a hello, my name is joe, i'm a traditional catholic, father of 6 children. i'm from dallas, texas originally. all right, my girls. what are you doing? by that time, many things had changed since crowded in america and to talk about the eligibility, propaganda and all that sort of thing. we think that we would like to move and live somewhere else to raise our children. 2023. my wife and i and my 6 children, we moved to restaurant. really actually, i've seen all these movies of russia being this dark jury plays in crass and everybody's starving. these are fish eggs, me and joking. so that's called the current and the russians loved peace. that was what it's like living in russia with a big family, the good and the bad. the pros and cons expectations. reading reality,

she'll not do that, but i can't do that. i see the, [000:00:00;00] the hello and welcome to was a part throughout history. humanity has tried many times to solve problems by means that have not only exacerbated the preexisting challenges, but also create as much bigger ones. they can nuclear weapons, for example, borne out of the need for security. they come with the risk of total elation. my guess today argues that our efforts to deal with climate change fall into

a similar pattern at times doing more harm than good. why is it so difficult to prevent the treatment from becoming the disease in its own right of to discuss that . i'm now joined by judith curry and american plan, the total induced and professor america at the georgia institute of technology. professor curry, it's amazing to talk to you. thank you very much for being available. well, thank you for inviting me now in one of your articles here. role of that and let me quote here. all things considered planet earth is doing fine. humans are doing better than at any other time in history. and i think it sounds incredulous in our era of almost paramount doomsday anxieties. why are you so chill population, you know, over the last 100 years population has substantially increased poverty has reduced substantially, globally,

agricultural productivity is way up. um fewer people per cap adults are dying from weather and climate related disasters on the planet is green me. it seems to enjoy the warmer temperatures and the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. so overall it, it seems like we've done pretty well over the past century. during a period when the planet has been warming. so yeah, that warming is dangerous. i think it was the weakest part of the whole argument, but as an adult said, show, that's why we have witnessed all these technological progress. our requirements of safety and security have increased dramatically and people are far less toller and not only of the real dangers. but even though if a basic uncertainty you reach our ancestors took for granted. i want to have that in and of itself necessitates postulating some major danger. that would be

a sort of a, you know, a designate is designated aggregates for all the existential anxiety. yeah, exactly. it's a convenient and climate global warming thoughts. so field warming has become a convenient scape code for, you know, all of the planets problem is, you know, whatever, there is a water resource shortage. they don't blame power, water management, add governance or extravagant use of water instead, they blame climate change. so by blaming climate change for everything that goes wrong, we ignore the real causes of many of our problems. so professor curry is a just a scape goat, to escape responsibility or, or is it also in a way a trojan horse to some of the land, some human vested interest? oh, well it's, it's driven by a particular world, the or neil male suzy, in world view the, you know, humans or

a blight on the planets of the environment as fragile. and the only way that we can deal with all this is through non government world control through organizations like united nations world economic forum at such a at the end of the day to me, this looks like big power grabs. that's rather than something that helps humanity. mm hm. well, uh, given the state of relations between russia and the united states, and you can hardly suppose that the crime is in the, in the pockets of, uh, washington activist. and yet i think, you know, some people here are also not necessarily share the the entire debate, but they, they do see uh the temperature changing and the extreme weather. whence uh, is there any relation between uh, new weather phenomenon, thats where witness and uh climate change. we've had extreme weather and climate events for you know,

for several 1000000000 years of the earth has been in existence. we've always had bad weather. we currently have bad weather and we'll have a bad weather in the future. there's even the un climate assessment reports finds no relationship between extreme weather events and global warming apart from hayward. that's the old one that seems to be increasing and that makes sense of the overall temperatures in thing. but for games plugs, droughts, hail, you know, whatever bandwidth or is it often gets blamed on fossil fuels, warming even the your on climate assessment reports 5 is low confidence in any trend, let alone anything that can be blamed on fossil fuel for me. mm hm. but i don't mean only, uh, quote unquote, bad weather because here in russia for example, we have witnessed some unprecedented unheard of weather phenomena. for example, um,

over the last couple of years we've been witnessing a lot of what we call ice rain when temperatures fall precipitously during the rainfall, creating essentially a huge ice rings. and that's would be very unpredictable and also very traumatic us . but really for the elderly and i've heard that all the countries also experience something like that, a phenomena that they either now were never experienced before or perhaps half forgotten about. and do you think there is any relation between these uh, like unheard of uh, things and uh what we see happening uh with a atmosphere globally. the key point is forgotten about, for example, in the us, the bad weather, everything from the worse he waves the worst route, see the worst land falling hurricanes occurred in the 19 thirty's. okay, and that is outside of most people's living memory,

but it's there in the records. and if you look back further, you know, into the 1800s you'll find all sorts of crazy weather. so the key point is forgotten about it or the, the, there are natural, very ations and the weather and climate extremes. and some of these are multi the cables. so maybe you may have to go back 6070 years, a 150 years before you find something comfortable. but it's very rare that you've completely knew whether a man that's trusted. so do i understand you correctly that climate and the weather patterns are, may be changing simply because nature always changes. it's never static. i'm claiming that it's all due to human activity may be not only misleading, but perhaps a little bit of ground heels, even if you just look back a 100 years rather than one person has lived thing memory. you will find lots of

extreme weather events, lots. you'll see lots of natural weather and climate variability. so this is nothing unusual and people have just been fed. the hype that, you know, a fossil fuels cause bad weather and it's is just ludicrous, but people have to somehow fro, at least people in the, in the, in the united states, on more largely within the western world. and i do want to ask you a sort of cultural, i guess question because to russian. and i think more broadly for an i, the american debate on climate change is characterized by implausible, with high predictions of emissions. and the sort of, uh, fee arise farm that they may make may cause the most governments around the world tend to stay on the conservative side of the forecast in the policy settings,

simply because the resources are limited and there are many present day issues competing for those resources, but i think in the united states we see a totally different trend. i mean there is a predilection for the most dramatic forecasts possible and not only in 5 mentions . take example take, for example of the public health debate and old because with projections they were also hugely uh overboard. do you think that's a cultural issue or is it perhaps an ideological one? even the u. n. climate assessment reports have focused on the extreme emission scenario and the very warm, you know, it gives a whole lot of warming and exaggerated 6 stream weather events. but even the contents of the parties, climate negotiators of bands at these extreme emissions scenarios and 2021. so why are the scientists still using them? and it's not just us scientists, there's a, a very healthy contingent. but what i would call a alarm, a scientist in europe, and particularly in germany,

many and then view k for example. so it's not just to us phenomena and a lot of motives. i mean, individual scientists get far more attention and funding and whatever if they make an alarming pronouncement time any or attention and or they have states that the big table is, you know, making policy and things like that. and so, so there's various social motives for people to exaggerate in the us and, and in europe, and by and think it's becoming more and more apparent. and you know, something is very wrong. and the news is that there is a growing move just to abandon the extreme emissions scenarios and look at the terminal scenarios. and i have to say the russian climate model has one of the

lowest sensitivities to um c o 2 emissions. and i think it's one of the better climate models out there giving more real projections. well, since you mentioned that, i think at least within the russian collective cycle, there is a um you to our soviet past. i think the sort of outlined this plans that the we were striving for at that time. there is now a very clear distinct distinction between uh uh, trying to implants. and so trying to control, we come implants lots of things to varying degrees, but we cannot control them. absolutely. and we have, i think this is what the west and policies premised on the, the demand for in germany. and not only as a do a political concept, but also as a, something that you know, human need to have isn't. that's one of the reasons why the climate change narrative. and perhaps, as i said, many other issues, like public house international polls, etc,

has become so intolerant to opposing points of view or even, you know, scientific data that doesn't know what they agree with the diagnostic proposition. and yes or you should on a keep point. but basically they've tried to characterize like, pandemic management and control of the client, that simple problems. you know, these are things that we can control. and in fact, these are what can probably deeply complex a lot of uncertainty. and a lot of ambiguity in the valley is surrounding the issue. and so, you know, for a problem like the climate change or a pandemic. i mean, we have to abandon the idea that we can control it, but we need to see the understand and then manage the impacts. i mean all it may be to a certain extent,

but not in any substantial way. and so we just phantom the idea that we can control these things well uh at least you and me, we can control our conversation to some extent in the sense of taking a short break right now. but we will be back to this fascinating discussion if in a few moments station the, the welcome back to wells of parts with judith curry and american climb intelligence and professor america at the georgia institute of technology. this is occurring just before the break. we were talking about, or rather you were talking about the need to abandon the attempts to control everything

and instead focus on adapting on whatever mother nature brings our way. but i think that's what the require. a lot of humility, perhaps, and a certain degree of tolerance of, of uncertainty. how do seeing those values could be sort of brought back into the public debate at least on climate change. you know, the, the or, and the issue is out there. and by trying to ignore it, or minimize that or frame a problem. you know, if so narrowly that uncertainty, you know, it doesn't seem so large. i mean, it's just a very, very big mistake and is very bad for policy making. but in scientific discourse, when there are sort of political values in play, there's always a lot of uncertainty and disagreement as a spice of academic life. and you know, nothing is ever settled and you know that. so the norm,

the scientific process normally works. but when politics come into play, no, everything becomes very overly certain, and you have tribal communities develop to try to cancel each other and marginalize each other. and we've seen the similar academic climb and debate and it's very pernicious thing, not only for science, but also for the policy making process. when policy makers are simply misled, i'm thinking that you know, this is simple. we know how to fix the climate and we have these very specific targets and timelines and we need to meet them and then bad weather will go way. what kind of simply of a fairy tale. so can you knowledge it and get on with trying to better understand the situation and to adapt to extreme weather events and the

climate variability and change smells. speaking about understanding the situation better. i know that the hallmark of your approach to climate and whether a forecast takes a particular attention to natural ver, very ability such as volcanic eruptions, san activity, ocean, or solutions, etc. why do you think it's important to take those parameters into account? well, because you know, we've had climate variability, huge variations in climate, and time scales from century 2 millennia to a hundreds of millions of years. and these were not caused by fossil fuels. ok before caused by natural processes involving ok knows the some ice sheets and ocean circulations and to all of a sudden and trivialize,

those processes and blame everything. so you know, emission of fossil fuels, those just items disability. now correct me if i'm wrong, i think those processes move on very long scale, so not only of thousands of years, but perhaps even millennia. and a lot of studies are investigating them. but uh, speaking generally, how well do we as humans understand what affects watch within the planetary system? well, you know, unfortunately we've lost 2 decades of research on trying to understand natural processes that contribute to climate variability. because everyone has been focused on the a c o 2 issue and global climate models. but the ocean oscillations i think are particularly relevant on scales from entre annual to multi decalle to multi century, which are the time scale,

the same time scales that we're talking about in terms of fossil fuel missions so. so this is huge in terms of racial climate variability. you know, like the ill nino and la nina are examples. and then there's, you know, the cable very abilities, mid atlantic and pacific ocean and as the arctic ocean southern hemisphere, all of these things, the circulation patterns heavily influenced our climate and our regional extreme weather pattern. and walk side of this. it shows by looking at globally average temperatures and c o 2 emissions. now from what you're saying, it looks like uh, an area that almost requires authentic global corporation. i understand that the, the discourse on climate change within the west has been somewhat ignited. but what about international academia? is it also under the pressure to conform to certain dog most or is it more sort of

independent and it's forecast some conclusions? well, in europe, in australia i would say the situation is pretty much the same as in the you of, um, you know, in asia things may be more open. i mean, i, i would say in asia things are a bit more open. but i think as policy makers started a band and a mix stream emission scenarios, all the climate scientists are going to have to move the natural climate variability is much more important than previous thought. because if you're using stream emission scenarios are so huge that yeah, they swamp natural variability, but once you get back to reasonable emission scenario, then natural variability definitely becomes a major player. mm hm. and as far as understand you are already a working in that field advising companies or private businesses on how to

go about their own decisions. how to invest that own money. and that may be sort of in, in, not in the full agreement with the mainstream. you, um, how much interest do you see uh to the kind of worried that you do uh, from private businesses, do they do they buy into they don't mind. okay. the people who are trying to meet some government regulations. you know, they're, they're looking for the, you know, the main dogmatic kind of thing. but my clients are people who have a direct economic interest or their have specific infrastructure that they're developing. and they need to make sure that it can withstand whatever mother nature froze its way over the next 3050 years, then that they come to me. and they say, oh, well we, we've heard the hype. now we need to hear from you some, some scenarios about how this might really play out

a range of possible scenarios. the on certain do, you know, give us stored, laid out for us, you know, so when people have real decisions that impacts, you know, the economic or engineering or infrastructure related they want to hear from me, tend to think from what you're saying they all, they have to think not only about was mother nature, so those are way, but what that government surf imposes on data that may be a burden over over its own kinds and perhaps even uh, a heavier than the natural situation. oh exactly. i mean, we're in a situation right now, or the cure is worse and then disease, particularly in the us, in europe with all the a renewable energy use and tearing down nuclear power plants and coal power plants . so, you know, i mean, they're ruining the environment and they're ending up with the very reduced and unstable power generation, which is not helping anybody. well,

but here you're just have the change of power in washington. and i don't want to get us into the sort of political discussion, but i'm sure you're heard some of the statements that the last, for example, who is prominent in the, in your trump administration, has been making about the energy policy and the use of the renewables from what i understand his point of view is that he believes that there, there is a place for them within the energy balance, but they have to be they have to be backups by traditional energy sources. are you in any way hopeful that the they may be changed? not necessarily in policy, but at least in the way those issues are discussed. um okay, um i think rooftop solar power is a good solution. but um, offshore wind is probably the worst solution and then when, when solar farms said there's a need for them in some regions, but that there is no way we're going to get around this without firm based loan

power, either of, of fuels, nuclear power, or maybe you know, you know, advance geothermal or some new developments are often about so, so we just need that's on the trunk administration has a very forward looking team of people looking at the energy issue and i'm very optimistic. the things will move forward in the us in a sense, simple way, as well as things move forward in, in the united states. i also want to ask you about international policy because over the last couple of days, because there has been a strong international drive towards some sort of a uniform climate or environmental a treaty that would have for, you know, all countries agreed to certain conditions. regardless of the geographic call climate or economic cult situation, do you think there is a need for some sort of a global agreement on those issues or are they better addressed on the regional or perhaps local basis?

they're much better addressed on a regional or a local basis so that each country, each state or whatever kind of work to secure their own environmental, economic and security issues. and then we need bottom up solutions to all these problems, not top down man. they've liked the way and then world economic forum of tried to impose on everybody and the parents, the brand. we've seen malay withdrawn. now trump has withdrawn. i think this is going to start a number of different countries withdrawing from the mobile cream. and but what, what do you then say to people from various pacific communities like to follow or the marshall islands who are facing very precipitous, arise in the, in their sea level as on their officials, like giving speeches, public speeches, standing in the high in the water to sort of dramatize the,

the impact would you just tell them okay guys, you know, but lots of nature, habits coming your way. okay. 2 issues. first off, the sea level rise issues is called sites. you have to look at each individual location and see what's going on. often a lot of what's going on if thinking where the land is thinking, either geologically or because of ground water extraction or even fossil fuel extraction. so a lot of the so called sea level rise problems are caused by thinking not by the sea level eyes. the other thing is even if you blame all of the sea level rise on humans and it's still not a lot. it's basically like 9 inches over the last 100 years, and it's now a lot, even if you blame at all on humans, if we were to stop emitting fossil fuels now. and even if you believe the climate models it would take several 100 years for this to reverse. we can't on ring those

particular bell. so there's a lot of inertia and very long time scales in the ocean. suddenly i sheets. so even if we stopped admitting the sea level, this is going to continue to do what i do and even, you know, i don't know what the people of 2 hour can do. but i think it's pretty clear that large industrial countries, like the united states or russia for that matter, you know, can do a lot of things by making sure that the hydrants have enough water and that they have uh, you know, well, fine, functioning, early warning systems either for the hurricanes or perhaps for wild fires. and that brings us back to this very mundane issue of governance. and what is it for, and how do you invest your time, your resources, whether you're investing into some abstract future or version goal, or whether you're trying to deal with boring, mundane,

but still resource requiring issues of the present day. do you have anything to say on that? well, i think we need to focus on the local and regional issues. i mean, the climate crisis is really a summation of thousands of local vulnerabilities that because we live on coastal regions in flood plains and, and various folder for places like that. and putting all of this can be exacerbated to some small, extends by global warming. but most of its population increased in increasing property in vulnerable full region. so, you know, we just, we need to confront that and we need to box this to increase our resilience. we named better warnings. we need better infrastructure,

we need better water management. we need to harden our electric utilities so they are less vulnerable to extreme. whether there's all sorts of things that we can do . and again, it's mundane, but it's going to make people's lives better and it's going to reduce large economic losses associated with it. whether it's downstairs when they do occur. ok, well professor curry, we have to leave it there. but thank you very much for highlighting that though we get into the future by attending to the present. no. and the other way around. and i think that's very important to, to keep in mind. okay, good. thank you. i'm thank you for watching hope this there again on was

a part of the and welcome to most of full born here we discuss and we'll in the hey buddy, welcome back to the law school mules. i'm shay bowes, and of course i'm joined by our guns. and you may notice this week here so that the forces of romance have separated us. uh, i mean, uh, let's say secret location working on another project. uh nogales has been dragged away, but we are united by the wonders of technology. i'm going to plow on for the next couple of shows. and prizes for those who guess where i may be. see