Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin

Steven E. Koonin 0:00 (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music) Well, uh, thank you for being here. Thanks, uh, um, I'm really appreciative of your time and the fact that you, uh, are willing to talk about this. This is a, uh, a very interesting book and extremely controversial. And I'm not exactly sure why that is, but I think it's a part of the times we're living in.

Steven E. Koonin 0:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:33 How many co-... Your, your book is called Unsettled?

Steven E. Koonin 0:36 Correct. That, uh, there, there it is, right?

Joe Rogan 0:38 How many, yes. How many copies of this book have you sold?

Steven E. Koonin 0:40 So, so we've sold, since it was published at the end of April, so about 10 months ago, we've sold more than 120,000 copies.

Joe Rogan 0:47 120,000 copies since you got it.

Steven E. Koonin 0:48 Yeah. Which, I, you know, I don't know anything about publishing, but my agent and publisher are sort of amazed at the numbers.

Joe Rogan 0:54 That's a lot.

Steven E. Koonin 0:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:55 And without much fanfare from the media, if any.

Steven E. Koonin 0:58 Well, depends which media you look at. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:01 Where, where have you gotten coverage?

Steven E. Koonin 1:02 So, so I've gotten good coverage from the Wall Street Journal. Uh, but if you look at the New York Times, Washington Post, uh, not very good coverage at all. Didn't make the New York Times bestseller list.

Joe Rogan 1:13 That seems strange 'cause it's a lot of copies.

Steven E. Koonin 1:16 Yeah, right. Well, you would think, right?

Joe Rogan 1:17 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:18 Okay. CNN, nothing. Um, and, uh, I think, you know, people are just ignoring it, which really surprises me.

Joe Rogan 1:26 Now, your book is on the climate. It's on climate change and climate science, and we should just establish right away, um, just because I know you're gonna experience so- some criticism, right?

Steven E. Koonin 1:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:38 Clearly, um, first of all, your credentials, you graduated from high school at 16.

Steven E. Koonin 1:44 (inhales deeply)

Joe Rogan 1:44 You, uh, w- went to MIT.

Steven E. Koonin 1:46 Uh, Caltech first.

Joe Rogan 1:47 Caltech.

Steven E. Koonin 1:47 I was an undergrad at Caltech, and then I went to MIT. I did a PhD there in theoretical physics in three years, and then I went back to Caltech, where I was on the faculty for 30 years.

Joe Rogan 1:58 And you were on the faculty at 23 years of age, which is-

Steven E. Koonin 2:01 That's correct.

Joe Rogan 2:02 ... pretty extraordinary.

Steven E. Koonin 2:02 Yeah, it's unusual. Not unprecedented, but really quite unusual.

Joe Rogan 2:06 Now, um, there's a, there's a couple criticisms that people have of you, just, just to get these out of the way right away. One of 'em is that you used to work for BP.

Steven E. Koonin 2:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:16 That is, this is a big one.

Steven E. Koonin 2:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 2:17 So if you work for some sort of an oil company, you were chief scientist at BP?

Steven E. Koonin 2:20 I was chief scientist at BP for five years after Caltech. Um, and you know, they didn't bring me there to, uh, help 'em find oil, all right? They knew how to do that really well. I was brought in to help figure out what beyond petroleum really meant, and that was renewables and alternatives to oil and gas. And I helped during my five years to help plot a strategy for that, which is today, now, uh, 15 years later, uh, starting to be realized.

Joe Rogan 2:50 But once you say you worked for BP, there's a certain section of our population that will immediately dismiss anything you say.

Steven E. Koonin 2:57 Yeah, of course. And, and you know, it's part of a structural problem that the advantage of having been in BP is I learned about the energy system, and I teach it at NYU these days. I just did my first lecture yesterday. And so I actually know quite a bit about how the energy system currently works. And a lot of people who, um, want to change the energy system have no idea at all of how it works, and so they can do great damage if they do the wrong sort of thing.

Joe Rogan 3:29 Well, in reading your book, one of the things that became very, uh, clear is there's so much data to sort through. It's, it's incredibly complex. I li- I actually listened to it on audio.

Steven E. Koonin 3:42 Oh, great.

Joe Rogan 3:43 And there were sections of it where I had to go back over it again-

Steven E. Koonin 3:46 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 3:46 ... just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening. To squash some more of the criticism-

Steven E. Koonin 3:53 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 3:53 ... really clearly upfront, you are, you're very clear about this. You believe the climate is changing.

Steven E. Koonin 4:01 Climate is changing, absolutely.

Joe Rogan 4:02 You believe that human beings are having an effect.

Steven E. Koonin 4:04 They are influencing those changes, yes, absolutely. Mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere. Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 4:13 Y- your position, though, is that there's an, either an exaggeration or there's, there's a way that people are looking at the data that's alarmist that you don't think is reflected by the actual numbers themselves.

Steven E. Koonin 4:29 Yeah, that's correct. I think the, you know, to put it in a British sense, uh, they have over egged the custard.

Joe Rogan 4:36 Okay. Now, why do you think this has happened?

Steven E. Koonin 4:39 Uh, you know, there's, uh, I have in the book one of my favorite quotes from H.L. Mencken is, "The purpose of practical politics is to keep people alarmed by a series of mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety."

Joe Rogan 4:57 Now, if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the climate is changing, wha- what, wha- what percentage of an effect are human influences?

Steven E. Koonin 5:08 Yeah. So you know, I, I think we don't really know that. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its last report in August said, you know, it's all, uh, human caused in the last many decades.

Joe Rogan 5:22 All of it?

Steven E. Koonin 5:22 All of it. But you know, they completely forget that the climate was changing comparable ways well before human influences became important. And, and so they, they say, "No, no, we, we're gonna ignore that. We're gonna suppress it and say it's all human caused."

Joe Rogan 5:40 Now, one of the things you highlight in your book is that when you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on Earth over a period of, say, like, 100 years, that if you do it in these blocks of time, that there's a way to look at it in a deceptive way that makes it seem, in the alarmist way, where it makes it seem that radical, drastic change is happening over a very short period of time. That's all I've ever heard.

Steven E. Koonin 6:06 Yeah. So you know, the climate changes a lot, uh, on its own. Maybe we can put up a picture, which is one of the ones I wanted to show you. Can we put up, um, the second chart in that, uh, file called Koonen Thumbs?And what I'm gonna show you is, uh, a record of the height of the Nile River-

Joe Rogan 6:31 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 6:31 ... which has been compiled by the Egyptians. Let me go to the ne- There we go. So, this is the height of the Nile River from 640 AD up until 1450 AD, so about 800 years of data every year about what was the lowest level that the Nile River reached in that year. The Nile was important to the Egyptians, as you might imagine, and so they measured it pretty carefully. And what you see are two things. The blue spikes are the annual values. They go up and down a lot. One year, it was up at six meters, 20 feet, and then the next year, it was down to one meter or something like that. So, a lot of variability from year to year. But then if you look at the curve, which is the average trend over 30 years, you can see, for example, in the first 100 years, it was going down. And you can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying, "New normal, new normal. We gotta do prayers and sacrifices." And of course, if they just waited another 100 years, it came back up again. And this was all before humans had any influence on the climate.

Joe Rogan 7:44 Are we looking at climate, and we're looking at these periods of time, um, are, are, are we looking at, at them incorrectly because we have such a short lifespan ourselves that we tend to think of great change as happening in these incremental ups and downs, but realistically, we should be looking at it on a broad-

Steven E. Koonin 8:07 Yes.

Joe Rogan 8:07 ... long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years?

Steven E. Koonin 8:10 Yes. So, so climate changes on all time scales. It changes on 1,000-year time scales, it changes on 10,000-year time scales, and it changes on decades. Every decade, it changes. Um, and, you know, we also forget a lot. Um, in the Midwest, there was a drought in 1955 and one of the news magazines, Time Magazine, said, "This drought will be long-remembered." Right? Nobody remembers 1955 drought anymore. So we forget and we think things are unprecedented when, in fact, they have happened before.

Joe Rogan 8:47 Now, you are... By training, you're a physicist, correct?

Steven E. Koonin 8:51 Correct, correct.

Joe Rogan 8:51 And another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist.

Steven E. Koonin 8:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 8:56 People will say that. Now, my question though, and, uh, I think you, you'd probably be able to help me on this, is like what exactly is a climate scientist?

Steven E. Koonin 9:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 9:07 Because most science, you have a hypothesis, you run tests, you get results, and then you, you do these experiments and that's how you get your data. With climate science, is it based off models?

Steven E. Koonin 9:24 Uh, I, you know, uh, uh, climate science is a very integrative discipline. It i- involves physics, chemistry, biology, geology, um, statistics, computer modeling and so on. So, nobody can be an expert in everything. Many prominent climate scientists are trained as physicists. You could... Jim Hansen, Michael Mann. Michael Mann actually once applied to be my graduate student and, uh-

Joe Rogan 9:50 Huh.

Steven E. Koonin 9:51 ... he decided to go to Yale instead, but that's a different discussion. That was many decades ago. Um, and so, so some of it is certainly physics. Um, I have published in physic- in, about climate science. I published a paper in August where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how shiny the earth was. That's very important because if the earth gets less shiny, it absorbs more sunlight and so it gets warmer. And we published a paper and it attracted some attention, press releases and so on. So, I have published in climate science. But more importantly, the kind of things I point out in the book are obvious to anybody who has any quantitative sense at all. It's like, you know, if I were ordering carpet for a room and the room was eight by ten, I would need 80 square feet of carpet. If the carpet guy comes back and says, "You need 400 square feet," I'm gonna ask him some hard questions, right?

Joe Rogan 10:47 Hm.

Steven E. Koonin 10:47 And that's the kind of, um, uh, misleading things that I'm pointing out in the book.

Joe Rogan 10:55 How did you get started on this journey of being, uh, uh, uh, I wanna say obsessed, but if not, fascinated with the, the science of climate change and the data itself?

Steven E. Koonin 11:05 Yeah. So I was exposed to climate science in the, uh, early '90s when I was working with a group called JASON, which we can talk about at some point, uh, for the government in looking at the impact of then high-performance computing and small satellites on, um, uh, climate science.

Joe Rogan 11:26 And the croup- group, JASON, is top scientists in their field that are recruited to work for the US government and it's like, what is it? 70% of it is classified projects?

Steven E. Koonin 11:37 Yeah, some- something like that. We work for all government agencies, but a lot of what we do is, is for the national security parts of the government.

Joe Rogan 11:45 And it's tackling the most complex-

Steven E. Koonin 11:47 Uh, the most difficult-

Joe Rogan 11:47 ... scientific-

Steven E. Koonin 11:48 ... technical problems, sometimes, uh, you know, mysteries that the government finds going on in other countries, things of that sort. What's going on? Et cetera. Or how do we do X, Y, or Z technically? Um...

Joe Rogan 12:00 And so what was the initial study that you had read or what, what, what-

Steven E. Koonin 12:05 Yeah. So, so the initial thing that got me interested, uh, was, um, the Department of Energy wanted to, uh, deploy a fleet of small satellites, which, remember, this was 30 years ago, so that was a pretty big, innovative deal, uh, to look at the earth and monitor what was going on for climate purposes, for science. And one of the things that you could do was to measure how f- shiny the earth was. The albedo, it's called, technically.... whiteness of the earth. And, y- of course, being curious, we asked the question, "Well, how was the albedo first measured?" And the answer was, back in the '30s, some guy started watching the dark part of the moon, and that brightness of the dark part of the moon is lit by light that is reflected from the earth, and so was a good measure of how shiny the earth is. It hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years, and so we started up a program, uh, that continues to this day, to watch the dark part of the moon to monitor how bright the earth is. And we'd just published a paper in August, uh, that showed the earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years, and so, not surprising, it'd perhaps gotten warmer. Um, anyway, that sorta got me interested in climate science. When I moved into the private sector, I was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could develop and deploy, or demonstrate and deploy, technologies that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And, uh, I did that for quite a while in both BP and then in the government. Um, and then in 2014, the American Physical Society asked me to do a review of their statement about climate science. They had put it... out a statement in 2007 which was very controversial among the physicists because it used the word incontrovertible, and for a physicist, that's fighting words.

Joe Rogan 14:06 (laughs)

Steven E. Koonin 14:06 Okay? So, uh, I... they asked me, you know, "Steve, recommend a new statement." And so I said, "Heck, we're physicists. We're not gonna take anybody's word for it. Let's look at the issue ourselves." And so I convened a one-day meeting with three mainstream climate scientists and three credentialed skeptical scientists, and we sat for a day, presentations, talk, discussion, uh, in early 2014. Uh, it's all up on the web. It was transcribed. You can find the transcript. And I came away from that thinking, "This science is not anywhere near as settled as I thought it was."

Joe Rogan 14:48 Hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 14:49 Because of the problems with the models, the observational data, and so on. Um, and my little group wound up proposing a statement that could not get through the bigger committee that was approving such things. People would say things like, "We can't say that even if it's true because it gives ammunition to the deniers."

Joe Rogan 15:11 Really?

Steven E. Koonin 15:11 Yeah, yep.

Joe Rogan 15:12 Now how frustrate... As a scientist-

Steven E. Koonin 15:14 Well, I-

Joe Rogan 15:14 ... how frustrating is that?

Steven E. Koonin 15:15 I got so frustrated, 'cause I'm used to, through Jason and others, of giving advice to decision-makers. You play it straight. You, you know, you say, "This could be. This might not be. Here are the options," and so on, but you don't try to spin the advice to get one answer or another, and I was really annoyed by that. I wound up resigning from the committee, but I wound up then publishing an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Um, they gave me 2,000 words, which was great. We got a couple of thousand online comments. Many people said, "Thanks for writing this, uh, and trying to expose the real science to what's going on." Uh, of course, the establishment trashed me completely, even though I'm just repeating what's actually in the reports and in the research.

Joe Rogan 16:01 And what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you?

Steven E. Koonin 16:03 Oh, you know, "You're cherry..." And, and we get it to this day with the book. You know, "You're cherry-picked." Um, "You're, um, uh, misleading." Um, "What you said is actually not true," and so on, even though I point to, you know, chapter and verse in the reports where these things are said.

Joe Rogan 16:22 So is this... uh, uh, the scientists that are claiming you're cherry-picking, are they... are they signaling to the other people that follow the ideology that you're not to question climate change and that anything that you say that in any way calls doubt to the settling of the data gives some sort of ammunition to the people-

Steven E. Koonin 16:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 16:49 ... who are the real climate deniers, who are a real problem?

Steven E. Koonin 16:52 Yes.

Joe Rogan 16:52 You-

Steven E. Koonin 16:52 Indeed, indeed.

Joe Rogan 16:53 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 16:53 And, look, um, my sense is that this is a problem. It's not an existential threat by any means, and it's a problem that we have time to deal with, and we should deal with it, uh, in time in a graceful way. But I think... You know, when the book first came out, there appeared an article in Scientific American written by, I think, 13 mainstream climate scientists that was a couple thousand words of mostly ad hominem criticisms, a couple of substantive criticisms, which I have rebutted, I think, quite effectively. Um, but it, it, you know, put a, a marker in the ground that people who didn't want to have the book understood, uh, could point to and said, "Aha!" You know, "Those guys said Koonin's an idiot."

Joe Rogan 17:38 Now what, what criticisms made sense that you could rebut?

Steven E. Koonin 17:43 Um, well, you know, they said, for example, I said sea level rise was not accelerating. And of course, I got a whole chapter that talks about the ups and downs of sea level rise. But they would criticize, uh, a review of what I said by somebody else, or they would say sometimes, you know, "Koonin said that, and it's true, but it's not important because of A, B, and C."

Joe Rogan 18:09 If you don't mind, pull that microphone just a little closer to your face there.

Steven E. Koonin 18:12 Yeah, sure, sure. How's that?

Joe Rogan 18:13 Perfect.

Steven E. Koonin 18:13 Great, okay.

Joe Rogan 18:13 Now, so these criticisms that were levied against you, did, did anyone, uh, of prominence that is a climate scientist come out and say, "This is a very interesting analysis of the data. These are things that I hadn't considered. Koonin makes a lot of really good points"?

Steven E. Koonin 18:29 Uh, not in public.

Joe Rogan 18:30 Not in public.

Steven E. Koonin 18:30 Not in public. In private. You know, when I first sorta came out in, uh, that Wall Street op-ed in 2014, uh, I had a chat afterward with a... the chair of a very prominent earth science department at one of our best universities.I won't say who or where, but suffice it to say, it's somebody who is firmly in the business. And he said, "You know, Steve, I agree with almost everything you said, but I don't dare say it in public."

Joe Rogan 19:00 Wow.

Steven E. Koonin 19:01 All right? You know, there's a whole organization called Covering Climate Now, which is a consortium of media, including the BBC and NPR, I think, and so on, who have ... you can look them up on the web. And they have signed an agreement, or made an agreement, that they will not cover anything that diverges from the narrative.

Joe Rogan 19:23 And who establishes the narrative? Like, where, wh- what's the top of the heap?

Steven E. Koonin 19:27 Um, I think, you know, the authoritative, allegedly authoritative voices are, uh, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, which issues reports, major reports every six or seven years. Uh, there is the US National Academies of Science. Uh, there is the UK Royal Society, and the US government, uh, issues reports as well. And, you know, when you get into the meat of these reports, they have some problems, and I, you know, we can go into them, but by and large, they're pretty good summaries of the science. But when you get to the summaries for policymakers, or you get to the media coverage, or the political discussion, that's where things get really corrupted. So it's like a long game of telephone-

Joe Rogan 20:15 Mm.

Steven E. Koonin 20:15 ... that starts with the basic science, and the scientists doing it are, by and large, you know, good, honest, hardworking people, and you talk to them privately and they'll admit to all the problems that they've got. But by the time it gets to the end and the public, it's, you know, the science is settled, we're headed for doom, et cetera, et cetera.

Joe Rogan 20:33 But that's always the case with something that's really controversial, right? There's, there's always the alarmist perspective, and the people that are looking at it that have m- maybe a, a less extreme point of view are criticized because they're not taking it seriously enough. And then there's what you were saying earlier, is that people are saying that like they can't even say certain things because it would give ammunition to the people that are real climate skeptics-

Steven E. Koonin 21:01 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:01 ... the r- the people that aren't paying attention to the science that have an ideology or a dogma that goes in the other direction.

Steven E. Koonin 21:07 Yeah. There is so much analogy here with the Reformation, when the Catholic Church started to come at odds with the Protestant movement. Let me give you two examples. Uh, in one of the best recent introductions I've had ... uh, you know, I'm a humble guy and I usually like to keep the introduction short, but this one was real interesting. I was compared to William Tyndale. Now, I didn't know who William Tyndale was. I'm not a historian, so I had to look up. William Tyndale, in the early 16th century, did one of the first translations of the Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew into English. So it had been originally in Latin, and ... so, um, that let ordinary people read what was in the Bible. And of course, the establishment got really mad at him for doing that. He was eventually burned at the dake- uh, stake-

Joe Rogan 22:02 Hm.

Steven E. Koonin 22:02 ... uh, for that and other reasons. Um, so, you know, I sort of made these reports, uh, accessible, at least parts of it, uh, to ordinary non-experts. Um, so that's one. The other one, which is maybe even more amusing, a couple years ago, uh, 13 senators led by Mr. Schumer, um, proposed a bill that says the government may not spend any money to challenge the consensus. The Council of Trent in the early 16th century said very much the same thing about Church dogma, not about spending money, but, you know, you would, you'd be in all sorts of trouble if you challenged dogma.

Joe Rogan 22:41 What would possibly motivate the government to come out with a s- a statement like that, that they can't spend any money to challenge the consensus? And doesn't a consensus mean most? It doesn't mean all.

Steven E. Koonin 22:54 All. Right.

Joe Rogan 22:54 So in, in cases of dogmatic opinions or ideologically formulated opinions ...

Steven E. Koonin 23:02 Yeah. I, you know, I, I'm so surprised that the government would try to suppress the scientific process like that. I think what precipitated it was I had, for a number of years, been advocating for a red team review of climate reports. Now when you get a bunch of credentialed, uh, people to look at the report and ask, "What's wrong with this?" We do that kind of thing all the time for spacecraft, uh, other matters of consequence when we have to make judgments. And I almost got to the point where we could have pulled it off, but, uh, the Trump administration, in the end, decided they wouldn't do it.

Joe Rogan 23:41 Now, the Trump administration had some of its own problems-

Steven E. Koonin 23:44 Of course.

Joe Rogan 23:44 ... with climate science-

Steven E. Koonin 23:45 Of course.

Joe Rogan 23:45 ... in the wrong way.

Steven E. Koonin 23:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 23:46 Correct?

Steven E. Koonin 23:47 Absolutely. Absolutely. I, you know, I felt ... I was, of course, a little bit concerned about, uh, going through the administration, but I had lined up the National Academies to play the blue team. Uh, I had assembled pretty much a, a good red team, and then it was stopped at the last minute, uh, by a political decision. So I'm, I'm really disappointed because I point out in the book a lot of problems with those reports. You know, it says X, but in fact the truth is Y, if you look at the data. Um, so we need that. It's about the integrity of the scientific institutions.

Joe Rogan 24:23 So let's go back to your initial impression that the science was not settled. When you first walked away from this meeting that you were discussing-

Steven E. Koonin 24:33 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 24:33 ... and you, you realized that this is, uh, either far more complex or it's influenced in a way where it's not just about the data-

Steven E. Koonin 24:42 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 24:42 ... it's about what the narrative is. So w- w- how do you go from there before you write this book? Like what is, what are your next steps?

Steven E. Koonin 24:49 So I started, um ...... uh, paying more attention to the disconnect between what was actually in the science, versus what was either in the reports or in the political dialogue. I think the next turning point came when I was helping with a study for another government agency and had occasion to look at hurricanes. And, uh, I turned to the official US government report in, uh, 2014, at the time, um, and you see this graph in the body of the report of some property of hurricanes going through the roof over the last 30 years. And it sure looks like, if you look at that graph, we're in trouble. And so I did a little deeper, I look up the reference that they cite, and I read in the back of the same report, on page 700 and something, if I remember right, and it says there are no long-term trends in hurricanes, okay? Which is still largely a true statement, all right? And I'm looking at that and I said, "My God, that's a swindle." In the part of the report that everyone's gonna read, you see this graph going up and it looks like all hell is gonna break loose. And then in the back it says, "We don't see any long-term trends."

Joe Rogan 26:03 So what is the graph? Like, what- what is the data that's-

Steven E. Koonin 26:06 So- so- so the- the graph is basically a graph, it's called the Power Dissipation Index, which is a graph of how many storms and how intense they are over the last 40 years.

Joe Rogan 26:17 And what is the trend?

Steven E. Koonin 26:18 Well, in that particular case, it was going up, okay? From 1980 up until, uh, 2010. But what they didn't show you was, there was an earlier part of the graph in which it was going down, okay? So it was really looked like a return to normal.

Joe Rogan 26:34 So in the beginning of the graph from 1970 to 1980, is that what you're saying it was going down?

Steven E. Koonin 26:40 Yep. Yep. Yep. I- I-

Joe Rogan 26:40 Do you have a- an image of that?

Steven E. Koonin 26:42 Uh, uh, yeah. I- I- I think I do, actually. Hang on. Let me...

Joe Rogan 26:45 And so, what they were looking at, again, we're- we were talking about how we're measuring things on these, uh, very small increments where time, for us, is 100 years. It's our lifetime.

Steven E. Koonin 27:01 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 27:01 So we're looking at things, like, as if that's a lot of time.

Steven E. Koonin 27:03 That's right. And there are these long-term trends, as you saw in the Egyptian river.

Joe Rogan 27:07 Yes.

Steven E. Koonin 27:07 Can we pull up, uh, s- chart number 35 in, uh, the unsettled file?

Joe Rogan 27:13 And we can safely assume that in those long-term trends in the Egyptian data that you're not talking about human influence, because it's too long ago.

Steven E. Koonin 27:20 No, it's too- much too- yeah, right. Okay. So let's pull up chart 35 and then ... so there is the original, uh, graph in the government report from 2014.

Joe Rogan 27:32 Oh.

Steven E. Koonin 27:32 And what's shown is from 1980 to 2010, and it's going up, right?

Joe Rogan 27:37 Right. But if you see from 19... looks like 1979-ish.

Steven E. Koonin 27:40 Well, so let's look at- let's look at the whole record, which is the next, uh, picture. There it is.

Joe Rogan 27:45 Mm.

Steven E. Koonin 27:45 All right? Okay.

Joe Rogan 27:47 So it's real similar to the Egyptian data.

Steven E. Koonin 27:49 Yeah. Yep. Yep, it's up and down.

Joe Rogan 27:50 That it's up and down and up and down.

Steven E. Koonin 27:51 Now, there's a lot of controversy still. Uh, this was, um, 10 years ago or so. Um, there's a lot of controversy about whether storms are getting more intense. One paper says yes, another paper published in July says no, and so on. So the matter is kinda unsettled at the moment, but overall, the- as I- I can read for you, the official report, the official statement from the most recent UN report, let me just get it. There is low confidence in most reported long-term multi-decadal to centennial trends in tropical cyclone, that's hurricanes, frequency or intensity-based metrics.

Joe Rogan 28:39 Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?

Steven E. Koonin 28:41 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 28:42 That image, when you see 1975 and then you see 2005, it's not that much of a difference. So the peak of 19- excuse me, 1945.

Steven E. Koonin 28:51 Yep. There.

Joe Rogan 28:51 The peak of 1945, and then you go to 2005, it's- you're not looking at that much of a difference.

Steven E. Koonin 28:59 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:59 And clearly there's been a gigantic difference in the amount of human influence.

Steven E. Koonin 29:03 Uh, of course. Of course. Let me show you another one, all right? Can we go to chart three of the other file? And this is one I think I'm gonna go public with pretty soon in an op-ed. Got- let's put it up. This is about Greenland, okay? And the popular image that Greenland is melting and it's melting faster and faster and so on, all right? This is the official data set for how much ice Greenland is losing every year. Okay? And the- it goes up right until, uh, 2021, and it starts in 1900. And what's interesting about this, there are several things. First of all, even though human warming influences have been growing steadily over the course of this, uh, there were a lot of ups and downs. So it says it's gotta be a lot more than greenhouse gases at play here. The second thing to notice is that in the most recent decades, at the right-hand end of the chart, Greenland is actually starting to melt less rapidly than more rapidly. Even as the globe has been warming.

Joe Rogan 30:15 And this is from 2010 to 2020?

Steven E. Koonin 30:18 Yeah. Correct. And then, if you go back to 1930, you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930...

Joe Rogan 30:27 Mm.

Steven E. Koonin 30:27 ... as it was in the last decade or two. And the human influences were less than a fifth of what they are today in 1930.

Joe Rogan 30:38 So what are the other influences if they're not just-

Steven E. Koonin 30:40 That- that's an excellent, uh, question, and the answer is, this has got to do a lot with the long-term money decade cycles of ocean currents and winds in the North Atlantic. And you can find papers that say that.All right? And there are research papers. Uh, but you don't hear any of that from the official reports or the media.

Joe Rogan 31:04 So the, the, the different factors that play into what we think the different factors are that play into the melting is greenhouse gases-

Steven E. Koonin 31:14 Warming. Yes, warming.

Joe Rogan 31:15 ... warming.

Steven E. Koonin 31:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 31:16 And what are the other ones?

Steven E. Koonin 31:17 The others are ocean currents that have their own dynamics that are not, you know, just getting warmer. They get warmer and colder. And the, the weather, if you like, because how much ice Greenland loses every year is a balance between how much snow accumulates, that's the weather, and how much flows out from the glaciers.

Joe Rogan 31:36 And those are the only factors?

Steven E. Koonin 31:38 Basically. There's a little bit of melting and so on that you have to worry about, but those ups and downs are really weather.

Joe Rogan 31:44 Does anything have to do with, uh, the, where the sun aligns with the earth and the cycle-

Steven E. Koonin 31:50 Uh, well, yeah. So, so-

Joe Rogan 31:51 ... procession of the equinoxes?

Steven E. Koonin 31:52 So, uh, well, no that's much too slow. I mean, over this period, year by year, uh, it certainly has a seasonal effect. These are though annual values, so they average out the seasons. But of course, the ice grows in the winter and then it melts in the, uh, summertime.

Joe Rogan 32:08 So there's all this data that shows the ups and the downs and there's all this data that shows that sometimes it's l- you... they're losing ice and sometimes-

Steven E. Koonin 32:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:15 ... they're losing less ice and gaining ice.

Steven E. Koonin 32:17 Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:17 Like, w- w- how do they know what is causing this or the... do they just assume that there's these, this series of factors and h-

Steven E. Koonin 32:26 They don't. They don't, okay? It, it is... you know, it's a combination of modeling and physical principles and other data that let them try to say how much is natural variability and how much is human influence. There's no doubt that if the globe keeps warming, that that warming might eventually come to dominate the ice loss, the melting. But right now, and for the foreseeable many decades, uh, it is these natural variabilities. And instead, in the media, all you hear is that it's been melting faster and faster over the last two decades.

Joe Rogan 33:02 And this media narrative, do you think this is just one of those things where people gravitate towards the most alarmist perspective so that's the one that makes the headline? Is it because of the green e- energy industry-

Steven E. Koonin 33:18 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:18 ... that-

Steven E. Koonin 33:18 It, uh, it's all of the above, but, uh, you know, I put a lot of it on activist reporters. So this statement that Greenland was melting just as fast in the 1930s as it is today, I made that... I got fact-checked by a reporter, John Greenberg at PolitiFact, and he deemed the statement mostly false. Okay? And you can look at how he analyzed things. He talked to some experts. It's entirely misleading. All right? So I got a non-expert reporter with an agenda and a platform criticizing what's actually in the data.

Joe Rogan 33:51 So the non-expert reporter with an agenda, in order for him to print something that's gonna get the response that he's looking for, he's looking for a positive response from the people that are climate... th- that, that believe these models-

Steven E. Koonin 34:08 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 34:08 ... and that think that the climate is, uh, of i- u- utmost importance.

Steven E. Koonin 34:13 And we're headed for catastrophe.

Joe Rogan 34:14 Yes. Catastrophe. And this is the narrative that all I... uh, that's the only thing I've ever heard.

Steven E. Koonin 34:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:18 Until I read your book-

Steven E. Koonin 34:19 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:19 ... that's all I had ever heard.

Steven E. Koonin 34:20 Well, that's interesting. Uh, you know, the most recent UN report, okay, which is 3,949 pages, almost 4,000 pages, it took several hundred scientists a couple years to write. You can search that report for the words existential threat, climate, uh, catastrophe and so on. You'll find the words climate crisis once in that report. No other alarmist words. And the context for climate crisis is not a scientific finding, but a description of how the US media have overhyped the situation.

Joe Rogan 35:00 Did this start with... I remember global warming in the '80s, 'cause I'm a standup comic and there was comics that would do jokes-

Steven E. Koonin 35:07 Yep. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:07 ... about global warming, like, this is great. I can go golfing in January. They were joking around about it. But then I remember An Inconvenient Truth.

Steven E. Koonin 35:15 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 35:16 And Al Gore put this documentary out when he was vice president, I believe-

Steven E. Koonin 35:20 No. I think-

Joe Rogan 35:20 ... or just, just retired?

Steven E. Koonin 35:21 I t- just before or just after. I can't remember. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:23 And when he, he put this documentary out, it, it scared a lot of people.

Steven E. Koonin 35:28 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:29 What... uh, but there was a lot of predictions in that documentary. Did any of those come true?

Steven E. Koonin 35:33 You know, apart from the fact that the globe is gonna continue to warm, uh, and sea levels are gonna rise, and we can talk about that in a bit, most of the predictions, you know, that hurricanes are gonna get more intense or we're gonna see more droughts or floods and so on, almost all of the high impact things don't show any long-term trend. They're all within natural variability.

Joe Rogan 35:56 One, one of the things that you point out in your book that I found was interesting that I hadn't considered is when they're talking about the amount of damage that hurricanes do. So when they're thinking about what, what kind of danger there is to hurricanes, they also talk about the economic danger of these hurricanes and the damage that they do. But that damage is accentuated by the fact that the population is increased in these areas. So naturally, when a hurricane hits, it's, there's going to be more things there to damage-

Steven E. Koonin 36:24 They're gonna see billions and billions of dollars c- just 'cause there's more stuff there, okay?

Joe Rogan 36:28 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 36:28 And more people. All right?

Joe Rogan 36:29 But that doesn't necessarily mean the energy of the hurricane is greater-

Steven E. Koonin 36:33 No. No.

Joe Rogan 36:33 ... or that the energy of the hurricanes over time is greater.

Steven E. Koonin 36:35 No. We can put up, if you wanna see, some of the hurricane statistics, but that's essentially right. You know-

Joe Rogan 36:41 But the hurricane... Th- so, so I'm sorry-

Steven E. Koonin 36:42 Don't worry.

Joe Rogan 36:42 But the, the hurricane thing is not settled, you were saying? That-

Steven E. Koonin 36:45 Well, there's some indication, uh, with a paper published a year and a half ago, that the s- strongest s- storms are becoming more common. But then there was another paper that said, no, no, it's just a natural fluctuation. So I think that's unsettled yet.

Joe Rogan 37:01 So what... how do they come to these conclusions that are different?

Steven E. Koonin 37:04 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:04 If they're basing it on data.

Steven E. Koonin 37:05 'Cause, 'cause they're doing... they're looking at two different kinds of data. The paper published in nine- in 2020 looked at satellite images of the hurricanes. We see beautiful images of the hurricanes. And you can try to infer from that how strong the storms are.... okay? They used a new technique. The people who said, "No, no, it's a natural fluctuation." looked in the North Atlantic, where only 10% of the world's hurricanes happen, or 12%, something like that. Um, and they looked at historical records. And so there's an issue that, as you go back in time, you haven't seen all of the hurricanes and you gotta correct the observations for that. So, they tried to do a good job. What they found was that the measure of hurricane intensity went down from about 1960 to 1980, and then from 1980 to the year 2000s was just coming back to normal.

Joe Rogan 38:03 So-

Steven E. Koonin 38:03 So there's a lot of, you know ... there's a lot of controversy about this. This is at the bleeding edge of unsettled science.

Joe Rogan 38:10 This variability, when it comes to the temperature of the ocean, when it comes to the melting of the icecaps, and all these different things that we're talking about, what do ... why does that exist in these radical ups and downs throughout the history of the earth?

Steven E. Koonin 38:26 Uh, you know, the, the earth ... there are two reasons. Um, one is that, um, the earth is subject to external influences, or influences outside of the climate. The orbit of the s- earth around the sun, the way the sunlight falls on the earth, this is what drives the ice ages, if you like, or the glaciations and so on. Um, but the other is that climate is a chaotic system, which means it has, you know, very complicated and variable internal motions all on its own. Uh, we know that because we have cartoons of the equations and they show that. Uh, we know that because you can't predict weather past about 10 days, two weeks. It's chaotic, and so has a lot of variability. Um, some of these long-term variations we understand. For example, El Niño happens every few years, takes a couple years. We kinda understand that. But these longer term things that take 70 years, or in some cases a thousand years, having to do with the motion of the ocean currents, we don't have a very good handle on at all. And part of the problem is the models don't reproduce those well. And so you don't know where you are in those cycles when you're trying to match the model with the observations.

Joe Rogan 39:49 So, i- is it safe to say that w- what people are looking for, or what people would like to, to see is sort of a flat, easily predictable rise and lower ... Like that it's, there's very little variation.

Steven E. Koonin 40:05 Right. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:06 And that this is just not consistent-

Steven E. Koonin 40:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:08 ... with the historical record?

Steven E. Koonin 40:09 Absolutely. Let me ... I'm gonna do another one for you. We haven't talked about sea level yet. Can we pull up, uh, chart 13 of the Koonin file? Um, so sea level is one of the things that people worry about-

Joe Rogan 40:23 Yes.

Steven E. Koonin 40:23 ... most, right? And so-

Joe Rogan 40:25 That we're gonna lose Miami.

Steven E. Koonin 40:26 You're gonna lose Miami, right? So, here's a chart. I live in Manhattan some fraction of the time, and so I've gotten very interested in sea level at the battery, which is the tip of Manhattan. And there has been a tide gauge there since about 1850 or 1860, and it measures the height of the ocean. It gotta average out over the tides and the waves and the weather and so on, but okay. That black line, uh, on the graph, from 1920 to 2020 is 100 years of actual data showing how fast the sea level is rising. And what you can see is it goes up and down in a cycle, kinda like the Greenland thing we looked at.

Joe Rogan 41:13 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 41:14 And, you know, the peak was in 1950, and it was up at five millimeters a year. We can talk about what that means in a second. And then in 1980, it was down in two millimeters a year, and now again it's up at four millimeters a year, and looks like it's headed down.

Joe Rogan 41:30 And the peak that you're looking at from-

Steven E. Koonin 41:32 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:32 ... the 1950s and 2020-

Steven E. Koonin 41:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 41:34 ... is essentially the same height.

Steven E. Koonin 41:35 Yeah, that's right. And, you know, to set a scale, three millimeters a year, which is kinda the average over that time, is a foot a century. Okay? One foot rise a century, which is about what we've seen over the last 150 years, okay? It's thought that those ups and downs are due to natural variations in the ocean currents, uh, happening on these long time scales, 70, 80 years. What's interesting is those colored graphs going out from the present to 2000 show that the expected rate of rise starts at about eight millimeters a year, twice as much as we've ever seen, and then goes on up from there, okay? Those are the UN projections of w-

Joe Rogan 42:23 Based on?

Steven E. Koonin 42:24 Based on models. Okay? And you can see there are large uncertainties and large variations. I think, you know, if it's gonna look like that, we're gonna know pretty soon, within the next 10 or 15 years, and my bet is it's just gonna go down again.

Joe Rogan 42:40 So, w- why do they have these predictions that are so extreme?

Steven E. Koonin 42:43 I don't know. You should ask them, okay?

Joe Rogan 42:45 (laughs)

Steven E. Koonin 42:46 They don't even match up with what's happening today.

Joe Rogan 42:49 No.

Steven E. Koonin 42:49 All right?

Joe Rogan 42:49 They, they're much more extreme-

Steven E. Koonin 42:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 42:51 ... if you're looking at those green lines and the blue lines.

Steven E. Koonin 42:54 Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 42:54 Like, much more extreme than anything that we've seen over 100 years.

Steven E. Koonin 42:57 And you know, this is part of why I think we need a really rigorous review of these, uh, allegedly authoritative reports.

Joe Rogan 43:05 As a scientist, is ... how frustrating is it when ideology and d- d- dogmatic thinking, uh, and when someone's trying to push a narrative and it gets involved in something that is ...... a, a very complex science with a- m- many, many variables, some of them that aren't totally understood in terms of their effect.

Steven E. Koonin 43:25 Yeah. It's very frustrating to talk to non-experts about this. But I'm even more frustrated with my scientific colleagues, okay, because many of them know that there are these problems in communication and they do nothing about it, or, in fact, they, uh, abet it, if you will.

Joe Rogan 43:45 They abet it.

Steven E. Koonin 43:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 43:46 And many of 'em, like you said, who will talk to you privately will not speak about it publicly for fear of retribution.

Steven E. Koonin 43:53 Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You know, one of the reasons I wrote the book, uh, was in part to inform people, not persuade them, but also to inform my fellow scientists who are not climate scientists about the kind of misrepresentation that's going on. And many of them have written to me privately or spoken with me and have said, "Steve, uh, thanks for doing that."

Joe Rogan 44:16 Hmm. Thanks for doing that, but I have to shut my mouth.

Steven E. Koonin 44:20 Yeah. I don't-

Joe Rogan 44:20 (laughs)

Steven E. Koonin 44:20 I don't dare speak out about this.

Joe Rogan 44:22 Has, has it been a problem for you in your career, writing this book?

Steven E. Koonin 44:24 No. Uh, you know, I have enough other parts of my life that are interesting and robust. Um, I'm far enough along in my career that, frankly, I don't really care very much at this point what people think of me. I've got enough stature. Um, you know, I have been advising the government on non-climate matters for a long time. I help guide the national academies in some of the reports they did, uh, through JASON, I advise companies. Uh, it's fine. Uh, I really just want to get people to understand. You know, climate literacy and energy literacy, we haven't talked yet much about energy, are so important, and, uh, people need to understand. Let me give you an example, uh, of a different field that I think is a terrible example. So there's this guy named Jonathan Gruber, who's a professor of economics at MIT, and he was one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, okay? Now whatever you might think about Obamacare, what he said at one point was, "The only way we could get a principal provision of that act passed was to rely on the basic ignorance of the American people."

Joe Rogan 45:45 Wow.

Steven E. Koonin 45:45 All right? And, you know, there's a videotape of him saying this at a conference.

Joe Rogan 45:48 That's a crazy thing to say.

Steven E. Koonin 45:49 And, you know, for an educator-

Joe Rogan 45:51 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 45:51 ... and for an advisor-

Joe Rogan 45:53 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 45:53 ... to say that is terrible. By overhyping the climate threat, we've taken away from non-experts the ability to make their own judgments. We have displaced other priorities, and we've got so many priorities that are beyond climate. Uh, we have scared the bejesus out of young people, right? You talk to young people and they think the world is gonna end.

Joe Rogan 46:18 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 46:18 And so, you know, that's one of the reasons I wrote the book, is to just try to get people to understand.

Joe Rogan 46:23 Did you see that woman, I believe it was in Canada, but they listed her cause of death as climate change?

Steven E. Koonin 46:30 No, I've not seen that. Um-

Joe Rogan 46:31 You haven't seen that?

Steven E. Koonin 46:32 No, but I'm not surprised (laughs) .

Joe Rogan 46:33 You need to see that, because the first time I saw that, I was like, "Oh my god, here it comes."

Steven E. Koonin 46:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:38 Because, uh, and then, uh, I mean, I should say before I read your book, I was fairly convinced that we're in for a horrible next 50 years of climate change and rise of-

Steven E. Koonin 46:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:50 ... sea level-

Steven E. Koonin 46:51 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 46:51 ... and, and I was, I was buying all the catastrophic inc- I mean, I, you know, I bought it all. And then w- Peter Attia turned me onto your book.

Steven E. Koonin 47:01 Mm-hmm. Yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 47:01 I started reading it. I started listening to it, rather-

Steven E. Koonin 47:03 Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 47:03 ... and I was just like, "Okay, this guy, I need to talk to him."

Steven E. Koonin 47:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:08 I need to find out what's going on. Let me see, see if you can find that. Have you found the article? Yeah, but Hold on. No one can hear you. I'm trying to confirm its accuracy 'cause when I Googled it, it wasn't coming up a lot of places. I had to, like- I told you. DuckDuckGo, son. Okay, when I looked on the internet for it- (laughs) ... it was coming up only in one very specific spot, so I'm trying to find out, like, why. Is it in, uh, a bad, uh, source? Uh, it does. It's, it's a interesting source, so I'm just trying to see, like- Okay. Got it.

Steven E. Koonin 47:35 Uh, when, when you find it, I wanna talk about economic impact a little bit because that's another interesting story.

Joe Rogan 47:41 Yeah. Um, and then, uh ... There's, there's a lot of factors that lead to a narrative being established. What, what year do you think? Wh- is, is there a time you can pinpoint when this sort of alarmist perspective really took f- took root?

Steven E. Koonin 48:02 Yeah. I, I think it was the early '90s, um, and it was in part, um, the UN, the first UN assessment report that said maybe, you know, we're influencing it. And then there was a subsequent report maybe a decade later that said there was a discernible human impact on the climate. Uh, Al Gore's movie. Um, I, I think the Obama administration, uh, pushed pretty hard. And now you've got the Biden administration trying to infuse climate and energy in all sorts of government and private sector activities. Um, there we go, right.

Joe Rogan 48:43 Oh, here it is. Oh, there it is. Decent size.

Steven E. Koonin 48:44 Oh, come on.

Joe Rogan 48:45 "Doctor reveals why he wrote 'climate change' on patient's medical chart. When a Canadian doctor wrote two words on a medical chart, he had no idea those few strokes of his pen would make global headlines. 'Climate change' is wha- what Dr. Carl- Kyle Merritt wrote alongside a patient's symptoms following a heat wave which resulted in poor air quality across Nelson, British Columbia, in late June. Extreme weather condition during the North American summer the general practitioner believed had deteriorated the health of a 70-year-old woman who was suffering from diabetes and heart failure-"

Steven E. Koonin 49:17 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 49:17 "... while living in a caravan with no air conditioning." The idea that that, that you would say that's climate change-

Steven E. Koonin 49:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:23 Just, I'm gonna read that again.

Steven E. Koonin 49:25 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:25 "A 70-year-old woman who's suffering from diabetes and heart failure while living in a caravan-"... with no air conditioning. So she's in a trailer, she's got diabetes, and she's suffering from heart failure.

Steven E. Koonin 49:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 49:38 And they said, "Climate change."

Steven E. Koonin 49:39 Right.

Joe Rogan 49:40 And he put that on her autopsy.

Steven E. Koonin 49:41 Not, not only that medicine, but the fact of taking one summer hot wave, heat wave and calling it climate when it's really weather-

Joe Rogan 49:51 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 49:51 ... uh, is, you know, displays the ignorance of that doctor.

Joe Rogan 49:56 But it's also en vogue, right?

Steven E. Koonin 49:57 Of course, of course.

Joe Rogan 49:58 And that's-

Steven E. Koonin 49:59 Who, who doesn't wanna be, uh, en vogue? (laughs)

Joe Rogan 50:02 Yeah. Who doesn't wanna, like, hop on the trend? I'm sure he got a nice pat on the back.

Steven E. Koonin 50:06 Oh, sure.

Joe Rogan 50:06 Uh, congratulations on the patent.

Steven E. Koonin 50:07 And, and of course, and of course, I get all kinds of-

Joe Rogan 50:09 Just to add in for the clarity. What's that? It was, like, added on the chart, not her f- her diagnosis, according to him when asked. Okay. It says, "Reflecting on the decision, Dr. Merritt said he wasn't trying to make a big deal out of it," durr, "but he felt it was important for both him and his colleagues to recognize the 'truth," in quotes, "and add the contributive factor of tr- climate change." But he doesn't really know what he's talking about, right?

Steven E. Koonin 50:29 Of course he doesn't. And it, let's look at the data. Can we pull up chart seven of the, um, uh ... I'm gonna show you something about that heat wave, um, that's of the Kunin thumbs. No, it's the other file.

Joe Rogan 50:42 I know, when I looked this up though, just for clarity too-

Steven E. Koonin 50:44 Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay.

Joe Rogan 50:44 This is what, when I looked up the battery sea level trends-

Steven E. Koonin 50:46 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:46 ... this is what pops up on the-

Steven E. Koonin 50:48 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 50:49 ... government's website.

Steven E. Koonin 50:50 So, so that is-

Joe Rogan 50:51 It shows a trend.

Steven E. Koonin 50:51 ... that's the sea level itself, not the shorter term trends. But you can see in the upper right, it shows it's going up at 2.88 millimeters a year, just about three millimeters a year for the last 160 years.

Joe Rogan 51:06 So, but it, so I'm, I'm confused here now.

Steven E. Koonin 51:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:08 'Cause in that other chart-

Steven E. Koonin 51:10 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:10 ... it showed that the levels in, what was it, 1940-

Steven E. Koonin 51:13 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the slope of the, of the other chart that we've been looking at, the, the shorter term trend. In other words, you can see, like, from 1930 to 1940, this level is going up more rapidly, right?

Joe Rogan 51:29 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 51:29 So that black line I showed you on, on my chart is the trend, uh, how fast it's going up at any given time.

Joe Rogan 51:39 That's kinda deceptive then, right?

Steven E. Koonin 51:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:41 It's hard to look 'cause what I'm looking at, at that chart, I thought that was the actual level of the sea.

Steven E. Koonin 51:44 No, no, no. It's not the level. No. It's how fast it's going up.

Joe Rogan 51:47 Oh, okay.

Steven E. Koonin 51:49 Okay? Plus, you-

Joe Rogan 51:49 Okay. Go back to the other one, Jamie-

Steven E. Koonin 51:50 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:50 ... that you pulled up.

Steven E. Koonin 51:51 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:51 And thank you for doing that.

Steven E. Koonin 51:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:52 This is, uh ... So this shows a rise in the sea level.

Steven E. Koonin 51:57 A rise. Uh, it ... Sea level's been rising for 10,000 years. Okay?

Joe Rogan 51:59 How much?

Steven E. Koonin 52:00 Um, well, it's gone up 120 meters in 20,000 ... or in 10,000 years. 100 ... That's 500 feet.

Joe Rogan 52:08 R- 500 feet.

Steven E. Koonin 52:08 Or 400 feet. 400-

Joe Rogan 52:10 400 feet in 10,000 years.

Steven E. Koonin 52:11 Ten- yeah.

Joe Rogan 52:11 And how much over, like, the measurable time that we've been paying attention?

Steven E. Koonin 52:15 Yeah. So, so, uh, can we pull up chart 11, uh, in, in my file? And I'll show you that. There it is. So this is determined from geology, um, and you can see, we started 20,000 years ago and to the present, it's gone up about 120 meters.

Joe Rogan 52:34 So a lot of this is post-Ice Age?

Steven E. Koonin 52:36 That's right. The glaciers were melting.

Joe Rogan 52:38 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 52:38 They started melting 20,000 years ago. And what's interesting is that about 8,000 years ago, things slowed down a lot, as you can see.

Joe Rogan 52:46 Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 52:47 Okay?

Joe Rogan 52:47 It flattens out.

Steven E. Koonin 52:47 And so ... It flattens out. It's not completely flat. The real issue is not whether sea level is rising. As you can see, it's been rising for 20,000 years. The real issue is how fast is it rising and whether human influences are making it rise faster.

Joe Rogan 53:02 Hmm. Right. And-

Steven E. Koonin 53:04 And that's what I showed you in the, uh, right here.

Joe Rogan 53:06 Now, how do they measure? Like, when they look at the percentage of, like, how much agriculture has an impact, how much, uh, uh, methane has an impact-

Steven E. Koonin 53:18 Yep. Yep.

Joe Rogan 53:18 ... how much transportation has an impact, how do they measure all that?

Steven E. Koonin 53:23 Well, it's complicated. (laughs) Um, the first question you can ask is, um, how much carbon dioxide, uh, is the burning of fossil fuels putting up into the atmosphere? And we can pretty well measure that. We know how much coal is consumed, how much oil, how much natural gas. Um, methane is harder because most of the methane that comes out is not from fossil fuels.

Joe Rogan 53:53 It's from cow burps, right?

Steven E. Koonin 53:54 It's from cow burps, rice paddies, waste water treatment, and so on.

Joe Rogan 53:59 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 53:59 Okay? And of course, if we wanna reduce those emissions, we have a much more difficult task than just stopping to burn natural gas.

Joe Rogan 54:07 So what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases? Like, say, what, what's the biggest contributor?

Steven E. Koonin 54:12 Yeah. So CO2 is the biggest and most problematic contributor because it lasts in the atmosphere a long time. Centuries by some measures. Methane is much less problematic even though it has an impact, about half of CO2, uh, currently, because it only lives for about 12 years.

Joe Rogan 54:31 So CO2 is the most significant, but is, is it also the most abundant?

Steven E. Koonin 54:35 Yes. But, you know, you shouldn't talk about abundance because there are very complicated issues about how the greenhouse gases actually trap the heat in the atmosphere. What you really wanna talk about is their contributions to what's called radiative forcing, which is basically how much they enhance the heat intercepting ability of the atmosphere.

Joe Rogan 54:55 So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2?

Steven E. Koonin 55:01 That's correct. Oh, but ... And methane.

Joe Rogan 55:03 And methane.

Steven E. Koonin 55:04 But also, there are a couple of other minor gases, like nitrous oxide and CFCs, but humans also exert a cooling influence on the climate.

Joe Rogan 55:13 How so?

Steven E. Koonin 55:14 Because when we burn dirty coal, we make aerosols, smog, and so on, that, uh-

Joe Rogan 55:21 Block out the sun.

Steven E. Koonin 55:21 ... that block out the sun a little bit. And they, um, knock off about half of what CO2, um, warms. And if we stop burning dirty coal, which we should for other reasons, we're gonna see the globe get even warmer.... than we might otherwise.

Joe Rogan 55:36 How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth?

Steven E. Koonin 55:39 Um, so as I said, it's about half the warming impact of CO2.

Joe Rogan 55:44 Half the warming-

Steven E. Koonin 55:44 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 55:44 Okay, so what ... So the biggest contributor in, in terms of greenhouse gas is number ... Like, what is, uh, what industry causes the biggest-

Steven E. Koonin 55:53 Uh, so, so, uh, power.

Joe Rogan 55:54 Power.

Steven E. Koonin 55:54 Electrical power generation is big. Uh, heat of various kinds, both for buildings, but also for, um, industrial processes, the next biggest contributor. Transportation, which is what we usually think of in this country as greenhouse gases-

Joe Rogan 56:13 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 56:13 ... globally is only 14% of greenhouse gases.

Joe Rogan 56:17 Now, does that vary by country to country-

Steven E. Koonin 56:19 Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

Joe Rogan 56:20 ... depending upon their regulations?

Steven E. Koonin 56:21 Oh, yeah. If you go to China and India, it's mostly electrical power. In the US, about 40% of our emissions are transportation.

Joe Rogan 56:30 40%?

Steven E. Koonin 56:30 Yeah. So-

Joe Rogan 56:31 Interesting.

Steven E. Koonin 56:31 Yeah. But the US as a whole is only about six billion tons of CO2 a year, um, whereas, um, the globe as a whole is about 50. Uh, not CO2. Of greenhouse gases, generally. Uh, US is about, uh, one-eigh- 8% or something like that, of ... No, more than that. Um, let's see. It's about 6 out of 50, so 12%.

Joe Rogan 57:00 So then, uh, we have transportation.

Steven E. Koonin 57:02 Yep.

Joe Rogan 57:02 Um, w- so we have, uh, transportation in terms of moving goods and services.

Steven E. Koonin 57:07 Yeah, burning al- burning gasoline and diesel.

Joe Rogan 57:10 And then what a- what's below that?

Steven E. Koonin 57:12 Electrical power. Uh, in the US-

Joe Rogan 57:14 Electrical power.

Steven E. Koonin 57:15 ... electrical power. Is-

Joe Rogan 57:15 And what ... Is that coal? Like, what is-

Steven E. Koonin 57:17 Uh, co- coal and gas.

Joe Rogan 57:19 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 57:19 All right? Wind and solar don't contribute directly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Joe Rogan 57:23 Nor does nuclear, right?

Steven E. Koonin 57:24 Nor does ... Nuclear certainly doesn't either, right.

Joe Rogan 57:27 And then what's after that?

Steven E. Koonin 57:28 Um, ah, you know, small potatoes.

Joe Rogan 57:31 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 57:31 Um, uh, probably, uh, home heating, uh, and, um, industrial heat. Um, but the big ones are power, uh, transportation, and, um-

Joe Rogan 57:44 Agriculture.

Steven E. Koonin 57:44 ... agriculture. And globally, I don't know the US number, but globally, agriculture is 25% of greenhouse gas emissions.

Joe Rogan 57:51 Wow.

Steven E. Koonin 57:52 Right?

Joe Rogan 57:53 And this includes animal agriculture and also, uh, monocrop agriculture, in terms of, like, growing-

Steven E. Koonin 57:58 Y- yeah, well, fertilizer production, but also, um, uh, rice paddies.

Joe Rogan 58:03 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 58:03 And wastewater treatments.

Joe Rogan 58:05 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 58:05 Okay? That ... Uh, those bacteria that produce methane, that's how you treat wastewater and, and ... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:12 So when talking about these various factors and how they impact the environment, how much into consideration d- does one have to take? Like, what are the e- what's the economic impact of making a radical change-

Steven E. Koonin 58:27 Yep.

Joe Rogan 58:28 That's like, say ... One of the things that keeps coming up is electric cars.

Steven E. Koonin 58:32 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:32 Uh, California has, uh, initiated a, a new law that ... I believe it's somewhere in the 2030s, right? They can no longer sell gasoline vehicles.

Steven E. Koonin 58:42 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 58:43 Which is really soon.

Steven E. Koonin 58:44 Yes, I know. So, so let's talk about economic impacts. Let me first talk about the economic impact of a change in climate, okay?

Joe Rogan 58:52 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 58:52 And then we'll talk about the economic impact of an energy transition, all right? So could we put up chart 21 of the, um, uh, Koonin file? And I'm gonna show you a chart that comes right out of the, uh, most recent government report on the subject, which is on the left. And what you see is ... The horizontal scale is how much the temperature would go up at the end of the century compared to what it is today. And, you know, it goes up between one and 10 degrees or 15 degrees Fahrenheit. It's a US chart, so it's in Fahrenheit, not centigrade. And what's shown on the vertical axis is the percent of damage to the US economy in 2100, okay? And the takeaway from this is, first of all, as the temperature rise goes up, the damages go up. But more importantly, for temperature rises of up to five degrees centigrade or nine degrees Fahrenheit, it's 4% of the US economy in 2100, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:00:06 I'm not exactly sure what that means.

Steven E. Koonin 1:00:07 That means that the economy ... If the temperature were to go up, the economy would be 4% smaller in 2100 than it would've been otherwise.

Joe Rogan 1:00:16 Now, does that take into account the growth of the economy overall?

Steven E. Koonin 1:00:19 No, it d- well, it's a relative statement.

Joe Rogan 1:00:21 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 1:00:21 So if we go to the next chart, uh, that's a wonderful question. There's what would happen. So I'll show you the US economy starting from 2000 up to the end of the century. Uh, if it grows at 2% a year, which is kinda what everybody thinks it should be doing and might do, you get that curve. If you assume a 4% impact at the end of the century, or even a 10% impact, you just delay the growth by two years or a few years in 2100, 80 years from now. All right? So this is not the climate crisis, okay? The economic impact is projected to be minimal.

Joe Rogan 1:01:01 And this is the economic impact of ... As the way things stand today, without any major interventions, in terms of-

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:08 That's correct. That's cor- ... Well, it's ... No, it's really ... It's done as ... Depending upon how much warmer the globe gets.

Joe Rogan 1:01:14 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:14 Okay? So remember, the Paris Agreement is trying to hold things to two degrees centigrade, or about four degrees Fahrenheit, which is a few percent damage to the economy, okay? In 2100.

Joe Rogan 1:01:27 Yes.

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:27 Okay? Whereas the economy is gonna grow by 2% a year. All right? So instead of 70 or 80 years from now, it being, you know, um, let's say 400-... uh, well, the US economy, instead of being $80 trillion, it would be $76 trillion or something like that in 2100.

Joe Rogan 1:01:51 That seems like a lot of money.

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:52 Well, not as a percentage.

Joe Rogan 1:01:54 (laughs) Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:54 I- it grows by 2% a year.

Joe Rogan 1:01:56 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:01:56 So it's a two-year delay in the growth.

Joe Rogan 1:01:59 Two-year delay in the growth.

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:00 Okay.

Joe Rogan 1:02:01 And now, if major policy changes-

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:05 ... are implemented-

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:02:06 ... that are gonna shift, like, the sales of the combustion vehicles being banned, which is what they're doing in California-

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:14 Yep, yep.

Joe Rogan 1:02:14 Did that pass in California? Do you know?

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:16 I think that is the, the current policy in California.

Joe Rogan 1:02:18 I believe it's 2035.

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:20 Right. And, and, and, you know-

Joe Rogan 1:02:21 Is that what it is?

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:21 I was looking that up when we started on the show. Yeah. And the federal government is pushing for the same policy nationwide.

Joe Rogan 1:02:26 Nationwide?

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:27 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:27 Now, is there enough of these minerals-

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:31 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:02:31 ... that make batteries-

Steven E. Koonin 1:02:33 Right. ... to ... ? So, so what we forget, for people who don't understand energy and wanna change the energy system, is that it is a system. And so, let's talk about cars, okay? You have to change the car itself, which leads to issues about, do you have enough minerals? You have to change the fueling infrastructure. Namely, do we have enough charging points and can the grid handle all these cars plugged in at once? And then you have to change the fuel, or at least provide more electricity to power the cars in addition to what you're doing now. And, oh, by the way, they want to electrify heat as well in the houses. So the grid is-

Joe Rogan 1:03:12 Really?

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:12 Yeah. All right.

Joe Rogan 1:03:13 So here, Governor Newsom announced-

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:15 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:15 ... California will phase out gasoline-powered cars, drastically reduce the demand for fossil fuel. California's fight against climate change. Yeah, it's 2035.

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:23 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:23 So he wants all new passenger vehicles to be zero-emission by 2035, and additional measures to eliminate harmful emissions from the transportation sector.

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:34 Um, it says there-

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:35 ... the transportation sector is responsible for more than half of all California's carbon pollution, 80% of smog-forming pollution, and 95% of toxic diesel emissions, all while communities in Los Angeles Basin and Central Valley see some of the dirtiest and most toxic air in the country.

Steven E. Koonin 1:03:53 Yeah. So, so, you know this conflates ... I mean, it's a wonderful example of the political discussion. Uh, first of all, he's making a policy that will go into effect long time after he's gone, okay? From the political scene. The second is it conflates carbon pollution, and I hate that word because CO2, which is what they're talking about, is essential for plant growth. The more CO2, the more plants grow. All right? So in that sense, it's not at all pollution.

Joe Rogan 1:04:21 Is that an inconvenient truth?

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:23 Yes, that's ab- ... And, you know, the Earth has gotten 40% greener since 1980.

Joe Rogan 1:04:27 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:28 Because-

Joe Rogan 1:04:28 I heard about that from Randall Carlson.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:30 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:30 He explained that to me.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:31 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:31 And then when I saw y- it's, it's actually in your book as well.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:35 The, um, the thought process of carbon is only that carbon is a negative thing that's put out by human emissions, emissions from vehicles.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:45 Right, yeah. So-

Joe Rogan 1:04:45 But it's the fuel of plants.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:46 It's the fuel of plants. So we can talk about the carbon cycle for a second, but let me continue with Governor Newsom for a moment, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:04:53 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 1:04:54 I think what is going to happen as people start heading in that direction is that they're ... And with other emissions-reducing measures, is there's gonna be popular pushback. People won't be able to buy the kind of cars that they want or need actually. Uh, they're gonna see their electricity rates go up. They're going to see the grid becoming less reliable. Certainly a phenomenon you know about here in Texas. Um, and they're gonna say, "Tell me again why we're doing all of this when the US is only 13% of global emissions." Uh, we're gonna see geopolitical, uh, leverage disappear as we rely more on imported oil. It's already happened, that kind of pushback, in the UK where the government tried to mandate heat pumps in, uh, the houses. It would have been about £15,000 per house. And people, the legislature just said, "Hell no, we're not gonna do this." And I believe that that's what's gonna happen in this country because they're pushing too far and too fast. I like to say you need to change the energy system not by tooth extraction, but by orthodonture. Slow, steady changes.

Joe Rogan 1:06:08 Is it possible that battery technology will shift so radically that our concept of what's required to create a battery, uh, specifically the type of conflict minerals and, uh, uh, very rare earth minerals that we need right now currently, that that would shift by 2035?

Steven E. Koonin 1:06:25 I ... No. I ... You know, people are doing a lot of research on batteries. I think that's one of the fields we should be researching, uh, more, but it's not as though people haven't been trying.

Joe Rogan 1:06:35 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:06:35 All right? And, you know, there are issues not only with the minerals you use, but the lifetime of the batteries because they get charged and discharged and that does mayhem at the molecular level that tries to destroy the structure. Uh, there's also the weight and size of the battery. So ... And there are many things that go into making a good, viable battery. I think we will see slow, steady progress, but I'm not optimistic that there will be great breakthroughs. People have been trying this for a long time.

Joe Rogan 1:07:04 But there's no great breakthroughs on the horizon or, uh, concepts that may lead to some sort of new technology-

Steven E. Koonin 1:07:11 Well, you, you know, you hear, you hear people saying, "Well, we can produce a battery that's 50% better," but wha-

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 That's not enough.

Steven E. Koonin 1:07:17 That's not enough. And what I've learned is that while things might look really promising in the lab, to actually get them out at scale in the real world is a long, difficult, uh, job that you often fail at.

Joe Rogan 1:07:31 Have they done an analysis on all the rare earth minerals and what the quantities are and what would be required to make all the vehicles on Earth electric?

Steven E. Koonin 1:07:41 Um, I- I'm sure somebody has done those numbers. I don't have them at my fingertips, but-

Joe Rogan 1:07:46 Is it possible?

Steven E. Koonin 1:07:46 Yeah. So let, let me tell you about resource, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:07:49 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 1:07:49 Whether it's minerals or, or oil or gas and so on. The amount that you can get out depends upon the cost to get it out.And that depends upon the technology as well as how much is there. And so, as the price goes up, you're, um, willing to consider more extreme technology, which might cost more, but you can still produce it. Oil's a wonderful example. Um, you know, at $20 a barrel there are very few ways to produce oil. But at $80 or $90 a barrel, which we're at today, then offshore production, shale, many other technologies become economically viable. And so you shouldn't think about, you know, "Are we gonna run out?" But, "Are we gonna be able to open up new resources with new technologies fast enough in order to be able to satisfy the demand?"

Joe Rogan 1:08:50 Mm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:08:50 Okay?

Joe Rogan 1:08:52 So, you, you can't just look at it in terms of, uh, uh, what you want to see. You have to look at it in terms of there's a lot of factors.

Steven E. Koonin 1:09:00 Yes. So, you know, nobody has put together a sensible decarbonization plan for the US, let alone the globe. A sensible plan would entail technology, economics, business, because people have to make money doing this. It would entail what are the right policies and regulations, and it would also entail consumer behavior and preference. The plans that are put out by the National Academy, by universities, are generally formulated by, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of academics. Okay? And I can say that because I used to be one and I still am. Okay? But very few people who have experience with the real energy system of having to create and operate, whether it's fueling or electrical power and so on. So, I think the best thing that can be done right now is to get that kind of group together, spend a while, we've got the time, and let's come up with something that will let us decarbonize in a graceful way rather than the kind of very disruptive things that are being proposed now.

Joe Rogan 1:10:07 We were looking at this proposal for an enormous machine that was, like, the size of a skyscraper. Have you seen this?

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:16 No, te- well, tell me, what does the machine do?

Joe Rogan 1:10:18 The idea was that this machine extracts carbon and particulates-

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:10:21 ... from the atmosphere, so it reduces pollution.

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:24 Yes. So there are a number of people working on that. It's called direct air capture. And the question is, can you do it cheaply enough per ton? And can you do it at scale? Namely, to do enough of it to make a material difference in how much carbon dioxide there is in the atmosphere. Right now, it's about $500 a ton of CO2 to extract it from the atmosphere. Uh-

Joe Rogan 1:10:51 How much is CO2 worth-

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:53 Yes, well-

Joe Rogan 1:10:54 ... per ton?

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:54 ... at, at, at ... unless the government intervenes, it's not worth anything.

Joe Rogan 1:10:58 Mm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:10:58 But if you look at ... The right question, I think, to ask is, what does the price need to be to start to shift the power sector away from coal? And the answer's about $40 a ton or $50 a ton. Okay? So, people who are trying to do this hope to bring that $500 a ton down to $100 a ton. Still too expensive. But if the price of carbon goes up to $100 a ton, then you can start to make money. But then the real question is, can you do this at scale? All right? And there I'm very doubtful. You need to suck out 10 billion tons a year of CO2. And to think about how much atmosphere you need to pass through this machine, uh, with the capture efficiency you have and so on, nah. If you wanna capture CO2, the best way to do it is to plant trees.

Joe Rogan 1:11:47 Really?

Steven E. Koonin 1:11:48 Yeah. So, a little bit about the carbon cycle, all right?

Joe Rogan 1:11:51 Okay, yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:11:51 It's real interest- You know, when I was a kid, I hated earth science because you had to know too much. All right? I liked math, physics, 'cause you don't need to know much, you just need to be clever. But as I've gotten older, you start to realize these things are just wonderful science. So, about 200 billion tons of carbon, so roughly 800 billion tons of CO2, go up and back between the atmosphere and the Earth's surface every year, more or less in balance. 800 billion up, 800 billion down, having to do with the seasonal cycle of plant growth and changes in ocean temperature and so on. So, 200 billion tons of carbon is a good number to remember. We are digging out of the ground about, um, nine billion tons of carbon every year in the form of oil, gas and coal, and burning some forest as well, and putting it up into the atmosphere, into this cycle. Okay? And it's gradually going up. About half of it stays in the atmosphere every year. Okay? So if you could tweak that big cycle of 200 every year by a little bit, you could compensate, in part or perhaps in whole, for those nine billion tons that we're putting in every year. And the way to do that is to grow more trees. Or other living things, 'cause they suck carbon out of the atmosphere to make what they ... to make plant material.

Joe Rogan 1:13:18 And when you pointed this out in your book, you were talking about the study of green leaves and the percentage of green leaves. This is all gotten through satellite imagery?

Steven E. Koonin 1:13:28 Yes. So we can measure what's called ... well, not only the color, but what's called the leaf area index, which is the fraction of the land covered by leaves in any particular place. Of course, it's really high in the Amazon. It's pretty low in the Sahara or the Southwest. And we can watch that over the years, and we've been watching it for 40, 50, 60 years. And it's gone up, as I said, by about 40% globally. The world is getting greener because there's more CO2.

Joe Rogan 1:13:56 That's inconvenient, because th- we don't wanna think about it that way. We wanna think everything's catching on fire and it's all brown-

Steven E. Koonin 1:14:02 (laughs) Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:14:03 ... and th- there's no more water and ...

Steven E. Koonin 1:14:04 Right. You know, crop yields h- have been going up steadily-... since 1960.

Joe Rogan 1:14:11 Hm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:14:11 A lot of that is agronomy, that we've gotten better at farming, we've gotten better genetic, uh, strains of plants. But some of it also is more CO2. Plants love CO2. We put CO2 into greenhouses to get them to grow more. They also love warmer temperatures and longer growing seasons. And so, for example, I don't like to cite, you know, this year, et cetera, but I will in this case. You know, India has seen record grain harvests this year, more than any other year. And long term over the world, the yields have been going up.

Joe Rogan 1:14:45 Hm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:14:45 Okay? 'Cause it's getting warmer, we're getting better at agronomy, and there's more CO2.

Joe Rogan 1:14:52 Now, th- is there a point of diminishing returns? Like, is there a point where there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere that-

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:00 Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:00 ... then it becomes detrimental?

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:01 Yes. So, so there's a lot of controversy about that. Some people say, you know, eventually you're gonna be limited by water or nutrients in the soil.

Joe Rogan 1:15:08 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:09 But we haven't seen it yet.

Joe Rogan 1:15:10 All right. We haven't seen it yet.

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:15:13 Um, so these factors that lead to climate change, the, the human contributions-

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:20 Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:15:21 ... of agriculture, transportation, uh, all the various ones that you discussed earlier, how much of that can be eliminated?

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:31 At what cost, all right? And, and, and here I wanna take a global view, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:15:37 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:15:38 We, in the US, have a very distorted view of the world. We're a big country. Many people don't travel. They have no sense of what's going on in the rest of the world. In the developed world, the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, Canada, and so on, about one and a half billion people, and we have high energy use and we have a pretty good standard of living. There are six billion other people in the world who need energy in order to improve their economic lot. One point something billion people in China, another one point something billion people in India, and so on. The best way for them to get their energy, in terms of reliability and convenience, is fossil fuels. And who are we to tell them, "No, you can't do that?" All right? That's a moral issue, as Alex Epstein, for example, has pointed out. And so when you say, "Can we reduce?" and "What's it gonna cost?" I think you have to distinguish between those of us in the developed world, where we can do it, you know? We can cut our emissions if we have enough financial capital and political capital to do it. But what are you gonna do about the people in Indonesia, China, India who need the energy? What do you tell them? And nobody has a good answer for that.

Joe Rogan 1:17:07 So, we're looking at it from a perspective of this first-world country, and we're not taking into consideration that there's a lot of countries, particularly third-world countries, that are already struggling, and if we implemented these radical restrictions, it would devastate their economy?

Steven E. Koonin 1:17:24 Well, we can't implement restrictions-

Joe Rogan 1:17:25 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:17:25 ... on them. We can implement restrictions on ourselves, which will come at some cost and benefit, uh, cost, minimal benefit. We're only 13... in the US, 13% of emissions, right?

Joe Rogan 1:17:36 Now, when we look at all these factors, agriculture, transportation, all these different things, if you eliminated that, how much of an impact would that have on overall climate change and-

Steven E. Koonin 1:17:48 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:17:48 ... you know, warming?

Steven E. Koonin 1:17:49 Yeah. So you wanna do that for the world as a whole or just for the US?

Joe Rogan 1:17:52 Let's just do it for the US.

Steven E. Koonin 1:17:54 Yeah. So we're 13% of emissions. What you need to understand is that emissions accumulate in the atmosphere. And so by eliminating US emissions, you have only slowed down the rate at which the amount in the atmosphere accumulates.

Joe Rogan 1:18:11 When you say we're thir- so we're thirp- 13% globally?

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:14 Globally, correct.

Joe Rogan 1:18:15 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:15 Correct. Uh, so the rest of the world, the emissions are growing because they're burning coal and they're burning oil and gas, because they need all that. All right? So our 13% decrease, if we could do it tomorrow, would be wiped out by about a decade's worth of growth in the rest of the world.

Joe Rogan 1:18:33 Hm. So the growth in the rest of the world, they would just contribute-

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:37 ... so much that-

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:38 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:38 ... it wouldn't matter what we take out.

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:39 Yeah. That's right. And, and it- yes. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:18:40 So they're growing and their economies are booming and-

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:43 And-

Joe Rogan 1:18:43 ... yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:43 ... who's gonna tell them, "You shouldn't do that?"

Joe Rogan 1:18:45 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:18:45 All right? I'd like to say, you know, um, they've got the wolf at the door, all right? A real immediate problem with, they need lighting, refrigeration, transportation, and so on, and they're not gonna worry about their cholesterol, the long-term, uh, you know, what's gonna happen two generations from now, and it's kinda vague, and who knows exactly what's gonna happen. So, they are making what I would think is actually a pretty sensible solution for a sensible course of action from their point of view.

Joe Rogan 1:19:14 Well, let's say if that didn't happen. Let's say if the rest of the world stayed static, exactly how it sits now. What, what we do? If we could, uh, what, what is possible to do to eliminate our impact?

Steven E. Koonin 1:19:28 Y- yeah. You... if the rest of the world stayed static, um, our influences would still cont- uh, global influences would continue to grow because they keep emitting and it keeps accumulating. Even if they're not emitting any more in the future, they're still emitting and it's accumulating. If we wanted to just stabilize human influences, not let them grow, we would have to go to net zero, namely zero emissions overall, by 2050, 30 years from now, if we wanted to stabilize at a one and a half degree rise. We'd have to go to zero by 2075 if we wanted to stabilize at two degree rise. And if I look at the issues of development, demographics, technology, economics, and so on, I would say both of those goals are fantasy. Just not gonna happen.... 'cause people need the energy. They need to develop, uh... We in the developed world, in the US, might reduce our emissions, but it ain't gonna make much difference.

Joe Rogan 1:20:35 So the proposals that you hear, when you hear about government proposals for addressing climate change, and when you hear about these summits where these countries get together and talk about what they're gonna do to implement ch- climate change, how much of that is just sort of signaling that they're working towards doing something good? I mean, they're always criticized for taking private jets to these things in the first place, which is very odd.

Steven E. Koonin 1:20:59 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:20:59 But what, what, uh, what i- what impact could happen from any of these things that they're proposing?

Steven E. Koonin 1:21:06 I... Well, let me... Let's talk about what has happened-

Joe Rogan 1:21:08 Okay.

Steven E. Koonin 1:21:08 ... in the past first. We just finished in Glasgow, in November, uh, COP26, the 26th Annual Conference of Parties. Okay? And during that time, it started 26 years ago, which was probably 1995 or so, um, greenhouse gas emissions have grown spectacularly, all right? Despite all of the rhetoric, and the treaties, or accords, promises, and so on. Um, uh, the UN itself said that a lot of the pledges that countries have made to reduce their emissions over the next five to 10 years, uh, are not gonna be met, are not being met. All right? So I, I think it's a lot of politicians talking. Um-

Joe Rogan 1:21:55 So they're not met, but what if they were?

Steven E. Koonin 1:21:58 So we might reduce emissions now from 52 billion tons a year equivalent, down to 46, or something like that. It's still a lot. Remember, we gotta go to zero in 30 years-

Joe Rogan 1:22:11 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:11 ... if you wanna stabilize.

Joe Rogan 1:22:12 And... But is that real? So if they go to zero in 30 years, what is the actual result?

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:18 Well, we will have st- uh, stabilized, not eliminated, but just prevented from growing, human influences on the climate.

Joe Rogan 1:22:25 And what percentage of the change in the climate is human influence?

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:29 Uh, as we said, that's, uh, you know, a subject of some debate right now, the idea-

Joe Rogan 1:22:33 What is, is... What is the... About the zero-

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:35 Half, half maybe, of the warming, okay?

Joe Rogan 1:22:38 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:38 But there's a lot more than warming going on. There is storms and there are droughts and floods-

Joe Rogan 1:22:42 Mm-hmm.

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:42 ... and so on. Um, most of those are within natural variability.

Joe Rogan 1:22:47 So in terms of, like, your 100-year chart of ups and downs, most of those-

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:51 Not gonna change that. Not gonna change that.

Joe Rogan 1:22:53 So is it a percentage point?

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:55 Uh, no, I don't think people have tried to quantify-

Joe Rogan 1:22:57 They haven't.

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:57 ... at that level. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:22:58 'Cause it's too complex?

Steven E. Koonin 1:22:59 It's too complex.

Joe Rogan 1:23:00 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:01 And we have limited data. Okay? We don't have 100 years worth of data-

Joe Rogan 1:23:05 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:05 ... in many variables.

Joe Rogan 1:23:07 And, and again, this is what we're talking about at the beginning, that when you're looking at a human lifetime, it's such a short period of time, that we, we look at a shift in our lifetime and you're like, "Oh my God, the sky is falling."

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:18 Yep. Thi- think about the Egyptians-

Joe Rogan 1:23:21 Yes.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:21 ... and the river, right?

Joe Rogan 1:23:21 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:21 They said, "Oh my God, the drought's coming."

Joe Rogan 1:23:23 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:23 And you just wait another 100 years and it comes back up again.

Joe Rogan 1:23:26 Right.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:26 Okay? That's not true for everything. Humans are certainly having an influence, but a lot of the variability, the daily weather that the weather people talk about as climate change, it drives me crazy when I hear Al Roker, uh, talk about that as climate change.

Joe Rogan 1:23:42 And it's not.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:43 It's not.

Joe Rogan 1:23:44 It's just the variability and the chaos of weather itself.

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:47 Yeah, the weather. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:23:48 And this is for certain based on the models?

Steven E. Koonin 1:23:51 Well, you know, it's our best guess. This is an uncertain science. The models are kinda all over the place. And, um, if you had a bet, many of these phenomena are not being influenced by human.

Joe Rogan 1:24:02 Now, what prominent scientists and climate scientists have arguments against your, your book-

Steven E. Koonin 1:24:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:24:08 ... and against you and what... the way you're relaying this information?

Steven E. Koonin 1:24:13 Um, so, you know, Michael Mann, for example, Naomi Oreskes, um, Alan Dressler, um, Kerry Emanuel at MIT, I'll tell you an interesting story about Kerry in a minute, uh, have all spoken out and said, you know, "Koonin s- doesn't have it right." Very few of them offer specifics. Kerry did. Um, so it's the... um, and I think I have, I have a Medium page that people can look at, where I've written detailed rebuttals to the science. I mean, when people say, "You're a shill for the oil business," or, "You're a physicist. What do you know about climate?" I can't answer those. All right? But I can try to rebut the specific facts, uh, that they say I've misrepresented. And I do, I think effectively. Again, you can find it on my Medium page. Um, uh, sorry about Kerry. So, uh, Kerry was one of the people who criticized me early on. He said, you know, "Anybody who talks about 100-year trends in hurricanes doesn't understand that we only have good data until 80 years." But previously in this conversation, I read you the official statement, which says, "No long-term trends over a century." All right? So he was being, I think, uh, you know, he's putting on his Cambridge bow tie and saying, "Nobody here understands," et cetera, et cetera. I had the opportunity to share a stage with Kerry at MIT, uh, in October, and it was convened by John Deutch, who's a good friend to both of us and a senior scientific figure. Um, and I had my 10, 15 minute presentation, and I went through some of the things we've talked about. Kerry had 10 or 15 minutes, and he didn't challenge the science at all. I was really surprised. Instead, he started talking about fat tails, namely improbable things that might happen with high consequence, but no disagreement with the science.

Joe Rogan 1:26:15 So the improbable things with high consequence-

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:17 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:26:17 ... these... this is the sky is falling narrative?

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:19 Yeah, so Greenland starts melting-

Joe Rogan 1:26:21 Yeah.

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:21 ... the permafrost outgasses, the Atlantic circulation slows down, the Amazon dries out, and so on.

Joe Rogan 1:26:27 Did you try to press him?

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:29 Uh, no, I didn't, uh, because I was too polite. He was being too polite, um-

Joe Rogan 1:26:34 Interesting.

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:35 Yeah, and unfortunately that-... exchange was not recorded. Um, but-

Joe Rogan 1:26:39 Even more interesting.

Steven E. Koonin 1:26:39 ... even