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Feb. 11, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:03:00
Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin
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joe rogan
29:50
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steven e koonin
01:31:28
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jamie vernon
00:19
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unidentified
Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out The Joe Rogan Experience Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day Well, thank you for being here Thanks.
joe rogan
I'm really appreciative of your time and the fact that you are willing to talk about this.
This is a very interesting book and extremely controversial.
And I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I think it's part of the times we're living in.
Your book is called Unsettled?
steven e koonin
Correct.
There it is.
joe rogan
Yes.
How many copies of this book?
steven e koonin
So we've sold, since it was published at the end of April, so about 10 months ago, we've sold more than 120,000 copies.
joe rogan
120,000 copies.
steven e koonin
Which, you know, I don't know anything about publishing, but my agent and publisher are sort of amazed at the numbers.
joe rogan
That's a lot.
And without much fanfare from the media, if any.
steven e koonin
Well, it depends which media you look at.
joe rogan
Where have you gotten coverage?
steven e koonin
So I've gotten good coverage from the Wall Street Journal.
But if you look at the New York Times, Washington Post, not very good coverage at all.
Didn't make the New York Times bestseller list.
joe rogan
That seems strange because it's a lot of copies.
steven e koonin
Yeah, right.
Well, you would think, right?
CNN, nothing.
And I think people are just ignoring it, which really surprises me.
joe rogan
Now, your book is on the climate.
It's on climate change and climate science, and we should just establish right away, just because I know you're going to experience some criticism, right?
steven e koonin
Right.
joe rogan
Clearly, first of all, your credentials.
You graduated from high school at 16. You went to MIT. Caltech first.
unidentified
Caltech.
steven e koonin
I was an undergrad at Caltech, and then I went to MIT. I did a PhD there in theoretical physics in three years.
And then I went back to Caltech where I was on the faculty for 30 years.
joe rogan
And you were on the faculty at 23 years of age.
unidentified
That's correct.
joe rogan
Which is pretty extraordinary.
steven e koonin
Yeah, it's unusual, not unprecedented, but really quite unusual.
joe rogan
Now, there's a couple criticisms that people have of you, just to get these out of the way right away.
One of them is that you used to work for BP. Yeah.
This is a big one.
So if you worked for some sort of an oil company, you were chief scientist at BP? I was chief scientist at BP for five years after Caltech.
steven e koonin
And, you know, they didn't bring me there to help them find oil.
They knew how to do that really well.
I was brought in to help figure out what Beyond Petroleum really meant.
And that was renewables and alternatives to oil and gas.
And I helped during my five years to help part a strategy for that, which is today, now, 15 years later, are starting to be realized.
joe rogan
But once you say you work for BP, there's a certain section of our population that will immediately dismiss anything you've said.
steven e koonin
Yeah, of course.
And, you know, it's part of a structural problem that The advantage of having been in BP is I learned about the energy system.
And I teach it at NYU these days.
I just did my first lecture yesterday.
And so I actually know quite a bit about how the energy system currently works.
And a lot of people who want to change the energy system have no idea at all of how it works.
And so they can do great damage if they do the wrong sort of thing.
joe rogan
Well, in reading your book, one of the things that became very clear is there's so much data to sort through.
It's incredibly complex.
I actually listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where I had to go back Over it again, just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening.
To squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front, you're very clear about this.
You believe the climate is changing.
steven e koonin
Climate is changing.
Absolutely.
joe rogan
You believe that human beings are having an effect.
steven e koonin
They are influencing those changes, yes.
Absolutely.
Mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere.
Absolutely.
joe rogan
Your position, though, is that there's either an exaggeration or there's a way that people are looking at the data that's alarmist that you don't think is reflected by the actual numbers themselves.
steven e koonin
That's correct.
I think, you know, to put it in a British sense, they have over-egged the custard.
joe rogan
Now, why do you think this has happened?
steven e koonin
You know, I have in the book one of my favorite quotes from H.L. Mencken is, the purpose of practical politics is to keep people alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety.
joe rogan
Now, if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the climate is changing, what percentage of an effect are human influences?
unidentified
Yeah.
steven e koonin
So, you know, I think we don't really know that.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last report in August It's all human-caused in the last many decades.
joe rogan
All of it.
steven e koonin
All of it.
But, you know, they completely forget that the climate was changing in comparable ways well before human influences became important.
And so they say, no, no, we're going to ignore that.
We're going to suppress it and say it's all human-caused.
joe rogan
Now one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on Earth over a period of say like a hundred years, that if you do it in these blocks of time, that there's a way to look at it in a deceptive way that makes it seem, in the alarmist way, where it makes it seem that radical drastic change is happening over a very short period of time.
That's all I've ever heard.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
So, you know, the climate changes a lot on its own.
Maybe we can put up a picture, which is one of the ones I wanted to show you.
Can we put up the second chart in that file called Kunin Thumbs?
And what I'm going to show you...
Is a record of the height of the Nile River, which has been compiled by the Egyptians.
There we go.
So, this is the height of the Nile River from 640 AD up until 1450 AD. So, about 800 years of data every year about what was the lowest level that the Nile River reached in that year.
The Nile was important to the Egyptians, as you might imagine, and so they measured it pretty carefully.
And what you see are two things.
The blue spikes are the annual values.
They go up and down a lot.
One year it was up at six meters, 20 feet, and then the next year it was down to one meter or something like that.
So a lot of variability from year to year.
But then if you look at the curve, which is the average Trend over 30 years.
You can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down.
And you can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, new normal, new normal.
We've got to do prayers and sacrifices.
And of course, if they just waited another 100 years, it came back up again.
And this was all before humans had any influence on the climate.
joe rogan
Are we looking at climate and we're looking at these periods of time, are we looking at them incorrectly because we have such a short lifespan ourselves that we tend to think of great change as happening in these incremental ups and downs, but realistically we should be looking at it on a broad, long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years.
steven e koonin
Yes.
So climate changes on all timescales?
It changes on 1,000-year timescales, it changes on 10,000-year timescales, and it changes on decades.
Every decade, it changes.
And, you know, we also forget a lot.
In the Midwest, there was a drought in 1955, and one of the news magazines, Time magazine, said, this drought will be long remembered.
Nobody remembers 1955 drought anymore, so we forget and we think things are unprecedented when in fact they have happened before.
joe rogan
Now, you are, by training, you're a physicist, correct?
unidentified
Correct.
joe rogan
And another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist.
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
People will say that.
Now, my question though, and I think you'd probably be able to help me on this, is like, what exactly is a climate scientist?
Yeah.
Most science, you have a hypothesis, you run tests, you get results, and then you do these experiments, and that's how you get your data.
With climate science, is it based off models?
steven e koonin
You know, climate science is a very integrative discipline.
It involves physics, chemistry, biology, geology, statistics, computer modeling, and so on.
So nobody can be an expert in everything.
Many prominent climate scientists are trained as physicists.
Look at Jim Hansen, Michael Mann.
Michael Mann actually once applied to be my graduate student.
He decided to go to Yale instead, but that's a different discussion.
That was many decades ago.
And so some of it is certainly physics.
I have published in physics about climate science.
I published a paper in August where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how shiny the earth was.
That's very important because if the earth gets as shiny, it absorbs more sunlight and so gets warmer.
And we published a paper and it attracted some attention, press releases and so on.
So, I have published in Climate Science.
But more importantly, the kind of things I point out in the book are obvious to anybody who has any quantitative sense at all.
It's like, you know, if I were ordering carpet for a room And the room was 8 by 10, I would need 80 square feet of carpet.
If the carpet guy comes back and says, you need 400 square feet, I'm going to ask him some hard questions.
And that's the kind of...
Misleading things that I'm pointing out in the book.
joe rogan
How did you get started on this journey of being, I want to say obsessed, but if not fascinated with the science of climate change and the data itself?
steven e koonin
So I was exposed to climate science in the early 90s when I was working with a group called Jason, which we can talk about at some point, for the government and looking at the impact of then high-performance computing and small satellites on climate science.
joe rogan
And the group Jason is top scientists in their field that are recruited to work for the U.S. government.
And it's, what is it, 70% of it is classified projects?
steven e koonin
Yeah, something like that.
We work for all government agencies, but a lot of what we do is for the national security parts of the government.
joe rogan
And it's tackling the most complex scientific...
steven e koonin
The most difficult technical problems, sometimes, you know, mysteries that the government finds going on in other countries, things of that sort, what's going on, etc.
Or how do we do X, Y, or Z technically?
joe rogan
And so what was the initial study that you had read or what...
steven e koonin
So the initial thing that got me interested was the Department of Energy wanted to deploy a fleet of small satellites, which remember this was 30 years ago, so that was a pretty big innovative deal, to look at the earth and monitor what was going on for climate purposes, for science.
And one of the things that you could do Was to measure how shiny the Earth was.
The albedo, it's called, technically.
Whiteness of the Earth.
And, of course, being curious, we asked the question, well, how was the albedo first measured?
And the answer was, back in the 30s, some guy started watching the dark part of the Moon.
And that brightness of the dark part of the Moon is lit by light that is reflected from the Earth, and so is a good measure of how shiny the Earth is.
It hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years, and so we started up a program that continues to this day to watch the dark part of the Moon to monitor how bright the Earth is.
And we just published a paper in August that showed the Earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years, and so not surprising it perhaps gotten warmer.
Anyway, that sort of got me interested in climate science.
When I moved into the private sector, I was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could develop and deploy or demonstrate and deploy technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
And I did that for quite a while in both BP and then in the government.
And then in 2014, the American Physical Society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science.
They had put out a statement in 2007, which was very controversial among the physicists.
Because it used the word incontrovertible.
And for a physicist, that's fighting words.
Okay?
So they asked me, you know, Steve, recommend a new statement.
And so I said, heck, we're physicists.
We're not going to take anybody's word for it.
Let's look at the issue ourselves.
And so I convened a one-day meeting with three mainstream climate scientists and three credentialed skeptical scientists.
And we sat for a day.
Presentations, talk, discussion in early 2014. It's all up on the web.
It was transcribed.
You can find the transcript.
And I came away from that thinking, this science is not anywhere near as settled as I thought it was.
Because of the problems with the models, the observational data, and so on.
And my little group Wound up proposing a statement that could not get through the bigger committee that was approving such things.
People would say things like, we can't say that even if it's true because it gives ammunition to the deniers.
joe rogan
Really?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
joe rogan
As a scientist, how frustrating is that?
steven e koonin
I got so frustrated because I'm used to, through Jason and others, of giving advice to decision makers.
You play it straight.
You say, this could be, this may not be, here are the options and so on.
But you don't try to spin the advice to get one answer or another.
And I was really annoyed by that.
I wound up resigning from the committee.
But I wound up then publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.
They gave me 2,000 words, which was great.
We got a couple of thousand online comments.
Many people said, thanks for writing this and trying to expose the real science to what's going on.
Of course, the establishment trashed me completely, even though I was just repeating what's actually in the reports and in the research.
joe rogan
And what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you?
steven e koonin
Oh, you know, and we get it to this day with the book, you know, you're cherry-picked, you're misleading, what you said is actually not true, and so on, even though I point to, you know, chapter and verse in the reports where these things are said.
joe rogan
So is this the scientists that are claiming your cherry-picking are they Are they signaling to the other people that follow the ideology that you're not to question climate change and that anything that you say that in any way calls doubt to the settling of the data gives some sort of Ammunition to the people who are the real climate deniers, who are a real problem.
steven e koonin
Yes, indeed, indeed.
And look, my sense is that this is a problem.
It's not an existential threat by any means, and it's a problem that we have time to deal with, and we should deal with it in time in a graceful way.
But I think, you know, when the book first came out, there appeared an article in Scientific American, written by, I think, 13 mainstream climate scientists, That was a couple thousand words of mostly ad hominem criticisms, a couple of substantive criticisms, which I have rebutted, I think, quite effectively.
But it, you know, put a marker in the ground that people who didn't want to have the book understood could point to and said, aha, you know, those guys said Kuhn is an idiot.
joe rogan
Now, what criticisms made sense that you could rebut?
steven e koonin
Well, you know, they said, for example, I said sea level rise was not accelerating.
And, of course, I got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise.
But they would criticize a review of what I said by somebody else, Or they would say sometimes, you know, Koonin said that and it's true, but it's not important because of A, B, and C. If you don't mind, pull that microphone just a little closer.
Sure, how's that?
Perfect.
joe rogan
Now, so these criticisms that were levied against you, did anyone of prominence that is a climate scientist come out and say, this is a very interesting analysis of the data, these are things that I hadn't considered, Koonin makes a lot of really good points?
steven e koonin
Not in public.
In private.
You know, when I first sort of came out in that Wall Street op-ed in 2014, I had a chat afterward with the chair of a very prominent earth science department at one of our best universities.
I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who is firmly in the business.
And he said, you know, Steve, I agree with almost everything you said, but I don't dare say it in public.
joe rogan
Wow.
steven e koonin
All right?
You know, there's a whole organization called Covering Climate Now, which is a consortium of media, including the BBC and NPR, I think, and so on, who have—you can look them up on the web—and they have signed an agreement or made an agreement that they will not cover anything that diverges from the narrative.
joe rogan
And who establishes the narrative?
Like, what's the top of the heap?
steven e koonin
I think, you know, the allegedly authoritative voices are the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, which issues major reports every six or seven years.
There is the U.S. National Academies of Science.
There is the U.K. Royal Society and the U.S. government issues reports as well.
And, you know, when you get into the meat of these reports, they have some problems and, you know, we can go into them.
But by and large, they're pretty good summaries of the science.
But when you get to the summaries for policymakers or you get to the media coverage or the political discussion, that's where things get really corrupted.
So it's like a long game of telephone that starts with the basic science and the scientists doing it are by and large, you know, Good, honest, hardworking people, and you talk to them privately, and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got.
But by the time it gets to the end and the public, it's, you know, the science is settled, we're headed for doom, etc., etc.
joe rogan
But that's always the case with something that's really controversial, right?
There's always...
The alarmist perspective and the people that are looking at it that have maybe a less extreme point of view are criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough.
And then there's what you were saying earlier is that people are saying that like they can't even say certain things because it will give ammunition to the people that are real climate skeptics.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
The people that aren't paying attention to the science that have an ideology or a dogman that goes in the other direction.
steven e koonin
There's so much analogy here.
With the Reformation, when the Catholic Church started to come at odds with the Protestant movement, let me give you two examples.
In one of the best recent introductions I've had, you know, I'm a humble guy and I usually like to keep the introduction short, but this one was real interesting.
I was compared to William Tyndall.
Now, I didn't know who William Tyndall was.
I'm not a historian, so I had to look up.
William Tyndall in the early 16th century did one of the first translations of the Bible From the original Greek and Hebrew into English.
So it had been originally in Latin.
So that let ordinary people read what was in the Bible.
And of course the establishment got really mad at him for doing that.
He was eventually burned at the stake for that and other reasons.
So I sort of made these reports accessible, at least parts of it, to ordinary non-experts.
So that's one.
The other one, which is maybe even more amusing, a couple years ago, 13 senators led by Mr. Schumer proposed a bill that says the government may not spend any money to challenge the consensus.
The Council of Trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about church dogma, not about spending money, but you know, you would You'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenged dogma.
joe rogan
What would possibly motivate the government to come out with a statement like that, that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus?
And doesn't a consensus mean most?
It doesn't mean all.
So in cases of dogmatic opinions or ideologically formulated opinions, You know, I'm so surprised that the government would try to suppress the scientific process like that.
steven e koonin
I think what precipitated it was I had, for a number of years, been advocating for a red team review of climate reports.
And where you get a bunch of credentialed people to look at the report and ask, what's wrong with this?
We do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft, Other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments.
And I almost got to the point where we could have pulled it off, but the Trump administration in the end decided they wouldn't do it.
joe rogan
Now, the Trump administration had some of its own problems with climate science in the wrong way, correct?
steven e koonin
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You know, I felt I was, of course, a little bit concerned about going through the administration, but I had lined up the national academies to play the blue team.
I had assembled pretty much a good red team, and then it was stopped at the last minute by a political decision.
So I'm really disappointed because I point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports.
You know, it says X, but in fact the truth is Y, if you look at the data.
So we need that.
It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.
joe rogan
So let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled.
When you first walked away from this meeting that you were discussing and you realized that this is either far more complex or it's influenced in a way where it's not just about the data, it's about what the narrative is.
So how do you go from there before you write this book?
What are your next steps?
steven e koonin
So I started paying more attention to the disconnect between what was actually in the science versus what was either in the reports or in the political dialogue.
I think the next turning point came when I was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes.
And I turned to the official US government report in 2014 at the time, and you see this graph in the body of the report of some property of hurricanes going through the roof over the last 30 years.
And it sure looks like if you look at that graph, we're in trouble.
And so I dig a little deeper.
I look up the reference that they cite, and I read in the back of the same report on page 700 and something, if I remember right.
And it says there are no long-term trends in hurricanes, which is still largely a true statement.
And I'm looking at that, and I said, my God, that's a swindle.
In the part of the report that everybody's going to read, you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is going to break loose.
And then in the back it says we don't see any long-term trends.
joe rogan
So, what is the graph?
Like, what is the data?
steven e koonin
So, the graph is basically a graph.
It's called the power dissipation index, which is a graph of how many storms and how intense they are over the last 40 years.
joe rogan
And what is the trend?
steven e koonin
Well, in that particular case, it was going up, okay, from 1980 up until 2010. But what they didn't show you was there was an earlier part of the graph in which it was going down, okay?
So it really looked like a return to normal.
joe rogan
So in the beginning of the graph from 1970 to 1980, is that what you're saying is going down?
unidentified
Yep.
joe rogan
Do you have an image of that?
steven e koonin
Yeah, I think I do, actually.
Hang on.
joe rogan
And so what they were looking at, again, we were talking about how we're measuring things on these very small increments where time for us is 100 years.
It's our lifetime.
So we're looking at things like as if that's a lot of time.
steven e koonin
That's right.
And there are these long-term trends, as you saw in the Egyptian river.
Can we pull up chart number 35 in the unsettled file?
joe rogan
And we can safely assume that in those long-term trends in the Egyptian data that you're not talking about human influence because it's too long ago.
steven e koonin
No, it's too much too long.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
So let's pull up chart 35. So there is the original graph in the government report from 2014. And what's shown is from 1980 to 2010, and it's going up, right?
joe rogan
Right, but if you see from 19, looks like 1979-ish.
steven e koonin
So let's look at the whole record, which is the next picture.
There it is.
All right?
joe rogan
So it's real similar to the Egyptian data.
steven e koonin
It's up and down and up and down.
Now, there's a lot of controversy still.
This was...
Ten years ago or so, there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense.
One paper says yes, another paper published in July says no, and so on.
So the matter is kind of unsettled at the moment, but overall, as I can read for you, the official report, the official statement from the most recent UN report, let me just get it, There is low confidence in most reported long-term,
multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone, that's hurricanes, frequency or intensity based metrics.
joe rogan
Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?
That image when you see 1975 and then you see 2005, it's not that much of a difference.
So the peak of 1945 and then you go to 2005, you're not looking at that much of a difference and clearly there's been a gigantic difference in the amount of human influence.
steven e koonin
Of course, of course.
Let me show you another one, alright?
Can we go to chart three of the other file?
And this is one I think I'm going to go public with pretty soon in an op-ed.
Let's put it up.
This is about Greenland, okay?
And the popular image that Greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on, all right?
This is the official data set for how much ice Greenland is losing every year, okay?
And it goes up right until 2021 and it starts in 1900. And what's interesting about this, there are several things.
First of all, even though human warming influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, there are a lot of ups and downs.
So, it says it's got to be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here.
The second thing to notice Is that in the most recent decades, at the right-hand end of the chart, Greenland's is actually starting to melt less rapidly than more rapidly, even as the globe has been warming.
joe rogan
And this is from 2010 to 2020. Yeah, correct.
steven e koonin
And then if you go back to 1930, you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930 as it was in the last decade or two.
And the human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today in 1930. So, what are the other influences if they're not just- That's an excellent question.
And the answer is this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the North Atlantic.
And you can find papers that say that.
All right.
They're research papers.
You don't hear any of that from the official reports or the media.
joe rogan
So the different factors that play into what we think the different factors are that play into the melting is greenhouse gases.
steven e koonin
Warming.
Yes, warming.
joe rogan
Warming.
And what are the other ones?
steven e koonin
The others are ocean currents that have their own dynamics that are not, you know, just getting warmer.
They get warmer and colder.
And the weather, if you like, because how much ice Greenland loses every year is a balance between how much snow accumulates.
That's the weather.
And how much flows out from the glaciers.
joe rogan
And those are the only factors?
steven e koonin
Basically.
There's a little bit of melting and so on that you have to worry about.
But those ups and downs are really weather.
joe rogan
Does anything have to do with where the sun aligns with the earth and the site of the equinoxes?
steven e koonin
Well, no, that's much too slow.
I mean, over this period, year by year, it certainly has a seasonal effect.
These are the annual values, so they average out the seasons, but of course the ice grows in the winter and then it melts in the summertime.
joe rogan
So there's all this data that shows the ups and the downs and there's all this data that shows that sometimes they're losing ice and sometimes they're losing less ice and gaining ice.
How do they know what is causing this or do they just assume that there's this series of factors?
steven e koonin
They don't.
They don't, okay?
It's a combination of modeling and physical principles and other data that let them try to say how much is natural variability and how much is human influence.
There's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming, That that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss, the melting.
But right now, and for the foreseeable many decades, it is these natural variabilities.
And instead, in the media, all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades.
joe rogan
And this media narrative, do you think this is just one of those things where people gravitate towards the most alarmist perspective?
So that's the one that makes the headline?
Is it because of the green energy industry?
steven e koonin
It's all of the above, but I put a lot of it on activist reporters.
So this statement that Greenland was melting just as fast in the 1930s as it is today, I made that.
I got fact-checked.
By a reporter, John Greenberg at PolitiFact, and he deemed the statement mostly false.
And you can look at how he analyzed things, he talked to some experts, it's entirely misleading.
So I got a non-expert reporter with an agenda and a platform criticizing what's actually in the data.
joe rogan
So the non-expert reporter with an agenda, in order for him to Print something that's going to get the response that he's looking for.
He's looking for a positive response from the people that are climate, that believe these models and that think that the climate is of utmost importance.
steven e koonin
And we're headed for catastrophe.
joe rogan
Yes, catastrophe.
And this is the narrative that all, that's the only thing I've ever heard.
Until I read your book, that's all I had ever heard.
steven e koonin
Well, that's interesting.
You know, the most recent UN report Okay, which is 3,949 pages, almost 4,000 pages.
It took several hundred scientists a couple years to write.
You can search that report for the words existential threat, climate Catastrophe and so on.
You find the words climate crisis once in that report.
No other alarmist words.
And the context for climate crisis is not a scientific finding, but a description of how the US media have overhyped the situation.
joe rogan
Did this start with, I remember global warming in the 80s, because I'm a stand-up comic, and there was comics that would do jokes about global warming, like, this is great, I can go golfing in January.
They were joking around about it.
But then I remember An Inconvenient Truth.
And Al Gore put this documentary out when he was vice president, I believe.
steven e koonin
No, just before or just after, I can't remember.
joe rogan
And when he put this documentary out, it scared a lot of people.
But there was a lot of predictions in that documentary.
Did any of those come true?
steven e koonin
You know, apart from the fact that the globe is going to continue to warm and sea levels are going to rise, and we can talk about that in a bit, most of the predictions, you know, that hurricanes are going to get more intense or we're going to see more droughts or floods and so on, almost all of the high-impact things don't show any long-term trend.
They're all within natural variability.
joe rogan
One of the things that you point out in your book that I found was interesting that I hadn't considered is when they're talking about the amount of damage that hurricanes do.
So when they're thinking about what kind of danger there is to hurricanes, they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes.
And the damage that they do.
But that damage is accentuated by the fact that the population is increased in these areas.
So naturally, when a hurricane hits, there's going to be more things there to damage.
steven e koonin
You're going to see billions and billions of dollars just because there's more stuff there, okay?
More people.
joe rogan
But that doesn't necessarily mean the energy of the hurricane is greater or that the energy of the hurricanes over time is greater.
steven e koonin
We can put up if you want to see some of the hurricane statistics, but that's essentially right.
joe rogan
But the hurricane thing is not settled, you were saying?
steven e koonin
There's some indication with a paper published A year and a half ago that the strongest storms are becoming more common.
But then there was another paper that said, no, no, it's just a natural fluctuation.
So I think that's unsettled yet.
joe rogan
So how do they come to these conclusions that are different if they're basing it on data?
steven e koonin
Because they're looking at two different kinds of data.
The paper published in 2020 looked at satellite images of the hurricanes.
We see beautiful images of the hurricanes and you can try to infer from that how strong the storms are, okay?
They used a new technique.
The people who said, no, no, it's a natural fluctuation, looked in the North Atlantic where only 10 percent of the world's hurricanes happen or 12 percent, something like that.
And they looked at historical records And so there's an issue that as you go back in time, you haven't seen all of the hurricanes and you've got to correct the observations for that.
So they tried to do a good job.
What they found was that the measure of hurricane intensity went down from about 1960 to 1980 and then from 1980 to the 2000s was just coming back to normal.
So there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of controversy about this.
This is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science.
joe rogan
This variability when it comes to the temperature of the ocean, when it comes to the melting of the ice caps and all these different things we're talking about, why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the Earth?
steven e koonin
You know, the Earth, there are two reasons.
One is That the Earth is subject to external influences or influences outside of the climate.
The orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the way the sunlight falls on the Earth, this is what drives the ice ages, if you like, or the glaciations and so on.
But the other is that climate is a chaotic system, which means it has very Complicated and variable internal motions, all on its own.
We know that because we have cartoons of the equations, and they show that.
We know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days, two weeks.
It's chaotic, and so it has a lot of variability.
Some of these long-term variations we understand.
For example, El Nino Happens every few years, takes a couple years.
We kind of understand that.
But these longer-term things that take 70 years, or in some cases 1,000 years, having to do with the motion of the ocean currents, we don't have a very good handle on it all.
And part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well.
And so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations.
joe rogan
So is it safe to say that what people are looking for or what people would like to see is sort of a flat, easily predictable rise and lower, like that there's very little variation?
steven e koonin
Right.
joe rogan
And that this is just not consistent with the historical record?
steven e koonin
Absolutely.
I'm going to do another one for you.
We haven't talked about sea level yet.
Can we pull up a chart 13 of the Kunin file?
So sea level is one of the things that people worry about most, right?
joe rogan
We're going to lose Miami.
steven e koonin
You're going to lose Miami, right?
So here's a chart.
I live in Manhattan some fraction of the time, and so I've gotten very interested in sea level at the battery, which is the tip of Manhattan.
And there has been a tide gauge there since about 1850 or 1860, and it measures the height of the ocean.
It got to average out over the tides and the waves and the weather and so on, but okay.
That black line on the graph from 1920 to 2020 is 100 years of actual data showing how fast the sea level is rising.
And what you can see is it goes up and down in a cycle, kind of like the Greenland thing we looked at.
And, you know, the peak was in 1950, and it was up at 5 millimeters a year.
We can talk about what that means in a second.
And then in 1980, it was down in 2 millimeters a year, and now again it's up at Four millimeters a year, and looks like it's headed down.
joe rogan
And the peak that you're looking at from the 1950s and 2020 is essentially the same height.
steven e koonin
That's right.
And, you know, to set a scale, three millimeters a year, which is kind of the average over that time, is a foot a century.
One foot rise a century, which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years, okay?
It's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents happening on these long timescales, 70, 80 years.
What's interesting is those colored graphs going out from the present to 2000 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about 8 millimeters a year, twice as much as we've ever seen, and then goes on up from there.
Those are the UN projections based on models.
And you can see there are large uncertainties.
And large variations.
I think, you know, if it's going to look like that, we're going to know pretty soon within the next 10 or 15 years.
And my bet is it's just going to go down again.
joe rogan
So why did they have these predictions that are so extreme?
steven e koonin
I don't know.
You should ask them.
They don't even match up with what's happening today.
joe rogan
No.
They're much more extreme.
If you're looking at those green lines and the blue lines, much more extreme than anything that we've seen over 100 years.
steven e koonin
And, you know, this is part of why I think we need a really rigorous review of these.
Allegedly authoritative reports.
joe rogan
As a scientist, how frustrating is it when ideology and dogmatic thinking and when someone's trying to push a narrative and it gets involved in something that is a very complex science with many, many variables, some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
It's very frustrating To talk to non-experts about this, but I'm even more frustrated with my scientific colleagues, because many of them know that there are these problems in communication, and they do nothing about it, or in fact, they abet it.
joe rogan
They abet it.
And many of them, like you said, who will talk to you privately, will not speak about it publicly for fear of retribution?
steven e koonin
Yeah, exactly.
You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book Was in part to inform people, not persuade them, but also to inform my fellow scientists, who are not climate scientists, about the kind of misrepresentation that's going on.
And many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said, Steve, thanks for doing that.
joe rogan
Thanks for doing that, but I have to shut my mouth.
steven e koonin
Yeah, I don't dare speak out about this.
joe rogan
Has it been a problem for you in your career writing this book?
unidentified
No.
steven e koonin
You know, I have enough other parts of my life that are interesting and robust.
I'm far enough along in my career that, frankly, I don't really care very much at this point what people think of me.
I've got enough stature.
You know, I... I've been advising the government on non-climate matters for a long time.
I help guide the national academies in some of the reports they did.
I do JSON. I advise companies.
It's fine.
I really just want to get people to understand.
Climate literacy and energy literacy—we haven't talked yet much about energy—are so important and people need to understand.
Let me give you an example of a different field that I think is a terrible example.
So there's this guy named Jonathan Gruber, who's a professor of economics at MIT. And he was one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.
Now, whatever you might think about Obamacare, What he said at one point was the only way we could get a principal provision of that act passed was to rely on the basic ignorance of the American people.
Wow.
All right?
And, you know, there's a videotape of him saying this at a conference.
unidentified
That's a crazy thing to say.
steven e koonin
And, you know, for an educator and for an advisor to say that is terrible.
By overhyping the climate threat, we've taken away from non-experts the ability to make their own judgments.
We have displaced other priorities, and we've got so many priorities that are beyond climate.
We have scared the bejesus out of young people, right?
You talk to young people and they think the world is going to end.
And so, you know, that's one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to just try to get people to understand.
joe rogan
Did you see that woman, I believe it was in Canada, but they listed her cause of death as climate change?
steven e koonin
No, I've not seen that.
joe rogan
You haven't seen that?
steven e koonin
No, but I'm not surprised.
joe rogan
You need to see that, because the first time I saw that, I was like, oh my god, here it comes.
I should say, before I read your book...
I was fairly convinced that we're in for a horrible next 50 years of climate change and rise of sea level, and I was buying all the catastrophic...
I mean, I bought it all.
And then Peter Attia turned me on to a book.
I started reading it.
I started listening to it, rather.
And I was just like, okay, this guy, I need to talk to him.
I need to find out what's going on.
Let me see if you can find that.
Have you found the article?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
No one can hear you.
unidentified
I'm trying to confirm its accuracy.
Because when I Googled it, it wasn't coming up a lot of places.
joe rogan
I told you, duck, duck, go.
jamie vernon
Okay, when I looked on the internet for it, it was coming up only in one very specific spot, so I'm trying to find out why.
joe rogan
Is it a bad source?
It's an interesting source, so I'm just trying to see.
Got it.
steven e koonin
When you find it, I want to talk about economic impact a little bit, because that's another interesting story.
joe rogan
Yeah.
There's a lot of factors that lead to a narrative being established.
What year do you think?
Is there a time you can pinpoint when this sort of alarmist perspective really took root?
steven e koonin
Yeah, I think it was the early 90s and it was in part the first UN assessment report that said maybe, you know, we're influencing it.
And then there was a subsequent report maybe a decade later that said there was a discernible human impact on the climate.
Al Gore's movie, I think the Obama administration pushed pretty hard.
And now you've got the Biden administration trying to infuse climate And energy in all sorts of government and private sector activities.
There we go.
Oh, come on.
joe rogan
Doctor reveals why he wrote climate change on patients' medical chart.
When a Canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart, he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines.
Climate change is what Dr. Kyle Merritt Wrote alongside a patient's symptoms following a heat wave which resulted in poor air quality across Nelson, British Columbia in late June.
Extreme weather condition during the North American summer, the general practitioner believed had deteriorated the health of a 70-year-old woman who was suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.
The idea that you would say that's climate change.
I'm going to read that again.
A 70-year-old woman who's suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan with no air conditioning.
So she's in a trailer, she's got diabetes, and she's suffering from heart failure.
And they said, climate change.
unidentified
Right.
joe rogan
And they put that on her autopsy.
steven e koonin
Not only that medicine, but the fact of taking one summer heat wave and calling it climate when it's really weather displays the ignorance of that doctor.
joe rogan
But it's also in vogue, right?
Of course, of course.
steven e koonin
Who doesn't want to be in vogue?
joe rogan
Yeah, who doesn't want to, like, hop on the track?
I'm sure you got a nice pat on the back.
steven e koonin
Oh, sure.
unidentified
And, of course, I get all clarity.
joe rogan
What's that?
jamie vernon
It was, like, added on the chart, not her diagnosis, according to him when asked.
joe rogan
Okay, it says, reflecting on the decision, Dr. Merritt said he wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it, but he felt it was important for both him and his colleagues to recognize the truth, in quotes, and add the contributive factor of climate change.
But he doesn't really know what he's talking about.
steven e koonin
Of course he doesn't.
And let's look at the data.
Can we pull up chart seven of the...
I'm going to show you something about that heat wave.
That's of the Kunin thumbs.
No, it's the other five.
unidentified
I know.
jamie vernon
When I looked this up, though, just for clarity, too, this is what – when I looked up the battery sea level trends, this is what pops up on the government's website.
steven e koonin
So that is – that's the sea level itself, not the – Shorter-term trends, but you can see in the upper right, it shows it's going up at 2.88 millimeters a year, just about 3 millimeters a year for the last 160 years.
joe rogan
So I'm confused here now, because in that other chart, it showed that the levels in, what was it, 1940?
steven e koonin
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So that's the slope of the other chart that we've been looking at, the shorter-term trend.
In other words, you can see, like, from 1930 to 1940, This level is going up more rapidly, right?
unidentified
Right.
steven e koonin
So that black line I showed you on my chart is the trend, how fast it's going up at any given time.
joe rogan
That's kind of deceptive then, right?
It's hard to look, because what I'm looking at, at that chart, I thought that was the actual level of the sea.
steven e koonin
No, no, no, it's not the level.
No, it's how fast it's going up.
joe rogan
Oh, okay.
Okay, so go back to the other one, Jamie, that you pulled up, and thank you for doing that.
Yep.
So this shows a rise in sea level.
steven e koonin
Sea level has been rising for 10,000 years.
joe rogan
How much?
steven e koonin
Well, it's got up 120 meters in 10,000 years.
That's 500 feet.
joe rogan
No, 400 feet.
400 feet in 10,000 years and how much over like the measurable time that we've been paying attention?
steven e koonin
So, can we pull up chart 11 in my file?
And I'll show you that.
There it is.
So, this is determined from geology.
And you can see we started 20,000 years ago and to the present it's gone up about 120. So a lot of this is post ice age.
That's right.
The glaciers were melting.
They started melting 20,000 years ago and what's interesting is that about 8,000 years ago Things slow down a lot, as you can see.
joe rogan
It flattens out.
steven e koonin
It flattens out.
It's not completely flat.
The real issue is not where the sea level is rising.
As you can see, it's been rising for 20,000 years.
The real issue is how fast is it rising and whether human influences are making it rise faster.
And that's what I showed you in the...
joe rogan
Now, how do they measure?
When they look at the percentage of how much agriculture has an impact, how much methane has an impact, how much transportation has an impact, how do they measure all that?
steven e koonin
Well, it's complicated.
The first question you can ask is how much carbon dioxide is the burning of fossil fuels putting up into the atmosphere?
And we can pretty well measure that.
We know how much coal is consumed, how much oil, how much natural gas.
Methane is harder because most of the methane That comes out is not from fossil fuels.
joe rogan
It's from cow burps, right?
steven e koonin
It's from cow burps, rice paddies, wastewater treatment, and so on.
Okay?
And, of course, if we're going to reduce those emissions, we have a much more difficult task than just stopping to burn natural gas.
joe rogan
So, what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases?
Like, say, what's the biggest contributor?
unidentified
Yeah.
steven e koonin
So, CO2 is the biggest and most problematic contributor because it lasts in the atmosphere a long time.
Centuries, by some measures.
Methane is much less problematic, even though it has an impact about half of CO2 currently, because it only lives for about 12 years.
joe rogan
So CO2 is the most significant, but is it also the most abundant?
steven e koonin
Yes.
But, you know, you shouldn't talk about abundance because there are very complicated issues about how the greenhouse gases actually trap the heat in the atmosphere.
What you really want to talk about is their contributions to what's called radiative forcing, Which is basically how much they enhance the heat-intercepting ability of the atmosphere.
joe rogan
So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2. That's correct.
steven e koonin
And methane.
joe rogan
And methane.
steven e koonin
But also, there are a couple of other minor gases like nitrous oxide and CFCs, but humans also exert a cooling influence on the climate.
joe rogan
How so?
steven e koonin
Because when we burn dirty coal, we make aerosols, smog, and so on.
That block out the sun a little bit.
And they knock off about half of what CO2 warms.
And if we stop burning dirty coal, which we should for other reasons, we're going to see the globe get even warmer than we might otherwise.
joe rogan
How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth?
steven e koonin
So as I said, it's about half the warming impact of CO2. Half the warming.
joe rogan
Okay, so the biggest contributor in terms of greenhouse gases, what industry causes the biggest?
steven e koonin
So power, electrical power generation is big.
Heat of various kinds, both for buildings but also for industrial processes, the next biggest contributor.
Transportation, which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases, globally is only 14% of greenhouse gases.
joe rogan
Now, does that vary by country to country?
steven e koonin
Oh, absolutely.
joe rogan
Depending upon the regulations?
unidentified
Oh, yeah.
steven e koonin
If you go to China and India, it's mostly electrical power.
In the U.S., about 40% of our emissions are transportation.
joe rogan
40%?
unidentified
Yeah.
joe rogan
Interesting.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
But the U.S. as a whole is only about 6%.
Billion tons of CO2 a year, whereas the globe as a whole is about 50 – not CO2, greenhouse gases generally.
U.S. is about 1, 8 percent, something like that.
No, more than that.
Let's see, it's about 6 out of 50, so 12 percent.
joe rogan
So then we have transportation.
So we have transportation in terms of moving goods and services.
steven e koonin
Yes, burning gasoline and diesel.
joe rogan
And then what's below that?
steven e koonin
Electrical power.
In the US, electrical power.
joe rogan
Is that coal?
steven e koonin
Coal and gas.
Wind and solar don't contribute directly to greenhouse gas emissions.
joe rogan
Nor does nuclear, right?
steven e koonin
Nuclear certainly doesn't either, right?
joe rogan
And then what's after that?
steven e koonin
You know, small potatoes, probably home heating and industrial heat.
But the big ones are power, transportation, and agriculture.
And globally, I don't know the U.S. number, but globally, agriculture is 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.
joe rogan
Wow.
And this includes animal agriculture and also monocrop agriculture in terms of like growing...
steven e koonin
Well, fertilizer production, but also rice paddies and wastewater treatments.
unidentified
Okay.
steven e koonin
Those bacteria that produce methane, that's how you treat wastewater and...
joe rogan
So, when talking about these various factors and how they impact the environment, how much into consideration does one have to take?
Like, what's the economic impact of making a radical change that's like, say, one of the things that keeps coming up is electric cars.
California has initiated a new law that I believe it's Somewhere in the 2030s, right?
They can no longer sell gasoline vehicles, which is really soon.
steven e koonin
Yes, I know.
So let's talk about economic impacts.
Let me first talk about the economic impact of a changing climate, okay?
And then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition, all right?
So could we put up chart 21 of the Kunin file?
And I'm going to show you a chart that comes right out of the most recent government report on the subject, which is on the left.
And what you see is The horizontal scale is how much the temperature would go up at the end of the century compared to what it is today.
And, you know, it goes up between 1 and 10 degrees or 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's a US chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade.
And what's shown on the vertical axis is the percent of damage to the US economy in 2100. And the takeaway from this is, first of all, as the temperature rise goes up, the damages go up.
But more importantly, for temperature rises of up to 5 degrees centigrade or 9 degrees Fahrenheit, it's 4% of the U.S. economy in 2100. I'm not exactly sure what that means.
That means that the economy, if the temperature were to go up, the economy would be 4% smaller in 2100 than it would have been otherwise.
joe rogan
Now, does that take into account the growth of the economy overall?
steven e koonin
Well, it's a relative statement.
So, if we go to the next chart, that's a wonderful question.
There's what would happen.
So, I'll show you the US economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century.
If it grows at 2% a year, which is kind of what everybody thinks it should be doing and might do, you get that curve.
If you assume a 4% impact at the end of the century or even a 10% impact, you just delay the growth by two years or a few years in 2100, 80 years from now, all right?
So this is not the climate crisis, okay?
The economic impact is projected to be minimal.
joe rogan
And this is the economic impact as the way things stand today without any major interventions in terms of...
steven e koonin
That's correct.
Well, no, it's really...
It's done as depending upon how much warmer the globe gets.
unidentified
Right.
steven e koonin
Okay?
So, remember, the Paris Agreement is trying to hold things to 2 degrees centigrade or about 4 degrees Fahrenheit, which is a few percent damage to the economy in 2100. Yes.
Okay?
Whereas the economy is going to grow by 2% a year.
So instead of 70 or 80 years from now, it being, you know, let's say 400, well, the US economy, instead of being 80 trillion dollars, it would be 76 trillion dollars or something like that in 2100. That seems like a lot of money.
Well, not as a percentage.
It grows by 2% a year, so it's a two-year delay in the growth.
joe rogan
Two-year delay in the growth.
steven e koonin
Okay.
joe rogan
And now, if major policy changes are implemented that are going to shift, like the sales of the combustion vehicles being banned, which is what they're doing in California, did that pass in California?
Do you know?
steven e koonin
I think that is the current policy in California.
joe rogan
I believe it's 2035. Right.
steven e koonin
Is that what it is?
And the federal government is pushing for the same policy nationwide.
joe rogan
Now is there enough of these minerals that make batteries to...
steven e koonin
So what we forget for people who don't understand energy, want to change the energy system, is that it is a system.
And so let's talk about cars, okay?
You have to change the car itself, which leads to issues about do you have enough minerals.
You have to change the fueling infrastructure, namely do we have enough charging points, and can the grid handle all these cars plugged in at once?
And then you have to change the fuel, or at least provide more electricity to power the cars in addition to what you're doing now.
And oh, by the way, they want to electrify heat as well in the houses.
So the grid is, yeah.
joe rogan
So here, Governor Newsom announced California to phase out gasoline-powered cars, drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel.
California's fight against climate change.
Yeah, it's 2035. So he wants all new passenger vehicles to be zero emission by 2035 and additional measures to eliminate harmful emissions from the transportation sector.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
joe rogan
It says there, the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California's carbon pollution, 80% of smog-forming pollution and 95% of toxic diesel emissions, all while communities in the Los Angeles Basin and Central Valley see some of the dirtiest and most toxic air in the country.
steven e koonin
So, you know, this conflates.
I mean, it's a wonderful example of the political discussion.
First of all, he's making a policy that will go into effect a long time after he's gone, okay, from the political scene.
The second is it conflates carbon pollution, and I hate that word because CO2, which is what they're talking about, is essential for plant growth.
The more CO2, the more plants grow, all right?
So in that sense, it's not at all pollution.
joe rogan
Is that an inconvenient truth?
steven e koonin
Yes.
joe rogan
And you know, the Earth has gotten 40% greener since 1980. Yeah, I'd heard about that from Randall Carlson, who explained that to me.
And then when I saw, it's actually in your book as well.
The thought process of carbon is only that carbon is a negative thing that's put out by human emissions, emissions from vehicles.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
joe rogan
But it's the fuel of plants.
steven e koonin
The fuel of plants.
So we can talk about the carbon cycle for a second, but let me continue with Governor Newsom for a moment, okay?
unidentified
Okay.
steven e koonin
I think what is going to happen as...
People start heading in that direction, and with other emissions reducing measures, is there's going to be popular pushback.
People won't be able to buy the kind of cars that they want or need, actually.
They're going to see their electricity rates go up.
They're going to see the grid becoming less reliable, certainly a phenomenon you know about here in Texas.
And they're going to say, tell me again why we're doing all of this when the U.S. is only 13 percent of global emissions.
We're going to see geopolitical leverage disappear as we rely more on imported oil.
It's already happened that kind of pushback in the U.K. Where the government tried to mandate heat pumps in the houses.
It would have been about 15,000 pounds per house.
And people, the legislature just said, hell no, we're not going to do this.
And I believe that that's what's going to happen in this country because they're pushing too far and too fast.
I like to say you need to change the The energy system, not by tooth extraction, but by orthodonture.
Slow, steady changes.
joe rogan
Is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's required to create a battery, specifically the type of conflict minerals and very rare earth minerals that we need right now currently, that that would shift by 2035?
steven e koonin
You know, people are doing a lot of research on batteries.
I think that's one of the fields we should be researching more, but it's not as though people haven't been trying.
And, you know, there are issues not only with the minerals you use, but the lifetime of the batteries, because they get charged and discharged, and that does mayhem at the molecular level that tries to destroy the structure.
There's also the weight and size of the batteries, so...
There are many things that go into making a good, viable battery.
I think we will see steady progress, but I'm not optimistic that there will be great breakthroughs.
People have been trying this for a long time.
joe rogan
But there's no great breakthroughs on the horizon or concepts that may lead to some sort of new technology?
steven e koonin
Well, you know, you hear people saying, well, we can produce a battery that's 50% better, but that's not enough.
And what I've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab, to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long, difficult job that you often fail at.
joe rogan
Have they done an analysis on all the rare earth minerals and what the quantities are and what would be required to make all the vehicles on earth electrical?
steven e koonin
I'm sure somebody has done those numbers.
I don't have them at my fingertips.
joe rogan
Is it possible?
steven e koonin
Yeah, so let me tell you about resource, okay?
Whether it's minerals or oil or gas and so on.
The amount that you can get out depends upon the cost to get it out.
And that depends upon the technology as well as how much is there.
And so, as the price goes up, you're willing to consider more extreme technology, which might cost more, but you can still produce it.
Oil's a wonderful example.
You know, at $20 a barrel, there are very few ways to produce oil.
But at $80 or $90 a barrel, which we're at today, then offshore production, shale, many other technologies become economically viable.
And so you shouldn't think about, you know, are we going to run out?
But are we going to be able to open up new resources with new technologies fast enough in order to be able to satisfy the demand?
joe rogan
So, you can't just look at it in terms of what you want to see.
You have to look at it in terms of there's a lot of factors.
steven e koonin
Yes.
So, you know, nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the U.S., let alone the globe.
A sensible plan would entail technology.
Economics, business, because people have to make money doing this.
It would entail what are the right policies and regulations, and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference.
The plans that are put out by the National Academy, by universities, are generally formulated by, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of academics, okay?
And I can say that because I used to be one and I still am, okay?
But very few people who have experience with the real energy system of having to create and operate, whether it's fueling or electrical power and so on.
So I think the best thing that can be done right now is to get that kind of group together, spend a while, we've got the time, and let's come up with something that will let us decarbonize in a graceful way rather than the kind of very disruptive things that are being proposed now.
joe rogan
We were looking at this proposal for an enormous machine that was like the size of a skyscraper.
Have you seen this?
unidentified
No.
steven e koonin
Well, tell me, what does the machine do?
joe rogan
The idea was that this machine extracts carbon and particulates from the atmosphere, so it reduces pollution.
steven e koonin
Yes.
So there are a number of people working on that.
It's called direct air capture.
And the question is, can you do it cheaply enough per ton?
And can you do it at scale, namely to do enough of it to make a material difference in how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere?
Right now, it's about $500 a ton of CO2 to extract it from the atmosphere.
joe rogan
How much is CO2 worth?
steven e koonin
Yes, well, unless the government intervenes, it's not worth anything.
But if you look at the right question, I think, to ask is, what does the price need to be to start to shift the power sector away from coal?
And the answer is about $40 a ton or $50 a ton, okay?
So people who are trying to do this hope to bring that $500 a ton down to $100 a ton, still too expensive.
But if the price of carbon goes up to $100 a ton, then you can start to make money.
But then the real question is, can you do this at scale?
And there I'm very doubtful.
You need to suck out 10 billion tons a year of CO2 and to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass through this machine with the capture efficiency you have and so on.
Nah.
If you want to capture CO2, the best way to do it is to plant trees.
unidentified
Really?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
So a little bit about the carbon cycle.
It's real interesting.
You know, when I was a kid, I hated earth science because you had to know too much.
I like math, physics, because you don't need to know much.
You just need to be clever.
But as I've gotten older, you start to realize these things are just wonderful science.
So, about 200 billion tons of carbon, so roughly 800 billion tons of CO2, go up and back between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface every year, more or less in balance.
800 billion up, 800 billion down, having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on.
So, 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember.
We are digging out of the ground About 9 billion tons of carbon every year in the form of oil, gas, and coal, and burning some forest as well, and putting it up into the atmosphere, into the cycle.
And it's gradually going up.
About half of it stays in the atmosphere every year.
So, if you could tweak that big cycle of 200 every year, By a little bit.
You could compensate in part or perhaps in whole for those 9 billion tons that we're putting in every year.
And the way to do that is to grow more trees or other living things because they suck carbon out of the atmosphere to make plant material.
joe rogan
And when you pointed this out in your book, you were talking about the study of green leaves and the percentage of green leaves.
This is all gotten through satellite imagery?
steven e koonin
Yes.
So we can measure what's called, well, not only the color, but what's called the leaf area index, which is the fraction of the land covered by leaves in any particular place.
Of course, it's really high in the Amazon.
It's pretty low in the Sahara or the Southwest.
And we can watch that over the years, and we've been watching it for 40, 50, 60 years.
And it's gone up, as I said, by about 40% globally.
joe rogan
The world is getting greener because there's more CO2. That's inconvenient because we don't want to think about it that way.
We want to think everything's catching on fire and it's all brown and there's no more water.
steven e koonin
Right.
You know, crop yields have been going up steadily since 1960. A lot of that is agronomy, that we've gotten better at farming, we've gotten better genetic strains of plants, but some of it also is more CO2. Plants love CO2. We put CO2 into greenhouses to get them to grow more.
They also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons.
So, for example, I don't like to cite, you know, this year, etc., but I will in this case.
You know, India has seen record grain harvests this year, more than any other year.
And long-term over the world, the yields have been going up.
joe rogan
Hmm.
unidentified
Okay?
joe rogan
Because it's getting warmer, we're getting better at agronomy, and there's more CO2. Now, is there a point of diminishing returns?
Like, is there a point where there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that then it becomes detrimental?
steven e koonin
Yes.
So there's a lot of controversy about that.
Some people say, you know, eventually you're going to be limited by water or nutrients in the soil, but we haven't seen it yet.
joe rogan
We haven't seen it yet.
So these factors that lead to climate change, the human contributions of agriculture, transportation, all the various ones that you discussed earlier, how much of that can be eliminated?
steven e koonin
At what cost?
All right.
And here I want to take a global view, okay?
We in the US have a very distorted view of the world.
We're a big country.
Many people don't travel.
They have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world.
In the developed world, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada and so on, about one and a half billion people and we have high energy use and we have a pretty good standard of living.
There are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic heart.
One point something billion people in China, another one point something billion people in India and so on.
The best way for them to get their energy in terms of reliability and convenience is fossil fuels.
And who are we to tell them, no, you can't do that?
That's a moral issue, as Alex Epstein, for example, has pointed out.
And so when you say, can we reduce and what's it going to cost?
I think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world where we can do it.
You know, we can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it.
But what are you going to do about the people in Indonesia, China, India who need the energy?
What do you tell them?
And nobody has a good answer for that.
joe rogan
So, we're looking at it from a perspective of this first world country, and we're not taking into consideration that there's a lot of countries, particularly third world countries, that are already struggling.
And if we implemented these radical restrictions, it would devastate their economy.
steven e koonin
Well, we can't implement restrictions on them.
We can implement restrictions on ourselves, which will come at some cost and benefit, cost, minimal benefit.
We're only 13, in the US, 13% of emissions, right?
joe rogan
Now, when we look at all of these factors, agriculture, transportation, all these different things, if you eliminated that, how much of an impact would that have on overall climate change and, you know, warming?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
So, you want to do that for the world as a whole or just for the U.S.? Let's just do it for the U.S. Yeah.
So, we're 13% of emissions.
What you need to understand is that emissions accumulate in the atmosphere.
And so, by eliminating U.S. emissions, You have only slowed down the rate at which the amount in the atmosphere accumulates.
joe rogan
When you say we're 13% globally?
steven e koonin
Globally, correct.
Correct.
So the rest of the world, the emissions are growing because they're burning coal and they're burning oil and gas because they need all that.
So our 13% decrease, if we could do it tomorrow, would be wiped out by about a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world.
joe rogan
So the growth in the rest of the world, they would just contribute so much that it wouldn't matter what we take out.
steven e koonin
That's right.
joe rogan
So they're growing and their economies are booming.
steven e koonin
And who's going to tell them you shouldn't do that?
I like to say, you know, they've got the wolf at the door, all right?
A real immediate problem with They need lighting, refrigeration, transportation, and so on.
And they're not going to worry about their cholesterol, the long term, you know, what's going to happen two generations from now, and it's kind of vague, and who knows exactly what's going to happen.
So they are making what I would think is actually a pretty Sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view.
joe rogan
Let's say if that didn't happen, let's say if the rest of the world stayed static exactly how it sits now, what we'd do, what is possible to do to eliminate our impact?
steven e koonin
If the rest of the world stayed static, Our influences would still—global influences would continue to grow because they keep emitting and it keeps accumulating.
Even if they're not emitting anymore in the future, they're still emitting and it's accumulating.
If we wanted to just stabilize human influences, not let them grow, We would have to go to net zero, namely zero emissions overall, by 2050, 30 years from now, if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise.
We'd have to go to zero by 2075, If we want it to stabilize at two-degree rise.
And if I look at the issues of development, demographics, technology, economics, and so on, I would say both of those goals are fantasy.
It's just not going to happen because people need the energy.
They need to develop.
We in the developed world in the US might reduce our emissions, but it ain't going to make much difference.
joe rogan
So, the proposals that you hear when you hear about government proposals for addressing climate change and when you hear about these summits where these countries get together and talk about what they're going to do to implement climate change, how much of that is just sort of signaling that they're working towards doing something good?
I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place, which is very odd.
Yeah.
What impact could happen from any of these things that they're proposing?
steven e koonin
Well, let's talk about what has happened in the past first.
We just finished in Glasgow in November COP26, the 26th annual conference of parties.
And during that time, it started 26 years ago, which is probably 1995 or so, greenhouse gas emissions have grown spectacularly, despite all of the rhetoric and the treaties or accords, promises, and so on.
The UN itself said that a lot of the pledges that countries have made to reduce their emissions over the next five to ten years are not going to be met, are not being met.
So, I think it's a lot of politicians talking.
joe rogan
So they're not met, but what if they were?
steven e koonin
So we might reduce emissions now from 52 billion tons a year equivalent down to 46 or something like that.
It's still a lot.
Remember, we've got to go to zero in 30 years if you want to stabilize.
joe rogan
But is that real?
So if they go to zero in 30 years, what is the actual result?
steven e koonin
Well, we will have stabilized, not eliminated, but just prevented from growing human influences on the climate.
joe rogan
And what percentage of the change in the climate is human influence?
steven e koonin
We said that's a subject of some debate right now.
joe rogan
What is the...
steven e koonin
Half, maybe, of the warming.
But there's a lot more than warming going on.
There are storms and there are droughts and floods and so on.
Most of those are within natural variability.
joe rogan
So in terms of like your 100-year chart of ups and downs, most of those...
steven e koonin
Not going to change that.
Not going to change that.
joe rogan
So is it a percentage point?
steven e koonin
No, I don't think people have tried to quantify at that level.
joe rogan
Because it's too complex?
steven e koonin
It's too complex.
And we have limited data, okay?
We don't have a hundred years worth of data in many variables.
joe rogan
And again, this is what we're talking about at the beginning, that when you're looking at a human lifetime, it's such a short period of time that we look at a shift in our lifetime and you're like, oh my god, the sky is falling.
steven e koonin
Yep.
Think about the Egyptians and the river, right?
Oh my god, drought's coming.
And you just wait another hundred years and it comes back up again.
That's not true for everything.
Humans are certainly having an influence, but a lot of the variability, the daily weather that the weather people talk about as climate change, it drives me crazy when I hear Al Roker talk about that as climate change.
joe rogan
It's not.
steven e koonin
It's not.
joe rogan
It's just the variability and the chaos of weather itself.
And this is for certain based on the models?
steven e koonin
Well, you know, it's our best guess.
This is an uncertain science.
The models are kind of all over the place.
And if you had a bet, many of these phenomena are not being influenced by humans.
joe rogan
Now, what prominent scientists and climate scientists have arguments against your book and against you and the way you're relaying this information?
steven e koonin
So, you know, Michael Mann, for example, Naomi Oreskes, Alvin Dressler, Kerry Emanuel at MIT, I'll tell you an interesting story about Kerry in a minute, have all spoken out and said, you know, Kunin doesn't have it right.
Very few of them offer specifics.
Kerry did.
I think I have a medium page that people can look at where I've written detailed rebuttals to the science.
I mean, when people say you're a show for the oil business or you're a physicist, what do you know about climate?
I can't answer those, all right?
But I can try to rebut the specific facts that they say I've misrepresented, and I do, I think, effectively.
Again, you can find it on my medium page.
Sorry about Kerry.
So Kerry was one of the people who criticized me early on.
He said, you know, anybody who talks about 100-year trends and hurricanes doesn't understand that we only have good data until 80 years.
But previously in this conversation, I read you the official statement which says no long-term trends over a century.
So he was being, I think, You know, he's putting on his Cambridge bow tie and say, nobody who understands, et cetera, et cetera.
I had the opportunity to share a stage with Kerry at MIT in October.
And it was convened by John Deutsch, who's a good friend of both of us and a senior scientific figure.
And I had my 10-15 minute presentation and I went through some of the things we've talked about.
Kerry had 10 or 15 minutes and he didn't challenge the science at all.
I was really surprised.
Instead, he started talking about fat tails, namely improbable things that might happen with high consequence.
But no disagreement with the science.
joe rogan
So the improbable things with high consequence, this is the sky that's falling there.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
So Greenland starts melting, the permafrost outgasses, the Atlantic circulation slows down, the Amazon dries out, and so on.
joe rogan
Did you try to press him?
steven e koonin
No, I didn't, because I was too polite.
He was being too polite.
joe rogan
Interesting.
steven e koonin
And unfortunately, that exchange was not recorded.
joe rogan
Even more interesting.
steven e koonin
I would love to be on a stage with some of these scientists, okay?
joe rogan
What about on a podcast?
One of the things that I know, I understand this is going to be a very controversial podcast and your book is controversial.
I would like to get someone to come on opposite of you next and either by themselves first and then you with them together or depending upon what they would like.
steven e koonin
I would certainly be up for that but let me tell you what you should do.
Have somebody else on and you can have them say where that guy Kunin is wrong.
But then have them write it down, okay?
You really, if you're going to do a scientific discussion, debate, you got to put it in writing, okay?
You can't call names and you can't say, okay.
So get them to write it down.
I've, of course, written down everything with citations.
Get her to write it down and then get the two of us on together and let's have a discussion.
joe rogan
Now, I know there's been some articles that have sort of attempted to debunk this.
What is the best one that you've seen?
steven e koonin
You know, I don't think any of them are really very good. - Right.
There's a young guy who, I'll get his name wrong, but you can look him up, who's a real climate scientist, and he wrote a book review.
And he said, you know, in terms of the data and the Historical data, I got it about right, which was a very brave thing for him to say.
But he said, I underestimated the ability of the models to talk about what's going to happen in the future.
I would disagree with that.
We can have a discussion about that.
But I thought that was a pretty fair review.
joe rogan
Now, how do they shape the models?
Like, how do they construct them?
steven e koonin
Boy, the model, so projecting the future more generally is very complicated.
First of all, you've got to say what emissions are going to be going forward, and that depends on technology and regulations.
But even given some scenario for emissions over the next 80 years, You got to feed that into a climate model and you use that to predict the temperature and other changes in the climate.
The climate models cut the earth into zillions, hundreds, millions of cubes that cover the earth They go up into the atmosphere, 20, 30 layers of cubes, and then down into the ocean, 20, 30 layers.
And then the models use the laws of physics to move water, air, energy, light, and so on through these cubes, 10 minutes at a time, typically.
And you do that for centuries, so millions of steps in time.
There are a number of fundamental problems in doing that, but let me just highlight two of them.
One is that the boxes are typically 60 miles on a side.
You can't make them smaller.
Because then you got too many boxes and the computer can't follow them all rapidly.
In our 60-mile scale, there are a lot of things that happen in the weather that are much smaller than 60 miles.
How many clouds are there?
Are there thunderheads?
Is it raining?
And so on.
And so you have to make assumptions about You know, given the temperature in the box and the humidity and so on, how much clouds are there?
What kind of clouds are there?
And so on.
And different people make different assumptions.
And so you get different answers coming out of the models.
That's one.
The second is the model's human influences are physically very small.
The flows of sunlight and heat in the climate system are measured in hundreds of watts per square meter.
The human influences are two watts per square meter.
And so the model has to be very precisely balanced if you're going to see the effect of human influences.
Balanced at about a percent.
And there are different ways to getting that balance, to tuning the models.
For example, one of the models It changes the way in which marine organisms on the surface produce a chemical called dimethyl sulfide.
This is a wonderful bit of earth science, okay?
So there are these bacteria, microorganisms, plankton, that live on the surface of the ocean.
And if they get too hot, they excrete, they put out a chemical that creates a haze.
So it's a kind of natural sunshade that they make.
And depending upon how much you say they do that, you can change the reflectivity a little bit and tune the model.
Who would have thought that that's what you need in order to get the climate of the Earth right?
But okay, so those are the knobs that they turn.
Different people tune in different ways, and so you get different answers.
Even more importantly, there are these long-term oscillations we've talked about a little bit.
And the models don't necessarily produce the amount of those or their timing, and so you get different answers as well.
So, as some of the modelers have said in professional papers, but not in the media, they only give us a hazy picture of what might happen globally.
And other people have said, again, credentialed members of the consensus, that for local or regional predictions, like the sea level in the battery or the drought in Texas, they're not capable of giving us anything useful.
joe rogan
So, these people that think that there is an established, settled climate change, what are they pointing to?
steven e koonin
They point to the global temperature rise.
joe rogan
Global temperature rise.
steven e koonin
Up and down and kind of not driven by human influences.
But they'll point to the temperature rise.
We could pull that up if you want to see that.
Let's do that, okay?
And I think this is something most...
It's one of the first charts in one of the files.
joe rogan
Which number is it?
steven e koonin
I'll tell you in one moment.
joe rogan
Is it?
steven e koonin
Yeah, that's it.
Great.
Okay.
So, on the left...
Is a measure of the global temperature.
It's not the global temperature itself, averaged over the globe, because we don't know that number actually very accurately.
No, we don't know it to within a degree centigrade or so, maybe a bit more.
joe rogan
When did we start knowing it?
steven e koonin
Well, we know changes.
It's easier to know changes.
And you can see this graph of changes In the global temperature, averaged over the globe, starts in about 1860. This is data from a project at Berkeley led by my friend Rich Muller whom I helped get this project funded and off the ground.
And what you can see Is that the data show up until about 1920 from 1860, it wasn't doing very much.
And then the temperature started to rise in about 1910. It went up by about half a degree To 1940, it then actually went down a little bit until 1970, and then it started to go up again, and it's been going up now.
And the dashed line shows somebody's projection, or at least just continuation of the trend to 2060. And what's interesting about this graph is, first of all, you can see that the rise has not been steady.
That the rate of rise from 1910 to 1940 is about the same as the rate of rise from 1980 to 2010. How could that be, and in fact it was even cooling from 1940 to 1970, how could that be if human influences have been growing steadily since 1900?
And the answer is, they don't know.
joe rogan
They don't know.
Now, when you're looking at this from 1860 to 2020, how far back can we look with this?
And do we do it based on core samples?
steven e koonin
So that's a great question.
This is the instrumental record, as it's called.
So it's based on thermometers on the ground.
These days, in the last 30, 40 years, we have satellites also.
But this is just the measurements of weather stations.
And there's a problem that There weren't too many weather stations starting in 1860, and even before that, far fewer.
The thermometer was only invented in the 18th century, I think, the mercury thermometer.
And so we have proxies.
We have weather records, not measured temperatures.
We have crop diaries and so on.
And then ice cores, of course, can tell us at particular places what the temperature was doing.
We do know, you know, if you go back to the 1600s, 1700s, there was the Little Ice Age.
And while there are still people who say it was only a regional phenomena, it certainly looks like it was around the globe.
And then it was about one and a half degrees cooler than what is shown there.
joe rogan
And what year did this start at?
steven e koonin
Oh, late 1600s, early 1700s.
joe rogan
And how did they measure it back then?
steven e koonin
We have ice records from...
joe rogan
Oh, from coarse apples.
steven e koonin
Well, not only that, but the Thames in London was frozen over.
Winters were much harsher.
The world was in a pretty sorry state, actually.
joe rogan
And so this is just through anecdotal reports or newspaper reports?
steven e koonin
Yeah, and we have ice core data also where you see the little ice age.
We can also, an interesting thing, we can't go back too far.
You know, if you drill into an oil well or a well in the ground, the water in the well remembers the temperature.
What the surface temperature was.
And so you can get some measure over the last 100 and some odd years.
joe rogan
How so?
How does it remember?
steven e koonin
Well, you know, the heat diffuses, kind of travels down from the surface.
And it travels.
And so by looking down, you can get a measure of what it was like 100 years ago.
People do that.
You know, paleoclimatology is a wonderful field.
There's a lot more techniques to look even further back.
It's just great science.
joe rogan
When you put this out, were you uneasy about this at all?
Were you like, oh boy, here we go?
steven e koonin
No, I knew what I was in for, but I was pretty confident.
You know, everything in the book is referenced to the official government reports or the quality data or the research literature that has happened since the reports were issued.
So people say, Kunin's not up to date.
Well, in fact, most of the stuff that is new was presaged in the book.
So, I was pretty confident.
Obviously, I wouldn't put it out if I didn't feel I was confident in it.
I knew I'd make a lot of people mad.
But, you know, I see my job, again, is to inform people, not to persuade them.
joe rogan
Yeah, the making the people mad thing, when that initially started happening, was there any consideration that maybe you could have worded things differently, or maybe you could have appeased them in any way?
steven e koonin
You know, I wanted to do something that was Kind of in your face.
Because, in fact, I wanted to get their attention.
I'm still, I believe, very accurate and very fair and balanced in the way I talk about the science.
But I didn't want to soften it at all.
Because I've been doing that a bit in other things I wrote, and it kind of, people tend to dismiss it at that point.
So I really wanted to get people's attention.
But still remain accurate to what the official science is.
joe rogan
And when it wasn't listed in the New York Times bestseller list, were you shocked by that?
steven e koonin
Nah.
What has shocked me, not so much that particular incident, is that I think there really are two media universes in the country, and I think quite apart from climate, that's a very bad thing to happen.
Let me give you one example.
So when the book was just about to come out, we had sent copies around, and My wife and kids turn on Bill Maher one night in, I think, early April.
And Bill Maher goes off on a 10-minute rant about this guy, Coonan, who publishes a book that says climate science, etc., etc.
I haven't had the stomach to watch it again.
But, you know, Bill Maher, of all people, Who, you know, is against religion and dogma and so on.
He obviously hadn't read the book, but he just went off.
It's just, you know, really bad.
joe rogan
What do you think motivated him to do something like that?
steven e koonin
You know, there is a narrative to preserve.
And anything like the Council of Trent or the Senators.
joe rogan
But why Bill Maher?
Because Bill Maher's not a politician.
Bill Maher is...
steven e koonin
What does Bill Maher know about climate, right?
joe rogan
Right.
steven e koonin
Okay.
I don't know.
joe rogan
So is it that he's signaling to the tribe?
steven e koonin
I think so.
unidentified
Yeah.
steven e koonin
I think so.
joe rogan
Well, he has to do a little of that, I think, unfortunately.
steven e koonin
I can't get into his head, but I can tell you, and I'll say it, people can hear it, I'd love to get on a stage with him and show him X, Y, and Z, and Bill, tell me why this is not true, and it's counter to what you probably believe.
joe rogan
Well, the problem is, if anybody hasn't read your book, and they would make an assumption based on the idea that you are a climate denier, so it starts with that, which is very clear from the very beginning of the book that's not the case.
steven e koonin
Right.
How can I deny What is actually in the official reports?
You know, if you say I'm a denier, let's have a conversation about who's denying what.
joe rogan
Yeah.
steven e koonin
You're going to deny the Greenland story.
You're going to deny the hurricane story.
You're going to deny the economic impact story.
I think it's really hard when you look at the actual documents and see it's right there.
joe rogan
And particularly that you're not saying that the climate isn't changing.
You're not saying that human beings don't have an influence on it.
You're saying what is unsettled is the amount of impact we have And why it's happening the way it's happening.
steven e koonin
And the consequences of it for ecosystems and society, right?
joe rogan
Yes.
steven e koonin
Let me come back to economic impact for a minute.
I believe we should be doing something about this, but what is being proposed is much too fast and is much too sweeping.
There's a guy named William Nordhaus.
Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2018 for a fundamental insight about this problem.
And that is that there is an optimal best pace to decarbonize.
If you decarbonize too rapidly, change out the energy system, as is being proposed, you incur a lot of cost associated with economic disruption.
You know, 8% of the U.S. GDP is oil and gas production.
You also deploy immature technology, less than the best solar panels or nuclear reactors or whatever.
If you do it too slowly, you incur a greater risk that something bad might happen with the climate due to human causes.
Bad things are going to happen anyway, but maybe they happen more often when humans are influencing the climate.
And so there is an optimal pace.
And his initial estimate was we could let the temperature go up to three degrees by the end of the century and still be optimal, best course.
I think he's revised that downward a little bit now, but still, we've got the time and we should do it in a thoughtful and graceful way and not, again, try to do tooth extraction.
joe rogan
So there should be some intervention, something done to deal with what we're doing and to mitigate the effect that human beings are having on the climate.
steven e koonin
Yeah.
I think the other...
Yes, we should do that.
We've got time.
It's going to be very difficult because of the developing world problem.
The other thing we need to do is be thinking about adaptation and resilience.
You know, I like to think about three categories of things We could do, we should do, and we will do.
And I like to try to stay away from the should because you've got to balance all these competing demands, particularly the developed world.
What I think we will do, looking at all the drivers, is we're going to adapt.
That's going to be the main way in which we will respond to a changing climate.
And, you know, adaptation has got a lot of things going for it.
It doesn't matter whether the climate is changing because of human influences or because of natural phenomena.
It's proportional.
If the climate changes a lot, we'll adapt a lot.
Climate changes a little, we'll adapt a little.
Adaptation is local, and so it's much more It's palatable politically.
You're spending for the here and now and not for something halfway around the world and a couple of generations away.
And it's also very effective.
Consider the following.
That the globe, as I showed you, has warmed about a degree centigrade, two degrees Fahrenheit, since 1900. During that time, we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare we've ever had.
The population in 1900 was two billion people.
Today it's almost eight, so it's gone up by a factor of four.
And we've seen spectacular improvement in nutrition, in health, in literacy, et cetera, et cetera, right?
To think that another one or one and a half degrees is going to completely derail that, just beggars belief.
joe rogan
And this one to one and a half degrees is projected over a period of how many years?
steven e koonin
That's by the end of the century.
By the end of the century.
So I should say, the best UN projection right now, making some assumptions about emissions, is that we'll go up another one and a half degrees.
joe rogan
Now, what is the worst case scenario if it does go over this one and a half degrees?
And what is the impact on it?
Is it mostly on the coasts?
Is it...
steven e koonin
Well, you know, you saw the sea level projections.
I don't think it's going to...
Change very much.
Maybe it goes from one foot a century to two feet a century even.
That would be pretty spectacular if that happened.
We might see more high temperatures, but then there are other parts of the globe as you move north that will become more temperate.
And on a time scale of a hundred years, society learns how to adapt to that, at least in the developed world.
joe rogan
You were saying also in your book that when they're looking at the global temperatures and they're listing these highest global temperature years, that there's also lowest temperature that sometimes coincides with those years.
steven e koonin
So, what's happening globally is that the Record high temperatures are not going up very much, but they are going up.
But what's also interesting is that the record low temperatures are going up faster.
joe rogan
Faster than the high temperatures?
steven e koonin
Faster than the high temperatures, yeah.
And so we're getting the climate in some ways is becoming milder temperature-wise than it is at the same time as it's warming.
And also, the warm parts of the globe, the tropics, are warming not as rapidly as the polar regions, particularly the Arctic.
That's warming pretty rapidly.
joe rogan
So the Arctic is warming rapidly, but other parts of the globe are not warming as rapidly.
And what did they attribute that to?
steven e koonin
There are various processes in the Arctic that are happening that accelerate the warming.
For example, The sea ice in the Arctic Ocean or on the land disappears or at least doesn't come back as rapidly in the wintertime and consequently the Earth absorbs a little bit more energy because the ice is reflective whereas the seawater is not.
joe rogan
Now, when you talk about adaptation and you talk about the rise in the global temperature, so if it does rise up a couple degrees, what sort of adaptation will be required and what areas of the world, or at least of our country, will actually benefit from a warming?
Is that a real factor?
steven e koonin
Yeah, sure.
I mean, you know, again, because the projected economic impact is pretty small, there are going to be winners and losers.
All right?
And I would say the southern parts of the U.S. are going to get warmer.
The northern parts will become more temperate.
And so Kansas, the Dakotas, Montana, etc., will become a little bit more temperate.
Agriculture will probably shift north, as it's already happening.
You change the genetics of what you're growing.
You change the agronomic technologies.
And we'll do just fine.
We've already been warming a degree a century, and I don't see that there have been great disruptions.
joe rogan
Well, we've really only had the sort of large-scale industrial age, you know, over this past century.
steven e koonin
This century.
And that makes us more capable of adapting than...
joe rogan
But it also makes us terrified that the changes happen so quickly and it leads to this fear of what's going to happen and what kind of damage we're doing.
It's irreversible.
unidentified
Right.
steven e koonin
So, okay.
People, in the end, what we do about this, I like to say, is a value judgment, okay?
The science is what it is.
I've tried to portray it accurately, certainties and uncertainties.
What we decide to do about it depends on risk tolerance, Intergenerational equity, North-South equity, and just cost-benefit generally.
Those are not scientific issues.
Those are value issues.
They're the proper concern of the politicians But you have to have an accurate representation of the risks and certainties and uncertainties in order to have that discussion.
And I think what people have done in the political and popular discussion is overhyped the threat in order to move the discussion one way or the other.
joe rogan
Is it safe to say that even if there was no impact by human beings on climate change, if there was zero impact because of our society and civilization, that there would still be change that we would have to work with?
steven e koonin
Absolutely.
Look, we had the Dust Bowl in this country in the 30s, okay?
And that was partly climate, natural climate, and partly farming practices.
And, of course, we had to deal with that.
We had the Little Ice Age.
Not in, you know, in anybody's lifetime, but it was certainly there.
And they had to deal with it.
And it was pretty bad.
joe rogan
And there's a thing about the coast, too, that always drives me kind of nuts when I think about it.
It's like we know when you look at maps...
You know, when you go back a million years or 100,000 years, the tides have risen and, like, where the coastline is has shifted.
steven e koonin
Yes, you saw it.
It was, you know, 400 feet in 20,000 years.
joe rogan
All right?
steven e koonin
400 feet pushes the...
The coastline in tremendously.
Of course it happens.
But for the time that we've had accurate measurements, you know, with tide gauges and so on, it's been going up at less than a foot a century, right?
And we've been perfectly fine in adapting to it.
joe rogan
And you think that that's going to continue to happen?
steven e koonin
Well, who can say what's really going to happen in the future?
But if I had a bet, I would.
And, you know, the politicians believe that, too.
I mean, you see the former President Obama, you see Bill Gates, all of whom are raising alarm.
They got houses on the beachfront.
All right?
So, if he really believed that...
joe rogan
Yeah.
steven e koonin
He'd be living in Colorado.
joe rogan
Now, there was some alarmism in, I think it was the 1970s, worried about the next ice age, that an ice age was coming.
What was that based on?
steven e koonin
Yeah, so you saw that cooling trend, and people started to get the data from ice cores for the first time to understand the cycle of Not what are called ice ages, but glaciations and interglacials.
They happen because of the way in which the sunlight falls on the Earth and how it changes due to the Earth's orbit and tilt of the axis of the Earth and so on.
They happen about once every 100,000 years.
The last interglacial, the last time the Earth was mostly ice-free, happened 125,000 years ago.
The temperature was thought to be 2 degrees warmer than it is currently, and the sea level was thought to be 20 feet higher than it is currently.
joe rogan
So, 125,000 years ago, it was very little ice?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
Wow.
And it's got to do, again, with how sunlight falls on the Earth.
It's called the Eemian, named after a river in Holland, where they first realized it.
And we see that kind of thing happen pretty regularly, roughly 70,000, 100,000 year intervals, back for a million years at least.
And it's paced by, again, the way in which the Earth's orbit changes and allows sunlight to fall on the North Pole.
joe rogan
I mentioned Randall Carlson, and one of the things that Randall had said to me, he said, what we really should be scared of is global cooling.
steven e koonin
We don't know.
So, you know, by some measures we're due, okay?
It's been, you saw the last glaciers disappeared about 20,000 years or started disappearing about 20,000 years ago.
And 20,000 years is about how long these interglacials last before the ice starts growing again, takes a long time for it to grow, and then it warms up pretty suddenly.
I have often thought, you know, what are the signatures that we'd start to enter a glaciation again?
What should we be looking for?
One of the obvious ones is that the snow cover in the northern hemisphere starts to last through the summers.
If and when that happened, it would of course take some thousands of years for the glaciers to build up.
But you might ask also, what geoengineering could we do?
What interventions would we do if we saw that starting to happen in order to forestall it from happening or slow it down?
And I don't think anybody, at least I haven't found anybody who's thought seriously about that.
It's a great academic exercise, I think.
joe rogan
Well, there have been some theories, some suggestions on geoengineering as far as cooling the earth, right?
steven e koonin
Yeah.
joe rogan
There's a suspension of reflective particles and… Good.
steven e koonin
Yes.
So, this is an idea that's been around for, you know, some number of decades.
And the idea is to put, as you said, some reflective particles into the stratosphere where they will hang around for a couple of years and enhance the reflectivity by a little bit.
And you don't need to do very much in order to offset the warming.
There are several downsides to doing that.
One is that you've got to keep putting the particles up there because they fall out, and if they fall out, it's going to get warmer again.
joe rogan
So how do they fall out?
steven e koonin
Just big gravity and they get trapped by water vapor and they fall out as rain and so on.
This is what happens every time a big volcano goes off.
So you remember Punitubo, perhaps?
Lovely sunsets whenever it went off in the 90s, 91 or 92. And then it fades off for about two years.
So we'd have to keep doing it, otherwise the temperature would rebound if we stopped.
joe rogan
And the fear would be that those suspended particles would get into our water supply?
unidentified
No, no, no.
steven e koonin
We already put a lot of junk up into the atmosphere by burning dirty coal.
Those stay in the lower atmosphere and come down pretty quickly.
They get rained out.
The amount you'd have to put up there is only one-tenth of what we put into the lower atmosphere already.
joe rogan
And would it change the way the sky looked?
steven e koonin
Yep.
It would make it a little bit hazier and dimmer.
It would look like what happened after a volcano.
The other bad thing, or at least somewhat downside to it, is it doesn't exactly cancel out the greenhouse gases because it only cools when the sun is shining, whereas the greenhouse gases are effective all the time.
It'll change precipitation patterns somewhat.
And people have done studies with models about how it would change.
You can just imagine the fights that would occur if the world decided to start to do this.
Somebody would say, hey, you know, it was rainy the last two years, and much more rainy than it should have been, and it was your geoengineering that did it, and therefore you owe me money.
joe rogan
There is some geoengineering that I was reading about, I believe it's Abu Dhabi, that does, they do cloud seeding.
I think they do it once a week.
So 52 times a year, they make it rain.
unidentified
Yeah.
steven e koonin
So those are local effects?
joe rogan
Yeah.
steven e koonin
And that's about weather modification.
And, you know, the Chinese are said to have done that before the Beijing Summer Games to keep the rain away.
Really?
Yeah.
joe rogan
And so...
steven e koonin
It's plausible that it works, actually.
But this is different, okay?
Because that's in the lower atmosphere.
This is way up there.
There are other schemes besides stuff in the atmosphere.
People have proposed creating mist near the ocean surface, like low-lying clouds.
And you can calculate how many boats you need to do that and putting stuff up into the lower atmosphere to make that happen.
joe rogan
So is there a technology that would involve the boats extracting water from the ocean and steaming it somehow?
steven e koonin
Yeah, salt crystals actually.
joe rogan
Salt crystals.
steven e koonin
Yeah, they're nucleate.
You know, ships already create tracks behind them just from the diesel exhaust that they have.
You can see them on the satellite and can tell you where the ship's been for a day or two.
So it would be more of that.
We could develop the technology.
The question is, you know, who's allowed to do it?
Is the world really going to do this?
One nation could decide to do it, but it would affect the global climate.
The real issues are governance, not the technology so much.
joe rogan
And also the potential negative consequences of some of this technology that they didn't anticipate.
steven e koonin
You're going to have to, you know, balance the pluses and minuses.
And I'm all for research into this, both the technology and the impacts, both positive and negative.
I'm very much against deployment of it.
But we should know whether we have it as a tool that we might take out someday if the climate started to go really bad.
joe rogan
There's a lot to think about.
steven e koonin
This is complicated stuff.
joe rogan
It's very complicated stuff.
steven e koonin
It's nuanced.
The amount of climate illiteracy and energy illiteracy is stunning.
And we're trying to make these decisions without people really understanding how much we know and what we don't know, what the possibilities are.
So that's why I wrote the book, you know?
joe rogan
There's also this reflexive, pejorative term of, you know, a climate science denier.
steven e koonin
Okay.
You know, if I were younger, I would say, you're triggering me.
All right?
So, if you go back two generations in my family, 200 of my relatives died in the Holocaust, okay, in the camps.
So, denier by itself.
joe rogan
Just the word.
steven e koonin
The word.
joe rogan
Offensive.
steven e koonin
If I were younger, I'd say, you're triggering me.
But, in fact, You know, what am I denying?
I'm just telling you what's in the reports.
joe rogan
No, I'm not in any way, of course.
steven e koonin
No, I'm speaking to a hypothetical interlocutor.
joe rogan
It's so reflexive.
I mean, it's just a reflex.
People do it, and, you know, and they say it with such conviction and confidence, and it's...
I know that just this episode getting out there is going to do that, especially in this day and age where everybody reacts...
Sort of signaling to their tribe almost before they analyze the science.
unidentified
Right.
steven e koonin
So what I hope is that, you know, people will read the book before they criticize, although that usually doesn't happen, and those who do read it will look up some of the references and say, yeah, that guy Kunin seems to be right.
Go ask your favorite climate scientist, is that guy Cootin right?
And if he is, what else haven't you told me?
joe rogan
Well, other than Bill Maher criticizing it, was there anybody else that criticized it that you clearly could tell that they haven't read the science or haven't read your book?
steven e koonin
Oh, I think many of the scientists who wrote The criticism in Scientific American clearly hadn't read the book because they say Koonin says X when in fact Koonin actually said not X. So what can you do about that when a public article is published?
You know, I actually submitted a rebuttal to Scientific American.
They refused to publish it.
joe rogan
Wow.
steven e koonin
Okay?
That's crazy.
joe rogan
That's not scientific.
steven e koonin
You know, as a kid, I used to read Scientific American cover to cover.
Because it was interesting and it discussed science.
I and many other people I know have stopped reading it over the last 20 years because it's become so political and the content has been dumbed down, if you like.
joe rogan
When did that start happening?
steven e koonin
You know, there was a German firm that took over the ownership of the magazine at least a decade ago.
I don't know exactly when.
We can look it up.
And I think that has exercised a lot of editorial control.
joe rogan
And that editorial control is going through an ideological filter.
steven e koonin
I believe so, yes.
joe rogan
Well, Steve, is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we wrap this up?
Is there anything that you feel like we missed?
unidentified
No.
steven e koonin
You know, I mean, maybe just a summary.
I'm a scientist.
I try to stick with the data and reasonable implications of it.
I understand something about modeling from a previous life.
I wrote a book on computational physics 40 years ago that did pretty well.
People should really understand that this is not a simple subject.
As we've been exploring, and to do a little bit of investigating for themselves.
Don't believe everything you hear, like so many other things these days in the media.
joe rogan
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
And thank you for writing this book and sticking your neck out and examining this at a very detailed level.
It was very interesting to read and listen to, actually.
And I really enjoyed our conversation.
steven e koonin
Great.
You know, my goal is always to just inform people.
They can make their own decisions about what to do, but at least they should do it on the basis of the facts.
joe rogan
Well, you've certainly stirred up a lively debate.
steven e koonin
Great.
Good.
joe rogan
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I really appreciate it.
unidentified
All right.
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