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May 13, 2007 - Art Bell
02:35:31
Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Climate Change and Global Warming - Richard Somerville
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Time Text
From the high desert, always wanted to say that, and the great American Southwest.
Good evening, good afternoon, good morning, whatever it is, wherever you are, all these time zones across the earth, covered ever so well by this program, the largest of its type in the world, called Coast to Coast AM.
I'm Art Bell, and it is now the second half of the weekend.
My honor and privilege to be taking you through it.
Turning to the never-to-disappoint bad news worldwide, Al-Qaeda claims to have three missing troops.
An Al-Qaeda front group announced Sunday.
It has indeed captured American soldiers in a deadly attack the day before as thousands of U.S.
troops searched insurgent areas south of Baghdad for their three missing comrades.
The statement came on one of the deadliest days in the country in recent weeks.
Seems every day is a new deadliest day, doesn't it?
With at least 124 killed or found dead.
A suicide truck bomb tore through the offices of a Kurdish political party in northern Iraq, killed 50.
A car bomb in a crowded Baghdad market killed another 17.
The wildfires continue.
Authorities briefly reopened two highways crossing North Florida into Georgia on Sunday, before dense wildfire smoke forced them to again halt traffic.
Seems hundreds of Florida residents wanted to return to their threatened homes.
Officials, though, say no, not yet.
233,700 acres thus far.
133,700 acres thus far. That's big.
Iran's president led a raucous anti-American rally Sunday.
I doubt that I'll ever read a story that begins with Iran's president leading a pro-American rally.
Anyway, in the tightly controlled US ally, that would be Iran, in the Persian Gulf, a
day after a low-key visit by Vice President Dick Cheney aimed at countering Tehran's influence
in the region, the president told a cheering crowd that America was to blame for creating
instability and robbing the region of its wealth.
A small plane that crashed near a private airstrip killed its pilot and four skydivers.
It made an abrupt turn just before going down, according to a federal investigator Sunday.
The Cessna 182 had just taken off from Skydive Lost Prairie, there's a name for you, on a crash Saturday.
Tom Little, an investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board said, too early to tell what might have caused the crash.
Said it appeared, though, the plane made a 180 degree turn just after takeoff and was about only 500 feet in the air when it plummeted to earth.
Pope Benedict blamed both Marxism and unbridled Urge bishops to mold a new generation of Roman Catholic leaders in politics to reverse the Church's declining influence in the region.
Before boarding a plane for Rome at the end of a five-day trip, the most populous Catholic nation in the world, Benedict also warned that legalized contraception and abortion in Latin America threaten the futures of the peoples.
...said that historic Catholic identity of the region is under assault.
Democrat-controlled Washington stepped in to help save Chrysler.
Many of you old enough remember that, about 30 years ago, when the automaker was on the verge of bankruptcy due to lackluster sales of its fuel-thirsty vehicles, with the big three struggling yet again.
Many political leaders are now taking Detroit to task for failing to do more to reduce how much gas their vehicles use.
The Democratic presidential candidates are pledging tougher gas mileage rules.
Automakers say any changes like that would hurt an industry already down.
I don't get that one.
It's down because our cars use a lot of gas.
Right?
So, seems to me any stringent rule in that area that actually worked would get them back up again and make us competitive worldwide with our cars.
Alright, well, we're going to go to unscreened open lines shortly.
I guess I ought to mention that I will not be here, tentatively will not be here, June 1st.
That is the date that the young lady in the webcam photograph With a cat on her chest, resting on top of the baby in her womb, is going to deliver.
Now, you know, she's very, very pregnant right now.
We're two weeks away from Asia Rain Belle, and every time she gets a little pain now, we both go, oh boy, is this it?
So when I say June 1st, the weekend thereof, it could be earlier.
Won't be later, because it's going to be a C-section.
It could be earlier.
And as I just said, any little tiny pain, you know, now, and we're going, oh, this is it.
You know, I'm beginning to get a little bit of a case of the nerves about it all.
It's going to be something.
Asia Rain, just about to make her way into the world.
And that really is, you know, a birth.
No matter what age you are, it is a miracle.
Nothing short of a miracle.
I'm going to be there with a high-definition camera to record every last moment of it, as long as they're going to let me in, and they promise they will.
So that's coming up either any minute or June 1st, one way or the other.
We're going to do a break and we'll be right back.
Ah, computers acting up.
How can that ever happen?
They're perfect.
Climate change may have passed A key tipping point.
Oh, that's a bad phrase, tipping point.
It could mean temperatures rising more quickly than even predicted.
And it being harder to tackle global warming, Bristol University researchers say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from all those bad trees, plants and soil.
Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution pumped out by human activity.
Such a shift would worsen the gloomy predictions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned last week that there is less than a decade to tackle rising emissions to avoid the worst effects of global warming.
At the moment, about half of human carbon emissions are reabsorbed into the environment.
The fear among scientists is that increased temperatures will reduce the effect.
Wolfgang Knorr, a climate researcher at Bristol, said, quote, we could be seeing a carbon cycle feedback kicking in, which is good news for scientists because it shows our models are correct, but it's bad news for everybody else.
NASA, as I mentioned yesterday, is saying global warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern U.S.
by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists determined eastern U.S.
summer daily high temps, you're going to love this, that currently average in the low to mid-80s Fahrenheit will likely soar to the low to mid-90s by the 2080s, but during seasons With infrequent rainfall, July and August, daily temperatures could average between 100 and 110 degrees in cities like Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.
Are you all ready for that?
Those are the temperatures we have here in the desert.
110 degrees.
But of course, you all have a lot of humidity to go with it back there.
This is from a listener, but I thought it was pretty good.
I promised you I'd keep up my field observations as a trained ectomologist.
And the wild bees are now gone as well.
Some of them are not colonial.
Other pollinators, like some of the wasps, flies, and beetles in this year's spectacular butterfly population, they're still in place, but not a bee one.
I normally see at least four species of wild bees.
A couple of varieties of domestic bees, beginning in late March.
Also, some of the other pollinators I normally see are missing, like the cuckoo wasp.
That is a bit odd.
By the way, that's from Rick.
Rick goes on, we can speculate until the cows come home, including the mad ones, about the cause, but the damage is obviously done.
As a strategic planner, my direction now is to evaluate the next step.
My friends, I have come to but one conclusion.
Begin storing preserved food now, while it is still relatively plentiful.
Emergency managers always tell the public to have a store of supplies, but only for short periods.
If this is a permanent loss, with little or no recovery, we're in for some really hard times in a short period.
You all hinted at what this might mean.
Thank you for not stirring fear and panic.
However, if officials have kept this crisis on the back of the news for a purpose, as they make their own preparations, shame on them.
If this catastrophic loss appears to be permanent as it spreads, then it's time to start planning like the Mormons always have.
I'd love to get their take on these events.
Actually, so would I.
In BBC News, Richard Black reports that Earthwatch has found that whales are arriving at their breeding grounds in Mexico malnourished and, as usual, they have no idea why.
On the other side of the world, whales that breed near Russia are dwindling now due to hunting, we know, as well as offshore oil drilling.
In New Scientist, Peter Atthouse reports that South Korean fishermen are catching many more whales than they're admitting, which could be part of the decline.
They claim to net these whales accidentally while fishing for other species.
And whale meat can be sold legally there in Korea if it's caught by accident.
However, researchers suspect they're catching them On purpose by accident, which is a violation of the moratorium on commercial whaling set by the International Whaling Commission.
Now, we've talked a lot.
Yesterday I had Dr. Pike Leaney on the program, and she has clearly foreseen into the future.
And we've talked a little bit about that.
It seems there is beginning to be proof that man can see into the future.
Do some of us avoid tragedy by foreseeing it?
Some scientists now are beginning to believe that the brain actually can predict events before they happen.
Professor Dick Bierman sits hunched over his computer in a darkened room.
The gentle whining of machinery can be heard faintly in the background.
He smiles, presses a grubby-looking red button in the next room.
A patient slips slowly inside a hospital brain scanner.
If it wasn't for the strange smiles and grimaces that flicker across the woman's face, you could be forgiven for thinking this was just a normal health check of some sort, but this scanner is engaged in one of the most profound paranormal experiments of all time, one that may prove whether or not it's possible to actually predict the future.
For the results, Released exclusively to the Daily Mail who printed this article, it seems to suggest ordinary people really do have a sixth sense that can help them see the future.
Such amazing studies, if verified, might help explain the predictive powers of mediums and a range of other psychic phenomena such as extrasensory perception, déjà vu, clairvoyance, or on a more mundane level, it may simply account for gut feelings and instincts.
The man behind the experiments is certainly convinced.
Quote, We're satisfied that people can sense the future before it happens, said Professor Biermann.
We'd like to now move on and see what kind of person is particularly good at it, and Biermann is not alone.
His findings mirror the data gathered by other scientists and paranormal researchers, both here and abroad.
Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize winning physicist from Cambridge University says, quote, so far, the evidence seems compelling.
What seems to be happening is that information is coming from the future.
In fact, it's not clear in physics why you can't see the future.
In physics, you certainly cannot completely rule out this fact.
Virtually all the great scientific formula, which explain how the world allows information to flow backwards and forwards through time, They can work either way, regardless.
Shortly after 9-11, strange stories began circulating about the lucky few who had escaped the outrage.
It transpired that many of these survivors had changed their plans at the last minute after vague feelings of unease or airplanes that go down.
And then you'll hear stories about people who just didn't feel right about getting on that aircraft before it took off.
How lucky they were, everybody says, right?
Was it really luck?
Or was it some profound feeling they had and then just sort of bowed out?
Didn't say much afterwards.
An exploding star first observed last September is the largest and most luminous supernova ever seen, according to the University of California at Berkeley.
And may be indeed the first example of a type of massive exploding star rare today but probably common in the very early universe.
Unlike typical supernovas that reach a peak brightness in days to perhaps a few weeks and then dim into obscurity a few months later, this one took 70 days to reach full brightness and stayed brighter than any previously observed supernova for more than three Now, that's nearly a Big Bang, right?
Nearly eight months later, it is still as bright as a typical supernova at its peak, outshining its host galaxy 240 million light-years away.
UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellows Nathan Smith and David Pulley estimate the star's mass at about 100 to 200 times that of our Sun.
Such massive stars are so rare that galaxies like our own Milky Way may contain only a dozen out of a stellar population of 400 billion.
Alright, we're about to go to the phone lines.
By the way, do you smoke?
If so, you're probably in for it again.
The big government nanny state politicians are at it again in the name of safeguarding all of your health.
Some in Congress are proposing an increase of as much as 156% in the federal cigarette excise tax.
The truth is the big government politicians are looking for ways to bring in more tax revenue to finance their wasteful spending programs and they think they can sell this targeted tax increase to most Americans who won't even notice it.
But if we don't draw the line in the sand here, it's going to be death by a thousand cuts.
First, smokers.
And you say, sure, well, I hate smokers.
Go ahead, tax them.
Next, though, people who eat snack foods.
Ah.
Then those who dine at fast food restaurants.
Those who watch satellite television.
And on and on, and before you know it, every single American is going to be hit by these narrowly targeted taxes.
And the big spenders will have a whole new stream of our tax dollars to spend on their pet programs if we let them sneak this cigarette excise tax by.
It's only going to embolden them to propose more and more of these narrowly targeted increases until finally, by a thousand cuts, we are all taxed to death.
We're going to do open lines now.
Number one, most important, when I answer, turn your radio off immediately.
Number two, be prepared to say whatever you're going to say.
Let's give it a try.
Wildcard Line, just enough time before the break.
You're a dial tone.
How about you, Wildcard Line?
You're on the air.
Hi, Art.
You were talking about premonitions.
Yes.
And I've always believed in premonitions.
One thing I wondered though, and it seems to happen a lot and doesn't particularly care what war, is that guys on the line, and it's happened to me a couple of times, where you can feel, you can't put your finger on it, but you can feel when something's going to happen.
And sure enough, later on, you'll talk to a couple of other guys and they'll say, yeah, I felt the same way.
And I don't know why.
Well, I don't know why either.
But I know it's true, sir.
And look, I think that if you did a careful examination, nobody's ever really done it.
They've done some studies.
But I really think that you'd find the people that are the biggest successes in whatever field, whatever career field they're in, the people who are really knocking them dead, are those who follow their instincts.
They might not talk about it.
But life is nothing but a continuous series of decisions.
Do you go left, or do you go right?
Do you do this, or do you do that?
That's all it is.
One decision after another, and how life turns out for you is dependent on what route you take.
So try it.
Listen to yourself.
You really know if you listen very carefully, you know You know what's going to work and what's not going to work, what's a potential disaster and what's not, and if you listen to yourself and then act on it, you'll be one of the success stories out there.
From the High Desert and the Great American Southwest, I'm Art Bell.
A lot of people on the smoking issue.
James in Santa Rosa, California says the extortion that is tobacco tax seems to be engineered to create a new drug market like marijuana.
Lots of smuggling going on in the black market for cheap smokes from across borders and Indian reservations.
At least they haven't touched my cigars, says James.
They'll be coming after those soon, James.
Shouldn't have even mentioned it.
Yeah, I'll tell you something.
I haven't had a cigarette all day today.
Not a one.
This is my biggest test when I get on the air.
It's the hardest, but I'm making progress.
Now, when I went to the Philippines, For eight months.
When I arrived there, I found that a pack of Marlboros, about five bucks here in the US, was 37 cents in the Philippines.
And I thought, oh boy, this is going to help me to quit.
We'll be right back!
Onward with unscreened open line calls once again.
Because they're unscreened, that means, boom, I come to you right away.
So when I say you're on the air, reach over right away, turn your radio off, and forward you go.
Let's give it a test.
First time caller line, you are on the air.
Hi.
I was wondering if you heard about the World Trade Center UFO the day before it happened.
I know there's a couple video clips online.
Well, I saw a picture of what appeared to be a large, winged creature.
That's about all I've seen.
Otherwise, World Trade Center UFO?
No, not really what I would call a UFO.
Hmm.
Yeah, these kids were in this helicopter, it looked like, and then this object was near the building, and then it came toward their helicopter, and then... Oh, yeah, I've seen that video.
That's a very old video, though.
That's been around a long time.
Very startling video.
Oh yeah, I know what you're talking about, sure.
Oh yeah.
I'm sorry, I thought you were connecting it with 9-11.
Oh no, oh no.
Oh yes, indeed, I've seen that video.
Tremendous video.
And I think that's been around for three or four or five years.
Quite a while now.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hi, this is Dan from Long Beach, California.
Yes, sir.
It's been a long time since I called your show.
Well, then, in that case, it's been a long time since we've talked.
Yeah, well, I just called to point out something that's kind of peculiar.
I think it's kind of interesting how there's, like, the twelve signs of the Zodiac.
Turn your radio off, sir.
It is off.
Oh, thought I could hear it in the background.
Alright, twelve signs of the Zodiac.
It also happens to be the 12 months in the year, and I think it's also interesting in how the Mayan calendar should happen to expire in December of 2012.
I was wondering, what do you make of it?
Well, alright, I don't know.
I think there appears, I can only go this far, there appears to be a confluence of events.
Centering around 2012.
I never attached a great deal of importance, I guess, to the date 2012.
I never thought that the Mayans stopped because it was going to be the end of time and the end of the world and all of that.
However, one does have to admit there's going to be quite a few events that seem to be centered around that date.
Certainly the climate is beginning to change rapidly in May.
Reach some kind of tipping point about then.
The sun is due to be at a peak of its performance in a cycle that's said to be one of the biggest ever.
About then.
A number of things are coming together in that timeline, so it makes one think.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Uh, hi Orr.
Hello.
Uh, my name is Tony Davis.
Okay, well I'm going to have to, uh, Eliminate that, because you gave me your last name.
So let's try it again.
Your name is Tony, and we lost you.
Tony is gone.
All right, let's try it again.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hello.
All right, how are you tonight?
I'm quite well, sir.
Very good.
I've got a kind of unusual question to ask you.
Starting about three years ago, I wear glasses.
I've always kind of seen things at the corners of my eyes.
And I even went so far as to get my eyes checked and to get ear-framed glasses, thinking I was maybe catching the corner of the frame, you know what I mean?
Yes.
And over the last three or four months, it gradually gets worse to the point where it's almost... I can see things moving, especially if it's dim behind me, at the edges of my vision all the time, to the point where it gives me goosebumps.
On occasion, it'll make me jump.
And it's always just kind of dark, moving figures.
Yes.
And I wondered if you have ever heard of anything like that?
Absolutely.
Do you know, I mean, can I get rid of them?
There's nothing, except for I have astigmatism, there's nothing wrong with my eyes.
No, you can't get rid of them.
What you're experiencing, sir, is What we've been talking about for some time now, and that is... I hate to even mention shadow people, but for lack of a better name, what you're probably seeing are artifacts from elsewhere.
And they're frequently seen in peripheral vision.
So right at the corner of your vision, you will see things that you just... I don't really have a good explanation for you.
We believe they're from elsewhere, meaning perhaps either another dimension or another frequency might be a better way to put it.
Yeah, another frequency.
That is a better way to put it.
I've talked frequently about people who sit in front of computers all day.
They also tend to see things in peripheral vision more than other people.
And I believe that it has something to do with the refresh rate of a computer monitor, which after a number of hours begins to train your brain to see things at a frequency you otherwise would not normally see.
You don't really notice the refresh rate of a computer, for example.
But it begins to train your brain.
How about that?
Wildcard line, you're on the air!
Well, you would have been.
This wildcard line is on the air.
Hello, sir.
Extinguish thy radio.
It's done.
Good.
Wow, man.
I'm excited I'm not even having a kid.
This is exciting.
Wow.
I can imagine how you feel.
I was thinking, I hope you don't pass out while shooting that video.
No, sir.
I was a medic in the Air Force.
I'll make it.
Oh, you're fine then.
God, I think I'd probably be on the ground myself.
No.
Boy, that's great.
Well, anyway, can't wait for that.
That's neat.
Now we've got kitties, her, you, and a little kitty.
That's right.
That'll be fun.
Anyway, well, anyway, I'll find out, I don't know if you're up on this, but Michael Moore's latest movie coming out called Sicko about the drug pharmaceutical companies.
You aware of that?
No, I hadn't heard about it until now.
Yeah, and he's showing it around right now in other countries.
He's actually hiding it from the U.S.
because the United States government is trying to confiscate the video, his movie.
Really?
Yeah, so what's going on?
Seems somewhat un-American?
Well, you know, think about it.
The oil companies and the farm-sewage companies pretty much run our country.
Well, I know, but you can still criticize and you can still make noises like that, that First Amendment thing, you know?
Yeah, well, that's true.
But it should be interesting to see that.
You know, I've been doing a lot of research about pharmaceutical companies.
It's funny, they actually have so much money.
I used to actually, you know Jay Leno, he used to deal with a business that I used to deal with.
We used to refuel his jet and stuff, and I used to talk to him a lot.
And he actually goes out, these pharmaceutical companies have so much money that they actually hire him for one night for $125,000 to sit in a basement and tell jokes while they ignore him.
Now that's sick!
That's a lot of money!
Okay, let's get Jay Leno and just have him tell some jokes and ignore him, but you know, it makes $125,000 a night just for that on the weekend when he's not doing his regular job.
That's fantastic.
That's a lot of aspirin, brother.
Yeah.
Alright, listen, thank you very much for the call.
Sicko, huh?
Well, watch for that at your local theaters or pay-per-view, I suppose, whatever.
Confiscate the film.
I don't think we're to that point just yet.
Oh, let's go west of the Rockies.
You're on the air.
Hi.
Hello, Art?
Hello.
Oh, hi.
I'm calling from Canada here.
Yes, sir.
I'm British Columbia.
Right.
Yeah, I just wanted to talk to you about something that's been bugging me lately.
They're going to be doing no-fly lists here in Canada as of June 18th, just like I guess you guys have it in the States.
Yes, we do.
And that's a thing that seems pretty un-American to me, you know, banning people from flying.
Are you anticipating being on one of them?
Well, I sure hope not, but you never know.
I mean, they're just arbitrarily, it seems, deciding who they want to ban from flying, and without due process or anything.
So that seems very objectionable, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, it does, doesn't it?
Seems un-American.
I don't know if I can say it seems un-Canadian, but I mean, you guys are pretty much like us.
Yeah, yeah.
That's pretty much all I wanted to bring up tonight.
All right.
Well, I appreciate the call.
So, Canada is going to have a no-fly list as well.
Seems to me, if you can get past the... and boy, there is a lot of security.
I mean, it's enough to make one not want to fly.
And international flights are particularly egregious in terms of the amount of security you go through now.
So that's bad enough.
I mean, unless you're just... I don't know what to say.
A totally objectionable person?
Somebody given to constantly fighting or brawling on an aircraft causing problems?
Not to mention terrorism, but I mean, why else would you keep somebody off an airline based on what?
That you're a terror suspect?
I suppose that would be reasonable if you truly were one.
I don't know, I'll have to give that a little thought.
I mean, after you go through everything that ensures you're really... You don't have any pointy little objects.
Not even a nail clipper with you.
You've surrendered your lighters.
Boy, I'll tell you, I've lost a lot of lighters.
No more with the lighters.
Wild Card Line, you're on the air!
Hello, this is Jack from Miami.
I'd just like to make a counterpoint real quick.
The government is not trying to confiscate the movie.
Michael Moore said he's worried about it.
The government is pursuing a trade embargo investigation because it's illegal to purchase anything in Cuba, and obviously he did.
He went down there, he filmed, he purchased.
Well, I'm sure Michael Moore would love nothing better than to have his movie confiscated by the American government.
Talk about something that would drive up the ratings.
Yeah, he's making a lot of noise about it.
They never said anything about that.
They said they're investigating a trade embargo breach.
Just like to point that out.
Well, I appreciate that because, you know, that's un-American.
We just wouldn't do that.
And if we did, all we'd do is make it more popular.
Exactly.
Have a good night, Art.
Yeah, thank you very much.
All right, so there you go.
So they're not really confiscating the film.
Apparently he had something to do with Cuba or something like that.
That makes sense.
We don't confiscate movies.
East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hi.
Hello, Howard.
Hello.
Nice to talk to you.
First time I've ever had a chance to talk with you.
Where are you?
That sicko movie, the ban on that they're trying to get is because of something to do with the Cuban embargo.
Right.
That's what the last caller said.
Oh, OK.
Well, I had my radio down.
Yeah.
Anyway, I have a theory on time travel.
Oh?
Yeah.
Because, uh, you have to achieve the speed of light.
The only thing you can do is catch up to the light that's been, so you can only go backwards.
Hmm.
Try that on me again.
Wait a minute.
Hold on.
Run that by me again, please.
Okay.
The theory on time travel is to achieve at least the speed of light, if not greater, so you're catching up to light that's been, not light that's gonna be.
All right.
Well, if you could go faster than light, then obviously you'd... Actually, even at sub-light speeds, you'd be, in effect, time-traveling, right?
Right.
But you'd be going backwards, because you'd be catching up to light that's already been.
Catching up to light... Well, in a way, yes.
Uh-huh.
But if you... Still, if you... Even sub-light, if you return to the point of origin, you'd be in a very different time than those you had left behind.
Right.
But I think it would be only dimensional travel then.
Hmm.
All right, sir.
Well, I appreciate the theory, and I'm going to have to think about it a little bit.
International Line, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Hi.
Hi.
This is Brett from HD.
Okay.
We don't have a very good connection here.
Hold on just a second.
Okay.
Run down the road.
I've got to get away from the shop.
I've been trying for five months to get ahold of you.
I built a fuel heater, and it can do up to 120% increased mileage on any vehicle, can be adapted to any vehicle.
What does it do?
It brings the fuel up to the temperature of the radiator.
Unheated fuel is only 10% efficient.
At 150 degrees, no, 120, you gain 50% efficiency, and at 190, you gain 90% efficiency.
My God.
With the carburetor, you disconnect the accelerator pump, and you make a thermal coil of 15 wraps around the upper radiator hose, and put a key in it and run it back to the tank.
And my GM halftone with a V8, a 1979, runs 40 miles per gallon.
Good Lord.
Yeah.
What have you done with this so far?
I put it on the radio.
No, no, no.
This is the month of my life.
Oh, okay.
Can I get my email?
No, I can't allow you to give your email, but what I can allow you to do is to send me an email with all the particulars, and if it's good, I'll have you on as a guest.
Well, thank you.
Shall I title it Fuel Heater?
Title it Fuel Heater.
Thank you, Art.
And send it to me, artbell at aol.com or artbell at mindspring.com and I absolutely will take a look.
One of these days, somebody like that caller is really going to hit it.
And they're going to come up with something so obvious and so real and so helpful that it's going to go into immediate production and they're going to be rich.
Wildcard Line, you're on the air.
Hi.
Yes, Mr. Bell.
That's true.
Yeah, this is Lee from Columbus, Georgia.
How you doing tonight?
I'm doing okay, sir.
That's good.
A little bit more on the Michael Moore thing, how he violated the embargo was he took, I think it was three or four former firefighters from New York City, and took them down to Cuba and paid for them to get health care down there for his movement.
Well, you see, we have this restriction where Cuba is concerned.
Yes, sir.
And so that's the problem.
There you go.
Yeah, he violated the law, basically.
Yeah.
All right.
I'd like to give you a thing with the honeybees, too, if you've got time.
I do.
All right.
I used to work for the post office.
And, you know, I drove a truck from the main office here in Columbus to the rural post offices.
And every now and then, I'd get a load of bees.
They'd come from, you know, California.
I'd even get some from Alaska.
And, you know, I'd drop them off.
By the end of the day, I'd clean out my truck, and I'd have, you know, three or four dead bees in the truck.
Not crushed, I mean full bees dead.
Right.
And my theory might be that, you know, down here in the south, you know, you got the different climates and maybe, you know, the thicker air.
I mean, it's harder for a person to breathe visiting here.
Imagine what it would be for, you know, a little bitty honeybee that maybe they can't handle the climate change.
Well, that was suggested also by somebody in Canada yesterday by email.
And it is possible that our climate change has had an effect on the bees.
Why is it not reasonable to assume that what is going to turn into a 10 degree hotter summer
for many of our cities and really has already begun in, well, some scientists are saying
has reached the tipping point, would not affect a delicate insect first.
It is as good a guess as any of the others out there, and at this point, that's all it is, is a guess.
A guess.
A guess.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning.
Yes, sir.
This is Dwight Thomas.
Okay, we cannot take a last name, so I had to eliminate that.
Let's try it again.
Your first name is Dwight, and you've got very little time, Dwight.
We're right here at the top of the hour.
What's up?
I need a little help with a problem I got.
It's with numbers.
Here about six months ago it seemed like I would wake up in the middle of the night and look at the clock and it would be like 2-2-2.
And it happens, you know.
A lot.
A lot, right.
And I drive a truck and I look Just all of a sudden, someone tell me to look at my clock and it'll be like 11-11.
11-11 is very common, or 2-2-2.
I think the human mind just looks at those numbers, you know, they're all the same, and they go, wow, this must mean something.
Well, not necessarily.
There are coincidences, from my point of view.
I'm Art Bell.
Indeed, here I am.
I've had a series of guests, very credible scientific guests, on the subject of global warming.
Tonight comes another certainly distinguished.
Richard C. J. Somerville is a distinguished professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.
He received a Ph.D.
in Meteorology from New York University in 1966.
Dr. Somerville is interested in and studies all aspects of climate science and climate policy.
He comments frequently on climate and environmental issues for the media and has also testified before the United States Congress, briefed United Nations climate change negotiators, That's a strange... We'll talk about that.
Negotiations, huh?
And advise government agencies.
Professor Somerville is also coordinating lead author for the 2007 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
So, coming up in a moment, Professor Somerville.
Professor Somerville, welcome to Coast to Coast AM.
Thanks very much, Art.
A pleasure to be on your show.
It is indeed a pleasure to have you here.
Professor, why should I, or anybody else, think that global warming is a real problem and a serious matter?
Well, there's been a remarkable set of advances in the science, Art.
We've come a long way in about the last 30 years scientifically.
we've got uh... whole array of tools from satellites to observe the earth
to computer simulations to help us understand the climate system
and during that time signal of man-made global warming has become so strong
that there's a real scientific consensus now we have settled
uh... science that uh... demonstrates uh... really beyond reasonable doubt
that we are seeing uh... the fingerprint of human activities
on the climate system and uh... good uh...
a summary of that is in the most recent report of this remarkable international body called the intergovernmental
panel on climate change
So basically we've simply seen an enormous amount of scientific progress at the same time that Mother Nature is showing us in the real Earth exactly the things that we had predicted would happen.
The melting of glaciers, the thinning and shrinking of sea ice, the rise in global temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, all those things are being observed on the planet now and
they're not a surprise to the scientists because it's a sense of deja vu
we had expected them and now they're showing up in the measurements. All right I
see I have in front of me a story which I read earlier tonight from the
Guardian which says climate change may have passed a key tipping point that
could mean temperatures rising more quickly than predicted and it
being harder to tackle global warming.
They're talking about vegetation Let's see.
Bristol University researchers say a previously unexplained surge of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in recent years is due to more greenhouse gas escaping from trees, plants and soils.
Global warming was making vegetation less able to absorb the carbon pollution dumped out by human activity.
And it says such a shift would worsen the already gloomy predictions of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Well that's an interesting story and I haven't checked that one out.
It's brand new.
But the fact is that it's good to think about these tipping points or instabilities or thresholds in a kind of probabilistic way.
They're unpredictable by their very nature.
You can't say when part of the Greenland ice sheet might destabilize, for example, and dramatically raise sea level.
It might happen Tuesday morning, but it might happen in 500 years.
But the longer global warming continues unabated, the longer that Humanity really does nothing to stop it, just continues to load the atmosphere with the waste products of the way we generate energy.
The greater the risk.
You're tilting the table, and so you're increasing the odds of some unpleasant threshold like that.
We know the climate system has these instabilities.
It can behave like a light switch, so that you push on it, and you push on it, and you push on it, and then it comes a moment when it flips over to the other position.
But by their very nature, these things are unforeseeable.
All we can do is alert the world to that possibility and to tell them that the longer one delays in taking this issue seriously, the greater the odds that we pass a point like that.
Now, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Let me ask about the report, Professor.
Was it as gloomy as it should have been?
Well, that's an interesting question.
You know, it's not a political report.
It's very much a scientific report.
It wasn't influenced by any kind of politics.
It was under the control of the scientists.
But scientists are intellectually cautious.
they're conservative not in the political sense but they're conservative
in that they don't want to say anything that can't be solidly backed up by firm
scientific results. It's not consistent with the data and so they won't they're
unwilling to go out on a limb you might say and I think in that sense the report
is very serious because compared with previous reports they've been this is
the fourth one in the 20-year history of that organization and compared to
previous reports this one uses firmer language it said that global warming is
unequivocal it's the chances are nine out of ten or better that the warming
observed in recent decades is predominantly man-made. Now those are
firmer statements than the science would have permitted five or ten or fifteen
years ago and in that sense that it is stronger language and I think it
deserves to be taken seriously.
And what about all the skeptics?
We've got a lot who call and write this program, and they're actually angry, Professor.
They come at it with a lot of anger and say the kind of thing that you're talking about right now, and the other scientists are talking about, and I believe that, by the way, it's a very settled science, it's very real, but they get angry.
There's a lot of anger attached to it, and they just don't believe it or don't want to believe it.
I think you put your finger on it right there.
They don't want to believe it.
They're in denial about it, because they'd rather not believe it.
I think if you scratch a lot of people who are skeptical of this science, it's not really the science that they doubt, they're not usually particularly well informed about it, but it's the consequences they fear.
That is, if you're of a mind to think that You don't want the government interfering in your life.
You don't want taxes on gasoline.
You don't want to be told what kind of fuels you can use.
You don't want the economy straitjacketed by constraints on how energy can be developed.
Then all those kinds of things are going to make you tend to want this problem to go away.
And therefore you start to approach the issue like a lawyer rather than a scientist.
That is to say, you're making the best case you can For a point of view that you came into the room with, you're no longer just trying to find out how Mother Nature works, you're no longer trying to discover natural or physical truth, you're trying to buttress a position that you firmly believe in.
I can respect people who have those kinds of political or ideological or economic convictions, but you have to take the science seriously, whether you wish it weren't true or not.
Catching a disease and being told by your doctor that there's a treatment you have to undergo.
You may wish it weren't so, but your physician knows more about the disease than you do.
There's a lot of medical science behind it.
It's medical science like climate science is imperfect and still has things to learn, but it's good enough to be useful.
And I think that's exactly where climate science is now.
The IPCC is not policy driven.
It doesn't recommend policy.
It just simply assesses the science that's been done worldwide, published in the technical literature, and it assesses it in a way that is relevant to policy.
So we're trying to make sure that we help these decisions that have to be taken worldwide, in the near future, and make sure that they're informed by the best solid science.
It's not ideologically or politically driven at all.
One has to believe that.
Let's take your analogy and say that we have been told by our doctor, you scientists, that we have a very serious situation, that we are in effect ill, and if you had to recommend a treatment, is it one that the economy can withstand, or do we kill the patient with the treatment?
This is my personal view.
The IPCC doesn't take policy positions, but My personal view, and I think many people who are knowledgeable about the science would agree with it, and keep in mind I'm a climate scientist, I'm not an economist or a political scientist, but I think that a lot of the things that need doing are things you'd want to do anyway, because they're beneficial in many ways.
For example, the problem basically comes about because 80% of the world's energy is being generated by burning coal and oil and natural gas, the so-called fossil fuels.
They're cheap, they're abundant, and they have powered the prosperity that the U.S.
and many other countries enjoy.
But there are ways to have alternate fuels, and there are ways to use energy conservation and energy efficiency to use less of that fuel.
It's just as if you were to get a car exactly like your current car, but with twice as much gas mileage.
Wouldn't you like that?
it does help the climate but it also puts money in your pocket, reduces dependence on
foreign oil, helps the balance of payments issue, helps air pollution in your town.
There's lots of reasons to do that.
If you had a car, what's the downside of getting better gas mileage?
There really isn't one.
And I think there are a lot of that kind of low-hanging fruit out there that actually
have negative costs.
They're beneficial to the economy.
I really believe that many of the things that need to be done for climate can get done technologically
the potential is huge.
I think it's really a case of people taking this issue seriously enough, letting their
governments know it's important to them not to leave a damaged planet to their children.
Thank you.
Getting the government to declare these things a priority, that frees up all the inventiveness, all the creativity of corporations, smart engineers, to find a better way to make energy.
Professor, if we don't change, if we don't take the cure, whatever is involved, and if we continue as we currently are, and I don't mean just the U.S., but the rest of the world as well, and it becomes a worst case scenario situation, how soon and how bad?
I think you're going to see serious problems by mid-century when many of us and our children
are alive, and drastic problems towards the end of the century at best, if there's no
change. That is to say, if we keep on growing human population, keep on generating energy.
And you're quite right to have put your finger on the international dimension of this. This
is in no way only a US problem or only a first world, wealthy, developed countries problem.
China is going to pass the United States within a year or so, much faster than had been anticipated
just a few years ago, in terms of emitting carbon dioxide.
Right now, the U.S.
emits more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other single country, but China will pass us.
It's opening a new coal-fired power plant, a dirty one, every few days.
It has a population several times that of the United States.
and uh... right behind china are the other developing countries with large
populations so-called brick b r i c countries position brazil
russia india and china
and so uh...
great growth is going to come in the developing world uh...
whose people are are hungry for a better
standard of living and where the temptation to uh...
to develop generate energy on
fossil fuels like coal is uh... irresistible
I don't see how that's going to be stopped.
Let me read you a UPI story dated May 10th, so it's very new.
It says, a NASA study suggests global warming may raise average summer temperatures in the eastern U.S.
by nearly 10 degrees Fahrenheit by the 2080s.
National Aeronautics and Space Administration scientists determined eastern U.S.
summer daily high temperatures that currently average in the low to mid-80s That's not an implausible scenario.
There's some fuzziness around all these kinds of predictions, of course.
with infrequent rainfall, July and August daily temperatures could average between 100
and 110 degrees in cities like Chicago, Washington, and Atlanta.
That's not an implausible scenario.
There's some fuzziness around all these kinds of predictions, of course.
They can never be as accurate as you would like, just as your doctor can't tell you the
date of the heart attack you'll have if you keep on living in a bad lifestyle.
But it's that kind of scenario that's quite plausible, and you're right.
The danger there, the impact on human health, for example, is drastic.
It comes in the form of heat waves, which cause deaths.
You know, there was a heat wave in this country last summer that I think helped to get people's attention.
People are much more aware of this problem than they used to be, and I think it's because of weather events like that heat wave.
Whether or not they're caused by global warming.
Katrina, which you cannot specifically ascribe to global warming as a definite cause, was an event like that.
But in Europe, in 2003, there was an extraordinary, unprecedented heatwave that killed about 35,000 people.
And a lot of research has been done on that.
And I think it's a fair conclusion to say that a heatwave like that isn't impossible, absent global warming.
But the fact that global warming is going on, Is it fair to say that we're going to get all kinds of extremes, with hurricanes being generally stronger as time goes on, with the collision of the very warm air and the cooler air in our spring and fall in the central U.S.
causing probably more tornadoes and more extreme weather generally?
Is that true?
The hurricane seems more clear than the tornado issue right now.
There's a lot of research needed on that.
Those are very imperfectly understood issues.
But in the case of hurricanes, for example, we know where hurricanes get their energy.
It's from the warm surface waters of the tropical oceans.
And with global warming, you simply get higher temperatures there, and you get a greater area over which you have high temperatures.
There's a critical temperature around 80 degrees Fahrenheit.
Below which hurricanes tend not to form, and there's going to be temperatures above that, and there's going to be greater regions and greater part of the year when you have those high temperatures.
So we'd expect more intense hurricanes.
We're still not sure how much more intense.
Hurricanes are rare.
Fortunately, that takes a long time to build up stable statistics.
But the IPCC report did conclude that in the North Atlantic, where we have the best data There has been a statistically significant increase in the intensity of hurricanes since 1970, and the IPCC concluded that it would anticipate continued rise in hurricane intensity.
You have to keep in mind also that sea level is rising.
That's one of the surest consequences of global warming.
The ocean expands and more water flows into the ocean, and a rising sea level adds to the danger from hurricanes.
Just takes a small amount of sea level rise to overtop the levees or cause a destructive storm surge when the hurricane makes landfall.
So that is a serious consequence.
There are quite a few others.
Are there currently any estimates that the Greenland ice sheet is becoming in any way unstable?
Do we have to worry about that?
That's a wonderful question.
The IPCC really tiptoed around that issue and said
we don't have enough settled science there
to say with certainty uh... what the danger will be we do know that in the geological
past when these kinds of temperatures have been sustained for
centuries and longer that the greenland ice sheet did destabilize and sea level
rose markedly. If all the ice on greenland
were to disappear sea level goes up globally by something like twenty feet
again i'm not predicting that for tuesday morning but uh...
the people who are monitoring these things do notice more ice quakes is the slang term as you can hear the ice
shifting There are mechanisms that are poorly understood and that we can't add into our computer models accurately.
For example, as snow and ice on the surface of the ice sheet melt, some of that melt water flows through crevices down where it can lubricate the place where the ice sheet is grounded on bedrock, and that increases the odds of a big chunk of ice going into the sea.
So nobody can predict it exactly.
IPCC said it bears watching.
And you can have to make up your own opinion whether that was too cautious a statement.
But as I said, the scientists are intellectually conservative.
They don't want to hang their hat on something that isn't solid.
They don't want to assess speculations and hunches and conjectures.
They want to assess solid scientific results.
Then, of course, if you want to go south to Antarctica, we've got the Ross ice.
What about Ross?
Well, you saw the sudden breakup of Larsen B, a big chunk of ice that disappeared relatively rapidly.
That had been quite unanticipated.
I'll say.
Quite a surprise to the specialists.
And they're working frantically to understand that.
It's very complicated.
Ice is not a thing that sits there like an iron chunk.
Ice moves.
Ice flows.
And you have a very complicated set of dynamics when the flowing ice reaches the shoreline.
And the stabilization of that, the likelihood that it might go suddenly That's research that's going on now.
Science is like that.
Everything we learn uncovers more things we don't know.
Boy, that's scary stuff.
All right, Professor.
Hold tight.
We'll be back.
We're going to take a break here at the bottom of the hour.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest from the high desert, where it's that time of year, it's getting real warm.
I'm Art Bell.
Good morning, everybody.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest.
We're having a really terrible time with a gigantic echo on the line, and I know you can't hear it on the radio, but it's unbelievable.
Absolutely unbelievable.
So we'll just have to see how it goes.
Anyway, he's absolutely an expert in this field, and so if you're one of those who's, you know, kind of on the fence, not really sure what to believe, stay right where you are and listen very carefully.
Well, all right.
Professor, here in the United States, we're really good at handling a crisis when we get it.
We just go right to work in the U.S.
when we have a crisis.
The problem with what we're talking about here is that by the time we have the crisis, it's going to be too late, isn't it?
Well, that's right.
It's terrible if you have to wait until there's some emergency looming.
Again, the medical analogy works.
Prevention and early detection are always better than waiting until you've really had a serious problem.
Well, right.
I've done an extensive amount of travel in the Far East.
I've seen China.
Hard at work.
Recently, in the last few months, I've spent eight months in the Philippines, and these nations, they want and the people feel they deserve everything.
We have a couple cars in the garage, all the rest of it, and they're working toward that.
And if that happens, and it's happening, Professor, and I just, I don't see any way we're going to change that.
And so, I guess if you start from that point, concluding that it's going to happen, then how would you begin planning for the very different world we're going to be in?
Well, I think you put your finger on something important.
We're going to have to deal with some degree of climate change.
It's already happening.
We're seeing it.
And so it's a question of how serious you let it become.
So you're doing a combination of dealing with the inevitable climate change and taking steps to reduce the amount of further climate change.
But as I said, for example, one of the things that are going to have to be dealt with is rising sea level.
And that means that low-lying, vulnerable coastal areas are going to take some defending.
The Netherlands, for example, is planning to strengthen the dikes.
And there may be areas that are Going to become uninhabitable.
Some very low-lying island areas, for example, may have to be abandoned.
And that's unfortunate, but you can't live with water around your ankles.
So I think that's a very serious issue.
I'm not sure I'm as pessimistic as you are.
I'm optimistic technologically, in terms of the potential of the things that can be done.
I alternate between optimism and pessimism about mustering the political will to get them done.
But we know, for example, some of the things that have to happen.
It isn't going to be a single magic bullet, and so energy efficiency and energy conservation at the top of everybody's list, greater renewable energy supplies, greater reliance on the renewables, that's solar and wind and hydro and biofuel and so on.
I think nuclear power is going to have a role to play.
We can talk about that.
As you know, it's controversial in this country.
But France is 80% nuclear, and that was a conscious decision the French made for their electricity supply that they implemented over about 30 years.
We know what the problems are with nuclear.
They're serious, but they're not that many of them.
One of them is cost.
One is reactor safety.
One is waste disposal.
One is proliferation.
All of those are things that can be worked on.
I think also Carbon sequestration, that is, trying to capture the carbon dioxide before it goes out of the chimney, that's something that hasn't had a proper large-scale test yet, but there's potential there, too.
And, of course, one wants to keep doing research on the far-off, not yet practicable alternate energy sources.
Fusion, for example, the hydrogen economy, things that people talk about futuristically.
But I'm confident, I'm optimistic about the technological capability.
After all, just think, put yourself back in 1900, a century ago, and think of how little of the things we take for granted today, from nuclear weapons to jet planes to pharmaceuticals to color TV, were even dreamed of by visionaries at that time.
Technologically, lots is possible.
There's tremendous progress that can be made.
Is there any other kind of magical technological solution?
Anything that can mitigate what otherwise is going to happen?
I mean, people talk about putting mirrors in space or somehow limiting the amount of sunlight that gets to Earth.
Anything in that arena that you consider practical?
There's nothing practical on the horizon now.
Those kinds of geoengineering techniques, making the Earth more reflective in various ways, They have usually big feasibility issues.
You've got to loft a lot of stuff into space.
And I'm concerned about the ethical and legal aspects, too.
Who has the right to make that decision for the whole planet, for example?
And I'm also concerned about unanticipated consequences.
It's really a little bit arrogant, I think, to believe that you understand those technologies well enough so that you can implement them and be sure that everything will turn out for the best.
Also, even at best, they don't solve all the problems.
For example, one of the problems of putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which is what we're doing every day, is that some of it ends up in the ocean.
Long-term, a lot of it ends up in the ocean.
And it becomes dilute carbonic acid and makes the ocean more acid.
And for shell-bearing organisms, like corals, for example, a lot of small animals at the base of the food chain, If the ocean gets much more acidic, they have trouble making shells, and we can't yet predict the consequences for marine life.
But the short answer is, it's much better to stop the problem at the source by greatly reducing the amount of CO2 that we put into the atmosphere.
It's much better to do that than to try to clean up the mess after you've let it in there.
Richard Branson, the noted billionaire, is offering a prize.
For somebody who can figure out a way to get the CO2 back out of the atmosphere.
And that's going to be chemically, thermodynamically tough to do, but it's a lot of money behind the prize, and maybe he'll induce some very smart person to figure out a practical way.
Well, I suppose trouble for us is not trouble for everybody, and with warmer temperatures, there are going to be some areas that are now kind of cool, and for that reason not as, oh, I don't know, As populated as they might be, they're going to get warmer and be better places to live, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
There are going to be some areas in the far north, perhaps in Canada, perhaps in Siberia and northern Russia, that will have longer growing seasons, there will be more balmy climates.
When one does the things in detail, though, counts up the winners and the losers, then
there's more damage than benefit.
And in particular, plants do grow better, but not just the crops you want to grow, so
do the weeds and the things that produce pollen and so on.
So it's on most accountings that people have tried to look downstream and see the consequences.
The bad outweighs the good.
Furthermore, the time scale is faster than what we're accustomed to.
The Earth has gone through a lot of climate change naturally on very long timescales.
Ice ages come and go, for example.
Human beings have nothing to do with that.
We know why ice ages come and go.
But as you know, when they do come and go, they have big consequences for life on Earth.
Large species extinctions and so on.
And this time, we're really very rapidly changing the climate compared to the natural rate of change.
Ice ages come and go on a timescale of 10,000 years.
And this change, as you see, is happening on decades.
Professor, where are we in the world of ice ages?
Are we coming or going, or where are we right now?
Well, we're in an interglacial period, in between ice ages, and if there were no human interference with the climate system, we would expect a very gradual cooling, but so gradual that you wouldn't detect it over a human lifetime.
So, over several thousand years, the Earth would cool back into another ice age.
That gets caused by Changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun.
But it's so slow that it wouldn't matter on the local timescale.
Right now, for better or worse, human activities have become dominant.
All the natural factors are still there.
Sometimes people think that the scientists forget about volcanoes and the sun changing and all that.
We know all about that.
But they're not fast enough and not strong enough to counteract the human influences On this time scale of a century and less, right now we're headed into a warmer world.
You know, we understand the greenhouse effect very well, this heat-trapping effect, and carbon dioxide, which is the most serious of the man-made greenhouse gases, has increased so rapidly that right now, if you sample the atmosphere, better than one out of four of every carbon dioxide molecule is man-made.
We've made a real change in the chemical composition of the global atmosphere.
And so for people who don't want to think this problem is serious, you can turn the question around and ask them, well, gee, understanding as much as we do about the greenhouse effect, why wouldn't you think that an increase of 30-something percent in an important greenhouse gas would have a climate consequence?
And the answer is, there isn't any good reason not to believe that.
We really do have a clear understanding of what's going on here.
There's a lot of unanswered questions out in the details, but the basic physics is well understood.
All right, nuclear power.
Let us talk a little bit about nuclear power.
It seems clean.
I live near Death Valley, so I live not far from the area where they plan to store all of this waste.
I'm a little concerned about that.
Are there any answers on the horizon?
In other words, if we begin to build more nuclear power plants, right now we're not building any as far as I know, no new ones.
But if we do, what are we going to do with the waste?
Well, you're talking about Yucca Mountain, which is the designated waste depository.
But as you know, for political as well as engineering reasons, it hasn't been brought online yet.
And I think it's urgent that one attack those problems, that one find safe repositories.
As I said, that's one of the four serious problems of nuclear power, cost and proliferation and reactor safety being the others.
I'm not an expert on nuclear power, but as I said, other countries have chosen to use it to generate part of their energy supply.
There's no energy source that's completely trouble-free, but nuclear power does have the advantage that it's not producing greenhouse gases in any significant amount.
There's no downside to doing research.
I applaud attempts to make alternative sources of energy more practicable and to investigate the pros and cons and to develop ways to get past these very serious issues.
So whether or not a country elects to use nuclear power, that's a decision for governments and ultimately for the people.
As we've said, other countries have made decisions different from ours.
I think there's no harm In exploring it, and looking to see what is the potential for passively safe reactors?
What is the potential for beating down the costs?
What do you have to do to guard against weapon-sensitive radioactive materials falling into the wrong hands?
And, what's the right way to do the waste disposal problem?
As long as people don't think it's urgent, then I think the issue will languish as it has in this country for a long time.
I think ever since Three Mile Island in Chernobyl, The American people have been repelled by the horror of a reactor accident, and as you say, there are reactors on the drawing board.
But it's something that we have to look at.
I think all the options are on the table at this point, because continuing on the present path is just not a good option.
Professor, as the world warms, what, and I understand it's not your field, but shouldn't there be some concern About emerging diseases in warmer countries.
The country I came from recently, the Philippines, has a malaria problem, dengue fever, that sort of thing.
Aren't we likely to get a lot more of that sort of thing?
That's right.
The people who are experts have come to that conclusion that vector-borne diseases, things carried by mosquitoes for example, are a more serious problem.
So there are health issues that are very closely tied to to climate change.
And once again, they're tied to the rapidity of climate change.
We can adapt to anything if it just happens slowly enough.
But these are very rapid changes.
Another issue that we haven't mentioned tonight is water supply.
You and I both live in the arid western United States.
Here in Southern California, where I am, a lot of the water supply comes from snow melt.
The snow in the Sierras in the northern part of California is a natural reservoir.
Mother Nature has made it.
And it's not rocket science to realize that in a warmer world you get less snow, more rain, that natural reservoir goes away, earlier runoff happens, and therefore in the dry season there's less water availability.
And that has all the repercussions you could imagine, ranging from higher water rates, water rationing, water competition for over-allocated resources, fights between agricultural and urban users, All the way down to greater wildfire danger and because of greater droughts and less soil moisture.
So these are serious repercussions.
I've been saying for a long time that global warming is a bad name because global doesn't matter.
What happens where you live matters.
And it's not just warming.
The temperature rise is a symptom just the way fever is a symptom of ill health.
But it's all these downstream consequences from sea level to water supply to storm issues that really matter.
How much difference is there?
How much change has there been in the amount of snow we're getting and the melting situation?
Is there a way to quantify how much change, say, in the last decade or two or three?
It's hard to say and it varies a lot from place to place, but anecdotally we already know that ski areas, for example, especially low altitude ski areas, are getting too little snow.
That's happening both in the U.S.
and in In Europe, spring melt and runoff is coming something like a week earlier, typically, compared to the database.
So we're seeing those changes now, just as we're seeing damage in Alaska as permafrost melts and the buildings and roads on it sustain damage.
So, when I said at the beginning that we're not just conjecturing anymore, we're not just making forecasts, we're observing the very changes that we had expected.
I think the issues you're mentioning are right in that category.
And it could conceivably be even worse than the panel has said.
I mean, I talked to a number of people who said, look, a lot of what they wanted to say was, I don't know if censored is the right word, it was tempered.
Would tempered be a good word?
You know, I've heard that for part of the IPCC report.
This is a bureaucratic jungle here, but without going into detail, the IPCC works in three groups, and the one that I've been involved with, which was the first one to report this year, was concerned with the physical climate science, the understanding of the climate system.
And the other two groups were concerned with mitigation, what can you do about preventing things or reducing their effect, and adaptation, the issue you mentioned earlier, what do you do in the face of inevitable climate change.
And I've seen only news reports for what happened at the other two working groups, but I can tell you that for working group one, the physical science one, which negotiated its summary in Paris in late January and the first couple of days of February this year, it was harmonious.
The governments did not try to distort the science, the scientists were there, the scientists never lost control.
of the report.
The government helped reword it, helped choose the words that had the right nuance that would be most intelligible to the policy makers for whom the report's intended.
But it was a cooperative process.
We dictated the content, they helped in the wordsmithing.
And people who are veterans of this process, who've been involved in previous IPCC reports, said that they were very pleasantly impressed by the fact that the governments were helpful.
The U.S.
government, which had a reputation for a certain degree of intransigence in this and previous reports, was sweetness and light this time.
But that's Working Group 1.
That's the physical science of climate change.
And I've seen only news reports of how the other two working groups went, but one of them, Working Group 2, which met in Brussels, did apparently have some of that disagreement that you mentioned between the scientists and the government.
It's a tricky procedure.
You might ask, why don't the scientists just write their own report?
And the answer is that the government, aside from sort of paying our airfares and hotel bills to go to these meetings, they don't pay us, but they cover our travel expenses, the government are the customers for it, and when they help negotiate these so-called summary for policy makers, it's a summary for, but not by, policy makers, they essentially develop a stake in it.
They become stakeholders, they're partners, and they've had a certain buy-in so that when the report lands on the desk of, say, the Secretary of State, It's more plausible than if it had come from a completely outside body.
There's the word negotiate.
I tripped over that word a little bit.
Negotiate.
Why would you negotiate science?
Well, it's not the science that's being negotiated in these United Nations negotiations.
We're not talking about the IPCC now.
We're talking about the annual meetings that the United States and all other countries take part in.
You know, the first President Bush signed a document called the UN Framework Convention for Climate Change, and it was ratified by the Senate.
We're parties to this international treaty, whose object is to prevent dangerous man-made interference with the climate system.
Now, dangerous is impossible to define exactly to everybody's satisfaction, but it's annual meetings of the parties to that international document, with U.S.
included, Uh, that come up with things like the Kyoto Protocol, which, uh, you know, a simple little baby step, uh, that's not going to solve the problem, but keeps it on the table.
Well, we didn't even take that simple little baby step.
Professor, hold tight.
We're at the top of the hour, and we have to abide by the clock.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest.
We'll talk about other baby steps and problems in a moment.
I'm Art Bell.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest, and if you just joined us and you're wondering about his credentials, he is a distinguished professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
University of California, San Diego, received a PhD in meteorology from New York University 1966.
He is interested in studies all aspects of climate science and climate policy.
He comments frequently on climate and environmental issues for the media.
Also testified before the U.S.
Congress.
Briefed United Nations climate change negotiators, advised government agencies, Professor is also coordinating lead author for the 2000 Assessment Report on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
And here's the kind of thing you get.
We'll let the professor respond to this after the break.
Ron in New York, New York writes, Art, if your guest is indeed an expert, it's as a bully and propagandist.
Anybody who starts a discussion by claiming settled science and scientific consensus is there to lecture and browbeat.
Here's a response in a moment.
Professor Ron in New York, New York, you heard it, browbeat, bully and browbeat, lecture and browbeat.
Settled science, he's complaining about that.
Yeah, I'm sorry, Ron, that you feel that way.
I would say to inform, not to lecture or browbeat.
You know, science isn't democratic, and we all know Einstein famously said that if he were wrong, it would only take one person with proof to show that he was wrong.
The fact that the great majority of people knowledgeable about this subject take the position that I've been expressing, It doesn't mean that it's perfect.
It just means that at this stage, the research frontier has moved on, and there's some things that we don't have to reexamine.
There are many open questions, and I've discussed many of them on this show already, but the basics, the idea of what the greenhouse effect is, how it works, and whether or not we're adding to it, that's been well understood since the 19th century.
Laboratory experiments were done long, long ago.
in which people took gases like carbon dioxide, put them in the lab, and showed how they trapped
heat.
This is not mysterious any longer.
It was settled science quite some time ago.
And as I said, the predictions are far coming true.
It's exactly again like medicine.
The fact that medicine hasn't cured all diseases doesn't mean that you can ignore your doctor when you go for your physical.
And she says, look, you're heading for a heart attack.
You know, you've got to shape up, exercise more, eat more simply.
You don't say to your doctor, what day is the heart attack coming?
And what will the surgical options be available on that day?
Those are unreasonable questions.
You accept that medical science has made a firm link between whether you exercise and your chances of a heart attack.
And climate science is very much the same way.
We're planetary physicians and we're simply saying that the science here is very well understood.
The IPCC is the expression of mainstream science.
And the fact that there are outliers, that there are dissenters, skeptics, or contrarians, shouldn't be taken out of proportion.
There are contrarians in all fields of science.
You know, there's a famous retrovirus expert at the University of California, Berkeley, who doesn't think that HIV causes AIDS.
And his colleagues, as far as I can tell, think he can no longer be reasoned with on that subject.
uh... but you're not going to uh... that your health on that and if you're
infected you're not going to uh... refused to seek treatment because of
that one contrarian and i think uh... in many ways the climate plans within the same both
here there's a shrill minority
of people who dissent from the mainstream they haven't made their case
uh... in a way that convinces uh...
their colleagues and you don't want to bet the planet on them
at the planet uh... professor
how much do you think the uh...
the oil and energy companies contributing to this contrarian point of view
money and contrarian views made public That's changing very rapidly.
It's well known that some of the oil majors, ExxonMobil is a notable example, have contributed to what I and many of my colleagues regard as a disinformation campaign.
uh... in much the same way that the uh... tobacco industry portions of it for a long
time now to them in major
a public campaign to essentially confuse people about the link between
uh... smoking and health but the uh... that part of the industry is changing very
rapidly and uh...
many corporations including exxon mobil have said uh...
that uh... they're uh... much more convinced now of the reality and
seriousness of this uh...
The degree to which that statement's followed up by action is something people can dispute.
But I think it's quite clear that the oil majors in particular are interested in seeing a solution to this problem.
They can foresee, for example, that regulation is coming down the pike, and they'd like to be part of planning it. British Petroleum famously changed its name to
Beyond Petroleum. And I think that because there are going to be efforts to use alternative
sources of energy to a greater extent than has been the case in the past, I think that's
good. These are companies that have a big stake in it, that have great resources, great
expertise, and they want to see progress made. They're subject to these regulations
worldwide. One of the Saudi oil ministers famously used to say that the stone age did not
end because we ran out of stones, but it happened because we figured out better ways to do
things.
And I think that you can say the same thing if you're hopeful that the oil age will not end when we run out of oil.
It will end as we discover better ways to make energy with fewer harmful side effects.
So I applaud the efforts of the oil majors, just as I applaud the efforts of Of many corporations and politicians, you know, California has passed a very strong bill.
Governor Schwarzenegger has signed it.
The legislature passed it to drastically reduce California's emissions of carbon dioxide in coming decades.
And then this area, as in many other areas, I think the size and economic clout of California is going to help propel that to a nationwide and I hope an international campaign.
Other countries are taking similar steps.
Many corporations and municipalities in this country are.
And one can be hopeful that the federal government will also see the light.
Professor, I recently saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, and frankly, some of the visual evidence that was in that movie I thought was not only compelling, but scary as hell.
Was it scientifically, in your view, accurate?
Well, you can dispute it.
Parts of that movie that I, if I'd been on Al Gore's advisory committee, would have said, let's not quite say it this way, you know?
But on the other hand, in terms of the basics, you know, I think he's done a really good job.
I can quibble.
I'm an expert.
I can say, gee, I didn't like this particular way of talking about the ice sheets in Greenland or talking about Katrina.
But I think overall the explanation is good.
It's heartfelt.
You know, I think that That it was clear that the Vice President is sincere about that.
He has a long-standing interest in this subject.
He was interested in climate change while he was still in Congress before he became Vice President.
And I think, on the whole, he's done a good job.
He's certainly helped to bring this to the consciousness of many people.
Unfortunately, American politics being what it is, the Vice President is a polarizing figure on this issue.
And just as the Bush-Gore election was very close.
I think you'll find people that don't want to listen to the message just because Al Gore is not the politician they prefer to hear it from.
I'm sorry, personally, that this issue has become politically polarized in this country.
It doesn't have to be that way.
In many other countries, it's not a left-wing, right-wing, or liberal-conservative polarization.
For example, the newly elected president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, who's a law-and-order
guy, a tough conservative politician, in his acceptance speech mentioned the United States,
only to say, we hope the United States, who is our friend, will not disagree with us on
climate policy, but will take helping to end the global warming crisis seriously, because
it's going to be a priority for France.
And I think that's true all over the rest of the world.
There are many centrist and center-right politicians who take this issue seriously.
Unfortunately, in the U.S., it has become identified with a wing of the Democratic Party exemplified by Al Gore.
So I think he's done a good job in terms of making a movie that's accessible to the wider public.
Obviously, it's had a lot of audience success.
It won an Oscar.
It came from a less polarizing figure.
I tell people who don't like the movie because they don't like Al Gore to pretend it's their favorite baseball player or somebody that they do like.
Just change the messenger mentally.
Alright, what about the other side, Michael Crichton's State of Fear?
I read that also.
Yeah, Michael Crichton's a highly successful thriller writer, science fiction writer.
I've debated him.
He's clueless about climate science, and I think that that book does a great disservice.
It promotes as fact the footnotes in the book, whereas in fact they are full of inaccuracies, distortions, jay-picked evidence, and claims that have long ago been disproved.
So I'm very sad that somebody of Michael Crichton's stature and celebrity who has a great following Huge commercially successful popular author has chosen to go down that path.
I was very surprised by it.
Very surprised by it.
I was extremely surprised by it.
I really like most of everything Michael Crichton has done, and that one kind of stopped me cold.
Yeah, I don't know what got him off on this issue.
I'm sure he's sincere.
I'm sure he has a closed mind.
I don't understand why.
He's a fabulously successful author.
I was looking at his website before I debated him and it said at one time he had the number one movie and the number one bestseller, that must have been Jurassic Park or The Andromeda Strain or something like that, and the number one TV show.
He's responsible for ER also.
And a guy with that degree of success, enormous popular esteem, celebrity, has a rock star charismatic celebrity personality.
Why he's Chosen to go down what, to my mind, is very clearly a wrong path mystifies me and saddens me very much because we need people like that who have the ability to communicate well to the public to get on board with the scientific message that needs to be conveyed.
Do you see it changing, Professor?
You said it's polarizing.
It is indeed polarizing.
Terribly polarizing.
And it seems to still be.
I mean, are you making progress?
Well, I think so.
The polling numbers show that people are concerned.
People are, in fact, out ahead of the federal government on this issue.
I think the message that they don't want to leave a damaged planet to their children and grandchildren resonates with a lot of people.
And so I'm continually asked, what can I do?
Says Joe Sixpack, the man in the street.
What can one person do?
Does it help to recycle a can or bike to work or telecommute?
And I think the answer to that is, sure, it does.
It does help, and multiplied by 300 million people in this country, it helps a lot.
But I think the other thing one can do is to tell the politician who's asking for your vote that this is an important issue to you, that everybody has it on their list of good things to happen, but it's not the number one issue.
It's number 17 or something like that.
And if you tell the politician that it's important to you, then I think things will happen.
And we're seeing politicians on both sides of the spectrum.
Several on the Democratic side, but also on the Republican side.
John McCain, for example, has been a co-sponsor of pioneering legislation.
So I don't think this necessarily has to be restricted politically.
And I sense a greater movement here.
And I think also it's a false dichotomy to say that there are more important problems than this, so let's work on terrorism and better education and strengthening the economy.
I think all of those things Uh, can certainly be done, as can this.
As I said, in many cases there are negative costs to doing this.
There's money to be made, you know?
Toyota is watching those hybrid Priuses fly off the lot, and the people who are making gas-guzzling SUVs are having to give deep discounts to sell them.
So, I think things like that are an illustration of the fact that smart corporations are figuring out how to get on board here, and Environmentalism can be profitable.
It's not accurate to say we're choosing between economic prosperity and safeguarding the environment.
Okay, well as you know, Kyoto here is dead as a doornail.
I guess it's your view it wouldn't have helped that much?
It wouldn't have helped that much in the sense that if everybody had signed on to Kyoto, which was a treaty that essentially asked for a relatively small reduction in in uh... in greenhouse gas emissions a few percent five six seven percent below the nineteen ninety level with the the requirement uh... if everybody had signed on to that nobody cheated uh... and everybody meant to meet their target it would still be a very small reduction because we're still admitting one more greenhouse gases and they pile up in the atmosphere the last two hundred years and more some of them and but i think what diplomatic experience has shown is that
For a lot of these agreements, it's important to get that first baby step taken because you might say passing Kyoto at least gets you past the barricade of having Kyoto as an obstacle.
And then you can go ahead and discuss more serious things.
You know, Kyoto did come into force.
It's a binding international treaty now.
The U.S.
and a couple of other countries haven't signed it, but enough countries with enough total emissions have signed it so that it's in force.
But we're affected by it.
A U.S.
multinational company that's doing business in a country which has a Kyoto target has to restrict its emissions there.
I think that's an important thing to keep in mind.
Some people say they don't want to do these things because it costs money.
Well, we're paying that money now.
You know, if Katrina is an example of a natural disaster, whether or not it's caused by global
change is an illustration because it shows how we're all paying for it.
The cost of Katrina not being borne by the citizens of the region affected alone, they're
being borne nationally.
If you have agricultural problems due to droughts and so on, it affects everybody.
If the Chinese are competing for oil on the open market, that raises your gasoline prices.
And so, again, the medical metaphor is if you have the preventive surgery, it involves
risk and expense, but if you postpone it until the heart attack comes, that's more risk and
greater expense.
Sure.
Is global warming in any way connected to the ozone hole?
And I'd like to talk about the ozone hole a little bit.
Well, let's start there.
Is it connected to global warming?
There are connections.
It's not entirely unrelated, but basically there are two separate issues.
One of the connections is that the gases that are now being phased out by international
agreement because they cause the ozone hole, things like freons, the chlorofluorocarbons,
turn out also to be greenhouse gases.
So they have the dual disadvantage that they destroy ozone in the stratosphere, in the
ozone layer, and they trap heat air to the greenhouse effect.
So that's one connection, and there are several others.
But basically it's two separate effects with two separate causes.
It's illustrative though because the ozone hole issue is one that the scientific community
would say has been successfully dealt with.
The industry, the scientists, governments got on the same page, realized what the problem was, outlawed the offending gases.
The chemical industry, DuPont, and other big companies developed ozone-safe substitutes for them.
So if you buy a car today, it's air-conditioned, it doesn't have ozone-depleting gases.
That was an example of how international activity with corporations, scientists, governments, all working together can solve problems.
The greenhouse effect, the global warming problem, is much, much more difficult, but nonetheless you have a hopeful paradigm.
Professor, I'm sorry, have we actually made the holes smaller?
I've heard conflicting reports on that.
We have not made it smaller.
What we have done is taken the steps that we are confident will in future make it smaller, because those gases are still up there.
What we have done is greatly reduced the rate at which they're being added to the atmosphere, and so it will take time.
It might take 50 years to heal the ozone hole, but we're already seeing a reduction in some of the offending gases or the precursors, the chemical constituents that lead to those To those ozone-destroying reactions.
We're seeing progress there.
So, we still have a very serious ozone problem.
It varies from year to year, of course.
There's natural variability on top of everything else.
But the community of experts on that is confident that we're taking the right steps and that the ozone layer is on track to heal.
But it will take decades.
Decades.
Can we scientifically say it has already begun to heal?
Well, I think we can say that we've taken the steps that are going to lead it to heal, but because you're still seeing serious ozone holes in the Antarctic Spring last year and in other recent years, it's a long way from being finished.
Are you aware, Professor, of any experiments being done on our atmosphere?
I know there's, for example, HAARP in Alaska that's doing some ionospheric research.
Whether or not it has anything to do with the atmosphere, I'm not sure.
But are you aware of anything of that nature?
Well, there are small-scale experiments of all kinds.
The classical kind of experiment were the ones used to seed clouds or disperse fog at airports during the war and so on.
And there have been things suggested, but there are no large-scale experiments going on.
As I said, there are ethical and legal ramifications to that.
Professor, I'm sorry again to interrupt, but we are at the top of the hour, so we've got to take a break here.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest.
He's eminently well qualified to comment on The warming that's happening to our world right now.
That's right.
I'm going to open the lines.
My guest is Professor Richard Somerville.
Now, just taking a little sampling of what I'm getting on the computer, Tony, in Tucson, Arizona, writes, Enough liberal Nazi socialist political propaganda.
Art, I suggest you watch Glenn Beck's Expose a climate of fear on CNN and get the truth behind the media-driven hype of global warming.
Then cease having alleged experts that spread these lies.
Now, I wonder if these people have the cojones to come here on the air and actually, if not face-to-face, voice-to-voice, dispense this kind of angry rhetoric.
There's so much of it here.
Okay, phone lines are open.
Let's hear from you.
We'll be right back.
Saying all this is polarized, Professor, is understating it.
Richard in Loveland, Ohio.
I mean, these are samples I can read.
A lot of these I couldn't even read on the air.
Says, follow the money art.
Climate research is like any other kind.
The more the belief in an alleged problem, the longer the flow of research grants will last.
Anyone who claims there's no agenda here is either a liar or a fool.
Professor?
Well, I've always wondered about this follow-the-money accusation.
My salary gets paid by the University of California.
It's not dependent on global warming.
I've been there a long time.
There's nothing I can say about global warming that increases or decreases my income.
The research funding for this topic in this country is essentially flat.
People, scientists who want to do research, write proposals to the government, they compete, and some small fraction of them are typically funded.
We use those research dollars to, you know, computer charges and to help pay our graduate students and so on.
There's just not a lot of money in here.
In fact, if I wanted to make money on global warming, I might switch sides, if that were my motivation, and take up one of the The skeptic think tank offers to write hostile reviews of the IPCC report at $10,000 a pop.
Well now, Professor, where does that money come from, that skeptic money?
You know, I do not know.
I do not know.
But it's out there.
And I think, I just don't understand this follow the money thing.
I don't think anybody goes into scientific research in a subject like this for the money.
I try to persuade graduate students to come and get a PhD and take the pledge of poverty that a calling like that requires.
Sometimes they think, gee, I'd like to go into Wall Street.
They're bright enough to do anything.
So this is not a money-driven issue here.
I'm waiting to be told where the money is.
You just told us.
You said, really, on the other side, there appears to be, even if you don't know where it's coming from or you don't want to say, there's plenty of money on the other side.
Well, I think, as I said, there has been a well-funded disinformation campaign that I hope is turning the corner.
There are fewer corporations funding these skeptical propagandists, I would say, than
there have been in the past.
But frankly, I don't think this is money-driven, and I don't doubt the sincerity of people
who dispute the scientific consensus.
In fact, all four are doing research and publishing openly and so on.
So I think they are mistaken scientifically, but science is self-correcting.
That's one of the great things about science.
You wait long enough, and predictions that don't square with much
Joseph in Houston, Texas, you're on the air with Professor Somerville.
was wrong and that's how we make progress. Science makes forecasts, we test it
against the real world and in the long run claims that don't hold up fail and
are dropped or modified. One of the very nice things about science in the end an
error is found out and that's how we advance. All right let's give it a try.
Joseph in Houston Texas you're on the air with Professor Somerville. Hi. Hi I
have a question about something called the Little Ice Age.
I saw a documentary on Discovery Channel about an ice age that occurred in the 1500s and ended in the 1800s.
My question is, do you think it has anything to do with the global warming that's going on now?
I'm glad to speak to that.
The Little Ice Age is a fantastic example of a natural climate fluctuation.
The problem with trying to analyze these relatively small fluctuations in the past is we don't have the data we need to fully understand them.
So for example, we don't know how widespread by the 1600s, it wasn't a global network of
thermometers, there was nobody with satellites and so on.
And so we have, you might say, partial and incomplete information.
There was a medieval warm period also prior to the Little Ice Age.
And once again, we know that parts of the world were warm.
There's no reason to think that the entire world was warm then.
The IPCC, which looked at this very carefully and which included leading experts on these
past climate changes, concluded that the recent warming is probably unprecedented in at least
the last 1,300 years.
So I think what we have to keep in mind is that there are natural fluctuations in climate,
both recent and long ago.
The Dust Bowl in this country in the 1930s is an example.
As far as we know, it was just Mother Nature flipping a coin.
That was a random occurrence.
It wasn't caused by human beings.
And on top of that, there are the man-made causes.
When we test this out in our computer models to replicate the observed warming in the last
part of the 20th century, the first few years of this century, we can't do it just by putting
in the natural factors, changes in the sun, for example, which may have had to do with
the Little Ice Age, and changes in volcanoes.
We can't reproduce it unless we also include the increase in the greenhouse effect.
I think my metaphor for that would be forest fires.
You know, forest fires started by natural causes.
Lightning starts some forest fires.
That doesn't mean that there aren't people that start forest fires, too, either by accident
or by arson.
And so we're disentangling this mix of natural and man-made causes here.
And scientific, so far on that, that the warming is to a great extent man-made.
We're beginning to have trouble with your cell connection, Professor.
Okay, sorry about that.
That's quite all right.
There's another thing you can do about it.
We switch to a cell phone to get rid of the echo.
Phil in Fort Myers, Florida, you're on the air with Professor Somerville.
Hello Art, I sure love your show.
Professor, I got a question basically about, just a quick question about global warming, but first just a quick comment if I may about where the money is.
I agree, follow the money, but it's basically to the anti-warming people.
Art's cohort during the week largely has on mostly anti-warming people who are all right-leaning for the most part.
Uh, and clearly you can see the economics involved there on it, uh, and, uh, several times he's claimed he can't get anybody with your position on this credible to debate these people.
So at any rate, uh, going to that, uh, on the greenhouse effect, is it, is it pretty clearly understood by both sides?
That's largely caused by the gases and that there in fact is a greenhouse effect, or do they debate that also?
That's a very good question, perfectly reasonable question, and I think the answer to that is that there's considerable unanimity on both sides about the reality of the natural greenhouse effect.
Long before people started changing the atmosphere, There was a natural greenhouse effect.
It's still there.
There are gases in the atmosphere.
Water vapor is the single most important one.
Carbon dioxide is next.
Methane and nitrous oxide, quite a few other gases in the atmosphere, have this property of being able to trap heat much like a blanket.
In technical terms, they trap the infrared energy that the Earth would otherwise radiate to space.
And without this natural greenhouse effect, which is as real as gravity, We would have a much less habitable planet, which on the average, the surface of the Earth would be below the freezing point of water.
So the concern isn't with the natural greenhouse effect, the concern is that we're modifying it by adding to these naturally occurring gases man-made gases too.
So as I said, more than one out of four molecules of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today, and this is a known fact, nobody disputes it, is made by human activities, chiefly burning fossil fuels, but also other human activities like deforestation.
And I think where the disagreement might come, and it's not a great disagreement in the science community,
is what happens after that. What are the feedbacks? The climate system is full
of all kinds of feedbacks.
So, for example, the Arctic warms rapidly because as snow and ice melt, the darker surface that was under them absorbs more sunlight.
It's less reflective.
And that's the main reason why we see the strongest warming in the Arctic.
It's as though you had your house wired funny and when it heated up, it turned on the furnace instead of the air conditioner and made it still warmer.
And that kind of feedback, and there are many of them in the climate system, Are not all perfectly well understood.
There are things still to learn.
And the skeptics believe, I think, in general, I think it's fair to say, that there'll be compensating feedbacks that do act like a thermostat that will resist the warming.
Either the clouds will change, or the distribution of water vapor will change, or something else like that will change.
And to date, the mainstream scientific community has looked carefully into each of these suggestions for a stabilizing feedback that would make the climate robust against human influence, And has failed to find one that's ubiquitous enough or strong enough to block the warming.
So I think that's probably a fair statement of the mainstream scientific viewpoint at this point.
Professor, if nothing changes, at what point will all, virtually all, of the Arctic ice be gone?
I think if nothing changes, it's largely gone by the end of this present 21st century.
Wow.
That has profound effects.
It may allow navigation around Northern Canada, for example, the Northwest Passage.
It may destroy the indigenous way of life of Inuit people.
It may have strong effects ecologically on species that depend on that ice.
But we're not talking about something that's many, many, many years in advance.
Some of our children and many of our grandchildren will see that.
Joe in Los Angeles, you're on the air.
This is Joe.
It's always a pleasure to speak to you from the kingdom of L.A.
I have a couple comments real quick for the professor, and then I'll save my question until the end.
This issue always gets me so worked up.
I'm in agreement with the professor that there is the warming and whatnot, and obviously humans are having some sort of effect on that.
To that degree of effect, I guess is where I would argue with the professor.
I guess mainly my problem would stem with weathermen.
If weathermen can't tell me exactly what's going to happen today.
I'm originally from a town in the northeast corner of Missouri and sometimes a weatherman would tell you it's doing one thing when you're looking out the window and you're seeing almost the opposite thing happening.
How in the hell are they going to tell me what the hell is going to happen in 50 to 100 years, much less a thousand years?
Uh, the degree of severity as far as the global warming and the climate change, uh, excuse me, the Pope, uh, the Pope of this whole issue, Al Gore, if there was such severity in his words, if, uh, you know, this devastation was around the corner, why is the man around in private jets?
Why is he using up all these kilowatts in his house in Tennessee?
I mean, uh, you would think that somebody who truly believes in his life's work, Uh, would be taking the bus, uh, walking, doing whatever he's got to do.
I realize he's a very important man and he's got to get around the globe and not, but his, uh, his private plane probably put more carbon footprint up in, uh, the sky than any of all of us, uh, combined just on his press tour for the movie.
Uh, in speaking with people, when you, when you talk on this subject, they get so mad.
Well, didn't you see the movie?
Didn't you see the movie?
Of course, of course we saw the movie, but Uh, it's propaganda like every other movie.
I watch movies all the time, and you watch them for, uh, entertainment purposes.
When you watch a documentary, you have to, you have to understand someone has an agenda.
Uh, look, look, look at the, uh, director, Davis Guggenheim.
Uh, you talk about following the money.
There's, there's disinformation on both sides.
Okay, Carl, do you have a question?
What would you calculate your question to be?
Well, the question would be, you know, how are you going to believe weathermen that can't tell you what's happening today or tomorrow?
All right.
All right.
It's a good one.
It's a good one.
All right.
So we can't get the weather right.
Even sometimes I look at the weather forecast for my area, Professor, and sure enough, as he points out, they don't even have it right for what's going on right now.
So how can you forecast way into the future?
That's a perfectly good question, and I'm happy to answer it.
I'll start off by saying that weather forecasts have improved.
You know, they're better than they used to be.
It's always fun to kick the poor weatherman, but the people whose livelihood depends on weather forecasts, people, pilots and farmers and so on, will tell you that they have gotten more skillful.
The forecast of Hurricane Katrina's track and landfall It was extraordinarily good.
But the scientific answer to that is that weather is different from climate.
Climate deals with averages and statistics, and weather deals with specific events.
And predicting the weather more than a few days in advance runs you into the problem of the butterfly effect.
The butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, changes things in another part of the world.
It's chaos, it's nonlinear dynamics, it's what the mathematicians call sensitive dependence on initial conditions.
We can't observe The world perfectly.
It's an unstable situation.
The weather's like the twig in a stream or the pinball going down the pinball machine.
Hits one peg, bounces off, goes another way.
You can't predict where it will end up.
But I think a better way to think of it, perhaps a more clear way, is to say that we can't predict the future of any individual.
We can't predict when a specific person, for example, will die.
But the statistics of life expectancy for large populations Very predictable.
That's how life insurance companies fix their rates and still make money.
And so you're dealing with the statistics of something over a long period rather than with specific events.
So you can't say, for example, it's going to rain at 3 p.m.
on the 4th of July next year in London.
But you might be able to say that London next summer is going to be drier or wetter or warmer or cooler than normal.
With a higher degree of accuracy.
With a higher degree of accuracy.
Also, weather is a large spheric phenomenon.
You know, the weather is the state of the atmosphere.
But the climate involves parts of the climate system that have much longer timescales, like the ocean circulation.
It may take the deep ocean a thousand years to turn over for a parcel of water to sink, travel underneath, and come to the surface again.
The world of ice and snow has very long timescales.
uh... to so that uh...
that's also means that these effects occur for in the future which is politically
difficult but climate is inherently or
unpredictable uh... than whether we know for example
stages come and go because of changes in the earth's orbit and these are regular
uh... they're not chaotic uh... they don't depend on the butterfly
and so we can uh... hindcast them and that's how we know that
uh... i stages occur in synchrony with these changes in the orbit of the
of the earth. We've learned a lot about the climate system.
It may not be perfectly predictable, but we know that if we continue to add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and trap heat, that it's going to warm.
You know, the first real estimate of that was made by a great scientist named Arrhenius.
He was Swedish.
He made them around 1900.
He was no slouch.
He won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for other work, and his prediction of how much a given increase in carbon dioxide would warm the world It's within about a factor of two of modern predictions.
So this is science that's been refined for quite a while.
Okay, very quickly, Clark in Calgary in Canada, you're on the air with Professor Somerville.
Hi.
Good evening, Professor, and good evening, Art.
We were looking with a group of professors and academia from here in Alberta, and some of them are sitting, they don't like all the propaganda.
And they're not quite agreeing with some of the models, but they don't like the other side that they're on, so they're kind of like academia stuck in the middle.
One of the things we did look at was removing argon from the atmosphere because it is a highly... it's a noble gas, you know, inert, and going and sequestering it.
And if we need to warm back up, go and release it again.
All right, Clark, I'm going to ask you, Clark, to hold on through the break.
Can you do that?
Clark?
Hello, Clark?
Well, I'm going to hope Clark can hold on through the break, because that's what we're getting right now.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest.
I'm Art Bell.
Through a blizzard of phone difficulties, our guest is Professor Richard Somerville.
Good morning, everybody.
Here's an article dated today.
It's entitled, U.S.
Seeks G8 Climate Text Changes.
Think you're getting the straight stuff?
Listen carefully.
The United States is trying to block sections of a draft agreement on climate change prepared for next month's G8 Summit, according to documents seen by the BBC.
Washington objects to the draft's target to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees centigrade this century and halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The draft prepared by the German G8 presidency said action was imperative.
With UN talks struggling to extend the current Kyoto targets, the G8 summit is seen as a vital way to regain momentum.
Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has made climate a priority for the organization, With backing from other leaders, including Tony Blair.
But the U.S.' 's proposed revisions obtained by the BBC News mark a fundamentally different stance.
A clause saying, quote, climate change is speeding up and will seriously damage our common natural environment and severely weaken the global economy Resolute action is currently needed in order to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions is struck out.
So are a statement that, quote, we are deeply concerned about the latest findings confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, and a commitment to send a clear message on international efforts to combat global warming at the next round of UN climate talks in December.
Both struck out by the US.
We'll be right back.
Professor, when you hear the kind of story that I just read, that's got to be kind of discouraging to you.
Well, it is discouraging to me.
Once again, the IPCC doesn't make policy recommendations.
That's up to the governments to decide.
The IPCC, I think, like scientists, believe that sound science being an input policy in an area that's so technical.
But, Professor, perhaps you could move a little.
We're just losing your cell phone connection.
Sorry about that, because you're clear to me.
Is this better?
Momentarily.
We'll see how it goes.
Okay.
I've said that it does discourage me to hear this kind of statement from the government.
The Bush administration for some time has said the subject needs studying, and President Bush has said that he favors improved uh... uh... improved energy efficiency in the sense that we're
generating less carbon uh...
per unit of uh... of gdp or something like that but all mother nature cares
about is uh... the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mother nature
is not interested in uh... any of any political spin or nuance or anything
like that it's just up to humankind either on purpose or by accident to
decide how much c o two we're going to allow to accumulate in the atmosphere
And then the laws of physics take over and nature gives us the resulting climate.
And so you cannot stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without drastically reducing the rate at which you add it to the atmosphere.
Basically you have to reduce the rate that you're putting it into the atmosphere to the rate at
which natural processes remove it.
That may require a cut over the long term, after several decades, as much as, say, 70 percent.
Not seven, but seven zero. And that means seriously weaning fossil fuels or figuring out a way to
strip the carbon dioxide stack and store it away safely.
Boy, boy. You're breaking up again on me.
Professor, let me ask you a quick question.
Maybe a dumb question.
I live in a little town called Pahrump, Nevada.
Now, over the mountain from me, and at about the same altitude as Las Vegas, Nevada.
Now, there's a lot of, of course, you know, Las Vegas is very built up.
There's a lot of asphalt.
There's a lot of city.
It's a big city.
Now, during the day, our temperatures are very similar.
But for any given night during the summer, you may find as much as 10 to 15 degrees of difference in temperature, with it being higher in Las Vegas than it is here, just a very few miles away.
Right.
How much re-radiation?
We've got a lot of cities.
How much effect is there?
It's a big effect locally, as you've noticed.
But it's not a big effect globally, because although we've got a lot of cities, the world is a big place.
And if you look down on the world from an airplane, only a tiny fraction of it is covered by big urban areas.
So this problem has been studied to death.
And we know, for example, that the world is warming even in rural areas, far from cities.
We know it's warming in the ocean, very far from cities.
And so what's been called the urban heat island effect is real.
It's important locally.
it does get hot in Vegas and contaminate temperature. It's not at all why the world is warm. It's
the increase in the greenhouse effect.
Richard, in Las Vegas, over the hill, you're on the air with Professor Somerville.
Hi.
Good evening, gentlemen.
Art, love ya.
You get better every day with your voice.
I love the vibrance.
Professor, My question to you is based on a model I saw on the Discovery Show.
They took a black car and a white car and they put a frozen popsicle on each one and they let the heat melt them.
And the black car melted a lot faster than the white car.
These were professors and they were saying this is what happens because the ocean in it and around it is black when it loses the ice.
And this is the kind of effect that we're achieving.
Do you think that this is a proper model?
And I'm a visual guy because I studied photography.
Do you think this is a proper kind of a model for people who can't understand it to understand it?
The phenomenon you talked about is real, and it's not the main reason why the world is warming up,
but it is an important reason why the warming is strongest in the Arctic.
Because in the Arctic, what's happening is that as the world warms,
because of the stronger greenhouse effect, as the world warms, we get an important feedback.
The ice and snow start to melt, and when the ice and snow are gone, where they were is darker ocean or darker land, and they behave like the black car in your popsicle experiment.
They absorb more sunlight.
So the chain of events is first, we put carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, strengthen the greenhouse effect, trap more heat like a blanket, and warm the world.
That's the main problem we're talking about tonight.
But then the feedback that occurs in places where there was ice and snow is, as that ice and snow melt, the surface gets darker, and then more sunlight is absorbed, less sunlight is All right.
Russ in Toronto, Canada.
You're on the air with Professor Somerville.
why if you walk barefoot it's hotter on a sunny day on the black road than it is
on the white sidewalk. And so it's a feedback effect, it's a nice
demonstration of it. It's not the whole picture, but it's why the far north is
the canary in the coal mine here and is warming more than any other part of the
world. All right, Russ in Toronto, Canada. You're on the air with Professor
Somerville. Hi. Good morning Art and good morning Dr. Somerville.
I hope your staff can hold me over to the next commercial, Art, so I can secure a direct business number rather than email for the researcher here.
I'd like to get into some comments made on your show, Art, by Sir Charles Schultz III from Xenotech Research.
That's with an X in Orlando, Florida, who talked about the advent of nanosolar That is here to do a wonderful job and to throw a monkey wrench into our conventional energy production methods.
Now, this is to be contrasted with conventional solar paneling that he indicates you can paint on now.
We're developing that here in Canada and what Dr. Somerville might know about that application in its rescue of our climate by way of that application.
And I also wanted to highlight, quite frankly, some comments made by some notable people that talk about the scurrilous direction that the energy interests have gotten us into.
The production, Enron, The Smartest Guys in the Room, by Peter Elkind.
And we saw these news clips of these guys that were monopolizing the grid in California and laughing about the little old ladies who were losing out.
And of course, that gave rise to Schwarzenegger.
The work by Chris Payne, who killed the electric car Okay, Russ, do you have a question?
Well, what does Dr. Somerville know about the nanosolar and what does he feel?
I know he's not involved with policy with regards to his position about the interests scurrilously undermining the technology that we already have that is said to be in the wings providing solutions.
Because of those scurrilous politics in the marketplace, they're not going to happen because it's about power and money for them.
Okay, Russ.
Professor, there is a company in Canada developing a nanotechnological paint that you literally paint a house with and that will then generate electricity.
I'm sure you've heard about it.
I've heard about it.
I don't know a great deal about it, but to the extent that it's real and offers promise, I think It exemplifies the tendency that I was talking about, that there's great technological potential.
You know, just conventional solar photovoltaics have seen an improvement in their efficiency and a decrease in their price per kilowatt.
And I think as this development of renewable resources is encouraged by government,
as government says, this is worth doing, we're gonna subsidize it,
or we're not gonna at least gonna discourage it, then I think the potential is enormous
for solar and several other renewable technologies.
So I'd love to know more about it.
My field is climate, not power engineering, but I think that may be a great example
of what's down the road.
Technology is capable of enormous strides, and we have time.
You know, we need to get started.
The problem is that without a serious international effort to encourage this kind of technological development, to let these creative companies and innovative engineers loose on the problem, to give them motivation to do it, that's not going to happen.
We've wasted a lot of time already because we've known scientifically for a long time that this problem was going to get serious.
We're just seeing our forecast come true.
So I'm all for encouraging this kind of activity.
I'm a strong supporter of it.
Alright.
Steve in Portland, Oregon.
You're on the air.
Steve in Portland, Oregon.
Going once.
Going twice.
Gone.
Barbara in North Carolina.
You're on the air with a professor.
Hi.
Thank you.
Art, it's an honor to be able to talk to you tonight and also Professor Somerville.
My question is this.
I'm a long-time listener on Coast to Coast.
And I've heard that there are alternative energy available, and I recall that at the last Democratic convention, someone mentioned that the convention was being powered by a small unit that was on a truck out in the area.
And if this is available, and I've heard several times that On coast to coast, this was brought up that there were alternative energy sources already available, but people were dying because they tried to bring them out.
Now, possibly, I remember about three years ago, I was notified by mail that there were units available for those of us who lived in the area.
That we could have the unit and it was not harmful and we could have enough energy for our own uses.
Barbara, do you know what it was?
No, no I do not.
Alright, hold it right there.
Professor, are you aware of any little black boxes or bigger black boxes that are currently available on the market anywhere that power a house or, you know, a lot of people like Barbara have heard of these things, sort of generally, and they think the big oil companies have come in, grabbed them up, put them up on the shelf.
Are you aware of anything like that?
I'm drawing a blank, Art, and maybe one of your other listeners is more informed.
My field is climate, and so I'd like to learn more about those things if they exist.
If they exist, me too.
Lauren in Santa Monica, you're on with a professor.
Hello, Art and Professor Somerville.
If you'd be so kind, I have a short two-part question for you.
Some scientists, after examining the ice cores, have said that there's evidence that some of the ice ages or cooling periods came on rapidly, perhaps even within a human lifetime.
And I was wondering if you could please elaborate on that.
And also, looking forward, let's say, like 20 years, how do you think the current global climate changes could affect the 110 degree summers in the United States high desert like Pahrump?
Okay, all right.
How hot, Professor, can it theoretically get?
Well, it can get pretty darned hot, so you just think of the worst heat wave you've ever experienced, and it can certainly get that hot because it already has.
And I think within 20 years you're going to see just a continuation of the tendencies that we have seen.
The estimate is that we might see another perhaps third of a degree Fahrenheit globally which doesn't sound much.
But it does tilt the odds.
As we've seen, these global temperature changes are like a fever.
A fever of 2, 3, 4 degrees above normal in your body sounds like a small number, but as we know, it can be symptomatic of a serious illness.
So maybe in the next quarter century, half a degree Fahrenheit, and so on.
Beyond that, the paths diverge, and the warming that we'll see late in the 21st century is strongly affected by the amount of carbon dioxide we put
into the atmosphere now.
You know, these long timescales do make the problem politically difficult.
The politicians' time horizon stops at the next election, and we're talking about something decades down the road.
It does make it more difficult to take action.
But once again, I liken that to taking steps for your health.
You know, you can get healthier now, and it may reward you with a longer lifespan several years down the road.
As to the scholar's first remark, he's right.
The ice cores do show that we can get sudden climate changes.
The mechanisms involved in them are still Good evening, Art.
Professor, a couple of questions.
I'm one of these so-called skeptics that you talked about on your show.
and it can behave like a switch rather than a dial.
A small additional input can cause a big jump in the climate.
All right.
Chuck and Paul Lund, you're on with Professor Somerville.
Good evening, Art.
Hi.
Professor, a couple of questions.
I'm one of these so-called skeptics that you talked about on your show.
I'm also a meteorologist, and I was looking in my textbooks tonight that I had studied
a number of years back.
And if I look at those, the initial construct of radiative balance of the Earth and atmosphere
and the greenhouse gases is such that if you take away the latent heat and convective transport
terms out of a simple model, the temperature of the Earth's surface is elevated to 90 degrees.
So that implies, and as I learned years ago, Okay, hold on.
the convective latent heat transport terms are the response of the greenhouse
gases and in fact they moderate the surface temperature. So how could you
make the argument that adding more means warmer temperatures? That doesn't
connect at all with the theories that were initially developed. And secondly...
Okay, hold on. Let him answer that one. Okay. Well I'm a meteorologist too and I'd like
to say first of all that I'm a skeptic too in the sense that all scientists are
You know, we are not depending on received wisdom.
We want to see proof.
want to see data. So I encourage skepticism. I somehow regret that the people who disagree with
the mainstream have managed to capture this wonderful term skeptic. But with that aside,
you're right, the convective and latent heat transport, important part of the balance.
But when you add a small amount of carbon dioxide to the existing climate system, what you do is
you disrupt that balance. And what you're essentially doing, I'm talking one meteorologist
to another now, so Art, with your permission, I'll get a little bit technical.
No, go ahead.
What you're additionally doing now is raising the effective altitude from which the Earth emits, because seen from space, more energy will be coming from the atmosphere, less directly from the surface.
And at higher levels, it's colder because in the troposphere the temperature decreases with height, so the world warms to make that balance come back into balance again.
And right now we're a little bit out of balance, and that warming is going on.
So the latent and convective terms are not markedly increased on a global basis, not markedly changed by a small increment, but the ability of the Earth to trap infrared radiation Uh, is increased.
So, uh, the theory, the models, and the measurements, uh, agree on that.
You know, we're seeing those changes when we look at the, uh, emitted radiation from space.
All right, Professor, uh, hold tight right there.
And Chuck, uh, I'm gonna hold you through the break if you're able to hold.
Are you?
Sure.
We lost a caller earlier who I guess was unable to hold.
We've been having all kinds of phone troubles.
So, hold tight, both of you.
We'll be right back.
Professor Richard Somerville is my guest.
We're talking about global warming.
Very, very polarizing stuff from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
Here I am.
I just cannot understand how all of you can listen to people with the credentials of this professor and so many others that I've had on this subject and not be worried about the lives of your children and their children.
It's not that far away.
We have some responsibility to think past Us, don't we?
About eight years ago, I converted everything here at my home to solar and wind.
I've got big cars, but I don't use them for the most part.
They sit in the garage, and I drive a little tiny Chevy that gets very, very good gas mileage.
So I've been aware of this and acting on it for a long time, and I understand that not everybody can afford to do that.
In fact, it wasn't a very wise Thanks Art.
Could I respond to his last response?
I paid a lot more for it than I'll ever recover.
But I did that because I saw it coming.
I felt it coming.
And now it's here.
A lot of people don't want to admit it, but it's here.
And it's really here for our children and their children.
Professor Somerville back in a moment.
Okay, Chuck in Portland, you're back on with the professor.
Thank you for waiting.
Thanks, Art.
Could I respond to his last response?
Sure.
So the model says the effective emission temperature is elevated by increasing the greenhouse gases.
And we understand this is a theory.
But one of the things that the skeptics are concerned about is that the theory of the
emission temperature of the Earth being at seven kilometers would indicate that if you
increase the greenhouse gases, the warming that should occur and the models predict would
occur would be more rapid in the middle troposphere than anywhere else initially.
and the observations have not bear that out in fact all the warming has been
near the surface and very low as part of the troposphere which says you've got a problem with your model
and so and it's not just there they also missed the cooling of the stratosphere
they missed the recent cooling of the oceans there's things going on with
those models that just aren't syncing up with actual observation
well that's a lot all at once and I'll try to respond to it uh...
now being observed
the warming gets communicated to the surface because that convection that you
were mentioned keeps the lapse rate that's the rate of change of
temperature with height
about the same It's no longer true that there's a big difference thought to exist in the amount of warming at the surface and in the middle and upper troposphere.
It's very comparable.
The satellite data reworked.
The cooling in the stratosphere It's interesting, it's due to, it's one of the links between the ozone issue and the climate issue, because as ozone is depleted, you get as cooling in the stratosphere is peaked at the level of the ozone layer, about 25 kilometers up, and also as carbon dioxide increases, that also cools the lower stratosphere, where the heat balance is largely absorption of sunlight by ozone balance, by radiation, by ozone.
And the ocean cooling is far from certain.
There was erroneous quick data from a set of ocean floats that's being reexamined.
The IPCC report concludes that the ocean is warming down to depths of 10,000 feet in all
the major ocean basins.
So science is moving very rapidly in those areas, and the claims that you mentioned just
really don't hold up.
Hello?
Yeah, go ahead, Chuck.
Well, Roy Spencer and some other scientists that I've talked to about this don't agree with that assessment of the ocean observations.
There's still a lot of problems with the data and there's no definitive conclusion that the warming you're talking about is actually what is occurring.
So we can move on from that if you want to because I had another question.
Well then go ahead.
The other one was you say that the stratosphere would cool if you increase the greenhouse gas concentrations, but the upper troposphere, according to that model you just talked about from the effective emission temperature, would also cool.
And we haven't really seen a lot of that.
So there's still inconsistencies in the model, even though you're saying that these other things are happening with it.
And it's just it's not syncing up in the ways that it should be syncing up to really call it a validated model.
And there's many who see this who just don't agree with the assessment that the models are validated.
Well, you know, we're at a stage now where we're not going to settle that without talking about technical details that I'm not sure are appropriate for a general public radio call-in program like this, but I'd like to say that the oceanographic community does not agree with your friend Rob Spencer.
He's not an oceanographer, and that the lapse rate keeps constant because of the convective process, and we see very much the same degree of warming throughout the atmosphere.
There is a remarkable fingerprint match between the pattern of warming observed, how it changes with altitude and latitude, and the predictions of the model.
So what I'm giving you is the IPCC report.
You know, we've talked about the IPCC a lot, Art, and if I can take just a few seconds to say This is an extraordinary process.
It takes three years.
Hundreds of scientists are involved.
Four separate drafts are produced.
For the Working Group 1 report, we got 10,000 reviewer comments.
Each was numbered, logged, and responded to.
It's the most thoroughly vetted scientific assessment possible.
And so when one scientist or one paper or two or three say that they disagree with the IPCC, they've really got a job to do to show why this extremely thoroughly vetted and peer-reviewed assessment isn't in accordance with their views.
The last IPCC report was looked at carefully by the National Academy of Science in this country and a dozen other countries, approved, endorsed.
All the professional societies that we scientists belong to have looked at it.
The American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This really is a representation of science as it stands today.
Can the science evolve?
Yes.
Is the science imperfect?
Yes.
Are there unanswered questions?
Yes.
And the IPCC identifies them.
But this is not a snap judgment that just can be stood up against somebody else's hunch or conjecture.
This really is an effort to assess how the scientific community regards the current state of the science and it needs to be respected.
Okay, all right.
Let's go to Michael in Norfolk, Virginia.
Hello, Michael.
Hi, thank you.
Yes, Dr. Somerville, Art Bell appealed to our compassion for children at the start of this segment.
I remember a couple of decades ago, I can't remember the lady's name, it was a one-woman campaign that she conducted in New York to try to get dog poop out of the park.
And she fought and she fought and she fought, and finally she found a scientist who was able to connect an increase in blindness among children to the presence of dog poop in those parks.
And it was only then that we were able to get politicians in New York to get that garbage out of our environment.
Now, it seems to me That you as a scientist, who has given us statistics that say that millions of children are going to die if we don't make changes, it seems to me that you need to move a little more in the direction of what you did when you debated Michael Crichton, and maybe you ought to debate Michael of Norfolk, and these
Born-again evangelicals who are constantly talking about how God is going to destroy those who destroy the earth, and yet they do not get up off their dust to get the dog poop out of our environment that is destroying millions of children as we speak, as Art Bell pointed out.
It's not happening in the future, it's happening now!
Now, we're talking about pollution!
It's pollution we're talking about.
We see the stuff, just like all New Yorkers saw the stuff every time they walked the streets.
Decency should tell you to get the stuff out of our environment.
All right, Michael.
All right.
Thank you, Michael.
Yes, that's quite clear.
I guess it's not as clear as stepping in the wrong place if you're in New York.
Professor?
Well, you know, we're all entitled to our own opinions, but we're not entitled to our own facts.
I'd like to relate an interesting experience I had.
didn't say that millions of children are going to die, I said there'd be severe
environmental consequences. And so I and the caller mentioned
evangelicals, and I'd like to relate an interesting experience I had. I was at a
meeting not long ago where several prominent evangelical leaders said that
their parishioners really resonated with the idea of protecting the environment
because of the charge that God had given mankind stewardship over the
planet, and that they sometimes would rather not hear the message coming from
scientists, because they might differ from scientists on other issues, but that
for a certain fraction at least of the evangelical community in the United
States, this was a powerful message and it didn't resonate with them.
And I'm all for relating environmental causes concretely to their effects on human beings.
It's good to hear what this means to fishermen and to farmers and to Native Americans and to many stakeholders.
So I'm all for bringing it down.
Sometimes it is too abstract, I think, for a lot of people to get their heads around when we talk about global warming and a few degrees and so on.
But this boils down to real consequences.
For real people, that will cost real money and cause real pain.
And so I commend people who can relate this to things that people will resonate with and that will be meaningful to them.
All right.
Tony in Seattle, you're on the air.
Hi.
Just what percentage of the problem is man-made?
And didn't we not thank Kyoto because China burns a lot of coal in just open fire pits?
You say we have to reduce CO2 by 70%.
How are we going to do that?
Over 50% of our electrical power comes from fossil fuels.
Do you expect nuclear power to take up that slack or fusion power?
Hydrogen cars aren't the answer.
You've said water vapor is a bigger problem than CO2.
Just what are we going to do?
Yeah, well, you've mentioned a lot of things in a big hurry and many, many good issues you've raised.
Water vapor is a substance that we can't control the amount of.
The atmosphere itself controls the amount of it.
If we put too much in, it just rains out.
If we don't put enough in, it evaporates more.
So it's more of a feedback.
That is to say, as the atmosphere warms, more water vapor reaches the atmosphere.
The whole hydrological cycle speeds up.
More rain, more evaporation from the ocean.
And that's one of the feedbacks that happens.
The CO2 has the side effect of humidifying the atmosphere by warming it.
I think you're quite right.
There's not a magic bullet, and most careful analyses have said that you have to do all of those things, and they each contribute.
Energy efficiency, energy conservation, more use of nuclear, more use of renewables, research into more advanced energy technologies that are not yet ready.
All of those have a role to play.
And, Art, maybe since we're getting to the end of the program, I can mention what's sure to be controversial, and that's the population of the Earth is increasing.
The population of the United States is still increasing.
The U.S.
has about 300 million people.
Years ago, it was 200 million.
Okay, you're breaking up a little bit.
We're talking about population, I guess, and how it affects us.
Population is a multiplier for all of these things.
The global population has more than tripled since 1930.
The U.S.
population has increased by 50 percent.
The major population increase that's going on today is in the developing countries.
We have six countries that are going to be emitters of carbon dioxide in the future.
So although population is much too hot an issue for a politician to talk about, it goes to people's core values.
to their most personal decisions, often to their religious convictions.
It is a multiplier in this issue, and a world with fewer people in it
can have an easier time maintaining the climate that it wants. Okay, well I've looked at the
population projections for the world, and that's not particularly encouraging.
If I'm more pessimistic than you are, professor,
it's because of sort of what that color just laid out.
I see all of this happening.
I don't see any of the changes that you've articulated that we have to make.
In fact, I see the world going in exactly the opposite direction at a pretty quick pace, actually.
I think you're right.
We are emitting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this year than last year.
We're in the position of an overweight person who ought to be reducing the calories, but
is instead increasing the amount of calories.
I'm saying that the potential is there.
There's technology that can be brought to bear once the public is exercising enough
and enough political will is generated.
A country like the U.S. can't solve the problem alone, but it can provide leadership, both
political leadership and technological leadership and economic clout, and it can set an example.
So I'm optimistic about what's possible.
I might share your pessimism about the current path that we're on.
Well we may be strong enough to throw a monkey wrench into it if we want to.
And if we keep omitting statements by the IPCC and others, or softening them, or either omitting or softening them, then we probably have the power to see to it that nothing gets done in time.
I'm afraid you're right.
When all is said and done, more is said than done.
And I really am discouraged when I see political interference with science at any point.
You know, science is one input to a policy decision.
A policymaker has to take a lot of things into account.
The science is part of that.
But it doesn't serve anybody's interest if the science is suppressed or distorted or weakened.
It ought to come straight from the scientists.
And then the public and the policy world can give it the weight that they think it deserves.
I think that's all that we scientists can expect.
We're doing publicly funded work.
The taxpayer pays my salary and pays for my research.
And I think that scientists like me just want to do as good a job as possible of making our results available to the public and to the government in as clear and neutral a way as possible.
Okay.
Don in Minnesota, you're on.
Hi!
Happy to get through to you this evening, Mr. Bill.
Excuse me, Mr. Bill.
I'm pulling over here so I can speak safely.
I have a couple quick questions about some temperature statistics and how they relate to the theory of the tipping point.
Okay.
It's my understanding that the globe has been increasing in temperature ever since the last ice age.
Do I understand that correctly, Professor?
Yes, but the increase has speeded up enormously in recent decades.
Okay, so how much has it warmed in the last, is it 20,000 years we're talking about?
Oh, the difference between an ice age and an interglacial period might be something like 9 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that on global average.
And how much has the temperature increased in the last 100 years?
Oh, we're probably looking at a little over 1 degree Fahrenheit.
Okay.
I'm wondering how this relates to the theory of the tipping point.
Well, the tipping point is just a turn of phrase, instability or a threshold, where you can see a sudden rapid climate change.
And tipping points are not predictable.
We can just alert the world to the possibility that they're out there.
The odds that you'll cross the threshold like that grow up as the warming increases.
So it becomes a little bit like Dirty Harry, and you have to decide how lucky you feel.
Caller?
Don in Minnesota?
Anything else?
Oh, we may have lost him.
We may have time for one quick one.
Let's go to Jeff in Reno, Nevada.
Very quickly, Jeff.
Hi, Eric.
Yeah, I'm calling from KOH, the home of your great announcer.
And I'd like to find out what the professor thinks about Cost to the world, other than economic, and thank you for putting in solar, even though it costs economically more, are there benefits that we see overall, if maybe it was promoted more, solar power, wind power, things such as that, that even though financially it's expensive, we may have benefits that far outweigh those nickels and dimes that we tend to convert everything into.
That's a wonderful question.
I know we're short of time, so I'll be brief.
I'm all for removing the artificial price barriers and price subsidies to different kinds of energy, and I think that one can help reduce the discrepancy in cost between fossil fuels and the renewables, including solar, if, for example, we're more honest about what fossil fuels really cost.
You don't pay at the gas pump, For the respiratory diseases that smog in big cities cause, and I think a closer examination of how we subsidize things that we really ought to discourage and how we fail to encourage developments that we really ought to encourage would be worthwhile.
That may involve re-looking at the tax structure and a lot of other things, but I think that the government can do a lot, even those of us who favor small government, The government can do more to remove the artificial barriers to development of renewable resources, including solar.
And I think we're seeing it.
We're seeing an increase in efficiency and a decrease in the cost per kilowatt hour.
Indeed so.
I just want to see the rates go up.
Professor, we're out of time.
That's it.
I thank you for being here through all these phone difficulties and all the rest of it.
The message is much more important.
So thank you for being here and we'll have you back.
It's been my pleasure, Art, and I've enjoyed the discussion with the listeners, too.
Good night, my friend.
And for all of you, also a great big good night from the high desert.
I'm Art Bell.
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