Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin

1. 0:00 – 1:38

   Why Koonin’s climate book became controversial (and who covered it)

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin0:00

      (drum music) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      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.

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin0:33

      Yeah.

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:33

      How many co-... Your, your book is called Unsettled?

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin0:36

      Correct. That, uh, there, there it is, right?

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:38

      How many, yes. How many copies of this book have you sold?

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin0:40

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:47

      120,000 copies since you got it.

   9. SKSteven E. Koonin0:48

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

   10. JRJoe Rogan0:54

       That's a lot.

   11. SKSteven E. Koonin0:55

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan0:55

       And without much fanfare from the media, if any.

   13. SKSteven E. Koonin0:58

       Well, depends which media you look at. Um-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:01

       Where, where have you gotten coverage?

   15. SKSteven E. Koonin1:02

       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.

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:13

       That seems strange 'cause it's a lot of copies.

   17. SKSteven E. Koonin1:16

       Yeah, right. Well, you would think, right?

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:17

       Yeah.

   19. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18

       Okay. CNN, nothing. Um, and, uh, I think, you know, people are just ignoring it, which really surprises me.

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:26

       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?

   21. SKSteven E. Koonin1:38

       Right.

2. 1:38 – 3:53

   Credentials and the ‘BP’ criticism: separating expertise from dismissal

   1. JRJoe Rogan1:38

      Clearly, um, first of all, your credentials, you graduated from high school at 16.

   2. SKSteven E. Koonin1:44

      (inhales deeply)

   3. JRJoe Rogan1:44

      You, uh, w- went to MIT.

   4. SKSteven E. Koonin1:46

      Uh, Caltech first.

   5. JRJoe Rogan1:47

      Caltech.

   6. SKSteven E. Koonin1:47

      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.

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:58

      And you were on the faculty at 23 years of age, which is-

   8. SKSteven E. Koonin2:01

      That's correct.

   9. JRJoe Rogan2:02

      ... pretty extraordinary.

   10. SKSteven E. Koonin2:02

       Yeah, it's unusual. Not unprecedented, but really quite unusual.

   11. JRJoe Rogan2:06

       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.

   12. SKSteven E. Koonin2:15

       Yeah.

   13. JRJoe Rogan2:16

       That is, this is a big one.

   14. SKSteven E. Koonin2:17

       Right.

   15. JRJoe Rogan2:17

       So if you work for some sort of an oil company, you were chief scientist at BP?

   16. SKSteven E. Koonin2:20

       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.

   17. JRJoe Rogan2:50

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

   18. SKSteven E. Koonin2:57

       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.

   19. JRJoe Rogan3:29

       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.

   20. SKSteven E. Koonin3:42

       Oh, great.

   21. JRJoe Rogan3:43

       And there were sections of it where I had to go back over it again-

   22. SKSteven E. Koonin3:46

       Yeah, yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan3:46

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

   24. SKSteven E. Koonin3:53

       Mm-hmm.

3. 3:53 – 6:06

   Core thesis: climate change is real, human influence exists, but the alarmism is overstated

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:53

      ... really clearly upfront, you are, you're very clear about this. You believe the climate is changing.

   2. SKSteven E. Koonin4:01

      Climate is changing, absolutely.

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:02

      You believe that human beings are having an effect.

   4. SKSteven E. Koonin4:04

      They are influencing those changes, yes, absolutely. Mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere. Absolutely.

   5. JRJoe Rogan4:13

      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.

   6. SKSteven E. Koonin4:29

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

   7. JRJoe Rogan4:36

      Okay. Now, why do you think this has happened?

   8. SKSteven E. Koonin4:39

      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."

   9. JRJoe Rogan4:57

      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?

   10. SKSteven E. Koonin5:08

       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.

   11. JRJoe Rogan5:22

       All of it?

   12. SKSteven E. Koonin5:22

       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."

   13. JRJoe Rogan5:40

       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.

4. 6:06 – 8:47

   Natural variability in action: the Nile River record and the ‘short human lifetime’ problem

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin6:06

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan6:31

      Okay.

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin6:31

      ... 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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan7:44

      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-

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin8:07

      Yes.

   6. JRJoe Rogan8:07

      ... long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years?

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin8:10

      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.

5. 8:47 – 11:05

   ‘You’re not a climate scientist’: what climate science includes, and why models matter

   1. JRJoe Rogan8:47

      Now, you are... By training, you're a physicist, correct?

   2. SKSteven E. Koonin8:51

      Correct, correct.

   3. JRJoe Rogan8:51

      And another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist.

   4. SKSteven E. Koonin8:55

      Yeah.

   5. JRJoe Rogan8:56

      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?

   6. SKSteven E. Koonin9:07

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan9:07

      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?

   8. SKSteven E. Koonin9:24

      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-

   9. JRJoe Rogan9:50

      Huh.

   10. SKSteven E. Koonin9:51

       ... 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?

   11. JRJoe Rogan10:47

       Hm.

   12. SKSteven E. Koonin10:47

       And that's the kind of, um, uh, misleading things that I'm pointing out in the book.

   13. JRJoe Rogan10:55

       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?

6. 11:05 – 24:49

   How Koonin entered the climate debate: APS review, ‘ammo for deniers,’ and institutional pressure

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin11:05

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan11:26

      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?

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin11:37

      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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan11:45

      And it's tackling the most complex-

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin11:47

      Uh, the most difficult-

   6. JRJoe Rogan11:47

      ... scientific-

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin11:48

      ... 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...

   8. JRJoe Rogan12:00

      And so what was the initial study that you had read or what, what, what-

   9. SKSteven E. Koonin12:05

      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.

   10. JRJoe Rogan14:06

       (laughs)

   11. SKSteven E. Koonin14:06

       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."

   12. JRJoe Rogan14:48

       Hmm.

   13. SKSteven E. Koonin14:49

       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."

   14. JRJoe Rogan15:11

       Really?

   15. SKSteven E. Koonin15:11

       Yeah, yep.

   16. JRJoe Rogan15:12

       Now how frustrate... As a scientist-

   17. SKSteven E. Koonin15:14

       Well, I-

   18. JRJoe Rogan15:14

       ... how frustrating is that?

   19. SKSteven E. Koonin15:15

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:01

       And what was the nature of their criticisms when they trashed you?

   21. SKSteven E. Koonin16:03

       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.

   22. JRJoe Rogan16:22

       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-

   23. SKSteven E. Koonin16:49

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan16:49

       ... who are the real climate deniers, who are a real problem?

   25. SKSteven E. Koonin16:52

       Yes.

   26. JRJoe Rogan16:52

       You-

   27. SKSteven E. Koonin16:52

       Indeed, indeed.

   28. JRJoe Rogan16:53

       Yeah.

   29. SKSteven E. Koonin16:53

       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."

   30. JRJoe Rogan17:38

       Now what, what criticisms made sense that you could rebut?
7. 24:49 – 29:03

   Selective presentation example: hurricanes, truncated graphs, and ‘telephone game’ reporting

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin24:49

      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."

   2. JRJoe Rogan26:03

      So what is the graph? Like, what- what is the data that's-

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin26:06

      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.

   4. JRJoe Rogan26:17

      And what is the trend?

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin26:18

      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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan26:34

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

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin26:40

      Yep. Yep. Yep. I- I-

   8. JRJoe Rogan26:40

      Do you have a- an image of that?

   9. SKSteven E. Koonin26:42

      Uh, uh, yeah. I- I- I think I do, actually. Hang on. Let me...

   10. JRJoe Rogan26:45

       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.

   11. SKSteven E. Koonin27:01

       Yep. Yep.

   12. JRJoe Rogan27:01

       So we're looking at things, like, as if that's a lot of time.

   13. SKSteven E. Koonin27:03

       That's right. And there are these long-term trends, as you saw in the Egyptian river.

   14. JRJoe Rogan27:07

       Yes.

   15. SKSteven E. Koonin27:07

       Can we pull up, uh, s- chart number 35 in, uh, the unsettled file?

   16. JRJoe Rogan27:13

       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.

   17. SKSteven E. Koonin27:20

       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.

   18. JRJoe Rogan27:32

       Oh.

   19. SKSteven E. Koonin27:32

       And what's shown is from 1980 to 2010, and it's going up, right?

   20. JRJoe Rogan27:37

       Right. But if you see from 19... looks like 1979-ish.

   21. SKSteven E. Koonin27:40

       Well, so let's look at- let's look at the whole record, which is the next, uh, picture. There it is.

   22. JRJoe Rogan27:45

       Mm.

   23. SKSteven E. Koonin27:45

       All right? Okay.

   24. JRJoe Rogan27:47

       So it's real similar to the Egyptian data.

   25. SKSteven E. Koonin27:49

       Yeah. Yep. Yep, it's up and down.

   26. JRJoe Rogan27:50

       That it's up and down and up and down.

   27. SKSteven E. Koonin27:51

       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.

   28. JRJoe Rogan28:39

       Now that image, Jamie, can you pull it up again please?

   29. SKSteven E. Koonin28:41

       Yep. Yep.

   30. JRJoe Rogan28:42

       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.
8. 29:03 – 40:09

   Greenland ice loss and fact-checking disputes: cycles, ocean currents, and weather vs climate

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin29:03

      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.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:15

      And this is from 2010 to 2020?

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin30:18

      Yeah. Correct. And then, if you go back to 1930, you can see it was melting just as rapidly in 1930...

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:27

      Mm.

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin30:27

      ... 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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:38

      So what are the other influences if they're not just-

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin30:40

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan31:04

      So the, the, the different factors that play into what we think the different factors are that play into the melting is greenhouse gases-

   9. SKSteven E. Koonin31:14

      Warming. Yes, warming.

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:15

       ... warming.

   11. SKSteven E. Koonin31:16

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:16

       And what are the other ones?

   13. SKSteven E. Koonin31:17

       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.

   14. JRJoe Rogan31:36

       And those are the only factors?

   15. SKSteven E. Koonin31:38

       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.

   16. JRJoe Rogan31:44

       Does anything have to do with, uh, the, where the sun aligns with the earth and the cycle-

   17. SKSteven E. Koonin31:50

       Uh, well, yeah. So, so-

   18. JRJoe Rogan31:51

       ... procession of the equinoxes?

   19. SKSteven E. Koonin31:52

       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.

   20. JRJoe Rogan32:08

       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-

   21. SKSteven E. Koonin32:15

       Yeah.

   22. JRJoe Rogan32:15

       ... they're losing less ice and gaining ice.

   23. SKSteven E. Koonin32:17

       Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan32:17

       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-

   25. SKSteven E. Koonin32:26

       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.

   26. JRJoe Rogan33:02

       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-

   27. SKSteven E. Koonin33:18

       Yeah.

   28. JRJoe Rogan33:18

       ... that-

   29. SKSteven E. Koonin33:18

       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.

   30. JRJoe Rogan33:51

       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-
9. 40:09 – 53:06

   Sea level rise: long geologic rise, short-term rate cycles, and model projections

   1. SKSteven E. Koonin40:09

      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-

   2. JRJoe Rogan40:23

      Yes.

   3. SKSteven E. Koonin40:23

      ... most, right? And so-

   4. JRJoe Rogan40:25

      That we're gonna lose Miami.

   5. SKSteven E. Koonin40:26

      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.

   6. JRJoe Rogan41:13

      Mm-hmm.

   7. SKSteven E. Koonin41:14

      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.

   8. JRJoe Rogan41:30

      And the peak that you're looking at from-

   9. SKSteven E. Koonin41:32

      Yeah.

   10. JRJoe Rogan41:32

       ... the 1950s and 2020-

   11. SKSteven E. Koonin41:34

       Yeah.

   12. JRJoe Rogan41:34

       ... is essentially the same height.

   13. SKSteven E. Koonin41:35

       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-

   14. JRJoe Rogan42:23

       Based on?

   15. SKSteven E. Koonin42:24

       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.

   16. JRJoe Rogan42:40

       So, w- why do they have these predictions that are so extreme?

   17. SKSteven E. Koonin42:43

       I don't know. You should ask them, okay?

   18. JRJoe Rogan42:45

       (laughs)

   19. SKSteven E. Koonin42:46

       They don't even match up with what's happening today.

   20. JRJoe Rogan42:49

       No.

   21. SKSteven E. Koonin42:49

       All right?

   22. JRJoe Rogan42:49

       They, they're much more extreme-

   23. SKSteven E. Koonin42:51

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan42:51

       ... if you're looking at those green lines and the blue lines.

   25. SKSteven E. Koonin42:54

       Yeah. Yep, yep, yep.

   26. JRJoe Rogan42:54

       Like, much more extreme than anything that we've seen over 100 years.

   27. SKSteven E. Koonin42:57

       And you know, this is part of why I think we need a really rigorous review of these, uh, allegedly authoritative reports.

   28. JRJoe Rogan43:05

       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.

   29. SKSteven E. Koonin43:25

       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.

   30. JRJoe Rogan43:45

       They abet it.
10. 53:06 – 58:44

    What emissions matter and where they come from: CO2, methane, aerosols, and sector breakdowns

    1. JRJoe Rogan53:06

       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-

    2. SKSteven E. Koonin53:18

       Yep. Yep.

    3. JRJoe Rogan53:18

       ... how much transportation has an impact, how do they measure all that?

    4. SKSteven E. Koonin53:23

       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.

    5. JRJoe Rogan53:53

       It's from cow burps, right?

    6. SKSteven E. Koonin53:54

       It's from cow burps, rice paddies, waste water treatment, and so on.

    7. JRJoe Rogan53:59

       Mm-hmm.

    8. SKSteven E. Koonin53:59

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

    9. JRJoe Rogan54:07

       So what are the percentages when it comes to greenhouse gases? Like, say, what, what's the biggest contributor?

    10. SKSteven E. Koonin54:12

        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.

    11. JRJoe Rogan54:31

        So CO2 is the most significant, but is, is it also the most abundant?

    12. SKSteven E. Koonin54:35

        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.

    13. JRJoe Rogan54:55

        So the thing that we talk about when we talk about human impact on climate is CO2?

    14. SKSteven E. Koonin55:01

        That's correct. Oh, but ... And methane.

    15. JRJoe Rogan55:03

        And methane.

    16. SKSteven E. Koonin55:04

        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.

    17. JRJoe Rogan55:13

        How so?

    18. SKSteven E. Koonin55:14

        Because when we burn dirty coal, we make aerosols, smog, and so on, that, uh-

    19. JRJoe Rogan55:21

        Block out the sun.

    20. SKSteven E. Koonin55:21

        ... 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.

    21. JRJoe Rogan55:36

        How much of an impact does the burning of coal have to cool the earth?

    22. SKSteven E. Koonin55:39

        Um, so as I said, it's about half the warming impact of CO2.

    23. JRJoe Rogan55:44

        Half the warming-

    24. SKSteven E. Koonin55:44

        Yeah.

    25. JRJoe Rogan55:44

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

    26. SKSteven E. Koonin55:53

        Uh, so, so, uh, power.

    27. JRJoe Rogan55:54

        Power.

    28. SKSteven E. Koonin55:54

        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-

    29. JRJoe Rogan56:13

        Mm-hmm.

    30. SKSteven E. Koonin56:13

        ... globally is only 14% of greenhouse gases.
11. 58:44 – 1:15:31

    Economics of climate vs economics of transition: projected damages and rapid electrification risks

    1. SKSteven E. Koonin58:44

       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?

    2. JRJoe Rogan58:52

       Okay.

    3. SKSteven E. Koonin58:52

       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?

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:00:06

       I'm not exactly sure what that means.

    5. SKSteven E. Koonin1:00:07

       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.

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:00:16

       Now, does that take into account the growth of the economy overall?

    7. SKSteven E. Koonin1:00:19

       No, it d- well, it's a relative statement.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:00:21

       Okay.

    9. SKSteven E. Koonin1:00:21

       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.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:01:01

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

    11. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:08

        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.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:01:14

        Right.

    13. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:14

        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.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:01:27

        Yes.

    15. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:27

        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.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:01:51

        That seems like a lot of money.

    17. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:52

        Well, not as a percentage.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:01:54

        (laughs) Right.

    19. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:54

        I- it grows by 2% a year.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:01:56

        Right.

    21. SKSteven E. Koonin1:01:56

        So it's a two-year delay in the growth.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:01:59

        Two-year delay in the growth.

    23. SKSteven E. Koonin1:02:00

        Okay.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:02:01

        And now, if major policy changes-

    25. SKSteven E. Koonin1:02:05

        Yeah.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:02:05

        ... are implemented-

    27. SKSteven E. Koonin1:02:06

        Right.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:02:06

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

    29. SKSteven E. Koonin1:02:14

        Yep, yep.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:02:14

        Did that pass in California? Do you know?
12. 1:15:31 – 1:28:31

    Global reality check: developing-world energy needs, U.S. share of emissions, and net-zero feasibility

    1. SKSteven E. Koonin1:15:31

       At what cost, all right? And, and, and here I wanna take a global view, okay?

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:15:37

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SKSteven E. Koonin1:15:38

       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.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:17:07

       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?

    5. SKSteven E. Koonin1:17:24

       Well, we can't implement restrictions-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:17:25

       Right.

    7. SKSteven E. Koonin1:17:25

       ... 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?

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:17:36

       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-

    9. SKSteven E. Koonin1:17:48

       Yeah.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:17:48

        ... you know, warming?

    11. SKSteven E. Koonin1:17:49

        Yeah. So you wanna do that for the world as a whole or just for the US?

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:17:52

        Let's just do it for the US.

    13. SKSteven E. Koonin1:17:54

        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.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:18:11

        When you say we're thir- so we're thirp- 13% globally?

    15. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:14

        Globally, correct.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:18:15

        Okay.

    17. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:15

        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.

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:18:33

        Hm. So the growth in the rest of the world, they would just contribute-

    19. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:37

        Yeah.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:18:37

        ... so much that-

    21. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:38

        Yeah.

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:18:38

        ... it wouldn't matter what we take out.

    23. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:39

        Yeah. That's right. And, and it- yes. Yeah.

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:18:40

        So they're growing and their economies are booming and-

    25. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:43

        And-

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:18:43

        ... yeah.

    27. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:43

        ... who's gonna tell them, "You shouldn't do that?"

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:18:45

        Right.

    29. SKSteven E. Koonin1:18:45

        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.

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:19:14

        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?

Episode duration: 2:03:15