>> c-span now is a free mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what's happening in washington live and on-demand. keep up with today's biggest events with live streams of floor proceedings and earrings from the u.s. congress, white house events, the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. you can also stay current with the latest episodes of "washington journal" and five schedule information for c-span's tv networks in c-span radio plus a variety of compelling podcast. c-span now is available at the apple store and google play. downloaded for free today. c-span now, your front row seat to washington anytime anywhere. >> when we started planning this ago, we hadmonths no idea just how time it would turn out b to be in mid-march of 2022. we are seeing firsthand whiteha energy independence is critical

to national security. none other than elon musk tweeted a few days ago we need to increase oil and gas output immediately. yes, that was elon musk. across the nation including here in northwest colorado we are seeing critical decisions being made on our sources of energy. will determine whether the lights lightn when you flick a switch, and if they do, how much will cost you to keep them on. there are many conferences across the globe that discuss climate change, global climate accords and global warming, but none of these events include a discussion of the impact on individual p freedom, prosperity and standard of living. we aim to change that with our program today. the goal of this summit is to build a better understanding of the nexus of u.s. energy policy, climate science, and the effect on individual freedom and prosperity. this understanding we believe

will lead to better, , more realistic solutions which can address these issues without bankrupting our families and vastly lowering our standard off living. when we were planning a a rect campus liberty toic her debates which took place last week at the university of miami in florida and at cu boulder we had an incredibly difficult time finding anyone willing to debate alex epstein. the question was, should america rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent climate catastrophe? and especially notable response from a pulitzer prize-winning author who declined an invitation to debate was this. there's no room for debate on these issues. welcome we could not disagree more. real and robust debate is urgently needed to ensure that the impacts on freedom,, prosperity and are standard of living are included inn any discussion of energy policy and climate change. steamboat institute is proud to

offer today's program as a substantial contribution to the national discourse on these critical issues. as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit educational organization,, steamboat institute relies on supportive individuals and foundations to carry outnd our mission of promoting america's first principle and inspiring active involvement in the defense of liberty. i would like to thank our many sponsors of today's program including our title sponsor, liberty energy, and thank you, chris very much. round of applause for liberty energy. [applause] i would also like to recognize and thank our major foundation sponsor to jack ross shuttled foundation, the executive director arlen and her husband larry travel all the way from southern california to do withh the state so thank you. [applause] we have many other generous

sponsors and i encourage you to please take a moment when you can to read their names in the program and on the signage out in the hallway for their generous funding of our program. finally i would like to thank our steamboat institute board of directors and our energy and climate summit planning committee whose help in planning today's program was invaluable. you can find all of their names in your program, and i would like to ask all of our steamboat institute board members and our energy, energy and climate summit planning committee,, please stand so we can thank you. [applause] and now it's an honoro introduce our first speaker to kick off our program this morning. stephen coonan is a national respected leader in science policy. he served as undersecretary for science in the us department of energy under president obama where he was the lead author of the department's strategic plan. with more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics

and astrophysics energy technology energy policy and climate science, dr. keenan was a professor in climate science, dr. kuhn was a professor of theoretical physics at caltech and also served as caltex vice president and provost for almost a decade. he is currently a professor at new york university and in a review of dr. coonan's book unsettled what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters. a professor of global energy at the harvard kennedy school wrote dr. coonan's book is essential reading and a timely breath of fresh air for climate policy. the science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy. rather than an existential crisis. we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits. following his remarks this morning, dr. kunan will be joined on stage by jackie pick deason radio and podcast host who covers all things energy on

the on the jackie daly show. jackie will select your questions to ask dr. coonen, so be sure to submit your questions using the qr code, which you will find on the cards on your tables. let's give a warm steamboat. welcome to dr. steven coonan. play please can both. have this on the view others and me. i guess it's because i kind of changed my direction. and lord, i guess i went and broke. there. thank you family tradition. it's a great choice of music. well, it has been an adventure to be speaking the truth about climate and energy over the last couple years and i would like to tell you a little bit about that. i've chosen for my title unsettling climate and energy and it's actually a triple

entender. unsettled refers to some crucial points in climate science. it also refers to perhaps you'll feel as i did. when you hear about some of them that a contrary to what you hear in the popular and political dialogue. and finally, i would say that what we all nationally and globally do about the situation remains quite unsettled and the subject of great debate. climate and energy is certainly at the forefront. of the discussion today. i'll show you here changes in the globes average surface temperature. from about 1880 up to the present. and you can see it's starting in about 1900. it's gone up by about 1.1 degrees. celsius at the same time we see human influences on the climate growing.

largely through the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and here i show you the measured carbon dioxide from about 1960 and it's going up. it started at 300 and whatever on the graph and is currently about 420 parts per million. we know that that increase is you largely to the burning of fossil fuels as we produce energy that the world needs. but you can also see that the relationship is not so simple. because from 1940 to 1970 the temperature actually went down even has human influences group. and so the scientific story is a little more complex. what we like to know is how will changes in the climate in the future influence ecosystems and human society? and across the bottom line question is what are we going to do about it?

answering that last question means we have to strike a balance. on the one side we have the science with its certainties and uncertainties. and we have the hazards and risks as the climate changes. on the other side. we've got a growing demand. for energy reliable and affordable and clean namely with low greenhouse gas emissions. and then in the middle, we've got a set of considerations of values priorities. society's tolerance for risk equity between generations and between north-south or developed and developing world. and then finally, we've got if we think about different responses. are they really going to make a difference and how much are they going to cost? and i want to take you through these three elements the science on the left side the demand on

the right side and some discussion of the responses in the middle as i go through the next 30 minutes or so. so that montage that opened up the session this morning was just wonderful and you got a sense of how the political sphere or the non-experts think about the science. president biden on the first day of his administration signed an executive order saying we're going to follow the science. special envoy kerry even back in 2014 said there shouldn't be anybody doubt in anybody's mind that the science is absolutely certain. and if you can parse the rest of that sentence, i'd like to hear it because it's it's something that never mind. all right, and then there are all kinds of other folks. who used the phrase existential threat climate crisis climate emergency climate disaster and so on the president.

carry, senator sanders mark carney a major figure in international finance bill gates my good friend. ernie monice. the last two should know better because they're scientists. but nevertheless you hear those words from them. when the most recent un report on climate science was released in august. the un secretary general gutierrez said it's code red for humanity. despite the fact that you can only find the words climate crisis in there once and that's not a scientific finding but it's a description of how the us media have over exaggerated the situation. and then white austin the current secretary defense has declared it an existential threat, of course. this was almost a year ago. i think he's got a better sense now over an existential threat really. it's well, where does the science come from?

as opposed to these science the science gets assessed annually. i'm sorry, the science gets assessed by the un. in a series of reports roughly once every seven years. the last report was in 2013 or 2014 by the un they just issued the next such report on the science and on the impacts the science report was issued on august 9th, and the impacts report was issued about a month ago. and then we have the us government issuing reports once every four years. the last one came out in 2017 and 2018. these reports are meant to survey assess and summarize the science as it appears in the literature the research literature for non-experts and for decision makers. the reports say important and surprising things when you read them.

as i have and many scientists have however, most of the people on the slide i just showed you and appeared in montage have not read those reports. i guarantee you that otherwise, they wouldn't be saying the things that they are saying. at least if they're honest. i'm often reminded of a scene from the movie the princess bride. vizzini one of the characters the bald guy on the right there keeps using the word inconceivable. and inigo montoya at some point gets so annoyed with him. he says you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means. all right. i don't think the science says what most people think it says. and that's on the basis of the reports not something i'm making up. and in fact when you read them you realize that the climate is not broken. and that if we do not that we do

not face certain disaster. unless we take rapid and sweeping action. alright. there is very little justification for that and in the end it's going to be a balancing act as i'll try to elucidate. you might ask. how did the science which is good legitimate science as solid or unsolid as any other gets turned into the certain science that people talk about and it's a long game of telephone. it starts from the observational data and the primary research literature. it goes into the assessment reports by the un and the us government it goes into the summaries for policymakers of those assessment reports which are often not in agreement with what's actually in the report itself in part because they're not written by scientists. then it goes on to the media and then out to the public and the decision makers. and along this game a telephone there's much bad behavior as one

goes down the chain people confuse whether with climate they highlight recent trends without a historical context. they term implausible scenarios for future emissions as business as usual. there are alarming predictions that never materialize you can read the list yourself. and when i started to watch this closely about four years ago. i decided to write a book. unsettled which tries to get around this chain and give people a sense of what the reports actually say. in one of the best introductions that i've had over the last year. i was likened to william tyndall. now, i don't know who william tyndall. i didn't know who william tyndall was i'm not a historian. so i discovered he was a guy in the early 16th century. who was the first to translate the bible from the original greek and hebrew into english.

and it was the forerunner of the king james version. and needless to say he annoyed a lot of people when he did that. made the bible evident to less educated folks. he was burned at the stake for that among other things. i've been called a denier which is not quite as bad, but we'll see what happens. let me show you a little bit of some of the surprises in the science. there's very little happening with hurricanes over the past almost century. this is a graph of the number of hurricanes and tropical storms since 1970. so it's 50 years. and you can see it goes up and down, but it certainly not increasing. there's another measure of hurricane activity which counts the stronger storms more heavily than the weaker storms and you can see there are ups and downs

both globally and in the northern hemisphere, but again, no long-term term trend over 50 years. and in fact, the literature says that even the assessment reports say that. the us government report in 2018 said this still go confidence that any reported trend over decades to centuries is robust. there was a landmark paper of 11 authors that gave their individual opinions anonymously. in 2019 and what they said was most of the arthur team. has low confidence that there's any other observed trend apart from a slow drift in the northwest pacific. that can be detected or attributed to human influences. and then the most recent report from the un in august said there's no confidence in most reported trends over decades to a century in measures of

hurricanes that count the frequency or the intensity there's a little bit of a footnote in there, which i'm happy to go into in the questions that they think they have seen a slight strengthening of storms or the fraction of major storms is increased a bit, but it's pretty controversial and i can elaborate on that if anybody has a question let me turn to sea level rise. you often have sea levels rising? well if you don't know anything about geology that would sound alarming. but in fact sea level has been rising for 20,000 years. this is a record of sea level rise. over about 20,000 years and you can see it's gone up by about a hundred and twenty meters. 400 feet in 20,000 years coastlines were very different. 20,000 years ago of course, it has slowed down as you see starting about 8,000 years ago, but it still rising.

and the real question then is not whether the sea level is rising. but has it accelerated? since human influences became significant. let's say since 1900. and the discussion hinges on tense of a millimeter per year. differences in how fast it's rising we'd like to know whether the acceleration is due to humans at all. and of course what's going to happen in the next century or two? well, let me show you since i live in new york city part of the time. we have really good data. with the tide gauge in at the tip of manhattan the southern tip manhattan, which is called the battery if you don't know because they used to be an artillery battery there. and this is the rate of rise. as observed from 1920 up until last month. namely, it's how fast did the sea go up each year. and you can see that on average

it's looking like about three millimeters a year. that's a foot of century. not something to get too alarmed about but interestingly it goes up and down. and you can see in some years it was down at less than two millimeters a year another years up at five and it currently high at five and it's thought that these have got to do with long-term cycles of ocean currents in the north atlantic. well, noah the national ocean atmospheric administration a couple weeks ago issued a report. saying that sea level rise for the next 30 years was locked in. at one foot over the next 30 years. rock didn't means it's going to happen no matter what. if that were true, it would take this graph up to where the star is. in 30 years okay.

now you know, who am i to dispute noah? all right. but we're going to find out pretty quickly whether it's going to go up that rapidly or not. obviously if it does we should be thinking differently perhaps than we're thinking now. on the other hand, here's a statement from a paper published by hannah nissan in collaborators at columbia university. certainly within the mainstream that says the use of the models that are used to make these projections to glide adaptation actions is unwarranted. climate models can't reproduce future conditions with anywhere near the degree of accuracy or precision, which will make it useful. nevertheless nasa the ipcc put out these projections with great confidence. all right. we shall see. let me turn to weather extremes a bit. brought in the media over the

last summer. historic heat waves in the northwest virtually impossible without human caused changes said cnn european floods were invoked the latest sign of global warming the climate connection behind deadly downpours around the world fires floods dead fish climate change fuels extreme weather. with no return to normal said the new york times and maybe the best one from other boston globe. welcome to the climate apocalypse. it's going to get worse. well, i want to talk about extremes. and a reminder that climate plays out over decades and to do that. i want to talk about denial. not climate denial, but denial river. so there's a map of cairo and in the manure cairo in the middle of the river is, rhode island.

and at the southern tip of rhode island the medieval egyptians built a structure called a nihilometer. with a measured the height of the nile river was very important to them as you might imagine. props taxes for whoever was ruling egypt at the time. that's what the building looks like today. i was fortunate to have visited it about 20 years ago. and if you go inside the building you see this big vertical chamber with three outlets to the river at various levels and a pillar in the middle suspended from a beam. the pillar is marked in cubits. and of course we can change qubits into meters. and and so a number of people over the century have compiled a record of the readings of the nihilometer the height of the nile. this is one such record. it shows the annual minimum that the nile reached in any year.

this is a pretty good measure of climate over about a 10% of africa which is an area of about one. third the continental us so think mississippi scale measure of the hydro climate in africa, and you can see this record starts in 640 roughly and goes up to 14 something year by year the annual minimum of the nile. great that we have this. and it's really interesting because first of all you see there are a lot of ups and downs every year. some years can be up high at five and a half meters and then a year or two later. you're down at one meter. so a lot of variability. the second is if you take an average climate is defined as a 30-year average you get the red curve. and what's remarkable about that? is in fact it still shows a lot of variation. and what you can imagine is that there was some medieval ipsient

egyptian climate panel in the seventh and eighth century. screaming new normal new normal we got to do more prayers and sacrifices. if they're just waited a couple decades or more it would have come back up and then even higher. and was still doing this today, it turns out that the height of the nile in the minimum is controlled by the level of waters and lake victoria. and in 2006 nasa publishers of press release that says lake victoria's falling waters. and then last year there was a press release lake victoria's rising work. all right. i want to do one more to show you just how. misleading the media are on this and this is about greenland's losing ice. greenland has been losing ice faster and faster for the last 30 years and there's an article from the guardian.

a in december 2019 wonderful picture of somewhere in the arctic. i assume it's greenland and they say the rate of ice loss has risen from 33 billion tons a year in the 90s to 254 billion tons a year in the past decade. wow, that's pretty scary. right? it's growing up and up. well, i was able to publish in the wall street journal about a month ago the complete graph of how much ice. when loses every year and you can see well, yeah, it's gone up a lot since 1990. but it also went up from 19. whatever that is 1920 up to 1940 by the same amount. and human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today back 80 years ago? and then it goes down. and so this has got hardly anything to do with a globe

warming under human influences. it's just cycles of weather that extend over decades in the north atlantic nevertheless the guardian emphasizes this most media coverage does when i published this graph i got a lot of grief. from people who wrote in in the to the wall street journal, but i was just showing them the data. that's very disturbing. very disturbing them. there's no record trend or there's no clear trend of record high temperatures in the us northwest where we had a tremendous heat wave last summer this shows the number of record highs in a number of stations in the us starting basically over the last 100 years both for the us the black lines and for the 26 stations in the pacific northwest and there's no trend what happened was just weather. if you saw the same thing happen five years out of the next 10,

then you can start to talk about climate, but we're not there yet. but i want to do one more on impacts and i want to get on to solutions could see how we're doing on time. okay good. talk about the economic impact of warming in some ways. this is one of the bottom lines. and us government report allegedly the best advice. from the best scientists in the country in the absence of reduction of emissions climate change is going to impose substantial damages on the us economy that could grow hundreds of billions of dollars. by the end of the century okay. and to back that up they give us this wonderfully interesting chart. that shows how much damages would we see under high emission scenario in various sectors of the economy in 2090, essentially the end of the century versus if

we could reduce emissions. how much would we save? and this chart is remarkable for several reasons. one is the numbers are given to three significant digits. it's a hundred and fifty five billion. 70 years from now not 153 and not 157, but 155. second is the degree of granularity. look we go all the way down to 300 million in municipal industrial water. supply. how can you say that 70 years? from now and finally, they don't give you any baseline. so for example in labor sector. today must be five six seven trillion dollars at least. and 155 billion 70 years, hence is kind of small potatoes? never mind the uncertainty. nevertheless the media when this came out. well all over themselves. climate change will wall up the us economy.

climate report warns of grim epidemic consequences climate change across the us billions climate report warns of damaged environment shrinking economy, right if you don't read the report this sounds pretty bad. here's a graph. this is the last graph in the report in the last chapter and it shows you know for temperature rises in 2090 of up to 9 degrees fahrenheit, which is five centigrade. we got a few percent four percent damages. in 2090 there's a similar graph that beyond lombok put together jonas and expert on this stuff, and i'm sure you'll have something more to say about it when he talks at lunch. this is for the globe. the lesson is a few percent for a few degrees. the ipcc knew that that's the case. they wrote for most economic

sectors in their 2015 report. the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. in other words climate change has only one relatively small factor technology demographics governance trade, etc. etc. and here's what it looks like if you look at the us economy. growing it 2% which is about what the fed and everybody else thinks it will do. we start here today and you get the blue curve if there's a 4% climate impact in 2090. you get the orange curve namely things get delayed by a couple years of growth. and so i would love to share a stage with bill gates or any monies and ask them. is this what you mean by the climate crisis? it's kind of a bump in the road. the most recent un report which came out about a month ago backed off a little bit and said the aggregate economic impact could be higher than what we

said in the previous report, but we have no confidence in that statement. and we again we can go into the details of that will be on ken even better than i let me talk about a response. now. what do we do about all of this? so there are global greenhouse gas emissions and they're going up. at a few percent a year more and more. and if we're going to try to just stabilize human emissions at a level that some people deem to be prudent. we have to go to zero emissions. we need to take this curve down. by 2050 and the un has said well, this will avoid the worst effects of climate change, which is kind of a meaningless statement because you don't know how bad it's going to be. really english the economics doesn't look so bad and they'd map out through us various pathways of what it would take in order to do that versus the

trajectory that we're currently on which is this brown line over here. the un is convened a series of conferences over the last 25 or 30 years. the most recent one happened in glasgow. it was called cop 26 conference of parties 26 and my takeaway from that. is that the fundamentals of the situation? which have long been evident to anybody who's bothered to study it as they became to me, maybe 15 years ago as i started to learn about this. they have become apparent to everybody. and the way i would summarize the situation is that so there's wiley coyote. he's been chasing after roadrunner. and he's found himself off of a cliff. and what's more interesting? is look at his eyes.

he suddenly realized that there are some fundamentals in his situation. which are going to spell a really bad outcome. and that's what's happening here, and i want to tell you about some of those fundamentals. we'll start with demographics. people demographics is destiny, right? this is a graph of the historic and projected population of the globe. starting in 1950 and out to 2050. and we're currently just under eight billion people and we will grow. most middle rhoda projections to about 9 billion people by the middle of the century 30 years from now. and as you can see most of that growth. has happened in asia >> as you can see most of that growth happened in asia and some at the bottom of the glass in africa as well, but asia opens up and the rest of the world is static, modest growth

and that's demographics, the second is developments and this is a complicated chart and it shows the energy use per capita against the gdp per capita for a number of countries year by year since when did this start? 1980 up until 2017. while there's a lot to learn studying in detail, one is rich people use more energy, or well off people use more energy, second, there's a big swath of countries up here, including the u.s., which is over here, europe over here whose energy use per capita is relatively constant. the problem is there's only about a billion and a half people over here. this there's another six billion here whose energy use

is going to increase monetonicly as they improve their lot. and put those together, development and realize that fossil fuels have remained predominant in supplying the world's energy, currently about 80% in coal, oil and gas. wind and solar, while growing rapidly are down here. fossil fuels are the most reliable and convenient way of getting energy and you can predict that the energy consumption where it's growing today through the next 30 years and most of that growth is in asia and that if we don't change our policies, the great majority of that energy will continue to be supplied by oil, gas, and coal.

these are fundamentals, just data, but the basic outlines of the situation are self-evident. let's look at the developed world where we're living, one and a half billion people. it's ubiquitous, it's what makes society go. it's provided by complex systems whether it's the grid or the fuel supply chain for oil. these systems have to be highly reliable, and they're made highly reliable by having proven hardware and proven operating procedures. you don't change them rapidly. in fact, energy systems change for exactly that region. in shows the u.s. energy supply over the last many decades, maybe a century or so, and you can see coal got added to by oil, got added to by gas.

wood is only a little bit down at the bottom and recently we've seen an uptick in renewables. >> the reason energy systems change slowly is again, its big capital expense, long lifetime, things have to work together. you can't change cars unless you also change the fuel and you change the way in which you deliver the fuel. so, lots of pieces have to change together. people say what about efficiency if i make something people use more about it and there's some debate how important that is, but looking at the efficiency measures. finally, changes are going to be disruptive. we want to see changes in economics, employment, and rapid changes will be disruptive.

i'd like to say, you need to change by or the orthodonture. >> the biden administration's goals real quick, the goal is to reduce submissions by 20 -- by 2030, so, seven years, eight years from now, by 50%, relative to 2005 and to go net zero by 2050 to zero out emissions from the power sector in 13 years from now. they've been coming down largely because gas has been substituting for coal, but also there's a rise in wind and to a lesser extent solar generation. we're going to eliminate gasoline and diesel from the light duty vehicle fleet. you won't be able to buy if the policies come to pass, a gasoline or diesel engine by

2035, and i was at a conference ending yesterday where i saw the ceo of ford say well, we're not going to stop producing them, necessarily, the gasoline engines, but we're set to do those as opposed to electrification. but the car companies, if you watch the ads are into this big time. there were always restrictions on new oil and gas production, despite what the secretary of energy has said recently and jen psaki's energy in the room and how difficult it is to get a permit and production underway or to secure financing. i think the most dangerous thing they've been doing is to drive climate risk in all aspects of the financial situation, through the sec and the fed and so on. but, there are 1800 fossil fuel power firms in the country and if you want to make them

disappear by 2035, as robert said, you need to make 11 of them per month disappear, so, let's watch that to see if it really comes to pass. there are 280 million gasoline and diesel powered vehicles in the country and they all have to go away. so concerns, stranded assets, unreliability of the grid, and we're going to become less energy secure because we're discouraging foreign -- discouraging domestic oil and gas production. the secretary of energy was talking on wednesday and i heard her speak and for the first time reached out to the oil and gas company and said we need to get you to produce more. that hasn't gotten through to the other parts of the government, there's constant

jaw-boning. and the administration has to decide what it really wants. it's having a hard time doing that. >> so, i think there's going to be backlash as the measures start to bite on ordinary consumers. and particularly as people realize that the u.s. is only 13% of global emissions they're going to ask, tell me again why are we doing this? if it was going to zero tomorro it would be wiped out by a decade's worth and so it's not a solution to the problem. and i won't talk about this, i think that robert will talk about that. we don't have a way to produce a grid that's simultaneously clean in the sense of low emissions, affordable and not much more expensive than we have now and also reliable.

if you put in a lot of wind and solar, that's cheap generating capacity, wonderful. but it's highly unreliable, and if you want to make the grid reliable, the most expensive thing you're paying for is that reliability. do you want it to be 90% reliable, 99% reliable, 99.9% reliable and each extra bit of reliability costs more and more. by the way, we're at about 99.9% today. okay. talk about the developing world a little bit and then we'll wrap up. energy demand i showed you is correlated with well-being. emissions from the rest of the world are growing because fossil fuels are the most convenient and reliable, not necessarily the cheapest, but in fact, are the most convenient and reliable way for people to meet that demand. countries like china and india have a compelling near-term

self-interest in getting the energy that they need. and they're dealing with the wolf at the door, as opposed to having to worry about their cholesterol and some of that that might happen several decades from now. and who can blame them. and as they've pointed out, it's amoral to deny countries the energy that they need or not pay them to reduce their emissions using more advanced forms of energy that will cost more. and so it's going to be interesting, there's going to be a debate after i leave the podium and be very interesting to see that explored, the morality of how do you simultaneously satisfy energy demand and reduce emissions. when i look at all of this, adaptation is going to be the dominant response and that's what the globe is going to do. it's agnostic, it doesn't matter if they are changing for

more. and you do less if the climate change is less. it's local, and we would build seawalls, let's say, or shift the kind of crops that we're growing and so it's politically palatable as opposed to spending something that's half a world away and maybe a generation away, and does not require global consensus. it's autonomous, it happens on its own. one of the defining human characteristics is our adaptability and it is effective. consider that the globe has warmed by 1.1 degrees since 1900, and during that time we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare ever. we have two billion people to just about eight billion now, just about double and we've seen quality of health,

nutrition, educated and so on. to believe 1.1, 1.4 degrees, which is what the u.n. predict on average by the end of the century, sfft i think it's begging relieve. beyond phrases the globe is going to warm, warm more in the arctic or latitudes. or sea rise. as i showed you in that quote about sea level rise. let me wrap up with my next to the last slide. we must not gruberize political science. what do i mean by gruberize? john gruber was one of the principals architects of

obamacare, or affordable care act. and after he was out of government. the lack of transparency was a huge advantage, really, really, critical to getting the affordable care act passed. at least one key provision was the very clever basic exploitation of lack of economic understanding ever american voter. >> for an expert and educator to say that is so wrong. if we misrepresent the science or various technology we do great damage when we try to persuade people rather than nr them. we take away their right for enveloped decisions, as i showed you this is a values discussion in the end. it distracts from more urgent needs and certainly of the less couple years we've seen a

couple more urgent needs than nothing that's going to happen 30 or 50 years from now. we tarnish the reputation of science as it makes input into other matters, like pandemics, and maybe most depressingly, we have depressed young people. we've scared the bejesus out of them and that's so wrong. and that's one of the reasons i wrote the book. all right. last slide, what do i think we should do going forward? we should cancel the climate crisis, okay? there is no justification for saying we have a crisis. but at the same time we should acknowledge the task and the challenge of trying to reduce human influences. we need to better represent the science and energy. energy and climate literacy are so important and so deficient among the general public. i would also advocate as i had in the past, a red team review of the reports to make sure that they don't have the errors

and misleading sections that are in the current reports. we've got to keep watching the climate, if nothing else, this is a data-driven science and we need to know what it's doing and continuously and with high precision. i would put a greater focus on adaptation. right now we don't have a good frame work for it or a good estimate of the costs and in the developing countries. we need to simply promote their development and their resilience. you need to be able to execute national strategies. you need to be able to be wealthy enough to do the adaptation, i'm all for demonstrating trance misses, large grid storage, batteries, chemical, fuels, none of nem are ready for prime time particularly if your criterion

is that it shouldn't cost much more p of the current way we have of doing business. and most importantly, i would. form a graceful decarbonization pathway. and who won the nobel prize in 2018 realized there's an optimal pace, doing it too rapidly against something bad happening to the climate. we need to find out what that is and put together a plan that incorporates, technology, business, regulation, behavior. and implement it as necessary, depending upon what we see the climate doing. i'll close with the thought that precipitous climate action is a far greater danger to the nation's and the globe's well-being than is anything we can imagine for climate change.

and with that, thanks for your attention and i'm happy to take questions or comments. [applause] find with it wherever you find broadcasts and use the code that's texted to you. >> great to be with you all of you here in colorado so i have a lot of questions that have been sent in during your presentation. we'll take them one by one. >> okay. >> so the first how did you land a job in the obama administration given your independent views on climate change? >> well, look, you know, one's views evolve as one learns more and as the science and the technology evolves. i joined dp in 2004 to help

them figure out what the petroleum was, and they didn't need me to help find oil and gas and they knew that already. i educated myself about energy and energy technologies with the goal of helping to develop or focus on technologies. i haven't looked at the skypes. and i did more or less the same thing in the obama administration, brought in 2013, i had-- or 2014, early 2014 i had a hard look at the science at the behest of the american physical society. it's recounted in the book, if people are interested in the details and started to realize, this is not as solid as people think it is. the political dialog became more and more hyperbolic, the proposed energy solutions became more and more unrealistic after 2014 and

finally decided, okay, i've got to speak out more than op-ed columns and write the book. >> and a question that i'm getting to you, not mine, doctor, koonin, you come from the political left that he is powses the narrative. on the right many believe it's a chinese hoax, do you see any hope of the realistic viewpoint gaining traction in the area. >> as to my own political affiliations, i've never registered with a party. i'm an independent. and i did serve in the obama administration. my idea of what scientists should be doing in the political realm is provide advice, analysis, options, but not make the decisions. and i tried to do that when i was in the private sector and

when i was in the government. you know, i think it's best if we try to stay apolitical, as does the military and the judiciary. many of my colleagues don't subscribe to that, unfortunately. when you get politicians, industry leaders in a closed room, with an honest discussion, it's a very different kind of conversation than what you see in public. that's all. >> okay. so you mentioned the public reaction that could be quite strong. how soon do you see that coming on? >> well, you know, the whole climate agenda has now taken a back seat given what's happened in ukraine and what's happened with the energy system, ukraine. i think that people have come to realize just how important a secure, reliable, affordable

energy supply is. and i think that's going to occur a lot of thinking going forward. i think we're going to start to see it already at the mid term elections and i think certainly by the 2024 elections. >> okay. science question, what do most climate models assume about cloud feedback. how likely is that-- those assumptions are correct, what does it mean for testing if you're wrong? can you first define cloud feedback? >> cloud feedback happens in different ways, the ways in way clouds changes to a warming globe. a simple example. if the temperatures in the atmosphere goes up, hold a little more water. you would think that that might make more clouds and clouds

help result sunlight and the negative clouds will make it cooler than it it would have been otherwise. the high content the opposite effect it getting the balance right. the problem with clouds in the climate models. the climate models cut the earth, atmosphere, and ocean into boxes and the boxes, typically 60 miles on a side. you only have one number to describe the conditions in each of those millions of boxes. the one number might be the temperature, maybe the humid, that's it, but not variation across the box and unfortunately, clouds occur on much smaller spacial scales, clouds can be a couple miles across, or the box 60 miles across so you have to make assumptions about what clouds are doing, altitude type. amount, depending upon just the average over the box. the people try to do the best that they can, they use observations, they use physical

principles, but in the end the so-called subgrid parameters of clouds are one of the biggest uncertainties in the models, different people make different assumptions and because we're looking at such small changes, get almost any answer you want, but i think it's generally acknowledged that the lack of doing good cloud parameterization is one of the big problems in the models. >> why do you recommend decarbonization where there's no detectible signal in the climate and we know from available data increasing co2 in the atmosphere and warmer weather at high latitudes will save lives, increase biodiversity and increase well-being? >> okay, so those are two different questions. let me talk about the signal first. i think there are signals, they're not in the gross climate, but in the details,

the details of radiation flow, the temperatures in the upper atmosphere and so on. these are, with good physical reason, changed by growing amounts 67co2 and that's certainly going to have some effect on the climate. the problem is these are physically small amount. human impact 2 watts per square meter and energy flows are 2 or 300 watts per square meter. so the human influences today are about a 1% effect. and you can say, why do i care about 1%? the problem is the climate is also sensitive, a rise of 2 or 3 degrees in the surface temperature is a 1% rise in the temperature. it's sensitive. the effects are small and there are many other phenomena that can influence the climate at that level. and natural variability which i showed you in several cases is one of them. so untangling all of that is a difficult business. yet, i think most people would

say, some fraction of the warming of the last decade. whether it's 100% as the u.n. says or it's closer to 50% as i believe we can again go into some of the details, it's still up for grabs. the second question is whether the warming is good or bad and i think that that depends where you sit. and you know, there's a lovely quote from a guy named anthony downs. he was a political scientist, social scientist working in the 1970's and he was a-- he worked at brookings, so he was on the left. and he wrote a wonderful people called up and down with ecology working mostly or talking mostly about local pollution from smog. he was worried about the growing number of vehicles, i think he was in los angeles at the time he wrote it and he has a great quote. he says that the elites, environmental deterioration is often the common man's improving miss standard of living. and so, he was worried about

the proliferation, to everybody, we've got the same situation now with the developing countries. and i don't know whether it's good or bad, all right? it probably be okay to not do it if other things were equal, but the problem is, other things are not equal. >> okay. can you speak to the atlantic conveyor belt slowing? how much history do we have on it and to draw conclusions and could you please define atlantic conveyor belt slowing? >> so one of the major features of the earth's climate system, an important one, is the warming of waters in the northern tropical atlantic, the creation of the gulf stream which carries a lot of heat from the equator to the poles,

and then the sinking of that water as it becomes colder and more saline, it goes down to the bottom, flows down under the atlantic in a slow current centimeters per -- i can't remember, it takes a thousand years for it to go the whole way around. it goes down past south america, shows up in the indian ocean and so on, this is the great conveyor belt. wally broker is the guy who covered it in the '80s, i think. and the concern is that, well, maybe it's going to slow down a little and hence, not carry heat as rapidly from the equator to the poles, make more a colder northern hemisphere and so on? well, is it going to get colder or warm is the first question? what do we know about it? it's hard to measure. there have been papers over the last couple of decades that see it going down somewhat.

is that human cause or remember the nile, all right? it goes up and down, up and down. i don't think we know. >> okay. the buildout of temperature measurement in urban-- or the spreading urban models, do you think that's a real concern or not? >> no, i'm not so concerned about that, people who may not be so up on it, when you measure the temperature in the city, it's a few degrees warmer than the surrounding country side. you see that on the weather report every day, that's called the urban heat element. and it's a real phenomena. and some people got concerned that the record of global temperature, which i showed you at the beginning, was being contaminated by the growth of urban regions making more-- making more and more rapidly than it should have been.

i've got to say, the people who compiled the surface from record data, i believe do a pretty careful job. there are four or five independent estimates doing that. one of them, the most recent one is led by my friend, rich muller, and i helped to get na started when i was in the department of energy. i don't find much to criticize. people look at isolated stations and pictures of weather stations that are in location that is would make your hair raise, they've from next to an air conditioning, or from grass to concrete. >> how about the electric plants and coal mine. why should we spend money on decarbonizing while they ramp up making our energy more

expensive shipping more activity to them while they enjoy lower energy costs? >> so i don't have an answer to that. i think that's going outside of my remit as a scientist. i might have a personal opinion about that, but it's not worth much and probably-- worth less than the average. this is a values issue for society. it is the thing we should be debating, not whether the science is right or wrong. we need an accurate reputation of the science, but that's a moral discussion and i hope that that's the kind of discussion we should be having in our political sphere, not simply don't you care about your grandchildren. >> okay. and we run on time here. so i believe we're about at the 10:00 smart. >> okay. >> thank you, a big round of applause. what a great way to start the morning. [applause] >> thank you, doctor.

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