mobile app featuring your unfiltered view of what's happening in washington live and on-demand. keep up with events including live streams of floor proceedings and hearings from the u.s. congress, white house, the courts, campaigns and more from the world of politics all at your fingertips. stay current with the latest episodes of washington journal and live scheduling information for our tv networks and radio plus a variety of compelling podcasts. c-span now is available at the apple store and google play. downloadedfor free today . your frontrow seat washington anytime, anywhere . >> when we started planning this energy and climate summit we had no idea just how timely it would turn out to be in mid march 2022. we are seeing firsthand why energy independence is

critical to national security. none other thanelon 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 . these decisions will determine whether the lights will come on when you flick a switch and if they do a much it will cost you to keep them on. there are many conferences across the globe that discuss climate change, global climate records and global warming but none of these events include adiscussion of the impact on individual freedom , prosperity and standard ofliving . we aim to change that with our program today. the goal of this summit is to build a better understanding of the nexus of us energy policy, climate science and impact on individual freedom and prosperity.

this understanding we believe will lead to better more realistic solutions s which can address these issues without bankrupting our families and vastly lowering our standard of living. when we were planning our recent campus liberty to her debate as to place last week at the university of miami in florida and at cu boulder we had an incredibly difficult time finding anyone willing todebate alex epstein . the question was america rapidly eliminate fossil fuel use to prevent climate yesterday and especially notable response from a pulitzer prize winning author who declined our invitation to date was this. there is no room for debate on this issue. well, we could not disagree more. real and robust debate is urgently needed to ensure the liimpact on freedom, prosperity and our standard of living are included in any discussion of energy policy and climate change.tu 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 or educational organization steamboat institute relies on the support institutions to carry out our mission of promoting america's first principles and inspiring active involvement in the defense of liberty. yi'd like the bank are many sponsors of today's program including our title sponsor ry liberty energy and thank you chris right very much. round of applausefor liberty energy . [applause] i would also like to recognize and thank our major foundation sponsor jack ross, charitable foundation executive director arlen whitaker and husband harry dunn traveled from southern california so thank you jack ross, charitable foundation. when we have many other generous sponsors and i urge

you to take a moment to read their names in the program ayand on the signage out in the hallway. for their generous funding of our programs. finally i would like to thank our steamboat institute board of directors and energy and climate summit planning committee whose help in planning today's program was invaluable. find all their names in your program and i would like to ask all our steamboat institute board members and energy anand climate summit planning committee please stand so we can thank you. [applause] and now it's an honor to introduce our first speaker to kick off our program. stephen koonin is a national respected leader in science policy who served as ' undersecretary for science in the us department of energy

under president obama where he was lead author of the department's strategic plan. with more than 200 peer-reviewed papers in the field of physics and astrophysics energy technology, energy policy and climate science doctor tran five was a professor of theoretical physics at caltech and also served as caltech's vice president and provost for almost a decade. he is currently a professor at new york university and in the review of doctor koonin's book unsettled, what climate science tells us what it doesn't and why it matters a professor of global energy wrote doctor koonin's book is a breath of fresh air for climate policy. the science of climate is neither settled nor sufficient to dictate policy e. rather than an existential crisis we face a wicked problem that requires a pragmatic balancing of costs and benefits. following his remarks doctor koonin will be joined on stage by jackie beaton, radio and podcast host who covers all things energy on the

jackie daily show. jackie will select your questions to ask doctor koonin so be sure to submit your questions using the qr code which you will find on the cards on your table. let's get a warm steamboat welcome to doctor stephen koonin. >>. >> it's a great choice of music.well, it has been an adventure to be speaking the truth about climate in an interview the last couple of years and i'd like to tell you a little bit more about that. i've chosen for my title on settled on climate and energy and it's actually a triple

entendre . 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 are contrary to what you hear in the popular and political dialogue. and finally i would say that with what we all nationally and globally do about the situation remains quite unsettled in and the subject of great debate. climate and energy are certainly at the forefront of the discussion today. i'll show you hear changes in the world's average surface temperature from about 1880 up to the present and you can see starting about 1900 it's gone up by about 1.1degrees celsius . at the same time, we see human influences on the climate growing.

largely through the relation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. here i show you the measured carbon dioxide from about 1960 and it's going up. it started at 300 and whatever on the left and is currently about 420 parts per million. we know that that increase is due largely to the burning of fossil fuels as we produce energy that the world needs. but you could also see that the relationship is not so simple. because from 1940 to 1970 that temperature actually went down even as human influence group. so the scientificstory is a little more complex . what we'd like to know is how will changes in climate in the future influence ecosystems and human society and of course 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 to science with its certainties and uncertainties and we have the hazards and risks as the climate changes. on the other side we got a growing demand for energy. reliable and affordable and clean and with low greenhouse gas emissions. and then in the middle we've got a set of considerations of values, priorities. thsociety's tolerance for risk. equity between generations and between north south in the developing world and then finally we got if we think about different responses are they really going to make a difference and how much are they going to help and i want cito 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 was just wonderful . and you got a sense of how the political sphere for the nonexperts 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 carrie even back in 2014 said there shouldn't be any doubt in anybody's mind that the science is absolutely certain and if you parse the rest of that sentence i'd like to hear it because it's something that, nevermind. and then there are all kinds of other folks who use the phrase existential threat, climate crisis, climate

emergency, climate disaster and so on. m the president, kerry, senator sanders, mark carney, a major figure in international finance. bill gates, the last to know better because their scientists but nevertheless we hear those words from them. when the most recent un report on climate science was released in august the un secretary-general said it's code red for humanity. despite the fact you can only find the words climate crisis in their once and that's not a scientificfinding but the description of how the us media has over exaggerated the situation . and then the current secretary of defense has declared it and ask essential threat. thiswas almost a year ago. i think you've got a better sense of what an x essential threat really is . well, where does the science

come from as opposed to the science? the science gets assessed annually. i'm sorry, the science thgets assessed by the un in a series of reports 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 august 9 and impact 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 for nonexperts and 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 the montage have thnot read those reports. iguarantee you that otherwise they wouldn't be saying the things they are saying . at least if they're honest . i'm often reminded of a scene from the movie the princess bride. visit any one of the characters the tall guy on the right keeps using the word inconceivable and inigo montoya at some point gets so annoyed he says you keep using that word. i do not think it means what you think it means. 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 readthem you realize the climate is not broken . and that if we do not face certain disaster unless we

take rapid sweeping action. there's very little justification for that and in the end it's going to be a balancing act as you will see. ciyou might ask how did the science which is good legitimate science as solid were on solid as any other get thrown into the certain science that people talk about and it's a long game of telephone. ryit starts from the observational data and a primary research literature. it goes into the assessment reports by the un and us government. it goes into the summaries for policy makers 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. media e goes on to the and out to the publicand the decision-makers . along this game of telephone there's much bad behavior as

thone goes down the chain. people confuse weather with climate. they highlight recenttrends without historical context . they determine implausible scenarios for future missions as business as usual. there are alarming predictions that never materialized. you can read through this yourself. when i started to watch this closely about four years ago i decided to write a book unsettled which tries to get around this change and gives 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 tyndale. i don't know t, i didn't know who william tyndale was. 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

. it was the forerunner of the king james. and needless to say he annoyed a lot of people when he did that .de made the bible evident to less educated folks. he was burned at the stake for thatamong other things . i've been called a denier but we will see what happens. let me show you 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 tnumber of hurricanes and tropical storms since 1970 so that's 50 years. you can see it goes up and down but it's certainly not rt increasing. there's another measure of hurricane activity which e

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 trend over 50 years. and in fact the literature says that even the assessment reports say that. the us government report in 2018 said there's still no confidence that any reported trend over a decade or centuries is robust . so it's a landmark paper 11 authors that gave their individual opinions anonymously . in 2019 and what they said was most of the team has no confidence that there's any other observed trend apart from a slow drift in the northwest pacific. that can be detected or could lead up to human influences and in the most recent report from the un in august said there is no confidence that most reported trends over decades or a century in

measures of hurricanes that count the frequency or the intensity. there's a bit of a footnote in their which i'd be happy to go into into the questions but they think they seen a slight strengthening of storms with a fraction of major storms has increased but it's pretty controversial and ican't elaborate on that . let me turn to sea level rise. you often hear c level is rising. if you don't know anything about geology that would sound alarming 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 120 meters. 400 feet. in 20,000 years. coastline was very different 20,000 years ago. of course e it has slowed down starting about 8000 years ago but it's still robust.

the real question 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 tents of a millimeter per year differences in how fast is rising. we got whether the acceleration isdue to humans and of course what's going to happen in the next century . well, let me show you since i live in new york city part of the time we have really good data to an applied gauge of the southern tip of manhattan , there used to be an artillery battery there and this is the rate as observed from 1920 ofuntil last month . and how fast did the sea go up each year?

you can see that on average it's looking like about three millimeters a year. that's a foot acentury . not something to get to alarmed about. but interestingly it goes up and down and you can see in some years it was down to less than two millimeters a year, up at five and it's thought that these have got to do with long-term cycles of ocean currents in the north atlantic. noaa 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. locked in means is going to happen no matter what. if that were true it would take this graph of the where the star is over 30 years.

now, who am i to dispute noaa but we're going to find out quickly whether is going to go up that rapidly or not. obviously it does we should be thinking differently graph and we're thinking now. on the other hand here's a statement from a paper published by nissan and collaborators at columbia university, certainly within the mainstream to save the use of the models used in these protections to drive adaptation actions is unwarranted. climate map models reproduce conditions with anywhere near the degree of accuracy and precision which will make it usable. nonetheless, nasa, the ipcc put out these projections with great confidence. we shall see. let me turn to whether a in

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

an island and at the southern tip of this island egyptians built a structure called a nileometer because they measured the height of the nile river. it was important to them at the time. that's what the building looks like today. i was fortunate to have visitedabout 20 years ago . if you go inside the building you see this big chamber with three outlets to the river at various levels and a pillar in the middle suspended from the beam. the pillar is marked in cubits tsand of course we can changecubits into meters . a number of people over the century have compiled a record of the readings of the nileometer, the height of the nile. this record shows the annual minimum that the nile reached

in any year. this is a good measure of climate over 10 percent which is an area of about one third the continent of the us so think mississippi scale measure of the climate in africa and you can see this record in 640 roughly and goes up to 14 something. year-by-year that annual minimum of the nile. it's great that we havethis . and it's interesting because first of all you see thereare a lot of ups and downs . some years can be up-5 and a half years and a year or two later you're down to one meter a lot of variability. the second is if you take an average climate is defined as a third-year average you get the recurve and what's most remarkable about that is in fact it still shows a lot of variation . and what you can imagine some

media both egyptian climate panel in the seventh and eighth century screaming new normal. we've got to do more credits and sacrifices but if they just waited a couple decades or more it would have come back even higher. and we're still doing this today. it turns out hathe nile height is controlled by the levels in lake victoria and in 2006 nasa publishes a press release that says lake victorious falling woes. and last year there was a press release lake victoria is rising. i want to do one more to show you just how misleading the media are and this is about greenland's missing ice. greenland has been losing ice faster and faster for the last 30 years and there's an article for them from the guardian in december 2019.

a wonderful picture of somewhere in the arctic s because there's so much greenland and they say the right of ice loss has risen from 35 billion tons a year in the 90s to 254 billion tons a year in the pastdecade . that's pretty scary. it's going 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 greenland uses loses every year and you can see yes, it's gone up a lot since 1990 but it also went up from 19 whatever that is, 1920 to 1940 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 hardly anything to do with the global warming.

it's just cycles of whether that extend over decades in the north atlantic. nevertheless e, the guardian emphasizes this. most media coverage doesn't. when i published this i got a lot of grief from people who wrote in but i was just showing them the data. it's very disturbing. there's no clear trend of record high temperatures in the north southwest where we had a tremendous he waves last summer. this hishows the number of record highs in a number of stations in the us. starting basically over the last 200 years both for the us but for that 26 stations in the pacific northwest. what happened was just whether . if you saw the same thing out of the years

next 10 then you can start to talk about climate but we're not there yet. i want to do one more on impacts and get on two solutions because we are running short on time. let's talk about the economic impact of warming. in some ways this is one of the bottom lines and the 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 damage of the us economy that could grow to hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century. and to back that up they give us this wonderfully interesting chart that shows how much damage is when we see under high emissions 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 say this chart is remarkable for several reasons. one is the numbers are given to three significant digits. that's 155 billion 70 years from now. not 153, not 157 155. second is the degree of granularity. we go all the way down to 300 million in municipal and industrial . how can you say that 70 years from now? finally they don't give you any baseline so there's labor sector. today it must be five, six, $7 trillion at least and 155 billion 70 years hence. it's kind of small potatoes. nevermind the uncertainty. nevertheless, the media when this came out were all over themselves.

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

sectors in the 20/50 report the impact of climate change would be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. in other words climate change is only one relativelysmall factor . technology demographics come into play etc. and here's what it looks like. if you look at the us economy , growing two percent which is about what the fed and everybodyelse thinks it will do , we start here today and you get the blue curve. if there's a four percent climate impact in 2090 you get the orange curve. meaning things get delayed by a couple of years of growth. and so i would love to share a stage with bill gates and w ask them if this is what you mean by the climate. it's kind of a fork in the road. the most recent un report which came up, go 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 with that statement and again we can go into the details of that. let me talk about our response now. what do we doabout all of hethis ? there are global greenhouse e gas emissions and they're going up at two percent a year more and more. and if we're going to try to just stabilize emissions at a e level that some people deemed to be prudent, we have to go to zero emissions. we need to take this curve down by 2050. and the un has said 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 . at least the economics doesn't look so bad and there e are various pathways of what it would take in order to do

that versus the trajectory that weare currently on . the un has convened a series of conferences over the last 25 or 30 years. the most recent happened in glascow. it was called, 26 and my take away from that is that the fundamentals of the situation which have long been evident to anybody was bothered to study it as the came to me maybe 15 years ago as i started to learn about this they have become apparent to everybody. the way i would summarize the situation is that. so there's while the highly. he's been chasing after the roadrunner and he's found himself off a cliff. what's more interesting is look at his eyes. he suddenly realized 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 . will start with demographics. people, demographics is destiny. this is a graph of the historic and projected population of the globe. starting in 1950 and out to 2050 and where currently just under 8 billion people and we will grow most projections to about 9 billion people by the middle of the century. and as you can see most of that growth hahas happened in asia. there's some at the bottom of the graph in africa as well but asia is what really opens up and the rest of the world ispretty stagnant . that's demographics.

the second is development. this is a complicated chart. it shows the energy use per capita. against the gdp per capita for a number of different countries . year-by-year such as when did this start, 1980. and while there's a lot to learn starting the start in detail, the broad lessons are pretty simple. one is that rich people use more energy. or more well off people use more energy. second there's a big swap of countries up here including the us which is over here. europe over here. whose energy use per capita is relatively constant. the problem is there's only about 1,000,000,000 anda half people over here . there's another about 6 billion people down here. whose energy use is going to increase as they improve.

so you can put those two things together, population and development and also realize that fossil fuels have remained predominant in supplying the world's energy. currently about 80 percent from oil and gas, wind and solar while there are growing rapidly are down here. fossil fuels are the most reliable and convenient way of getting energy. put that together and you project the world energy consumption is going to grow by 50 percent from where it is today over the next 30 years. 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. they're just data.

there are some projections as well but the basic outlines et of the situation are pretty self-evident . so let's look at the developed world where we are living. as i said one and a half billion people. energy is crucial and is ubiquitous. it is what keeps society going. is also provided by complex systems whether it's thegrill or the fuel supply chain for oil . these systems have to be highly reliable and they are in a highly reliable by having proven hardware and proven operating procedures. they don't change rapidly. but energy systems change for that reason. this shows theenergy supply over the past 20 decades, maybe a century or . cole got added to by oil. got added to buy gas. would is only a little bit down at the bottom and

recently we've seen an uptick in renewables. the reason energy systems change slowly again it is capital expense, long lifetime. things have to work together. you can't change cars unless you also change the fuel and the way in which you deliver the fuel so lots of pieces have to change together. people say what about efficiency? there's a phenomenon called rebound which says it by make something more efficient people will use more of it and there's some debate about how important that is what it does in fact weaken the impact of deficiency. finally changes are going to be disruptive. we're going to see changes in economics, employment, and behavior of geopolitics and large rapid changes willbe very disruptive . i'd like to say you need to change energy systems by

orthodontia, not quite tooth extraction. all right. anprovided administration plans and goals to reduce emissions, real quick. the goal is to reduce emissions by 2030 so seven years, eight years from now by 50 percent. and to go in at zero by 22 zero emissions from the our sector in 13 years from now they coming down logically because gas has been substituting for coal but also to a lesser extent solar. going to eliminate gasoline and diesel from thelight-duty vehicle fleet . you will be able to buy if the policies come to pass a gasoline or diesel engine by 2035 and i would say with

confidence and in yesterday i sure the ceo of ford saying where not going to stop producing them necessarily but we've established a set provision to do those as opposed to electrification the car companies if you watch the ads are into this big time. there are all restrictions on new gas production despite what the center of energy has said recently and jen psyches claims as well. many people in the room know how difficult it is to get a permit and get production under way or to secure financing. i think the most dangerous thing they can do is to drive n climate risk and all aspects of the financial situation with the sec and the fed and so on there are 800 fossil fuel powerhouses in the

country and if you want to make them all disappear by ai2025 as robert christ has said you need to make 11 of them disappear so let's watch that to see if it comes to pass. there are 280 million gasoline and l-diesel powered vehicles in the country. they help allhave to go away . so concerns, stranded assets, unreliability of the grid. and we're going to become less energy secure because we are discouraging domestic oil and gas production. so the secretary is talking, i heard her speak for the first time she reached out to the oil and gas companies and said we need to get you to produce more that message has not gotten through to other parts of the government who are constantly job owning oil and gas production so the

administrations got to decide what it really wants and is having a hard time doing that . so i think there's going to be a backlash as these measures start to hit ordinary users. and particularly as people realize the us is only 13 percent of global emissions are going to ask tell me again why we're doing all of this. if the us were to go to zero emissions tomorrow it would be wiped out by a a decade's 'worth of rope in the development of countries . so it's not a solution to the problem. another, let me not talk about this because i think robert will probably talk about this but we do not have a way today to produce a grid that is simultaneously clean and the sense of emissions that are affordable and is not that we have now and also reliable.

if you're putting a lot of wind and solar that's cheap generating capacity. wonderful but it's highly unreliable and if you want to make the great line 6 do you want it to be 99 percent reliable, 99 percent reliable and each extra bit of reliability cost you more . by the way where about 99.5 percent today. talk about the developing world for little bit and we will wrap up. energy demand 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 ways for people to meet that demand. countries like china and india have a compelling near-term interest in getting

the energy they need. they're dealing with bubbles at the door as opposed to having to worry about something that might happen several decades from now. who can blame them? and as our study pointed out it is immoral to deny countries the energy that they need for not pay them to reduce their emissions using a more advanced source of energy that will cost them. so i it would be interesting. there's going to be a debate after i believe i leave the podium and it will be interesting to see that he explored. the morality of how do you simultaneously satisfy your demand and reduce emissions. but when i look at all of this adaptation is going to be the dominant response. it's agnostic, it doesn't matter whether the climate is changing for human or natural reasons . it's proportional.

you do more for climate change and less if the climate changes. it's local. and we would build seawalls let's say or shift the kind of crops that were going though is allegedly palatable as opposed to spending something that's half a world away, maybe a generation away and does not require consensus. it's autonomous. it happens on its own. one of the defining human characteristics is our adaptability and it is effective . consider the globe as warmth by 1.1 degrees since 1900 and during that time we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare ever. and we went from 2 million people in 1900 to just about eight now. at the same time we've seen enormous improvement in the quality of life for nutrition, health. so on. to believe that another 1.14

1.4 degrees which is what the un protects through the end of the century on average is going to significantly the rail that i think it beggars belief. on the other hand adaptation is much easier if you're richer and it also helps if you want to know what you're going to adapt to and beyond general phrases like the globe is going to warm, it's going to warm a little more in the arctic, by how much u, as i showed you in that talk about sea level rise. let me wrap up with my next izto last slide. we must not gruberize science. jonathan gruber who stole a professor at mit is one of the principal architects of the affordablecare act . and whatever you might think about obamacare here is something he said after the

act was passed and he was out of the government. a lack of transparency is a huge political advantage . it was critical to getting the affordable care act passed. at least one key provision was a very clever basic exploitation of the lack of economic understanding of the american voter. for an educator and an expert to say that is so wrong. if we misrepresent the science or the potential of various energy technologies we do great damage when we tried to persuade people rather than inform them. >> as i showed you this is about your discussion. >> it distracts from more urgent needs and the last couple of years vewe've seen a couple more urgent needs than something that's going to

happen 30 or 50 years from now. we tarnish the reputation of science as it makes input into other matters for the pandemic and most depressingly we have to pressed young people. we've scared the jesus out of them and that is just so wrong. that's one of the reasons i wrote the report but last slide. uswhat should we dogoing forward? we should crcancel the climate crisis . there is no justification for saying we have a crisis but at the same time we should acknowledge the challenge of trying to reduce human influence. 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 advocate as i had in the past a 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 k and we really need to know what it's doing and we need to do it continuously. i would put a greater focus on adaptation. right now we don't have a good framework or good estimate of the costs. and in the developing countries we need to simply promote their development and resilience. we need to be able to execute national strategies. we need to be wealthyenough to do the adaptation .i'm all in favor of developing and demonstrating technologies. my favorite is rsa small modular reactors and all great but none of them are ready for prime time particularly if your criterion is it shouldn't

cost much more than the current way we have . most importantly i've formulate a graceful grdecarbonization. beyond board has taught me that fillmore house who won the prize in 2019 realized there's an optimalpace for the decarbonization . it balances disruption against doing it rapidly something bad happening with the climate. so we need to find out what that outcome is and put together a plan that incorporates technology, business, economics, regulation and implement it as necessary depending on what we see theclimate doing . i'll close with the thought that precipitous climate action is a far greater danger to the nations and the globe than anything we can imagine.and with that

thanks for your presentation and i'm happy totake questions or comments . [applause] >> welcome to the stage jackie deason, because of the podcast the jackie daily show . find it wherever you find but podcasts and welcome jackie. submit your questions using the mic provided to you. >> good to see you doctor koonin. i have a lot of questions during yourpresentation and will take them one by one . the first, how did you land a job in the obama administration given your independent views on climate change? >> one's views evolve as one learns more and as the science and technology evolves. i joined bd in 2004 to help them figure out what beyond

petroleum was. they didn't need me to help them find oil and gas, they were good at doing that already so i educated myself about energy and energy technologies . sswith the goal of helping to develop or catalyze the involvement ofemission technology . i wasn't very focused on the ncscience at the time and not look deeply at. i did more or less the same thing in the obama administration . brought in 2013 or 2014, i had a hard look at the science at the behest of the american physical society recounted in the book if people are interested inthe details . and i started to realize this is not as solid as people think it is. the dialogue became more and more hyperbolic of the proposed energy solutions became more unrealistic after 2014 and then i finally decided okay, i've got to be in the more significant way

than writing off comes. >> this is the question i'm giving to you. doctor, you come from the political left which increasingly is as a catastrophic narrative. on the right many believe that the chinese hopes. the is he any prospect of the realistic viewpoint getting traction in the onpolitical realm -mark. >> first of all with respect to my own political affiliations, i have never registered as a member of any party i've always been .ndependent i did a course serving the obama administration but my view of what scientists should be doing in the political realm is provided by us. analysis, options for not make the decisions. and i've tried to do that in the private sector and when i was in government.

i tried 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 and what you see in the public. >> you mentioned the public reaction tcould be quite strong. housing you see that coming on? >> the whole climate agenda is now taken a backseat given what happened in ukraine and what's happening with the energy systems. i think people have come to realize just how important a secure reliable affordable

energy supply is. and i think that's going to color a lot of the policy going forward. will start to see certainly by the 20/40 for elections. >> science question. what do most climate models assume about cloud feedback. if those assumptions are correct what does it mean if athey're wrong. >> cloud feedback first. so cloud feedback happens in different ways. it's the way in which clouds change in response to a warming glow which then affects the warming itself. let me give you an example. the temperature of the atmosphere goes up it can hold a little bit more water. you would think that might make for more clouds. clouds have reflected sunlight so that would be a negative feedback in the

sense that the increase clouds and make it a little cooler than they would be otherwise.it's complicated but the problem with clouds is the following. the climate models the atmosphere and ocean into boxes and the boxes are typically 60 miles on the side. so you only have one number to describe the conditions for each of those millions of boxes. the one number might be the temperature, might be humidity. it's not the variation plus the box but unfortunately the accounts that are on much smaller spatial scales. how to be a couple of miles across versus 60 miles so you're going to have to make assumptions about what clouds are doing about the amount depending upon just the average over the box. people try to do the best they can . these observations principles

in the end these so-called sub- grid prioritization of clouds are one of the biggest uncertainties of the models. yet when people have different assumptions and because we're looking at some small changes you can get all any thing you want i think it's generally acknowledged that the lack of doing good cloud prioritization's is one of the problems in the malls. >> why do you recommend the harmonization we know from the available data that those increasing co2 in the atmosphere at high latitudes were stabilized increased biodiversity. >> those are two different questions. let me talk about anthropogenic's. i think there are anthropogenic's. maybe not in the most details the details of the radiation,

the temperature in the upper atmosphere and so on. these are very good physical reason change by growing amounts of co2 and that's certainly going to have some effect on the climate. the problem is these are physically small effects. human influences about today about two kilowatts per square meter whereas the overall flows in the energy system are two or 300 watts per square meter. so the human influences today are about a one percent effect and you can say why do i care about one percent of the problem is the climate is also sensitive. a rise of two or three degrees in the surface temperature is a one percent rise in the temperature and so it's sensitive, the effects are small and there are many other nominal that can influence the climate level. natural variability which i showed you in several cases is one of untangling all that is a difficult business yet i think most people would say

some fraction of the warming th of the last decades whether it's 100 percent as the un says or is closer to 50 percent as i believe we can again go into some of the details. still up for grabs. the second question is one of the warming is good or bad and that depends on where you ssit. there's a lovely quote from a guy named anthonydowns . he was a social scientist working in the 1970s. he was, he worked at brookings so he was on the left and he wrote a wonderful paper called up and down with ecology working mostly or mostly about local solutions with small. he was worried about the growing number and was in los angeles at the time he wrote it and he has this great quote. he says elite environmental deterioration is often a common man's improving his standard of living.

so he was worried about everybody. we got the same situation now with the developed versus developing countries. and ani don't know whether it's good or bad. it would probably be okay to not do it but the problem is other things are not equal. >> can you the frantic conveyor belt flowing, how much history do we have, enough to draw conclusions and could you please define conveyor belts? >> so one of the major features of the earth's climate system is the warming of borders in the northern tropical atlantic. the creation of the gulf stream which carries a lot of

of it to the equator to the polls and the sinking of that as it becomes colder and more daily. goes down to the bottom, goes down under the atlantic in a slow current centimeters. i can remember. it takes 1000 meters whole way around. goes down past south america, shows up in the indian ocean. this is a great conveyor belt . he was the guy who discovered it in the 80s. and the concern is that maybe it's going to slow down and hence not carry heat as rapidly from the equator to the polls. make for a colder northern hemisphere. is going to get colder or warmer s? the second question is what do we know about it ? it's hard to measure. there have been papers measured over the last couple of decades that see it slowing down somewhat. is that human caused or hu

remember the nile? it goes up and down. i don't think we know. >> buildout temperature measurements in urban or spread of urban areas affecting temperature models, do you think that's a real concern or not. >> i'm not so concerned about that. certain people may not be so ea on it. when you mention the temperature with the city's several degrees warmer andthe surrounding countryside you see that on the weather reports every day . that's henocalled the urban hea island and it's a real phenomenon. some people got concerned that the record of global temperature which i showed you in the beginning was being contaminated by the growth of urban regions making it warm more rapidly than it should have been. i've got to say that people who compile the surface m temperature record i believe

do a fantastic job. there are four of five independent estimates. one of them the most recent one is by my good friend rich mueller. i hope that program started when i was in the department f of energy i don't find much to criticize in the way that's being done.people look at isolatedstations . anthony watson showing pictures of weather stations that are locations that would make your hair race. it's an air conditioner events where they've been moved from a grass area of two countries and so on.ry people take that into account pretty well . >> there's time for one more. what about the rest of the well world: 4500: >> and coal mines. why should we send plenty on harmonizing how they went up making our money or energy more expensive, shifting more

jobs and economic activity for them while they enjoy lower energycosts . >> i don't have an answer to that. i think that's going outside of my units as a scientist. i'm a personal opinion about that but it's not worth much and is probably worth less than the average. this is a valuationto society . it is something they should be debating, not whether the science is right or wrong. we need an accurate representation of the science but that's a moral discussion and i hope that's the kind of discussion we should be having our political sphere, not simply don't you care about your grandchildren? >> so miss begins said we're running out of time.e. i believe you're at about the 10:00 mark. >> atwhat a great way to start the morning. thank you doctor koonin,

thank you jackie. >> book tv every sunday on c-span2 features leading authors discussing their latestnonfiction books . noon eastern on in-depth join our live conversation with journalists sam quinones who will discuss america's drug epidemic and his latest book the least of us: true tales of america and hope in the time of fentanyl and meth and at 10 pm eastern on "after words" creator and host of the rubin report shares his thoughts on how to revive the american dream and call out woke culture with his book don't burn thiscountry. he's interviewed by cato institute vice president and director of polling enemy emily eakin's . watch tv on c-span2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at booktv.org .

>> after months of closed-door investigations the house january 6 committee is set to go public. starting june 9 two and in as committee members question key witnesses about what transpired and why during the assault on the us capital. watch our live coverage beginning thursday tonight on c-span, c-span now or anytime online at c-span.org. c-span: yourunfiltered view of government . c-span has unfiltered coverage of the us response to russia's invasion of ukraine bringing you the latest from the president and other white house officials, the pentagon and state department as well as

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