hey hey hey. well i'm john harwood of washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture it's clear hurricane sandy is not your typical hurricane but instead a superstorm fueled by climate change global warming and climate change deniers still turn a blind eye to global warming after seeing the devastation sandy brought these codes blast our panel and the night's bigger picture discussion climate change from the denials also of speaker about his being or into the earlier today about a willingness to work with the president to avoid falling off the fiscal cliff the republicans put partisanship aside in favor of saving the economy that and more

into night's big picture rubble and inside still the take america maybe the shining city on the hill according to mitt romney but it only takes four easy steps to turn our nation into a third world country tell you what those steps are and how we can avoid taking them in tonight's deleted. right now thousands of americans along these coast are still reeling from hurricane sandy's devastating effects and from the nor'easter the dealt in insult to injury earlier this week in the immediate aftermath of sandy scientists meteorologists and even politicians felt compelled to point out it was not your average storm and that perhaps climate change played a role or even a major role in its development but of course there were an equal number of pundits and politicians who screamed nonsense climate change of it actually existed and had nothing to do was sandy's devastation there do you believe that there is no such thing as global warming i think that's trumped up by people out there who want to

get on the green agenda the reality of it is the science indicates most of it is. not all of it is caused by natural causes and as to the potential human contribution to that there's a great scientific dispute about that very issue or i gave a speech on the floor of the senate last thursday i was immediately attacked by john kerry and barbara boxer but the thing is phony you know. good about being redeemed after all of these years cap and trade. both of them bought into the global warming hoax bought into the cap and trade top down control of energy and manufacturing sector for sure there's a monopoly preconcerted even if you have three if you want a different seasons other than caffeine trade in turning over the internet to the e.p.a. also a minister paleontologist so i've posted letters and looking at the years temperature it was a long time and i'm a lot harder to convince just looking at a computer model. climate change is phony hoax despite nearly every reputable

scientist an expert on earth telling the world that climate change and global warming are very real climate change deniers refuse to believe that our planet's environment and conditions are changing for the worse and that it's bigger picture discussion climate change debunking the denial delve into the world of climate change denial and provide you with the science that proves climate change is very real and its effects could be very devastating on tonight's panel our dr amanda stout senior scientist in the climate and energy program at the national wildlife federation dr joseph rome's senior fellow at the center for american progress and editor of the climate progress dot org blog and dr john dam lot lashoff director of the climate and national climate and clean air program at the national resources defense council thank you all for joining me and great to have you with us dr live from new york as well. the center for. competitive

enterprise it's to see they've been running around all over on this stuff and they've come up with this list of the top ten global warming myths and provided handy talking points to anybody who wants to take this stuff down and i you know i've been debating this with these people for years and years and years i just want to get some really credible thoughtful people on and just let's put this drive a stake into the heart of this vampire if possible if i could start with you dr stout misstep dr. the one nine hundred ninety s. were the hottest decade on record according to the deniers this is a myth now that's just plain false i mean the two thousands are now the hottest year on record so actually surgically true. we're going to get out of work this gotten much worse this year is on track to be the hottest year on record i mean there's no doubt that if you look over the last hundred years the temperatures have been increasing at least a degree and a half and that they're on track to continue increasing over the next century maybe as much as seven to eleven degrees fahrenheit so what we've seen is just

a small taste of what we might expect in the future. and in fact there was a report that just came out today or yesterday said you know it's it's actually what we're looking at being played out are actually the worst case scenarios that we were projecting a decade ago right so the climate models give a range of potential future temperature increases and this new study actually looked at the the past projections and compare the observations of water vapor and found that those projections that are on the higher and the seven to ten to eleven degrees fahrenheit are probably more consistent with the observations are good news dr wrong. number two top ten global myth according to the competitive enterprise institute who causes global warming how dare we think that sir yeah this we've known for a very long time well over a century you know they call them greenhouse gases for a reason they act like

a greenhouse that they trap heat and this is been well demonstrated all the things you would expect to see if carbon dioxide were trapping heat we observe and i think the thing that people have to understand is. we are just at the very beginning the warming the carbon pollution that we've done to date it's only warmed us about a degree fahrenheit but as amanda said if we keep doing nothing if we just keep pouring in the air we are going to warm. you know five times six times as much as we warmed in the last half century this century so the kind of weather extremes that we're now beginning to see that like hurricane sandy people become the normal weather. and i recall. i been doing a radio show for nine years now and these guys come on the program regularly and we you know we just have these debates as if it was a debate now it's not even a debate but in the case they would say you know ok c o two is going up but the temperatures aren't tracking it and it's my recollection is that over the years

what we figured out was that a lot of that c o two was actually being observed by the oceans which is acidify in the oceans and much of that much of that heat was ending up in the oceans is. correct i'm i'm reading what should a chunk of it yeah i mean most of the warming goes into the oceans over ninety percent of it so that's why august is melting everywhere the arctic had record ice melt this year. but the the reason that the temperature doesn't match the rise in carbon dioxide perfectly is that there are these short term effects like el nino and la niña and then a volcano contemporary lower temperatures and so it can pollution from coal plants and the like but the fact is when you look over periods of decades the match with carbon dioxide and temperature rise is pretty much just what scientists said it would be remarkable climate dr lash of the climate was stable until man came along

this is a myth according to the deniers is this a. well there are of course are some natural climate variability is way back in time but what we've seen over the last fifty years is a rise in temperature that is clearly a tribute to the increase of carbon pollution in the atmosphere so human civilization developed during a period of very. stable climate over thousands of years and they like to confuse the issue by looking back further in time or selecting data here and there are that's a that's a pretty easy game to play if you're trying to confuse the issue but look it's really very very simple we're d.-in carbon up out of the ground in the form of coal oil and natural gas we're burning it in power plants and cars we're putting that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in a trap sea and guess what the earth is warming up just like we expected it to and

there really is no legitimate basis for disputed that the deniers at this point you know i really have been reduced to a small number of ideologues who just they just can't accept that reality because it it turns their world view upside down and because of climate change is a real problem then we're going to have to actually have the government do some things to reduce the pollution that's causing them and these groups like competitive enterprise institute just look at the name it's not a science group it's an ideological group that's the goal is to shrink the size of government and so they just simply can't accept the reality you say ideology mitt romney at one point when he was governor of massachusetts in fact he signed a cap and trade laws saying you know c o two is a real problem we're going to do something about this and signed it in the northeast compact you know proudly proclaim global warming was real then when he wanted to run for president he had to walk that back it seems to me like that's not

ideology that's opportunism i'm wondering what percentage of the people who are out there claiming that there is no such thing as global warming might be doing so because their campaign contributions from fossil fuel industry or the the risk of the fossil fuel industry funding somebody to run against them or destroy their careers is so great do you have any sense of the. yeah i think that's exactly right in mitt romney's case opportunism is. in fact the fossil fuel so i think what we have is a mix of fossil fuel money and sort of ideologues that as fuel the climate denial in this election cycle the fossil fuel interests spent something like five hundred million dollars to try to defeat climate realists and they lost in every case so people like john tester are coming back to the senate people like

martin heinrich were elected. with no i was having a ball but. their argument just didn't sell with the public the public wants once their leaders to base decisions on the facts of reality and i think people at this point they can see the effects of climate change all around them so despite that unbelievable influx of fossil fuel money they really almost nothing to show for it a doctor a minister i had one of these one of these fellows on my show a while back and i said you know the glaciers are melting this is one of the myths according to you and he said no actually snow fall in antarctica is higher than it's ever been in the glaciers are growing cities but the truth is that glaciers all across the globe are melting at remarkable rates i mean we're uncovering land in artifacts that we haven't seen in hundreds and hundreds of years and the sea ice in the arctic this year smashed the previous record by significant amount in i mean

the loss of snow loss of c.i.c. had more open ocean there than we have ever recorded before in antarctica we are seeing melting there are places where you're getting more snowfall and that's because of global warming too because we have more moisture in the atmosphere so we can have more snow in some places but in other parts we are seeing melting in major calving of icebergs on a regular basis so. so the net net is that the glaciers are melting all of them right and we're seeing the impacts because we're seeing the sea level rise you know sea level rise says from climate change has been seven or eight inches over the last century in places the like along the atlantic coast of north america it's even greater it's more like a foot and that kind of sea level rise contributes the type of impacts that we're seeing with her. satellite warrants and i'd say bigger picture discussion on

climate change that it was. it is easy to be easy if you.

well go back to finance bigger picture discussion climate change debunking the denial. and with us tonight on tonight's panel dr amanda stout senior scientist of climate energy program at the national wildlife federation dr joseph roma and dr dan lash up in new york so let's and dr. dr romer is also the author of a new book language intelligence lessons on persuasion from jesus shakespeare lincoln and lady gaga ok great i'm looking forward to ok so let's get back to the language here in in fact dr dr rome the. one of the dinner talking points. is that the sun's activity correlates more closely to global temperatures than c o two levels do we brought

this up with the growth of the ocean a little earlier is that the only variable well this particular myth has been you know debugged by countless studies the suns we've been warming you know a tremendous amount over the past century but the intensity of of sunlight sun solar radiation has not increased substantially it goes up and down there's eleven year cycle but you know you know as dan said i don't think there's any major climate scientist in the world who who thinks that the sun is a major contributor to the change in the temperature that we've seen in the past century or so the a couple of days ago on fox and kevin i'm hearing you know i hear a couple of days ago on fox there was it was michelle malkmus somebody was saying something about mars wobbles where does that come from is that just something somebody pulled out of there i think mostly it is the things that people pull out of the air i mean you can literally if people want. the full deep bunking of any

particular myth there's a great website i send people to skeptical science you can just google that and whatever myth someone has come up with they not only debunk it in a few sentences but they even go through all the science if you want to see that one can spend a lifetime trying to debunk you know things that aren't true and i think the important thing is you know what do ninety eight ninety nine percent of climate scientists understand and i think by actually going through some of these. long talking points what we do is provide an opportunity not only to refute them but also to figuring out the reality of this dr lash of green solutions would be ineffective and draconian according to fox news well this starts to get through really what i think motivates a lot of the climate deniers they they're wedded to fossil fuels and they don't believe that that we can get off of fossil fuels and i think that's just nonsense

we have seen the huge improvements in the fuel efficiency of vehicles driven by new standards that president obama said in the last term those standards over time are going to khat the carbon pollution from cars in half and save consumers eight thousand dollars over the life of their new cars and the cars are going to be . just as good or better than what they're replacing because we're seeing all kinds of innovation. with power plants it's the same thing the president will have the opportunity to set carbon pollution standards in this term that will modernize and and transform our electric system so that we're getting rid of these fifty sixty year old coal plants that are there literally killing people and replacing them with energy efficiency improvements with cleaner technologies with wind energy with solar all of which are making enormous progress so you know the idea that the only way to run our economy is on fossil fuels is just enough. one of those myths.

here's this is this is one that i find particularly interesting dr stout many experts do not attribute recent hurricane activity to global greenhouse gases and this was actually a major talking point on a lot of weather local weather forecasts the local meteorologists go out of their way to say well you know they don't think this has anything to do with global warming is just a storm or they would just avoid the topic altogether there was a deafening silence about global warming first couple of days of storms or hurricane sandy your thoughts are well global warming definitely is affecting our weather and is definitely contributing to extreme weather we mean we've changed the baseline conditions of our atmosphere so it makes sense that our weather is going to be different and some of the ways that we know that global warming will impact hurricanes are that we're putting more moisture in the atmosphere we have about five percent more moisture right now than we did remember the number that you see in fact that is about right and that means when we have we have more rainfall we

have more heavy rainfall events we have higher sea level so we have greater storm surge there's the potential that these storms are getting stronger stronger winds and in the models project that that's going to continue into the future so you know it's pretty clear that the science is all coalescing around the idea that. that global warming is currently more but that's not just hurricanes but heat waves we had major heat waves and drought this summer and wildfires other heavy rainfall events i think you know everybody whether they realize it or not as familiar with the relative stability of the of or the impact on stability of temperature you know a block of ice in a pan is very very stable until it melts and that's water is relatively stable had enough he starts boiling and then eventually it even goes into the atmosphere in these all these state transitions that are the consequence of simply injecting energy into the system in this case heat energy so. it seems that it would not be

unreasonable to assume that if the earth is warmer not only do we have more moisture in the atmosphere not only is sea levels higher but the system being more energetic would be less stable and more violent is that a reasonable kind of. simple word summary yeah i think you captured it and you know this means that what the way that many of us are going to experience global warming is through these more extreme events and it's you know it's a family issue with impacts on our communities and families like we saw with hurricane sandy like we saw with the wildfires that destroyed people's homes in colorado and new mexico now this is starting to affect our communities our families our wildlife and so absolutely we're shaking it up and we're seeing the impacts dr rome should people living in coastal communities be worried a significant portion of the population of the earth lives in coastal communities it's it's these edges where we're

a land meets sea where you get the greatest biodiversity you get you know large food supplies you know not just scenic views. what does what does this mean for those i mean here we are awash in d.c. which is not quite a coastal community but close enough to be affected what does this mean for the future of coastal communities well i think you know people should be worried i think if it's no accident the two biggest most destructive hurricanes hit the united states hit first we had katrina and that you know was storm surge and flooding that devastated a large part of area that's actually under sea level in the second sandy which with the storm surge hit all the low lying areas in jersey shore and new york city so absolutely at sea levels rise higher and higher and storms become more intense on top of that yes coastal communities are going to have to i think be quite worried about about it so i mean the two steps are one is you going to have to prepare for

rising sea levels and storm. and the second is hopefully the world will get together reduce carbon pollution so we avoid the worst case scenarios my wife and i and our three cats live on a boat in the marina here and one of the marinas here in washington d.c. are we crazy or are we smarter than the people living in the apartment buildings just on the other side of the seawall while boats you know look boats float and i miss my you know if you look at like what the bangladeshis are doing they're creating floating schools it's like kashmir you know i mean this is you know i think we're you know there was a movie waterworld i don't think it's going to get bad extreme but the fact the matter is is the thing about sea levels is if we don't act relatively soon they're just going to keep going up forever until every last drop of ice is gone and ultimately seas can rise up to two hundred feet now that that won't happen you know overnight won't even happen this century but the point is if you cross a tipping point if we warm too much it will just keep rising and rising and rising

and soon everyone will be on boats who live near the coast whether they want to or not you know we should keep a guest here buddy dr lash of. the hockey stick has been widely derided by people by global climate deniers just just a couple weeks ago somebody you know just on the show we were debating something relatively unrelated things like i am it's crazy is that a hockey stick thing there tell us what the hockey stick is and is this you know a real. name given to a temperature record because it was flat for. thousand years until the middle of the twentieth century and then it started to rise very steeply combining all the best data looking at both the measurements in recent times in reconstructing temperatures from various other kind of what are called proxies for temperature going further back in time this is work that might. man published first

but many other scientists have confirmed it he was attacked because the climate deniers didn't like the result and he has an excellent book out all about the hockey stick which. goes through that debate and how it was resolved but the reality is that his work was confirmed and that that's what we've seen is essentially a hockey stick stable temperatures until the effects of carbon pollution start to become really significant hot over the last several decades in your mind dr lush of how should we respond to this. how should we respond to the deniers are the problem no due to the problem well it's of the it's pretty simple. carbon pollution is driving climate change which is causing extreme weather and damaging our als so we need to reduce that pollution we know where it's coming from mostly power plants and the president actually has the authority under the clean air act to reduce it

so let's get after it. to rome carbon taxes cap and trade. manhattan project for alternative energies in the minute or so we have left your thoughts well i think we need to put a price on pollution make polluters pay i mean right now doesn't cost anything to just spew as much carbon pollution to the atmosphere as possible they don't pay the cost of the extra mile and i think you know ideally we should look does this country need more revenues is there some sort of debt problem around there so you know we could set up a carbon tax you could either give the money back to the people that you were you know or you could use it to reduce the deficit so i think we are going to need a price on pollution and then a big program to put to push more clean energy into the marketplace right dr stout that's been done by other countries european countries for for decades actually have effectively put a carbon tax particularly on gasoline on and diesel fuel hasn't worked.

certainly their use of automobiles is not as you know they're not as reliant on automobiles as we are here but you know we need to take a more aggressive stance here in the u.s. we need to be leaders and we not only need to be working on reducing our carbon pollution but we need to be helping communities and wildlife adapt to the changes that are now but about what we've set in motion some of these climate impacts and we need to prepare for that well as well time for a manhattan project. many different from yeah absolutely very very good thank you all very much for being it's so much appreciate dr amanda stout dr joseph and dr dan. to see this discussion again or any of our conversations with great minds go to our website conversations with great minds dot com. coming up are republicans finally ready to charge serious immigration reform and think i was attacked before america falls off the fiscal cliff all that more and tonight's big picture rumble.

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