbers, but he points out even with these better numbers, the models still are not valid for all the reasons that I've been talking about.
but you can, in a qualitative way, you can say this is going to be a bad lake 50 years from now, or this is going to be a good lake 50 years from now.
And so the BLM is like so many government agents, same problem with the core.
The BLM is expected to encourage mining.
At the same time, they're supposed to make sure mining is safe, and it won't leave what we call giant cuffs of poison all around the landscape.
When I come back, I want to be able to open up the phone lines.
It allows some people to ask questions.
And I want to address a particular concern I have.
If you say the models are no good, the people who don't like what's being said are going to use that as ammo to kill it.
I'm Art Bell.
Yes, here I am.
My guest is Dr. Oren Pilke.
And here's what I want Dr. Pilkey to think about during the break that we've got coming up.
And that is I'm willing to buy into what he's saying.
That is to say that a lot of the modeling that's being done right now simply is inaccurate based on the sampling information.
However, once you've said that, let's take climate change as an example.
Once you've said that the modeling is essentially trash, I'll be a little overly dramatic, I suppose, or perhaps not.
But once you've said it's trash, then you have handed the enemies, the political enemies of whatever it is, whether it's global warming or whether it's AIDS, the AIDS epidemic and money for it or the fisheries or beaches or any of these things or even mines, any of these things that we're trying to come to conclusions on.
You hand the enemies of these things ammunition, which they're going to use improperly to just kill the whole thing.
So I wonder if Dr. Pilke worries about that.
When you say the modeling is no good, then perhaps you're saying, well, global warming is simply not real because the models aren't real.
But the truth must be known, and we must, you know, we're going up a dead end if we believe these models in their totality.
We must recognize their limitations.
And of course, I'm a strong believer in global warming and the fact that we personally, we people are responsible for at least part of it, a significant part of the warming.
But yes, when one criticizes something as fundamental as mathematical models in our society, there's a large group out there waiting right now, perhaps listening right now, that are waiting to jump on this and point out that all these things, throw the baby out with a bath, that all this is wrong, all modeling is wrong.
Of course, we hope we made a strong enough case because that that can't happen.
I mean, we say odd nauseum that there's a difference.
There are good models and there are bad models.
There are qualitative and there are quantitative models.
And our modeling that we're talking about strictly has to do with major Earth surface processes like global warming, like fishing, like, you know, and so on.
If I was an attorney, doctor, and I had you on the stand, and I was on the side of trying to squash all of this global warming talk, I'd put you on the stand, and I wouldn't let you answer anything that I didn't want you to answer.
I would just allow you to Destroy the modeling being used by those promoting the concept that global warming is coming.
And by the time I was done, I can assure you that you would destroy the whole concept of global warming without ever being able to say a word about your belief that it really is happening, despite the bad modeling.
A good witness knows how to make sure that the attorneys don't hold complete sway.
You know, you've got to, when you answer the question, you've got to put in the plug for qualitative modeling and put in the fact that you're going to be able to do that.
And I believe that global warming is happening and global warming is a real hazard for our society and for the world.
So you're right.
On the stand, there's that tension between the outstanding attorney and often the scientist.
This is not the scientist's field to be playing games, word games, like the attorneys do.
I mean, I would take your book and I would say, look, Doctor, I've read your book, and nowhere in there do you say that you believe global warming is real, but you do certainly, and this is a yes or no question, Doctor.
Do you believe the modeling is accurate?
Is that a yes or no?
And, of course, you'd be forced to say no, it's not accurate.
You know, there are natural sands, what we call heavy mineral sands, that could come from somewhere, not necessarily Egypt, that are radioactive, slightly radioactive.
For example, there's a mineral called monazite, which is very abundant, well, which is somewhat abundant in some sands along the east coast of the U.S. And this is a radioactive mineral.
And sometimes heavy minerals contain gold.
So it might possibly be entirely a natural type sand.
I think these are the glass beads that I think we would, it's been proposed that we put our radioactive waste into glass beads in the form of glass beads.
And the glass beads are inert and therefore would prevent the radioactivity from escaping.
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I don't believe that quite it.
These are little beads that were made with a gentleman that was working with Fleshman and Ponds when they did cold fusion, and that was in the news.
And shortly after came out a TV rundown of that, and they showed a Geiger counter and a qualified amount of radioactive material.
No, I don't think it had anything to do with cold fusion.
It was a way of reducing the time that it took radioactive materials to decay, radically reducing the decay time.
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And not taking on the radiation, but neutralizing it in a manner that they don't have any idea of how it does it.
But it's a metal encapsulation of some kind, and it's got a series of, I can't remember what they call it, but it's there was something in there that was like little baffle plates or something that somehow neutralized it.
And they demonstrated, they showed the Geiger counter, and as I recall, it was something like 200 years worth of deterioration or neutralizing in a 20-minute period that they ran the Geiger counter for the show.
There was a demonstration on Good Morning America.
So there are a number of methods, Doctor, of reducing or speeding up radioactive decay.
Now, this kind of thing where you see it on Good Morning America, and as he pointed out, they had a Geiger counter, and they seem to prove it, but then you never hear another word about it.
You know, we have criticized their modeling in the technical literature.
I've written several papers, me and my colleagues have written several papers on their individual mathematical models in the Journal of Coastal Research, and we've never gotten a response from them.
We'd sure like to get a response, but they are untouchable for political reasons.
That is, politicians like pork barrel projects, and they're the origin of pork barrel projects.
But I mean, going back slightly here, the Corps, in a way, because the way the Corps is set up, where they have to have projects in order to survive, this makes them, you know, I don't think any agency that has to have projects to survive could ever be honest and confident.
We've set them up wrong.
And that's the way the politicians want it.
They want the Corps to do their bidding.
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I think that people all over the country need to know.
There are those levees, is it south of Sacramento?
Doctor, out of curiosity, she's from New Orleans, was there any mathematical model that predicted exactly what would occur with that intensity of storm?
And a lot of models went into the design of the levees and the design of the storms or the estimate of what the storms could do.
I think, though, the modeling did, mathematical modeling did tell the Corps of Engineers that, for example, that the levees would be breached where the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet Channel comes in.
A modeler in LSU, and this would be just a qualitative model, said that there's going to be the storm surge right there where that channel intersects with the levees.
The storm surge was going to be higher there because of the impact of the big channel, and it could potentially overtop the levees.
And it did.
The Ninth Ward was flooded, immediately flooded by that overtopping of levees.
When I come back, I'd like to ask you if the levees in New Orleans are now fixed so that when the next storm of that kind of magnitude comes along, all will be well.
From the high desert, I'm Art Bell.
Dr. Oren Koki is my guest, and his book is Useless Arithmetic, Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future.
And that title alone provoked the question that I asked just prior to the top of the hour.
It's very worrisome to me that, you know, just based on the title alone, you go, boy, here's some ammunition for the anti-global warming people and a lot of the rest of them as well.
And it certainly is that.
So that said, Dr. Pilkey firmly seems to believe, be on the side of those who believe global warming is going on, he just doesn't like the methods used in some of the modeling.
So I want you all to be straight on that.
I'm Mark Bell.
In a moment, we continue.
And Dr. Pilkey, welcome back.
I want to ask you a very sensitive question, and that is, are the levees in New Orleans now repaired to the degree that if they get a storm of similar intensity, and it's certainly likely, that all will hold up and be well?
Well, I think it's widely recognized, even by New Orleans people, that they will not, that there is still a high risk of these levees failing in one fashion or another, either being overtopped where that channel comes in or perhaps failing along some of the other sections that weren't repaired.
I don't think, I hope nobody really is convinced that they're perfectly safe now.
I mean, it's a very serious problem, and we have to have a societal debate as to whether we should rebuild those levees.
In a time of rising sea level and in a time of decreasing salt marshes out in front of New Orleans, which is going to increase the storm surge, the height of the storm surge, do we, should we do this?
Should we move the city?
At least we need to have this debate, and we're not having that, unfortunately.
For instance, when they take the numbers for carbon dioxide, I saw in the paper recently that we reached over 7 million tons in the United States.
But here, I want to read in the encyclopedia here, the natural output of carbon dioxide is around 700 million tons.
So our country puts out about 100th of the natural process.
But I was going to ask you, are you aware or not if they include the northern lights into that figure?
Because there's like somewhere between, I think it was 10 to 50 million tons coming in as methane ammonia off the sun in northern lights all by itself.
Actually, the measures, you're absolutely right, that natural CO2 is huge.
Production of natural CO2 is huge.
And we're talking about, when we talk about production of CO2, we're talking about production of excess CO2, CO2 that is produced or is in the atmosphere at a concentration that's too high for the oceans to absorb it or for the forests or whatever to absorb the CO2.
And so that's why, no, absolutely, the human contribution may be quite small compared to natural production of carbon dioxide.
And I'm not aware of the role of northern lights in the production.
You said methane, I think, another greenhouse gas.
I'm not aware of the role of northern lights in that.
I'm sorry.
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Well, speaking of methane, yeah, methane coming off the sun is one source of methane.
I know that some people say methane takes a long time to break down the atmosphere.
And when I looked up in the chemistry book, it says it breaks down sunlight rather quickly.
That's why it's undetectable unless you're near a methane source.
But what I was going to ask you is that, you know, they talk about cows being methane producers, and we should deal with cows.
But I'm thinking, well, if the grass lays on the ground and rots, or if the cow eats it and digests it quickly and makes methane out of it, isn't it the net sum zero?
No, I don't think the cow in effect manufactures methane.
It wasn't there before.
They manufacture it chemically in their bodies.
And yes, they, interestingly enough, are a major source of methane, which is a surprise to me.
This is not my field of endeavor.
But one of the new methane sources that's just becoming apparent is the melting of ice, the permafrost, in the tundra of the Arctic and Siberia especially.
Russian scientists are finding that a huge amount of methane is being released in this melt, and CO2 as well, by the way.
But this melting is going on at a pretty fast rate.
The permafrost is moving up.
The limit, the line of permafrost, no permafrost, is moving north at a very rapid rate.
And as it moves north, it releases more and more CO2 and methane.
Doctor, there is a great debate going on right now.
And I think it has something to do with modeling.
And this debate circles around what are called these triggers, these points where what's happening is going to accelerate at a gigantic rate.
There's going to reach some point in this environmental process where, kind of like flipping a switch, it's going to really accelerate past what we can even imagine.
I think you're aware of the 8,200 years ago we had what looks like a climate surprise where suddenly a huge cooling occurred and just lasted for, at least in the eyes of some scientists, it lasts for 20 or 30 years.
This is based on field evidence.
And yes, yes, there are other surprises.
For example, the Gulf Stream, that could happen on a decadal timeframe.
So, yeah, there are potential surprises that, and surprise means it's not predictable.
Although we can use qualitative models to say this is what could happen, and that's where the models are very important.
But predicting when it's going to happen is not possible.
In 05, the hurricane season, James McCanney made some startling observations in that the quantitative energy of that hurricane season relative to 06 was a fraction, and yet 06 had almost no hurricane.
That's one observation I'd like them to comment on.
I mean, all the modeling said it was going to be Yeah, and then David Serrita program last year revealed the fact that he had been commissioned by the energy industry to investigate the most feasible alternative energy source.
He discovered helium-3 and a fusion process that he said was easily attainable.
Well, I think that's a really good example of where we stand in our modeling, in accurate modeling of this is a major process, the hurricane, something we really need to know about.
And we just, we're not at a stage where we can predict this, and we haven't been very good in the past either.
So I think, and we've learned to live with that.
I think we can just kind of view the prediction about hurricanes for the next year as being something like stock market predictions and kind of curious and maybe interesting.
But we shouldn't take them much more seriously than that.
I was in New Orleans for the storm and for six days, so I got to watch the water rise and everything.
There's a man named Douglas Brinkley that could be considered a historical modeler.
He wrote Rising Tide, 1927 Flood, but he also has a book I read that book, Deluge, that's about the storm, and it's more of a historical modeling.
My question for you is, oh, God, I'm nervous because I'm on the phone.
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh.
They had predicted with the fictitional Hurricane Pam almost a year to the day before Hurricane Katrina, and that came out of LSU, and that was a climatologist or a climate scientist at LSU.
And he's a, I think, German.
I'm not sure.
His name escapes me.
Douglas Brinkley does not.
Everyone should read Deluge.
But I was wondering if you knew about that study.
And in the Hurricane Pam scenario, they calculated a hurricane category three.
And it flooded almost exactly where they said it would flood.
River modeling is actually, I believe the Corps' modeling of the behavior of the Mississippi River may have been better back when they used a physical model, you know, an actual model on the ground, but that's another matter.
But I think the example you're using of modeled predictions of what could happen with a category three hurricane by the individual in LSU, I'm sure, is true.
And that's a good example of a qualitative model.
You know, you just assume a certain level, and it has to be reasonable as far as atmospheric processes are concerned.
And then you look at the elevation of the levees, and that's good modeling.
And he didn't say, I'm sure, when it was going to occur.
He said, if it occurs, this is what's going to happen.
And, of course, we knew it would occur someday, and we know that it will occur again someday.
And there was some talk about burying it in the deep sea in trenches.
The problem there being that eventually that would be that the way trenches work, eventually maybe 1,000, 2,000, 10,000 years, it might be coming back as volcanoes.