Episode 5
The Parrot and the Igloo: A Deep Dive into Climate Denial with Author David Lipsky
A conversation with David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo
Global warming is a long history spent in the hall of ironies, a statement that resonates throughout our discussion today. We delve into the fascinating yet troubling journey of climate science, tracing back to Svante Arrhenius, who first calculated the impact of accumulating greenhouse gases over a century ago, to the alarming forecasts of the 1950s that continue to haunt us. Amidst this, we uncover the unsettling tactics of climate denial, echoing the tobacco industry's playbook, where for-hire scientists sowed doubt to stall progress.
Lipsky shares his extraordinarily well-researched insights on how this narrative unfolded, revealing how the merchants of doubt have clouded our collective response to an existential crisis. Join us as we explore the paradoxes of our climate reality, where the awareness of impending crisis often clashes with a lack of decisive action, leaving us to wonder: How did we end up here?
This episode is a witty and thought-provoking discussion revealing the intricate relationship between science, politics, and public perception.
Takeaways:
- Svante Arrhenius's early calculations of greenhouse gases highlight a century-long understanding of climate science.
- The irony of climate denial mirrors the tobacco industry's playbook, using misinformation to sway public opinion.
- David Lipski's 'The Parrot and the Igloo' reveals the long history of climate change awareness and its frustrating denial.
- Our discussions on global warming reflect a tragicomedy, emphasizing the urgent necessity for action in a delayed response.
- The historical context of climate science illustrates how public understanding has evolved yet remained stagnant in action.
- Despite awareness since the 1950s, global warming remains contentious, showcasing our collective failure to act decisively.
About David Lipsky
Visit GlobalWarmingisReal
Transcript
It was Svante August Arrhenius, a Nobel Prize winning Swedish physicist and chemist who did the first hard calculations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and how burning coal could upset Earth's energy balance.
Speaker A:His calculations, done so long ago, proved hauntingly accurate.
Speaker A: In the: Speaker A: In October of: Speaker A:Global warming is a long history spent in the hall of Ironies.
Speaker A:That's an excerpt from David Lipski's the Parrot and the Igloo.
Speaker A:Lipski is an excellent storyteller, a New York Times best selling author and he brings his writing skills to bear in his long exhaustive study of climate science, climate change and climate denial.
Speaker A:He tells me in our upcoming interview how writing the book was an act of revenge against the merchants of doubt that have clouded our response to climate change.
Speaker A:It is a long circuitous, sometimes funny, often enraging story well told by Mr.
Speaker A:Lipski.
Speaker A:Join me on this lively discussion with David Lipski, author of the Parrot and the Igloo.
Speaker B:Let me put my headphones on and tell me how the sound quality is.
Speaker C:Okay.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:So horse are good.
Speaker B:Where do I find you?
Speaker C:Where am I?
Speaker C:I'm in the Monterey Bay area in the West Coast.
Speaker B:That looked like, that had the.
Speaker B:That looked like a Bay area.
Speaker B:Yeah, a Bay area shelf and.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Where are you in.
Speaker C:Where are you?
Speaker B:I'm in the upper part of midtown Manhattan.
Speaker B:But I think that my background has no character whatsoever.
Speaker B:You could not draw a single imprint.
Speaker B:I think it maybe looks like a supply closet at some sort of medium sized corporate firm.
Speaker B:That's good.
Speaker C:So I gotta say I'm really enjoying your book.
Speaker C:I was gonna like power through it and get to the, get to the chase, you know, all the evil people that are denying crime.
Speaker C:But when I started it, it's just, I'm slow walking through it because it's such an enjoyable read.
Speaker B:So thanks very much.
Speaker C:Thanks for that.
Speaker C:What was the one line that global warming is a long history.
Speaker C:Spit in the hall of ironies.
Speaker C:I think that's great.
Speaker B:Can I tell you another irony right now?
Speaker B:Yeah, please.
Speaker B:You know that we had our first good year on emissions last year.
Speaker B: % by: Speaker B:Halfway there.
Speaker B:Everyone's after all the headlines.
Speaker B:No one did a progress report.
Speaker B:We're halfway There.
Speaker B: % since: Speaker B:However, hours are down and our coal use, as you know, is wildly down.
Speaker B: Around: Speaker B:I think now we're under 20%.
Speaker B:Do you know what, off the top.
Speaker C:Of my head I'd want to say natural gas, but I'm not sure.
Speaker B:Yeah, no, of course, but that's fracking.
Speaker B:Like every good hearted person wanted to go out and protest fracking because where do we get the right to squeeze water into fissures under our boots?
Speaker B:But that's the best thing, that terrible thing that we do to the planet is the best thing that we can do to the planet at the moment.
Speaker B:Look, how could a story not be ironical about this issue?
Speaker B:Let's say Superman.
Speaker B:Let's say Superman is the one thing that's keeping Earth safe from intergalactic threats.
Speaker B:And then it turns out that Superman is radioactive to every human being.
Speaker B:That is the ironic situation we find ourselves.
Speaker B:Anyway.
Speaker B:Yes, thank you for making that.
Speaker C:Yeah, it's interesting about coal.
Speaker C:I recently wrote a brief article, I guess the G7 has pledged to globally, of course, phase out all these catchphrases.
Speaker C: Phase out unabated coal by: Speaker C:And what was interesting was I did a social media Facebook boost on that post.
Speaker C:And the denial, the what is the 10% of the noisy people that just, they don't even realize what we just talked about, how the United States is actually really cutting down on coal.
Speaker C:They just, you know, what were they saying?
Speaker C:A lot of it was about China.
Speaker C:They just mentioned China.
Speaker C:You know, China's using coal.
Speaker C:One comment was, how are you going to power all those electric cars from Joe Biden?
Speaker C:A lot of it didn't even.
Speaker C:My Facebook page is called Global Warming is Real.
Speaker C:So they didn't even get to the article headline.
Speaker C:They just stopped.
Speaker C:They just stopped right there.
Speaker C:And you know, I'm a fool.
Speaker C:It's a hoax.
Speaker C:It's sometimes depressing to see that there's still.
Speaker C:And I know that it's a small, small vocal group, but they're there and they believe all these crazy things that you know, the hoax.
Speaker B:And what do you, what do you think is, what do you think is motivating that like they're right about.
Speaker B:They write about China.
Speaker B:I'm sure you know this number I know, which is the number of coal plants they've built on an annual basis last couple of years is like 168 new coal plants in China.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:That is basically one every three days.
Speaker B:It is shocking number.
Speaker B:It is.
Speaker B:What do you think is motivating them to say that?
Speaker C:To say, these deniers about being a hoax and all this sort of thing?
Speaker C:That's a good question.
Speaker C:You know, climate change has become such a part of the culture war now, and I guess they listen to Fox.
Speaker C:I don't know.
Speaker C:They're getting their information.
Speaker B:I like how you were gonna say it's Fox, and then you're like, fuck it.
Speaker B:I don't want to be the person saying Fox News is bad today.
Speaker B:Let someone else say it at Pacific time, but not me.
Speaker C:It feels too easy to say that sometime.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:Yeah, of course.
Speaker B:So what do you think is like, I have a thought about it, but I'm really curious to hear yours.
Speaker C:Well, perhaps fear is part of it.
Speaker C:I mean, what they see is their way of life, you know, being threatened and they're going after the messenger, perhaps.
Speaker C:And that's a viable or a realistic fear.
Speaker C:I mean, I understand that the world we live in is unsustainable and I don't really know how we're going to get out of it necessarily.
Speaker C:So it's kind of frightening.
Speaker C:But I think it's.
Speaker C:I think it's fair.
Speaker C:I think it ties in with all sorts of other political narratives that are happening right now in the U.S.
Speaker C:well, globally, I guess, but in the U.S.
Speaker C:and they equate people like me that write about and you that write about climate change as part of the problem, part of what's threatening their existence, all those same.
Speaker B:I was taking notes on them because they were interesting, all of those.
Speaker B:That's the way I understand it, too.
Speaker B:I think there's probably only a couple things that I would add to it.
Speaker B:I was just curious.
Speaker B:And then there's one that probably that I would have a special reason to think about.
Speaker B:Actually, there's two that I would have a special reason to think about.
Speaker B:One is my favorite movie is Jaws.
Speaker C:Oh, okay.
Speaker B:Have you ever seen Jaws?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:Long time ago, but yeah.
Speaker B:Okay, watch it.
Speaker B:Watch it again.
Speaker B:A simple explanation for why they would want to attack you is just the plot of Jaws.
Speaker B:And it's also the plot of Enemy of the People, which is, I think, Ibsen.
Speaker B:Do you know the plot of An Enemy of the People?
Speaker B:And you can just look it up.
Speaker B:You can look it up on wiki and you'll smile when you read it.
Speaker B:Okay, I'll look it up.
Speaker B:What it said, what it suggests is that human behavior is standard across eras, regardless of the issue, and in a weird way, predictable.
Speaker B:So here's the plot of An Enemy of the People.
Speaker B:There's a town, let's say it's in Germany or it's in Sweden.
Speaker B:I think it's in Swedish.
Speaker B:Wouldn't it be funny if it's not by Ibsen at all?
Speaker B:But in any event, he's a town doctor and they have a spring like Lourdes that people come to.
Speaker B:And, you know, there's a lot of tourism.
Speaker B:It's a quiet moneymaker for the town.
Speaker B:And for fun, just the doctor is doing a science experiment.
Speaker B:He tests it, and it turns out that that spring causes typhus.
Speaker B:There's just no question about it.
Speaker B:It is just a polluted spring.
Speaker B:And so the thing that's a money generator for the town is poisonous.
Speaker B:And so he goes to.
Speaker B:In the first few scenes, the mayor is like, you're our best doctor.
Speaker B:I love growing up with you.
Speaker B:You're amazing.
Speaker B:And then everybody exiles him, ostracizes him, because the data that he's bringing now, that's also the plot of Jaws.
Speaker B:The chief says the shark is.
Speaker B:And the mayor says very frankly, Amity.
Speaker B:He says to him, confidentially, amity is a summer town.
Speaker B:We need summer dollars.
Speaker B:And so everybody is angry at the chief.
Speaker B:When you're seen, if you know the movie pretty well, the scene where Robert Shaw drags his fingernails across the blackboard to get people's attention and then he offers to be hired.
Speaker B:Everyone's angry at the chief because he wants to shut the beaches down and they don't want to.
Speaker B:So has nothing.
Speaker B:Like, once you understand that's how people respond when something that they've relied on and something that's helped them make money, there's a suggestion that it'd be taken away.
Speaker B:Then it allows you to be.
Speaker B:Not to like those people, but to understand that it's human.
Speaker B:And then try to figure out don't have to do with one's inane angry desire.
Speaker B:Innate angry desire just to squash.
Speaker B:Second thing that I find kind of fascinating is that S.
Speaker B:Fred Singer, who I'm sure you know his dark works.
Speaker B:And if not, you'll read about him in the second half of the book.
Speaker B:Yeah, I know.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:So he's one of the two.
Speaker B:Two or three biggest.
Speaker B:I would say he probably did more damage than anybody.
Speaker B:All he wanted was that we do a cost benefit analysis.
Speaker B:Like if you just.
Speaker B:If you took away all of his lies and his comically awkward lies.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like the best.
Speaker B:I think the one woman I quote, which I love because it's so edged.
Speaker B:This is about Sea level rise.
Speaker B:The best thinking may be that it is a lowering of the land surface, but I just love the bullshittiness.
Speaker B:But also the best thinking.
Speaker B:But think about how just how wonderfully lawyered it is and that he can do that on the fly.
Speaker B:The best thinking may be.
Speaker B:And also he kept saying, I know, you know, how this happened, but they feasted on that bad satellite Data for about 20 years.
Speaker B:The satellites didn't show that there was heating at the poles, especially a lot of heating up by Grayland.
Speaker B:And so he would say, even though that was corrected by the middle 90s, he still was.
Speaker B:He was still quoting the bad data by the early part of our century.
Speaker B:And so he kept saying for years, he would say, if it were true, we would see that there was melting at the pulse.
Speaker B: l Aschenbach from The post in: Speaker B:You can navigate it 2/3 of the year.
Speaker B:And instead of saying, oh, I was wrong, he then said, oh, that's great.
Speaker B:For years he didn't even say, that's great.
Speaker B:Well, for years we've been looking for a Northwest Passage, and now we found one like he just shifted.
Speaker B:So anyway, the result of all of his desperate sort of Daffy Duck on the vaudeville stage improvisations, the result is he got us to the situation that he wanted in the mid-80s when he started thinking about this, and especially in the 90s, what he wanted to do since he styled himself an economist.
Speaker B:He wanted us to do a cost benefits analysis, which is, how much is it?
Speaker B:How bad is it to have ourselves heat up 1 to 4 degrees versus how good is it to have the convenience of fossil fuel?
Speaker B:Now, if we had acted during the window when this issue was fresh, we wouldn't have done that, right?
Speaker B:And we would be much farther along.
Speaker B:But now that we've waited for 30 or 40 years and that the average voter can see that nothing horrible happened immediately, they are naturally doing the cost benefits analysis in their head.
Speaker B:And that's the situation that we're in now, which is they've had 30 years of intelligently stirred warnings about this and they've decided it's livable.
Speaker B:And that's what they're trying to express to you.
Speaker B:Now, the other.
Speaker B:Those are the two ways that I looked at it that I thought you might not have.
Speaker B:The culture war thing, that's what the title of the book means, which is generally what any issue walks into the auditorium of our national debating questions.
Speaker B:It gets cycled to one or the other.
Speaker B:And when you get to the end, you'll see that where.
Speaker B:We could talk about it now if you wanted.
Speaker B:But I think that once we see an issue become that way, take off its wheel clothes and put on team clothes.
Speaker B:I think a part of us that is beyond our social responsibilities understands this bullshit.
Speaker B:And I think that's a problem.
Speaker B:And it's bad that this happened to global warming the way it's happened to everything else.
Speaker B:I don't think they're wrong to see it that way.
Speaker B:For example, just as a side note, if you're an intelligent.
Speaker B:I didn't want to say the word because one thing I learned from spending, but I spent about four or five years deeply involved with the military because I went to West Point as a reporter, basically.
Speaker B:And I was a funny person to send to that because my family was so progressive that my father told my brother and I when we were, you know, 10, 10 and 8, that we could do any job we wanted.
Speaker B:We could be doctors, we could.
Speaker B:We could clean streets.
Speaker B:The only thing he would forbid is that if we ever tried to join the military, he would hire strong guys to break our legs because he thought they were so immoral.
Speaker B:Okay, but when I.
Speaker B:If you ever.
Speaker B:You must know people in the military, they're great and they actually believe in a lot of the stuff that we claim to believe outside.
Speaker B:Like they don't care about money, and they do care about the people on the left and right, and they do care about shared objectives.
Speaker B:One thing I also learned during the four or five years that I was reporting on the military or reporting on the military experience at West Point is there are a lot of good people who believe things that you and I disagree with.
Speaker B:And looking at it as science, if we were pretending we're scientists, looking at it in a polarizing way hasn't solved the problem of people disagreeing with us in ways that we see aren't to their benefit or to the natural benefit.
Speaker B:So I resent myself that I wanted to say assholes.
Speaker B:It is totally counterproductive.
Speaker B:However, if somebody who is disinfined to believe this, think about their experience over the last 30 years.
Speaker B:This is the most serious issue facing us.
Speaker B:One of the fun things when you get to the denier section of the book is just how repetitive the history of the last 30 or 40 years has become.
Speaker B:The same issues.
Speaker B:Abortion is back.
Speaker B:Immigration is back.
Speaker B:Education is back.
Speaker B:Like we.
Speaker B:In a weird way, you could argue that one of the.
Speaker B:Among the ironic bits of that, among the ironic bits of misfortune suffered by this particular issue is that it walked into the political auditorium at the moment.
Speaker B:That campaign strategy, that information discipline, achieved maturity as a profession.
Speaker B:So that what Lee Atwater, what people like Lee Atwater put into practice in the later 70s and in the 80s, is a way to keep issues constantly in play but never resolving them.
Speaker B:So you always have gotd.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Without ever having to reach an issue.
Speaker B:Like one of the funny things about the abortion.
Speaker B:Tom.
Speaker B:Do you want to call you Tom Thomas?
Speaker B:Okay, great.
Speaker B:Tom, I know you're a political head too, right?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:So the abortion issue, what they understood, not people who were committed, not people who were movement conservatives, but the people who, like Reagan, were fellow travelers with them.
Speaker B:They understood that the abortion thing would be great for gotv.
Speaker B:And you could keep saying, hey, we're going to get more justices on the court if you keep electing us.
Speaker B:And then some smart people in the room said, at a certain point we will have elected enough justices to actually pass that law and it will make us unpalatable.
Speaker B:And the idea was we'll cross that bridge when we get there.
Speaker B:And now they're there.
Speaker B:Right?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:So at the same time, that campaign strategy achieved critical mass and became an absolutely viable and devious profession.
Speaker B: Then it came: Speaker C:Right.
Speaker B:And so they can tell that it's also a GOTV thing for the Democrats.
Speaker B:And so since the Democrats are using it tribally, they respond tribally.
Speaker B:So you have heard that it's the most serious issue facing us as a way to get thought leaders to say we need to have a Democrat now more than ever.
Speaker B:We need to have a Democrat here.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:That is why you have thought that that's why you would do the high end work.
Speaker B:It's the same reason why the West Wing.
Speaker B:Who would have thought we'd be talking about Aaron Sorkin this morning?
Speaker B:It's the reason that the West Wing was the most expensive ad for a while on NBC.
Speaker B:Never that highly rated a show, but the audience was the audience that BMW wanted.
Speaker B:So that that was the reason why if you read stuff about advertising on the West Wing during its first few seasons, it was super attractive as a get.
Speaker B:You wanted to buy your half minute or minute, even though it wasn't a giant.
Speaker B:It wasn't a giant viewership, but it was the right viewership.
Speaker B:Similarly, it's good to make those noises that you were, if you elect us, we're going to.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's fun to read about similarly if you make the noises that if you elect our side, we're going to deal with the problem, even though it's never polled terribly high as an issue.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It's always at the bottom, even with kids, even with college students, however much they talk about it.
Speaker B:Gallup did polls this season and also Harvard through Harris did polls this season and it was down near the bottom, up at the top with inflation and jobs, as it always is with kids.
Speaker C:That's interesting though.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:No, because we think of them as the most committed.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:But anyway, if you keep hearing thought leaders saying this is the key issue, and when I was mentioning that our politics have become comically, wonderfully circular.
Speaker B:1992, Margaret Thatcher is saying the biggest threat is not from Saddam Hussein.
Speaker B:And his text, the biggest threat is from the possibility of global climate change.
Speaker B: That's the end of: Speaker B:Hamz Blix, in the last weeks before we go into Iraq again, is saying the biggest threat is not Hussein.
Speaker B:I'm much more worried about global climate change.
Speaker B:So that.
Speaker B:That's how circulated the same speeches delivered on the eve of the exact same international events.
Speaker B:Anyway, so if you've been hearing that for 30 years and then as you'll see when you get to that part of the book, a.
Speaker B: back a verdict in February of: Speaker B:We don't have the idea about EVs then.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:There isn't an ambitious plan to bring back more effective nuclear reactors.
Speaker B:Do you know what we decided to.
Speaker C: Ban that year in: Speaker C:No.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:That was the big emotional.
Speaker B:The big emotional issue that they began with was the fucking light bulb.
Speaker B:The light bulb.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:It was so crushing to Al Gore that at Davos, after he got the Nobel, he's saying it's about changing laws, not light bulbs.
Speaker B:Even though An Inconvenient Truth ended with advice like change or light bulbs, he didn't mean that.
Speaker B:The kind of thing that we should focus on.
Speaker B:Because if you are unconvinced or if you think that the deal we get from fossil fuels balance the pros and cons is still pretty good.
Speaker B:If you're hearing for 28 years that nothing is more important and then they begin by saying, let's get rid of light bulbs, you're going to think that it's not true.
Speaker B:Similarly, if we are hearing that this is the biggest challenge facing the world and no actions are taken.
Speaker B: bruary and March And April of: Speaker B:Might stay in China.
Speaker B:It has spread to Europe.
Speaker B:Italy is more like us than China is.
Speaker B:And they are not letting people out of their houses at night.
Speaker B:They are actually patrolling the streets and there's a crisis in ventilators.
Speaker B:And so that is a problem.
Speaker B:And we see that over a two week period, people change their entire way of life and they change it for more than a year.
Speaker B:But that is seen as a smaller problem than global warming.
Speaker B: earing for, at that point, by: Speaker B:What could they wonder?
Speaker B:But is it a hoax?
Speaker C:Yeah, I mean, that makes, makes perfect sense.
Speaker C:Yeah, it does.
Speaker C:It's.
Speaker C:You know, I've done two of the COP conferences.
Speaker C: in: Speaker B:And was 15 cutter.
Speaker B:Is that right or is that 15?
Speaker C:Was, was Copenhagen.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:And what was interesting to me, and at this point.
Speaker C:Well, I'll back up.
Speaker B:Go for it.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, yeah, in Copenhagen.
Speaker C:Arrived on scene there the second day after it started.
Speaker C:And by then the whole thing was off the rails.
Speaker C:Everybody's mad at everybody else.
Speaker C:And that was the one where we trying to figure out what to do after the Kyoto Protocol.
Speaker C:And that was disheartening.
Speaker B:Yeah, that was the one that was seen as a total failure.
Speaker C:Total failure.
Speaker C: And then Paris in: Speaker C:You know, we, everybody was.
Speaker B:Copenhagen also, when you reread, that was also compromised by the beginning of Climategate.
Speaker B:So that's the other reason that Copenhagen couldn't get.
Speaker C:That's right.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:When you read that part of the book, you'll get a cold sweat.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, I remember that.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B: But then, but then: Speaker C:There was just a determination to come away with something.
Speaker C:The whole, the whole vibe around the conference was a lot more positive than I do.
Speaker C:It's a real side note.
Speaker C:I remember I was riding into the compound.
Speaker C:They had shared rides with somebody from the E.U.
Speaker C: is is, of course, December of: Speaker C:And she said, you know, we're really concerned over here in Europe about Donald Trump.
Speaker C:And I remember saying, don't worry, there's no Chance you'll ever even get nominated.
Speaker C:So I was wrong about that.
Speaker C:I wish I could find that person and go, hey, I'm really sorry.
Speaker C:But you know, since then, since then, these cop conferences, they've become more.
Speaker C:The last one, what was it?
Speaker C:28.
Speaker C:What was the last one?
Speaker C:The cop.
Speaker C:Wow.
Speaker B:Yeah, sorry.
Speaker B:It was all.
Speaker B:It was in.
Speaker B:It was in.
Speaker B:It was in Emirates.
Speaker B:Yeah, it was in the Emirates.
Speaker C:I wasn't there, but the presence of the fossil fuel industry and like you were just saying, after all this time, nothing has really happened substantially.
Speaker C:I've kind of lost my faith in these cop conferences because it just doesn't.
Speaker B:Nothing.
Speaker C:There's a lot of talk and we have, we have the Paris agreement, which even if we were to.
Speaker C:If all the countries were to do their nationally.
Speaker C:What is it?
Speaker B:Diet.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Meet their agree to obligation.
Speaker C:You know what the science says still be not enough.
Speaker C:And ratcheting up ambition and all these, like the G7, they want to phase out unabated coal.
Speaker C:There's just a lot of loopholes that leaves avenues for nothing to happen.
Speaker C:And so I can understand people's frustration.
Speaker C:But on the other hand, you know, I have some of these people, like I was talking about the trolls that, that harass me coming from the Midwest, like right now they're in the middle.
Speaker B:Of a heat wave.
Speaker C:And I mean, they're experiencing the climate change, but they're still denying it, which is interesting to me.
Speaker C:I mean, they see the climate changing and I've talked to other people that are like, working on the ground, like farmers and people that.
Speaker C:Ski resort owners, they, they see it too.
Speaker C:But I think they're more open to admitting that climate change is real.
Speaker C:They might not like.
Speaker B:They might not like aoc, they might feel their back hairs go up when AOC is on television, but they see.
Speaker C:The climate is changing.
Speaker B:Yeah, there's a few ways to think about that.
Speaker B:But the basic thing is very similar to the vaccine, to the way people in those parts of the country were celebrating, sometimes not taking the vaccine, although you kind of suspected they were taking the vaccinations and then pretending that they hadn't taken the.
Speaker B:That's my assumption.
Speaker B:But it shows just how powerful.
Speaker B:They're yelling angrily about how this isn't true while they are, you know, wiping the humidity off the inside of their windshields while they're driving.
Speaker B:It shows just how inflamed we are, how effective medicine became for both parties.
Speaker B:That you would celebrate the thing that's causing you discomfort and you would feel that you were Being a good member of your tribe, one of the things that you would think about maybe, is that a national system and planet that was given this data and converted into a normal argument.
Speaker B:It's a little bit like a, it's like a, it's sort of like a test to see just how effective we are as a people.
Speaker B:And I don't just mean here, but overseas too.
Speaker B:Like, like if we can't, if we can't see past that, you could argue maybe that's the verdict, maybe that's physics verdict on this thing that we built.
Speaker B:Do you see what I mean?
Speaker B:I know that there's a process where you drink a thing that's like grapefruit juice at a doctor's office and then your, your, your circulatory system pumps it out to all areas of your body and then you stand in front of a screen and they can see how the different systems are working.
Speaker B:Yeah, this issue is like that at every level and like we can see what works and doesn't work.
Speaker B:And so one of the things it shows us is that tribalism is so strong and we only have two tribes.
Speaker B:So it becomes a dull argument too, because it's just, I don't like you.
Speaker B:You know, we are us, you are them.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:So it's not even, it's not even interesting to follow in a way, but it shows that the thing that we built doesn't work well for solving large problems.
Speaker B:Here's the second thing that to me is fascinating and it's interesting to see.
Speaker B:So when I talk to climate scientists, the expression that you had when you were talking about the conference of the parties is just the way they talk about that and they talk about politics, which is just this system doesn't work and not something that they would want to talk about publicly because one is supposed to be optimistic about it.
Speaker B:But in a weird way, that's the same experience, expression, it, the, the anger.
Speaker B:Saying it's a hoax isn't that different.
Speaker B:It's just that in Europe, in the case of what you're talking about, the performance of concern about this is hoaxy to you.
Speaker B:Just like the.
Speaker B:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker B:You're like, this is something that we do.
Speaker B:It is time intensive, it is literally expensive, it is carpet intensive.
Speaker B:And it's just so that we can do what a cargo cult is.
Speaker B:That's such a great idea.
Speaker B:Let me just write something down.
Speaker B:So, cargo cults, it's not clear whether they exist, but I think they probably did exist.
Speaker B:So let's say you're on the Solomon Islands, and It's World War II.
Speaker B:And you just.
Speaker B:Your society is still in the developing world, and we are from the developed world.
Speaker B:And so the US Military comes in to use your island as a staging ground for fights to take.
Speaker B:To take the islands that the Japanese have occupied away from the Japanese, because there's a lot of that fighting within the Pacific.
Speaker B:But you haven't.
Speaker B:You.
Speaker B:Your society is not a highly organized one yet.
Speaker B:So people come in and they are covered in a green or blue thing which has shiny things up the middle, right?
Speaker B:And then they also are taking parts of your island, and they are smoothing them out.
Speaker B:And then sometimes machines land there and leave cargo.
Speaker B:And sometimes they will go with what look like glowing rods.
Speaker B:They're flashlights with things on top.
Speaker B:And they go into the middle of the paved area, and then they wave them.
Speaker B:And then from the sky, boxes of cargo come down.
Speaker B:Things you can eat, wonderful tools, things you can drink.
Speaker B:And so after the military left, people on those islands, this is what the phrase cargo cult means.
Speaker B:They would paint their bodies the same colors as the uniforms even.
Speaker B:So they would have versions of the epaulettes, they would have versions of the uniform colors, and then they would have things that look like buttons, and then they would construct things that looked like landing strips from, like, shells.
Speaker B:And then they would go and they would perform the same motions that you would use to signal to airplanes to drop your cargo, and they would try to do that to get good stuff.
Speaker B:And you could argue that our performances of concern, our annual performances of concern about this issue are cargo cult behavior.
Speaker B:It's a way to say, look, it's going to occupy our news for 17 days.
Speaker B:At the end of every couple of years, there will be expressions of support on this issue from every important leader.
Speaker B:We will have done our diligence on this, and then we'll go back to doing whatever we want for the rest of the year.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:And that's how some of the scientists feel about the elections, which are.
Speaker B:They would come out and say it was really important.
Speaker B:And especially when President Obama sort of ran on the issue and then chose health care instead.
Speaker B:It made them have the same smile that you have on your face right now.
Speaker B:The other thing I was going to say, which is just a weird thing, is, and maybe we'll get to this.
Speaker B:Hard to know how to phrase this, but the fracking thing is a good way to think about this.
Speaker B:We are morally organized animals.
Speaker B:And so one of the things that's been fascinating about climate is that fossil Fuels offered us a free lunch.
Speaker B:And there's some part of us, some primitive Grimm's, Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales part of us that gets nervous about free lunches that like, ah, I told you that there would be a price to pay.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:So that morally it makes sense to us.
Speaker B:The primitive, the, the part of us that's wired towards believing in stories with morals was like, you know, we've had a good ride for, for a century and a half with these very messy fuels, but there was always going to be a price that seems right to us.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:The reality tracking thing is a good other way to look at it, which is this is a problem and we want there to be a moral solution, which is we were on a bender and we have to be abstemious.
Speaker B:But it may not be that at all.
Speaker B:It may be that there's going to be a technological solution which doesn't satisfy the moral animals that we are.
Speaker B:But on the other hand, if we look at it, it is only a technological problem.
Speaker B:It's not a moral failure.
Speaker B:It's not a moral.
Speaker B:It isn't a moral failure that we're responsible for.
Speaker B:It isn't a moral test that we were given to pass and failed.
Speaker B:There were few that made it seem that we could accelerate our medicine, our transportation, our cities.
Speaker B:We accepted the deal.
Speaker B:And then it turned out to our horror there was a terrible side effect.
Speaker B:But if there's a technological solution to a technological problem, it won't suit us morally, but it makes a kind of narrative sense.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah, but there's not going to be a widget that's going to get us out of this kind of thing.
Speaker B:Well, that's the weird thing.
Speaker B:Sorry to.
Speaker B:Look, I've been thinking about this for a very long time, have great conversation about it.
Speaker B:It's sort of a.
Speaker B:Just as you can see, is a thrill.
Speaker B:A friend of mine went to write speeches for one of the senators who is.
Speaker B:Has historically been most closely allied with this issue.
Speaker B:And so he went because he cared.
Speaker B:And he was very surprised by the difference between that Senator's public and private self on this issue publicly was talking about changing behavior, changing cars, changing light bulbs, etc.
Speaker B:But in private, what this senator believed and what this senator's friends believed, and it helps us understand the behavior in Washington for the last 30 years.
Speaker B:They believe a widget will be invented.
Speaker B:That was shocking.
Speaker B:My friend completed his or her contract the day the contract was over.
Speaker B:They left that senator's employee.
Speaker B:It was a real demoralizing surprise that for all of the.
Speaker B:For all the public statements that we shouldn't count on a widget, that the people in D.C.
Speaker B:are counting on a widget.
Speaker B:Once.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Once you understand that their behavior since 88 makes perfect sense.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:That's interesting.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Another thing that's fascinating is right from the beginning, and also the media, to which you and I both belong, be very proud of its coverage on this.
Speaker B:There's a lot of stories that they didn't get right.
Speaker B:Obviously, I care about the military, the second Iraq War, first Iraq war, but especially second Iraq War.
Speaker B:They did not distinguish.
Speaker B:They did not wrap themselves in glory because that war shouldn't have been fought in Iraq.
Speaker B:But, my God, have they wrapped themselves in glory on this issue.
Speaker B:They were on it quickly and they've been great on it.
Speaker B: And in: Speaker B: magazine has Roger Revell in: Speaker B:And also there could be salt water running through the streets of New York and London.
Speaker B:2012 just adds six years to his prediction.
Speaker B:Was the second wettest year in Britain's history.
Speaker B:London wasn't flooded because they had the Thames Seagate.
Speaker B:And New York did flood that year, and there was salt water running on the streets of Manhattan.
Speaker B:Hurricane Sandy shorted out the lower part of the island.
Speaker B: zine that ran a story that in: Speaker B:You couldn't create a better one than global warming.
Speaker B:It is just at the base of so much.
Speaker B:And this problem is so circular that 20 years later, Yale had had.
Speaker B:We've had.
Speaker B:People like ourselves and people in general have had so much trouble they feel, communicating the seriousness of the issue, that Yale set up a school the same way they have a law school and a medical school.
Speaker B:They have a school and a climate Communications.
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B: And in: Speaker B:It'd be hard to think of one that's so against our basic mental wiring than this one.
Speaker B:And so all you had happen in the 20 years between those two quotes is just a different person saying the same thing.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:The difficulties.
Speaker B:The difficulties in solving this Are it's a technological problem.
Speaker B:It is at the base of so much of the stuff that we do.
Speaker B:And reporters have accurately said that this is extremely serious.
Speaker B:Politicians suggest that it's serious for reasons of their own.
Speaker B:And then they don't act as if it's serious.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which then already plays into a pre existing culture and you get the situation that you get hundreds of unpleasant communications from people who feel it's in their long term interest to say don't take away our fuel.
Speaker C:Yeah, right.
Speaker C:What would happen if these congresspeople, these leaders were straightforward and said, you know, it's a technical problem.
Speaker C:We need to find a technical.
Speaker C:You tell me, by the way, I.
Speaker B:Think it would be better.
Speaker B:So scientists.
Speaker B:There's a great.
Speaker B:I really love Dr.
Speaker B:Hansen, James Hansen.
Speaker B:And Hanson said that the politics just will never work on this issue.
Speaker B:So he thought.
Speaker B:He continues to think that the courts are the way to do it.
Speaker B:Courts end up being effective against tobacco.
Speaker B:He may not know that, but they ended up being effective against tobacco in a way that legislation was or couldn't be.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Just there were too many different interests, whereas the courts were able to do it.
Speaker B:I love the thing that.
Speaker B:And if you know his background, he had a terrible time getting his facts to the people who paid for it.
Speaker B:He had a terrible time getting his research data to the American people.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like the Bush White House rewrote his testimony.
Speaker B:Reagan tried to close down his division at Godard, the NASA, the NASA satellite that he works with at Columbia.
Speaker B:Finally, when the data is brought forward, Professor Hanson has to then see that there is no particular action taken on this.
Speaker B:And he said this great thing, he just said that it's as if we don't know.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like our action wouldn't have been different, you know, if we hadn't known.
Speaker B:Our action wouldn't be any different, wouldn't be any different than it is now that we do know.
Speaker B:And that's one of those things that becomes extremely haunting, you know, after you live through this.
Speaker C:It is, it is because like you say there's been 30, 40 years at least like you describe in the book, in the turn of the 20th century.
Speaker C:What was his name?
Speaker C:Arrhenius.
Speaker B:Yeah, Arrhenius.
Speaker B:Yeah, Arrhenius.
Speaker C:They saw it happening a long, long time ago.
Speaker C:They probably didn't realize what they didn't realize, I think was like the great acceleration in the 50s and the just huge expansion of consumption.
Speaker B:Yeah, sorry, go to your question.
Speaker B:But I can explain to you what Arrhenius got wrong, which is Kind of fascinating.
Speaker B:Not that he got wrong what he didn't anticipate, but where were you?
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker C:At this point, our reaction is just.
Speaker C:It's the same as if we just had no idea.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:He said that it wouldn't make any difference.
Speaker B:You would think that difference.
Speaker C: we're at the point now in the: Speaker C:Climate change is actually starting to kick our butt a little bit.
Speaker C:My general rhetorical question is, so how do we start from where we are now?
Speaker C:We can't do anything about what's behind us.
Speaker C:That's gone.
Speaker C:We've wasted that time.
Speaker C:We have to move forward.
Speaker C:How do we go about that?
Speaker B:Yeah, it's an interesting one.
Speaker B:So with Hansen, that's one of the things that's great about him.
Speaker B:He said this great thing before he went to brief.
Speaker B:He was going to brief the energy task force that Cheney was running for Bush.
Speaker B:And experience would tell you that was going to be not a serious task force.
Speaker B:In fact, experience would tell you the results of that task force finding in advance.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:They're going to say, let's keep doing what we're doing.
Speaker B:But he had to brief them and he gave them a great briefing just the same.
Speaker B:And he said this great thing, he said, because they give him the invitation and should you take it, should you go to the White House and brief them when you're pretty sure that they're not going to act on your data?
Speaker B:But he said this great thing.
Speaker B:Being an eternal optimist, what else could be effective?
Speaker B:I welcome the chance.
Speaker B:I love that scientific approach.
Speaker B:That's just science, which is what else is effective?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:If I'm pessimistic, it won't be effective.
Speaker B:Similarly, if we look at the 40 year version of this, which involves the culture war, if we looked at it the way scientists would look at it, it would be like, this approach is ineffective.
Speaker B:Now you could argue if you were looking at it as an AI.
Speaker B:You see what I mean?
Speaker B:Like, this hasn't worked to generate mass public support.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So this approach where Democrats are in favor, the Red Team is not in favor.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:It hasn't led.
Speaker B:Even when we, even when we had, sorry to speak as an actual Democrat, but even when we had all three branches.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And when we, we had a majority in the Supreme Court, or at least we had a.
Speaker B: he Senate and the White House: Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:By January, we've lost that.
Speaker B:We no longer have all three branches.
Speaker B:Even then, we don't pass it.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So you could argue that for whatever reason, Rahm Emanuel, whose job it is to understand what's going to be popular and what isn't, he determines that health care is smarter to do than climate legislation.
Speaker B:So that we could argue that this approach hasn't worked.
Speaker B:So if we were scientists, we would be like, let's not apportion blame.
Speaker B:But if we're looking at this, enlisting this in labor vs.
Speaker B:Tories, right.
Speaker B:That doesn't work.
Speaker B:Labor vs.
Speaker B:Tories is in every world capital just as different.
Speaker B:But that hasn't been successful for dealing with this.
Speaker B:So we have to have a different approach.
Speaker B:Technologists would probably say, and if there is a widget in the same way that tracking turns out to have been a good widget here in America.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Think about it.
Speaker B:We went from 50% coal to 20%.
Speaker B:That's only because of a widget.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It just, it made more economic sense.
Speaker B:So if you're a technologist, the way this might look in 50 years is they squabbled.
Speaker B:The people who weren't in the business squabbled for a while and in the background, the engineers solved the problem.
Speaker B:But it was nice.
Speaker B:It gave them something to do and it kept them out of our hair.
Speaker B:The other thing that's super, that's been interesting for me is that do you remember the ozone, the ozone crisis of our youths?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Do you remember how it happened?
Speaker B:It was totally fascinating.
Speaker B:Like Sherwood Rowland, he and Mark Molina do research and they're just looking for a topic.
Speaker B:That's what science, that's what university science can be like.
Speaker B:He's just curious what's happening to the chlorofluorocarbons when they get sprayed out of the hair can or the underarm can.
Speaker B:And so they do their research and to both of their tremendous surprise, the CFC molecules, each one can take out something somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 molecules of ozone and it's going to start causing terrible skin cancer.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:For example, just one of the outcomes is that the cancer to which, like Australian cows, since they are closer to the sun, they get a horrible eye cancer because of our eating away the ozone.
Speaker B:And if you look at pictures of it online, it is a horrifying thing to see.
Speaker B:But in any event, they published their results and they say, look, we've got it.
Speaker B:We can't use this.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:There was a state senator at the time who said it's simply an unconscionable way to deliver a Durham deodorant.
Speaker B:And there's intense pushback, and it was only about a billion dollars per year in DuPont's giant corporate portfolio.
Speaker B:But there is tremendous pushback.
Speaker B:And when you get to that section of the book, it's the exact same.
Speaker B:It's like the Spanish Civil War for World War II.
Speaker B:Like, a lot of the things that you'll recognize that were run about global warming were run on the ozone fight, what were called the ozone wars.
Speaker B:And there was a stalemate.
Speaker B:They were saying, it's too big a sector.
Speaker B:Why should America change?
Speaker B:Because India and China are coming online and we can't affect them.
Speaker B:So if America changes the way it uses chloroformal carbons.
Speaker B:Hard to say that word.
Speaker B:If we unilaterally give up the profit we can make from these chemicals, India and China, much bigger markets, they're going to keep doing it and we'll still lose our ozone.
Speaker B:And it was a total stalemate until just by chance, a British team at the bottom of South America found out there was a giant hole in the ozone.
Speaker B:No one anticipated that, but you could not argue against it.
Speaker B:It was just.
Speaker B:Just like our using these chemicals that eat between each molecule, eats between 10,000 and 100,000 molecules of ozone.
Speaker B:No one anticipated this.
Speaker B:You can't keep arguing whether it's going to happen, whether it's just computer simulations.
Speaker B:Here it is.
Speaker B:And within two years, they had hammered out the Montreal particles.
Speaker B:So since then, the climate scientists, a lot of whom lived through that, they had kept waiting for something like the ozone hole, a convincing demonstration of their data.
Speaker B:Interesting thing for the story, the wonderful triple decker novel that we're living through with this is that the ozone hole was discovered.
Speaker B:You know, was measured, discovered and brought to public attention about 11 years after this became a national issue.
Speaker B:So it was still like, it was still on the first act of the movie, right?
Speaker B:So people were like, is it true?
Speaker B:Is it not true?
Speaker B:Holy s.
Speaker B:It's true.
Speaker B:We have to act, right?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:They were waiting and waiting.
Speaker B:And many climate scientists felt that the terrible summers of the last couple of years, and especially last summer, they felt that would be the ozone hole.
Speaker B:And it seemed like it during the time.
Speaker B:The problem is that it's coming not in the first act of the movie, but in the middle of the third act, or just.
Speaker B:We don't know how long this movie is going to be.
Speaker B:Maybe it's in the middle of the movie.
Speaker B:And at that point we've gotten used to the warnings and so it didn't have the galvanizing effect that the ozone hole had.
Speaker B:And that becomes really, really odd.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So you're saying that it's finally kicking our butt.
Speaker B:Yeah, but what people have found is enough people were talking about how this needed to be cured, that it was the number one priority.
Speaker B:20, 30, 40 years.
Speaker B:The sun kept rising.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And they kept being able to ski and swim in the process.
Speaker B:Seasons.
Speaker B:And they realized it's a horrible thing.
Speaker B:Do you know that old Moynihan term defining deviancy down?
Speaker C:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:It's politically charged.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Because he was not.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:He wouldn't.
Speaker B:He's not racially sensitive in the wonderful way that the culture has become sense.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Like, he.
Speaker B:He represents the cultural sensitivities of his time, but his basic idea is.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:His basic idea is we can get used to.
Speaker B:And in the interim, we got used to it.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:It's like the.
Speaker C:The boiling frog idea.
Speaker C:You know?
Speaker B:You know the boiling frog thing.
Speaker B:When you get.
Speaker B:There's a section in the book called the Frog, which I always love because it's very short.
Speaker B: It's like, I don't know,: Speaker B:It turns out that the boiling frog thing is not true.
Speaker B:So, yeah, a business magazine fault called Fast Company just decided to test it.
Speaker B:If you drop a frog in water that's already boiling right out, and if you drop them into lukewarm water that's heating, they jump out only a second later.
Speaker B:The only people, it turns out, who will stay are us.
Speaker B:The only creatures who will stay are us.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:No, only humans like frogs.
Speaker B:They talked to a guy from Harvard and he chuckled and said, yeah, they won't sit still for you.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C:You know, now that you say that, it kind of makes sense.
Speaker C:I always wondered, why would a frog.
Speaker C:Something gets hot enough, you're gonna leave.
Speaker B:If you're a frog or whatever.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:The fact that our basic metaphor for this is wrong.
Speaker B:It's a myth and not true.
Speaker B:Let that be the part that stands for the whole.
Speaker B:Even the metaphor that we use for is incorrect.
Speaker C:That's a good point.
Speaker C:It illustrates the whole inadequacy of the narrative that we've constructed around this.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then also we would blame the poor frogs that we would say frogs, no, we are quite a bit duller.
Speaker B:Although if there's a widget, and many people have behaved as if there's going to be a widget since this problem was discovered, and then I want to defend our heaviest for a second.
Speaker B:But if a widget is discovered, then this will have been very sensible behavior.
Speaker B:What scientists say is that since you don't know if there'll be a discovery, it is prudent to have what one of Professor Hanson's colleagues at Columbia called just an insurance policy.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:The insurance policy that we have is.
Speaker B:It's early.
Speaker B:It's fairly early in the book.
Speaker B:It's a very simple geoengineering thing.
Speaker B:So the professor who was arguing for this was saying, look, if it gets really bad, no one likes the sulfur dioxide release, but if we have to, that would cool us down by a full degree.
Speaker B:So it doesn't seem intelligent to count on something that hasn't been invented yet.
Speaker C:Exactly.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker C:And, well, it's the precautionary principle, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker B:But interesting to think that as Fred Singer, the precautionary principle was one of his favorite principles.
Speaker B:So here's why he got it wrong.
Speaker B:Basic thing is, so he and his, you know, he begins examining this just because he belongs to a scientific society that meets.
Speaker B:And in the, you know, in the course of one of those wonderful boozy sciencey evenings, they will address various topics.
Speaker B:And one that came up is what causes ice ages.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And so he went back, checked Tyndale's research from the late.
Speaker B: s for him,: Speaker B:So he spends a year plotting out by hand what would happen if you have, have or doubled the carbon dioxide in square, you know, square meters of the Earth.
Speaker B:And so he comes up.
Speaker B:It's his.
Speaker B:I'm sure his results were surprising to him.
Speaker B:He said it was the most tedious of his life's calculations.
Speaker B:And he said that he had never.
Speaker B:He hadn't crammed for anything.
Speaker B:He had never crammed for anything harder since school took him a full year.
Speaker B:And he found that if you have carbon dioxide ice ages again, and if you doubled it, you had a Fahrenheit increase of between 4 and 9 degrees, 4 and 10 degrees, pretty much what computers were taught in the generations to come.
Speaker B:He's Swedish.
Speaker B:That's good news for him and some of his friends, they're like, hey, why wait?
Speaker B:This is, you know, your data makes sense.
Speaker B:Let's take some of the.
Speaker B:And also what's fascinating about that period is people already thought that we were like energy hogs.
Speaker B:So people were using much more coal than scientists thought was warranted.
Speaker B:And so he said that there is an anxiety that we are spending coal, you know, too quickly, that we are expand thread generation.
Speaker B:But as in so many things, there is.
Speaker B: in a way that's slightly more: Speaker B:It'll be warmer in three or 400 years.
Speaker B:It'll be warmer because we are using too much fuel.
Speaker B:His friends didn't want to wait.
Speaker B:And they were like, you know what we should do?
Speaker B:We should take some coal mines that are already mined out, that still have carbon in them and let's light them on fire so we can get more smoke going out, so we can have climate change now.
Speaker B:The reason why he thought it was centuries ahead was that two great sinks, as you know, you know, okay, you know this stuff.
Speaker B:But for.
Speaker B:So the.
Speaker B:The land sink is trees and the water sink is water.
Speaker B:So he thought that the oceans would absorb it and then they would release it slowly over a century.
Speaker B:Over a century timescale.
Speaker B: was absorbed by the oceans in: Speaker B: arbon that was being released: Speaker B:What Roger Revell found in the 50s, because he was an oceanographer is, is yes, the oceans will hold it, they will absorb it, but they respond to changes allergically, and they will very quickly release it.
Speaker B:So that it's not that we can bank all that carbon that is a big sink, but it doesn't release it slowly.
Speaker B:It's going to release it extremely quickly.
Speaker B:So that was why Darhenius was wrong.
Speaker B: st or the: Speaker B:It's going to be happening now.
Speaker B:Let me hire somebody who's good at measuring carbon dioxide.
Speaker B:If this is right, it will be measurable annually.
Speaker B:And so he hired Dave Keelig because he was a government guy.
Speaker B:This was always mainstream science.
Speaker B:The Navy was putting up an observatory on Molana in Hawaii.
Speaker B:That's a great place to get clean air.
Speaker B:So he says, set up a testing thing there, and every year it's higher.
Speaker B:But Arrhenius just had it.
Speaker B:Since Arrhenius is a chemist and not an oceanographer, he just thought the oceans would hold it for quite a bit longer time than they would hold it now.
Speaker B:I have defended Arrhenius daughter.
Speaker C:Give him some slack.
Speaker C:You know, that's Interesting.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker C: rted the year I was born, was: Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:He's publishing and he starts doing it.
Speaker B:Yeah, 58 sounds right to me.
Speaker B:He is measuring.
Speaker B:He's just fixated on measuring it.
Speaker B:Yeah, 58 sounds right.
Speaker B:He didn't publish the results until the fourth year he had data for.
Speaker B:So 58 sounds right.
Speaker B:I think he started measuring from 53 just because his departmental chairman bet him that it would be hard to measure carbon dioxide.
Speaker B:And so he accepted that bet.
Speaker B:That was why he was the person who was recommended to Revelle, was because he had been measuring this for a while before.
Speaker B:So they have data.
Speaker B:So, yeah.
Speaker B:So you're right about when it's first published.
Speaker B:Absolutely.
Speaker B:So when you give lectures about it.
Speaker C:I characterize myself as the CO2 keeling curve, baby.
Speaker C:I was born when that started.
Speaker B:That's great.
Speaker B:Martin Amos felt the same way.
Speaker B:Martin Amos said that he was born the same year.
Speaker B:I think it was the test of the first Hill Bomb.
Speaker B:And so he felt that same connection to that issue.
Speaker B:And so ended up writing two books about it.
Speaker B:Interesting.
Speaker C:This is great talking to you.
Speaker C:What got you started on all of this?
Speaker C:Because you've written a few books, but.
Speaker B:What happened?
Speaker B:You're trying to make it smooth, but it's like, yeah, you've written some other books.
Speaker B:Not on this topic.
Speaker B:So I was working on a different book.
Speaker B:And I came across stuff that showed how long we'd known about this.
Speaker B:And as I heard about the environment, I just got extremely angry.
Speaker B:Do you know that poet, Robert Lowell?
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:So this answer is going to take, let's say, five minutes plus.
Speaker B:But it'll be interesting.
Speaker B:So Robert Lowell's wife is a great essayist named Elizabeth Hardwick.
Speaker B:And she said a great thing about writing.
Speaker B:She taught writing at Columbia for decades.
Speaker B:And was one of the great writing teachers her students like.
Speaker B:Amazing.
Speaker B:And she's also super brilliant.
Speaker B:Not just brilliant, but a super brilliant essayist.
Speaker B:Anyway, she said there are only two good reasons to write anything.
Speaker B:Money and revenge.
Speaker B:And so for me, it was revenge.
Speaker B:I saw it was a different project that I was on.
Speaker B:And actually one that I was paid substantially more money than this.
Speaker B:So that I both embraced and failed.
Speaker B:So I got one right and one wrong, by Hardwick's estimation.
Speaker B: s to the world's attention in: Speaker B:And it's in Time magazine in 56.
Speaker B:And then especially I learned this, which is early in this century.
Speaker B:It Was clear that we were warming up and no one knew how to account for it.
Speaker B:And so you'd keep seeing stories like that Associated Press or in the Times.
Speaker B: One day in: Speaker B:We have to close down Al Capone speakeasies.
Speaker B:And on the right there's a story that the Nazis promise to end attacks on Jews and the Reich.
Speaker B:And in between, a story about Adolf Hitler and Al Capone.
Speaker B:Is America in longest heat wave in history.
Speaker B:Experts note 25 year rising red line.
Speaker B:No one understands why this is happening.
Speaker B:So that's kind of how far back this goes.
Speaker B:And people were trying to account for it in the 50s it became a large issue in the culture.
Speaker B:This was staggering to learn and it was worth a book to write about.
Speaker B:By 61.
Speaker B:The New York Times is describing it as one of the primary concerns of scientists in the period of oceanographers and climatologists is what do about carbon dioxide.
Speaker B:Did you see Oppenheimer?
Speaker C:Yes.
Speaker B:Okay, so you know, you didn't need Oppenheimer know about the Manhattan Project.
Speaker B:So the Manhattan Project shortens the war and also gives us radar which allows us to have our air travel system 10 years after.
Speaker B:And then it disbands.
Speaker B:It's like the Beatles release a number of great tracks and they disband, no hard feelings.
Speaker B:Ten years later the defense establishment is like, you know, we have other things that are coming up.
Speaker B:Let's get the band back together.
Speaker B:And so a lot of the Manhattan people reform as a group called Jason.
Speaker B:This is my back of the envelope summary of something that you were back to read in the book.
Speaker B:It's in the section about Carter.
Speaker B:So if you read the section called Wood Chips and the Malaise you will read this history of the Jason's.
Speaker B:So the Jasons are the scientists.
Speaker B:They are the Manhattan, the Manhattan Project veterans and people they would pick.
Speaker B:So they pick their own new members and they are secret and they deal with questions that the defense establishment asked them to deal with.
Speaker B:So that for example, one reason we didn't use atomics in Vietnam, Jason's advise against it.
Speaker B:They also advised a version of smart weapons.
Speaker B:So our research in smart weapons is also thanks to the Jasons.
Speaker B:So that the Iron Dome, for example is one of the foreseeable outcomes of the advice coming from the Jason's in the 70s.
Speaker B:Roger Revell, he's our leading oceanographer, he's our reading he's our leading oceanographer.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:He's so famous that there are buildings named after him, colleges named after him.
Speaker B:I think UC Davis while he's still alive.
Speaker B:What a great thing to see.
Speaker B:Like Reville College.
Speaker B:Hey, that's great.
Speaker B:Anyway, so it's a little bit like, like checking a drug, promising drug.
Speaker B:So he publishes those results in the 50s and then there's 20 years of seeing what his results are like in 20 years of following the.
Speaker B:The Schenerman curve.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Human girl.
Speaker B:And so in the mid-70s the results start coming in and reading this is what made me where they want to tell this great Godfather like catch 22, like big book story is that 77.
Speaker B:The first National Academy of Science.
Speaker B:National Academy of Science report comes in and it is 340 pages and it is front page news.
Speaker B:And even in Business World Week what they're saying, Department of Energy is saying we will make big changes and fast.
Speaker B:And there are so many meetings.
Speaker B:We were talking about this earlier.
Speaker B:You were talking about it with regard to cop and you'll find this in the Reagan section.
Speaker B:There was already so much work going on that one of the people in the DOE is saying if anything has been meeting to death, it's carbon dioxide.
Speaker B:If meetings could fix problems, this would be solved by.
Speaker B:And so all these big reports come in and they are in the Times.
Speaker B:They're not secret.
Speaker B:Like the Jace report comes in in the spring of 79 and the chairman of that report because they're still secret.
Speaker B:If you ever, if you ever look at the Times article about it, it's like a report that was presented to the Department of Energy and they're not saying you're at home which would mean if you were in government you would know that it's the Jason's but it was also going to the White House.
Speaker B:The head of that report says people think it's far off but the government is going to have to start dealing with this now because on environmental quality they present a report that spring and they say the head of it is Gus Speth who ends up being fired from the Council of Environmental Quality once Reagan comes in.
Speaker B:But he tells the Times that he expects that the report will become extremely influential in government circles.
Speaker B:And he's right.
Speaker B:Within a year or two Reagan is elected and tries to shut down the council that he's on.
Speaker B:But he says that this is going to start happening not far off.
Speaker B:It's going to start happening in the 80s and 90s.
Speaker B:So those reports come and the Carter White House is especially unnerved by the Jason Report.
Speaker B:The Jason report says this is ominous.
Speaker B:And the chairman of the Jason report says we have to deal with it now.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:And then.
Speaker B:And the message from both.
Speaker B:And I said the Times is this is going to be a problem unless mitigating actions are taken immediately.
Speaker B:Carter does.
Speaker B:And this is what made me want to write the book.
Speaker B:Carter turns to the National Academy of Science and says, is this real?
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Obviously jason's are saying it, these other scientists are saying it.
Speaker B:You guys just gave me a report on it in 77.
Speaker B:Is this going to happen?
Speaker B:And so they form a panel and it's all new.
Speaker B:It's not people who've been working on the issue and they report back very quickly and what they say.
Speaker B:And this was so meaningful that I pretty much have it memorized.
Speaker B:The results of this brief but intense panel will be reassuring the scientists.
Speaker B:Brackets.
Speaker B:Scientists don't like to have their.
Speaker B: emember this, this science is: Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:So you wouldn't want it to be wrong.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:It'll be reassuring to scientists but disturbing to policymakers.
Speaker B:If the, if the carbon dioxide release continues.
Speaker B:This panel finds no reason to believe that climate changes will not result and no reason to believe those changes will be negligible.
Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:And pretty much done nothing since then.
Speaker B:And so my revenge for that was bringing the story.
Speaker B:That's.
Speaker B:It's a great, funny story, but it's a story.
Speaker B:That's who we are.
Speaker B:That's what our system is right now.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Like whatever else I was working on.
Speaker B:And then I also thought, since people had often discussed when they reviewed my other books how entertaining they are for better or worse, I thought that it was.
Speaker B:The thing I could do would be to tell the story in a way that it would be a lot of fun to read and so that you would know how long, how long the tale is, how long the history of this issue is and that you couldn't be misled about it anymore.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:So I stopped whatever else I was doing and did this.
Speaker B:So that's how I did it.
Speaker B:I was motivated by a third thing that Elizabeth Hartwood would shake her head about.
Speaker B:I was motivated by angry altruism.
Speaker C:Well, you know, I'm, I'm glad that you got your revenge as somebody who's, you know, dealt with writing about climate change for many years and struggled with the narrative, the book, I mean, it's Kind of just what.
Speaker C:What is needed, I think, because it's like reading a novel and it's like a tragic comedy, and it tells the story from the very beginning.
Speaker C:You know, there's so many people that just think that this came up, like a decade ago or something.
Speaker C:And so I think thought processes and books and writing like yours is the kind of thing that might just, you know, make a difference.
Speaker C:You get the revenge.
Speaker C:Get your revenge.
Speaker B:Thomas, I love what you said so much.
Speaker B:I wrote it down.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:You know, that was what it was a lot of.
Speaker B:I never worked on a book longer or harder, but it seemed it was worth doing just for that reason.
Speaker B:And then you also, you.
Speaker B:You know, especially if there's some part of a certain kind of personality.
Speaker B:And if you read.
Speaker B:If you skip ahead just for fun, if you skip to the opening of the section of the book that's called the igloo, actually, do you have the book handy?
Speaker B:I do.
Speaker B:It's the opening of the epilogue.
Speaker B:Don't read it out loud or anything, but tell me if this matches your experience.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'm reading it.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:Okay, great.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:Just tell me if that rings true for you.
Speaker C:Yeah, I think it does.
Speaker B:It does.
Speaker C:I sometimes will joke with people that I'm no fun at parties.
Speaker B:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker B:And the guy who.
Speaker B:Did he design Gelspan?
Speaker C:Oh, yeah.
Speaker B:I always felt bad for him because whatever else he might have done, he got sucked into the thing.
Speaker B:And a certain kind of personality, the same personality that wants to tell people what's going on when people are lying all the time and where their story is changing in ways where you can point back.
Speaker B:Do you remember that thing from Orwell?
Speaker B: l detail that in the world of: Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:And chocolate is important to a British.
Speaker B:A British taste bud.
Speaker B:The chocolate ration in October might be 14 grams per week.
Speaker B:And then by November, It'll only be 10 grams per week.
Speaker B:But you don't want to say that your economy isn't working.
Speaker B:So this is a repeating gag throughout the book.
Speaker B:Good news, the chocolate ration has been raised to 10 grams per week.
Speaker B:Good news, the chocolate ration has been raised to 8 grams per week.
Speaker B:And there's a certain kind of personality that wants to say, no, it was 14 and it was 12.
Speaker B:This isn't true.
Speaker B:So, yes, it's the positive that makes it thrilling to do the kind of stuff that we do, but it makes us not fun at parties.
Speaker B:I just was curious if that was your Experience.
Speaker B:Experience, too.
Speaker C:Yeah, it is.
Speaker C:I get the feeling people just wish I'd shut up about it sometimes.
Speaker B:Well, that's like it's.
Speaker B:We got a great deal.
Speaker B:It was just meant to be.
Speaker B:It was meant just to be something you could read for fun, because you could read some cool thriller for fun, and you could also read this for fun, and then you would be harder to lie to.
Speaker B:But Christopher Monkton, who was like, he has gone to copes too.
Speaker B:He's banned for life for a good reason.
Speaker B:He wrote a thing saying it was bullshit.
Speaker B:He's not a scientist.
Speaker B:He's never been a scientist.
Speaker B:The Daily Telegraph published it and it broke their server in the first 24 hours because so many people wanted to read it because it would be much better.
Speaker B:It's the same reason why people, smart news personalities, wanted to believe Climategate.
Speaker B:What could be better news than the fact that we can fly and we can draw effect and we can charge our phones?
Speaker B:Of course they want us to go away.
Speaker C:Yeah, but.
Speaker C:But the thing is, we can go away, but climate change isn't.
Speaker C:So, you know.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's very funny that.
Speaker B:That's just.
Speaker B:That's what the climate scientists rule is.
Speaker B:It's just.
Speaker B:It's not an opinion thing.
Speaker B:It's just.
Speaker B:It's just an equation.
Speaker B:And you can't reason with the equation.
Speaker B:You can't argue around it.
Speaker B:The equation's going to do what the equation's doing.
Speaker C:Yeah.
Speaker B:All right, Tom.
Speaker B:I think so.
Speaker B:You want to go.
Speaker B:That could not have been more fun.
Speaker B:If you have any more questions or if you want to talk about it again, I love the conversation.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:It was a treat.
Speaker B:Accept my apology for the 10 minutes it took me to figure out that I could use my NYU account.
Speaker C:Not a problem at all.
Speaker C:No, this has been great.
Speaker C:I enjoyed the talk.
Speaker C:Thank you very much.
Speaker B:Thanks a lot for your time, Tom.
Speaker B:I hope we'll talk again.
Speaker B:Okay, see you.
Speaker C:Take care.
Speaker B:Bye.
Speaker A:There's always more we can do to stop climate change.
Speaker A:No amount of engagement is too little.
Speaker A:And now more than ever, your involvement matters.
Speaker A:To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.
Speaker A:I'm your host, Tom Schueneman.
Speaker A:We'll see you next time on Global Warming is Real.
Speaker B:Sa.
