Podcast appearances and mentions of zeke hausfather

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Apple enters the John Ternus era as he becomes CEO ahead of the anticipated iPhone event, a climate scientist exposes the real energy costs of AI use, a bezel-free concept phone debuts at IFA, and Malwarebytes warns GTA fans about dangerous fake "GTA 6 Extended Look" downloads. Apple kicks off the John Ternus era as CEO, just ahead of a much-anticipated iPhone event—facing challenges in AI, manufacturing, regulation, and the ever-present rumor of a foldable iPhone. A climate scientist's 8-week experiment spotlights how much energy AI actually burns, showing prompt-based measurements miss the real environmental impact of today's intensive tools. Tecno unveils Bezelless - a bezel-less concept phone at IFA, as anticipation builds for Apple's rumored border-free iPhone. Chris Fistonich from Malwarebytes joins to warn about fake GTA 6 sites delivering info-stealing malware to unsuspecting gamers. Hosts: Mikah Sargent and Abrar Al-Heeti Guest: Chris Fistonich Download or subscribe to Tech News Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/tech-news-weekly. Join Club TWiT for Ad-Free Podcasts! Support what you love and get ad-free audio and video feeds, a members-only Discord, and exclusive content. Join today: https://twit.tv/clubtwit Sponsors: outsystems.com/twit framer.com/tnw rippling.ai/tnw

Michael Walker speaks to climatologist Zeke Hausfather about global warming, geoengineering & more.

Every few years, the Pacific Ocean's surface waters become especially warm near the equator, a climatic phenomenon known as El Niño.El Niño is a normal part of the climate system, but even in a normal year, it can trigger extreme weather around the world. Forecasters are worried that the current El Niño — which just began a few weeks ago — is going to be anything but normal. Models suggest that we could soon see the hottest El Niño ever measured, with unpredictable and catastrophic effects for ecosystems and societies around the world.What does that mean? And why does this El Niño look so bad? On this episode of Shift Key, Rob is joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth. They discuss what forecast models are saying about this El Niño, why it gives us a glance at the future, and whether climate change itself is accelerating.Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.You can find a full transcript of the episode here.Mentioned:NOAA's El Niño page and the relative El Niño indexAn Assessment of Earth's Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence, the 2020 paper where Zeke was a coauthorZeke's blog post on AI emissions: The real energy use of agentic AIJohn Bistline's post on AI emissions at WatershedHeatmap's coverage of AI emissions: A New Guesstimate for Corporate AI Emissions--This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by ...Discover the Yale Clean and Equitable Energy Development online certificate program at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this fully online, 5-month program, you'll learn from leading experts, develop practical skills, and grow a powerful network. Visit cbey.yale.edu to learn more and apply.Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In today's special edition, Ari Weitzman interviews Zeke Hausfather who is the climate research lead at Stripe, climate research scientist at Berkeley Earth and contributor at Carbon Brief about the recent global wild fires and what they have to do with changing climate. Ad-free podcasts are here!Get 20% off your first year of ad-free episodes, exclusive interviews, and deep dives with Tangle's podcast membership!The latest Suspension of the Rules.In this week's episode, Isaac, Ari, and Kmele discuss what we have and haven't learned from the Covid-19 pandemic. Plus, a conversation about whether government-run grocery stores will help or hurt consumer prices, and Isaac heaps some praise onto an unlikely character. Check it out here!You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here. Our Executive Editor and Founder is Isaac Saul. Our Executive Producer is Jon Lall.This podcast hosted by: Ari Weitzman and audio engineered and edited by Dewey Thomas. Music for the podcast was produced by Jon Lall.Our newsletter is edited by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman, Senior Editor Will Kaback, Bailey Saul, Audrey Moorehead, and Carina Pacheco. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People on both sides of the Canada - U.S. border have been choking on smoke in recent weeks, much of it coming from fires burning in Canada's forests. Now, U.S. President Donald Trump is threatening new, fire-related tariffs in retaliation. Climate scientists like Zeke Hausfather say wildfires in Canada's vast boreal forest are linked to global warming and can't be blamed on just one country. And environmental law expert Godwin Dzah explains, when health hazards cross borders there are ways to hold governments and companies to account. But the question of liability gets hazy when climate change enters the conversation.

 Zeke Hausfather is a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Donald Trump claimed on social media that climate scientists were “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!” about their global warming projections. But climate scientist Zeke Hausfather says the experts were not wrong, and the new projections are not entirely bad news. The world has made some progress in reducing emissions, though he says we still have a long way to go when it comes to stabilizing the climate. Then, tips on how to protect yourself – and your home – from heat, smoke and wildfire while not breaking the budget.

At this point, for most consumers, the use of Artificial Intelligence is a no-brainer. The ability to produce quick results while minimizing labor has revolutionized workflow in every single sector, with the latest being climatology. AI tools like Claude are running real-time climate model simulations in a matter of minutes instead of days now. But these ambitious abilities do not come without their inherent flaws, as AI systems still produce hallucinations with inaccurate information. This poses the obvious challenge as it relates to the nuanced nature of scientific research and judgment. Today on AirTalk, we are joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate research lead at Stripe, a financial technology company, and co-author of the Substack newsletter The Climate Brink, to talk about what being an AI-augmented scientist could look like.

How do we model the climate system? How warm will 2026 be? And can geoengineering be anything more than a bandaid?  This week on Cleaning Up, Bryony Worthington sits down with leading climate scientist Dr. Zeke Hausfather on the day the 2025 global temperature data is released. Despite a La Niña year, the planet has just experienced one of its hottest years on record — pushing us ever closer to the 1.5°C threshold. Zeke explains why recent warming has accelerated, how declining air pollution may be unmasking hidden heating, and what disappearing cloud cover could mean for climate sensitivity.  The conversation ranges from the surprising accuracy of early climate models, the risks of rising nationalism, and what the U.S. withdrawal from international science means for the world.  They also tackle controversial questions:  Are worst-case climate scenarios still plausible? Is geoengineering a dangerous distraction — or an emergency brake? And can carbon removals ever work economically at scale. Leadership Circle: Cleaning Up is supported by the Leadership Circle, and its founding members: Actis, Alcazar Energy, Davidson Kempner, EcoPragma Capital, EDP, Eurelectric, the Gilardini Foundation, KKR, National Grid, Octopus Energy, Quadrature Climate Foundation, SDCL and Wärtsilä. For more information on the Leadership Circle, please visit https://www.cleaningup.live. Discover more: Zeke's articles in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/by/zeke-hausfather Zeke on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeke-hausfather-7327699/ Zeke's Blog on Substack: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/my-2026-and-2027-global-temperature  

Whether we like it or not, global warming is happening. The global temperature has already gone up, and it's going to go up more, because the atmosphere is already full of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and we're continuing to add to that stock. Quite how much it will increase by is a very important question for all of us. Until relatively recently, during much of the 2010s and into the 2020s, many scientists claimed that if we kept on going down the path we were on, if we just kept on with business as usual, then by the end of the century global temperatures would increase by almost five degrees centigrade. This projection was based on something called RCP 8.5, a statistical scenario used by scientists to model the future of the climate. You can still find scientific papers published in 2025 that make the same claim. However, there's a good case that RCP 8.5 should never have been used as the business-as-usual scenario. And in hindsight it doesn't look like an accurate vision of the future at all. So what's going on? Dr Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the climate research lead at Stripe, explains the argument. Presenter: Tim Harford Series producer: Tom Colls Sound mix: Donald MacDonald Editor: Richard Vadon

This week on Green Street, Patti and Doug talk about dramatic new findings that environmental exposures are causing humans to age faster and suffer from diseases earlier, and how air pollution can cause myopia in children. After the premiere of a new song, “Enough Is Enough,” Dr. Zeke Hausfather talks about his work on climate change and the various kinds of solutions being proposed to reduce the intensity of solar heating while we simultaneously reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

The EPA is moving to rescind the 2009 “endangerment” finding that declared CO₂ a pollutant—supposedly dangerous to human health, well-being, and the planet. Now that the public comment period is open, the National Academy of Sciences is rushing activist scientists into action to defend it. The usual suspects—Michael Mann, Zeke Hausfather, and others—are already whining, while media allies like AP's Seth Borenstein launch their own attacks.In this episode of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Institute's Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely—joined by returning special guest Chris Martz—dig into the coming “NASty Gram” on CO₂ headed to the EPA. Chris brings his sharp, meteorology-based analysis to cut through the noise and spotlight the facts.We also cover some of the week's most outrageous climate news: claims that “deniers” are refusing to die from heat waves, a school district ditching electric buses to go back to gas because EVs can't be repaired, and why climate change isn't dooming your bananas.Sponsored by Advisor MetalsProtect your wealth with precious metals: https://climaterealismshow.com/metals In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there!Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

The EPA is moving to rescind the 2009 “endangerment” finding that declared CO₂ a pollutant—supposedly dangerous to human health, well-being, and the planet. Now that the public comment period is open, the National Academy of Sciences is rushing activist scientists into action to defend it. The usual suspects—Michael Mann, Zeke Hausfather, and others—are already whining, while media allies like AP's Seth Borenstein launch their own attacks.In this episode of The Climate Realism Show, The Heartland Institute's Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely—joined by returning special guest Chris Martz—dig into the coming “NASty Gram” on CO₂ headed to the EPA. Chris brings his sharp, meteorology-based analysis to cut through the noise and spotlight the facts.We also cover some of the week's most outrageous climate news: claims that “deniers” are refusing to die from heat waves, a school district ditching electric buses to go back to gas because EVs can't be repaired, and why climate change isn't dooming your bananas.Sponsored by Advisor Metals Protect your wealth with precious metals: https://climaterealismshow.com/metals In The Tank broadcasts LIVE every Thursday at 12pm CT on on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Tune in to have your comments addressed live by the In The Tank Crew. Be sure to subscribe and never miss an episode. See you there!Climate Change Roundtable is LIVE every Friday at 12pm CT on The Heartland Institute YouTube channel. Have a topic you want addressed? Join the live show and leave a comment for our panelists and we'll cover it during the live show!

In this episode, I talk with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather about how enhanced rock weathering (ERW) turbocharges a natural process to permanently store CO₂. We dig into how it profits from existing infrastructure, and the big questions around measuring and verifying the carbon captured. Zeke also explains why farmers might actually benefit from spreading all those rocks — and why ERW could become a key, if limited, piece of the broader climate puzzle. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.volts.wtf/subscribe

Late last year we started interviewing folk in the business of solar radiation management (SRM) - aka one flavour of “geoengineering”. It's a taboo subject. It's sci-fi gold. It's also something we're going to be talking about. Particularly after famed climate scientist James Hansen and a platoon of other climate scientists published a new paper declaring not just the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5C to be in the rear-view mirror, but - as Damian Carrington in the Guardian summed it up: “The new analysis said global heating is likely to reach 2C by 2045, unless solar geoengineering is deployed.”The reason for a lot of this acceleration in global heating, say Hansen and colleagues, is (perversely) the result of successful efforts to reduce pollution. Specifically, removing sulfur from maritime fuel. That sulfur has been causing potentially millions of deaths a year due to respiratory diseases. So it's being phased out. Only one problem - the sulfur was having the under-appreciated consequence of reflecting quite a lot of sunlight back into space. How much? More than the entire energy output of humanity in a given year. And now that it's been removed, enough to - according to the paper - drive half the acceleration in global heating over the past 5 years or so.Hansen is hardly fringe for picking this up, though people don't all agree on the significance. Zeke Hausfather, who was not involved in the research, is among climate scientist who has acknowledge this “aerosol forcing” problem. Some data of his turned up in Nat Bullard's superb annual climate deck:Wicked Problems is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.On the call releasing their findings, Hansen et al discussed SRM. Which (even more perversely) often involves ideas for putting sulfur dioxide back into the atmosphere. But on purpose. To cool things off. To buy time.So here is part one of a series of conversations about SRM, featuring Kelly Wanser - the head of Silver Lining, one of the leading non-batshit-crazy outfits trying to do research on technologies that might make it possible. We'll put out part two very soon.00:00 Introduction to the Climate Crisis00:28 The Doomsday Clock and Climate Realities01:57 Hansen's Climate Predictions02:55 Aerosol Forcing and Global Warming05:10 Purposeful Global Cooling08:04 Interview with Kelly Wanser11:07 Silver Linings' Mission and Climate Interventions23:19 Challenges and Ethical Questions31:32 Introduction to Luke Eisman and Make Sunsets31:50 Neal Stephenson's Influence and Geoengineering Concept32:45 Luke Eisman's DIY Approach to Geoengineering34:05 Critique of Non-Expert Interventions35:10 Challenges in Atmospheric Science37:51 Responsible Research and Global Perspectives40:10 The Importance of Atmospheric Monitoring47:56 Global South and Climate Risk Research 52:55 The Montreal Protocol and Climate Agreements54:54 Final Thoughts and Recommendations Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Headlines are screaming that the world is about to reach a climate tipping point, which feels like a point of no return where the climate is screwed and there's nothing we can do. But it turns out, that's wrong. These visions of a climate apocalypse don't align with the science. So what exactly is going on with our climate? What even is a tipping point? And are we really about to lose control of the climate? Comedian Michael Hing joins us for a journey with climate scientists Dr. Ed Doddridge, Dr. Seaver Wang, and Dr. Sarah Das, as well as Dr. Felicity McCormack, who's at the Australian Research Council Special Research Initiative Securing Antarctica's Environmental Future at Monash University. Find our transcript here: https://bit.ly/ScienceVsClimateTippingPoint  In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Fire in the hole (06:14) What is a tipping point?  (11:04) Is Planet Earth "tipping"?  (17:00) How do we know when the ice sheets tip? (25:04) When will the ice sheets tip? (27:34) Have we lost control of the climate?  (31:58) Why tipping points are the distracted boyfriend meme (35:30) The good news! Send us your questions about How to Solve the Climate Crisis!!  Insta: @science_vs Tiktok: @wendyzukerman Send a voicemail or video to merylh@spotify.com Or! If you're in the U.S., you can call 774-481-1238  This episode was produced by Wendy Zukerman, with help from Meryl Horn Rose Rimler, Ekedi Fausther-Keeys, and Michelle Dang. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Bobby Lord, Sparse Movement, Bumi Hidaka and So Wylie. Thanks to the researchers we spoke to, including Professor Andrew Dessler, Professor Christina Hulbe, Dr David Armstrong McKay, Professor Tim Lenton, Aditya Lolla, Dr Elizabeth Maroon, Dr Jan Nitzbon, Professor Johannes Quaas, Dr Jonathan Leung, Dr Kirsten Schell, Dr Madi Rosevear, Michelle Dvorak, Dr Robin Lamboll, Dr Zeke Hausfather, Dr Sam Krevor, Flowra Zhang and others. And extra thanks to the Zukerman Family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A decade ago, I was feeling pretty pessimistic about climate change. The politics of mitigating global warming just seemed impossible: asking people to make sacrifices, or countries to slow their development, and delay dreams of better, more prosperous lives.But the world today looks different. The costs of solar and wind power have plummeted. Same for electric batteries. And a new politics is starting to take hold: that maybe we can invest and invent and build our way out of this crisis, without needing people to make sacrifices at all.Hannah Ritchie is the deputy editor and lead researcher at Our World in Data and the author of “Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet.” She's pored over the data on this question and has come away more optimistic than many. “It's just not true that we've had these solutions just sitting there ready to build for decades and decades, and we just haven't done anything,” she told me. “We're in a fundamentally different position going forward.”In this conversation, we discuss whether sustainability without sacrifice is truly possible. How much progress have we made so far? What gives her the most hope? And what are the biggest obstacles?Mentioned:“What was the death toll from Chernobyl and Fukushima?” by Hannah Ritchie“Reducing food's environmental impacts through producers and consumers” by Joseph Poore and Thomas Nemecek“Future demand for electricity generation materials under different climate mitigation scenarios” by Seaver Wang, Zeke Hausfather et al.Book Recommendations:Factfulness by Hans RoslingPossible by Chris GoodallRange by David EpsteinThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin and Aman Sahota. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Remember when the airwaves were full of people questioning the idea of man-made climate change? You don't hear much from them any more - in large part becuase the evidence that our CO2 emissions are altering the climate has become so overwhelming.After a recap on how we know that carbon warms the climate, Tom and Stuart use this episode of The Studies Show to discuss climate predictions—er, I mean, projections—and how accurate they've been. They ask whether the media always gets it right when discussing climate (spoiler: no), and whether we should be optimistic or panicked about what's happening to the environment.The Studies Show is sponsored by Works in Progress magazine. Ever wondered what people mean when they talk about “progress studies”? Works in Progress is what they mean. It's a magazine bursting with fascinating articles on how science and technology have improved our lives - and how they could be even better in future. There's a whole new February 2024 issue out now - read it at this link.Show notes* 2023: the hottest year on record, with surprising and anomalous melting of ice in Antarctica* NASA on how the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere raises the Earth's temperature* Carbon Brief explains how scientists estimate climate sensitivity, and discusses the complexities of the latest climate models* The most recent IPCC report, from March 2023* The IEA's forecast of solar power, with the incredible and very optimistic graph mentioned in the episode:* Tom's unfortunately-titled Unherd article on the unlikely but much-discussed “RCP 8.5” scenario* Zeke Hausfather's study on matching up the projections of climate models with what actually happened years and decades later* Response from the sceptics (they still exist!)* Website offering responses to all the most common claims by climate change sceptics (e.g. “the Earth hasn't warmed since 1998”; “CO2 is plant food”)* Toby Ord on how, whereas climate change could be extremely bad, it's tricky to argue that it's a truly “existential” riskCredits and acknowledgementsThe Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. We're grateful to Karsten Haustein for talking to us for this episode (any errors are our own). This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be worried?, published by A.H. on December 29, 2023 on LessWrong. tl;dr: There are several trends which suggest that global temperatures over the next year will experience a short-term increase, relative to the long-term increase in temperatures caused by man-made global warming. Credits: Most of the information comes from Berkley Earth monthly temperature updates. Several people on Twitter (Robert Rohde, Zeke Hausfather, James Hansen and Roko) have also been talking about the issues discussed here for a while. Man-made global warming has been causing a steady, long-term increase in average global temperatures since the industrial revolution. However, recently several trends are lining up which suggest that the next year/few years might experience temporary greater-than-average warming, on top of baseline man-made warming. Some of these factors are already in play and 2023 is 'virtually certain' to be the hottest year on record. The story can be summed up in this lovely graphic from Berkley earth: I've had a look into some of the things that are happening and have written up what I've learned. I am not a climate scientist, so take this all with a pinch of salt. El Niño What is El Niño? Periodically, the strength and direction of the winds over the Pacific ocean changes, causing the surface waters to flow differently, which leads to changes in the amount of cold water coming up from the depths of the ocean. This pattern is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The phase when the surface waters are warmer is known as El Niño, and the phase when the surface waters are cooler is known as La Niña. These periods occur irregularly every few years and last approximately a year. How does it affect global temperatures? Unsurprisingly, during the El Niño period, when surface waters are warmer, more heat is released into the atmosphere, leading to warmer global surface temperatures. In general, years with El Niño are hotter and years with La Niña are cooler on average. This is a pretty reliable generalisation but is not a totally hard-and-fast rule as shown in the figure below[1]. However, like a lot phenomena in climate science, El Niño has different effects depending on what part of the world you are in. Broadly, areas in the southern hemisphere and areas by the coast experience more warming than others. But El Niño can actually cause cooling in some areas, so its important to check where you live. When averaged out over the globe, global surface temperature during El Niño years is about 0.1-0.2C higher than normal. What about second-order effects? This change in temperature can cause all kinds of other effects such as flooding, drought, disease and crop failures, on top of the direct effects of heat. Are we currently in an El Niño phase? Yes, it started in early summer this year. How long will it last? It is expected to last until (Northern Hemisphere) summer 2024 and expected to peak around (Northern Hemisphere) winter (ie. soon). However, (quoting Berkley Earth) again: 'Due to the lag between the development of El Niño and its full impact being felt on global temperatures, it is plausible that the current El Niño will have a greater impact on global temperatures in 2024 than it does in 2023.' So it is not over yet. Even though it will peak during Northern Hemisphere winter, its effects will still be felt into the summer, on top of normal seasonal temperature increases. Is this one going to be bad? The current El Niño phase is shaping up to be the one of the strongest ever. However, one thing I don't understand: is this just because of 'standard' increases from man-made warming or is it something about the winds/ocean currents which makes this one strong? Solar Cycles What is the solar cycle? Approximately every 11 years, for reasons I d...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Will 2024 be very hot? Should we be worried?, published by A.H. on December 29, 2023 on LessWrong. tl;dr: There are several trends which suggest that global temperatures over the next year will experience a short-term increase, relative to the long-term increase in temperatures caused by man-made global warming. Credits: Most of the information comes from Berkley Earth monthly temperature updates. Several people on Twitter (Robert Rohde, Zeke Hausfather, James Hansen and Roko) have also been talking about the issues discussed here for a while. Man-made global warming has been causing a steady, long-term increase in average global temperatures since the industrial revolution. However, recently several trends are lining up which suggest that the next year/few years might experience temporary greater-than-average warming, on top of baseline man-made warming. Some of these factors are already in play and 2023 is 'virtually certain' to be the hottest year on record. The story can be summed up in this lovely graphic from Berkley earth: I've had a look into some of the things that are happening and have written up what I've learned. I am not a climate scientist, so take this all with a pinch of salt. El Niño What is El Niño? Periodically, the strength and direction of the winds over the Pacific ocean changes, causing the surface waters to flow differently, which leads to changes in the amount of cold water coming up from the depths of the ocean. This pattern is known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The phase when the surface waters are warmer is known as El Niño, and the phase when the surface waters are cooler is known as La Niña. These periods occur irregularly every few years and last approximately a year. How does it affect global temperatures? Unsurprisingly, during the El Niño period, when surface waters are warmer, more heat is released into the atmosphere, leading to warmer global surface temperatures. In general, years with El Niño are hotter and years with La Niña are cooler on average. This is a pretty reliable generalisation but is not a totally hard-and-fast rule as shown in the figure below[1]. However, like a lot phenomena in climate science, El Niño has different effects depending on what part of the world you are in. Broadly, areas in the southern hemisphere and areas by the coast experience more warming than others. But El Niño can actually cause cooling in some areas, so its important to check where you live. When averaged out over the globe, global surface temperature during El Niño years is about 0.1-0.2C higher than normal. What about second-order effects? This change in temperature can cause all kinds of other effects such as flooding, drought, disease and crop failures, on top of the direct effects of heat. Are we currently in an El Niño phase? Yes, it started in early summer this year. How long will it last? It is expected to last until (Northern Hemisphere) summer 2024 and expected to peak around (Northern Hemisphere) winter (ie. soon). However, (quoting Berkley Earth) again: 'Due to the lag between the development of El Niño and its full impact being felt on global temperatures, it is plausible that the current El Niño will have a greater impact on global temperatures in 2024 than it does in 2023.' So it is not over yet. Even though it will peak during Northern Hemisphere winter, its effects will still be felt into the summer, on top of normal seasonal temperature increases. Is this one going to be bad? The current El Niño phase is shaping up to be the one of the strongest ever. However, one thing I don't understand: is this just because of 'standard' increases from man-made warming or is it something about the winds/ocean currents which makes this one strong? Solar Cycles What is the solar cycle? Approximately every 11 years, for reasons I d...

New forecasts for weather patterns could help the solar and wind industries make better investment decisions in the long term.Climate trends are accelerating rapidly. Global temperatures hovered consistently at around 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels from January to August. Then in September, they shot up to 1.8 degrees. Dr Zeke Hausfather, research scientist at Berkeley Earth, opined in a recent NYT piece that global warming has actually accelerated in the last 15 years, rather than continuing at a gradual pace. The effects of climate change are no longer something for the next generation to worry about; they're being felt here, and now. As a result, it's crucial to deploy renewables as quickly and efficiently as possible. This involves continuing to invest in the two largest sectors – wind and solar. There's a strong correlation between the effectiveness of these energy sources and the weather predictions we make to inform our long-term planning and investment decisions. Anticipating and planning for variability in supply and demand comes from analyzing historical weather and climate data. On the Interchange Recharged today, David Banmiller is joined by Rob Cirincione, founder and CEO of Sunairio. They have a model which they say can make better predictions for solar and wind demand and supply, helping the industry to make better investment decisions and deploy more quickly. Traditionally, historical data has been the primary tool for making predictions about future weather events and their possible impact on supply-demand imbalances. Historical data has its limits and does not always provide an accurate representation of future weather events. With climate change accelerating faster than we thought, and with a limited amount of historical data available, there's a need for modeled projections to fill this gap.For instance, in the solar industry, historical average models like the typical meteorological year (TMY) are used to predict future performance and returns. However, the assumption that the climate is the same as it was when the model was developed is flawed. Therefore, it's essential to continually measure and observe the impact of climate trends on irradiance and thus, the performance and returns of solar projects.Rob explores with David the tools used to predict weather-driven variability in energy, what the solar industry currently uses to predict long-term performance, how to apply the predictive model Sunairio is developing to make better investment decisions, and how progress with decarbonization efforts could impact future forecasts.Subscribe to the show on your podcast platform of choice and visit woodmac.com/podcasts to listen back to previous episodes. Join in the conversation on X – we're @interchangeshow00:00:00: Introduction to the show00:00:01: Rob's career and the start of Sunairio00:00:06: The weather's impact on energy supply and demand00:00:37: Tools used to predict weather-driven variability in energy00:01:01: The limitations of using historical weather data00:01:47: The reason for creating Sunairio00:02:02: Sunairio's role in the industry00:03:18: Investment analysis and planning in regards to weather events00:03:32: Current practices in solar industry00:04:38: Flaws in using historical data for future predictions00:07:18: The impact of changing climate trends on the solar performance00:09:02: The importance of this analysis for investors and project managers00:09:30: The risk of production underperformance in renewable projects00:10:49: Sunairio's use of statistical climate model for predictions00:11:16: Discussion on weather forecasting and its impact on energy production00:12:20: Using statistical approach in climate modeling for energy production00:12:42: Applying the predictive model in decision-making00:14:27: The forecasted production gap and how it affects renewable energy goals00:16:13: Coverage and capabilities of the modeling system00:17:49: Expansion and future expectations for the renewable energy markets.00:20:01: Geographical challenges and solutions in energy productionSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Since the Paris Agreement coming into force in 2016, world leaders have increasingly emphasized the need to keep warming to the 1.5°C target by the end of this century, in order to avoid more dangerous impacts from climate change. Yet temperature readings around the globe show that the world has already warmed by roughly 1°C on average above pre-industrial levels. Many models suggest we will very likely exceed 1.5°C of warming, possibly in the next 5-10 years, in the absence of aggressive worldwide action to reduce emissions and (perhaps) engineer the climate. While we have made much progress, unfortunately the world is nowhere close to that level of action. So does the 1.5°C target still make sense if overshoot seems almost certain? Is it a science-based target or a political target - and even a reasonable and just target in the first place? Is the target about holding the line at 1.5°C or getting it back down to 1.5°C by 2100? When are we likely to exceed it, how will we know, and what will be the physical and political consequences of missing it?On S5E2 of Energy vs Climate, David, Sara, Ed, and climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of Stripe and Berkeley Earth discuss all things 1.5°C.energyvsclimate.com@EnergyvsClimate

World temperatures in September were "absolutely, gob-smackingly bananas," according to climatologist Zeke Hausfather. Last month was 0.93 degrees Celsius warmer than the average September temperature between 1991 and 2020, and half a degree hotter than the previous record set in 2020. It puts 2023 firmly on track to be the warmest year on record. Thomas Reuters foundation climate correspondent Jack Graham spoke to Ingrid Hipkiss.

Is climate change an impending existential threat, or a serious but manageable problem we can tackle with innovation and human ingenuity? Zeke Hausfather joins this episode of Faster, Please! — The Podcast to explain the basics of climate modeling and give a clear-eyed assessment of the risks we face and the measures we can take.Zeke is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst. He is the climate research lead for Stripe and a research scientist at Berkeley Earth.In This Episode* Human impact on the climate (1:11)* Global temperature forecasting (6:33)* Low-probability, high-risk scenarios (15:07)* Reducing carbon emissions (17:06)* Carbon capture and carbon removal (25:25)Below is an edited transcript of our conversationFaster, Please! is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Thanks!Human impact on the climateJames Pethokoukis: How do we know that our planet is warming? And secondarily, how do we know the actions of people are playing a key role?Zeke Hausfather: That's a great question. In terms of how we know it's warming: We've been monitoring the Earth's climate with reasonably dense measurements since the mid-1800s. That's when groups like NASA, NOAA, the UK Hadley Centre, my own Berkeley Earth group, have been able to put together reliable global surface temperature estimates. And we've seen in the period…That's since the 1980s?1850.1850. NASA was not around in 1850.No. But enough measurements were being taken both at weather stations around the world and on ships in the oceans that we can reconstruct global temperatures with an accuracy of a couple tenths of a degree going back that far. We know that the world has warmed by about 1.2 degrees centigrade since 1850 with the vast majority of that warming, about 1 degree of it, happening since 1970. That isn't in much dispute in the scientific community at all. Now, going further back is harder, obviously. We only invented the thermometer in the early 1700s. There are a few locations on land that go back that far, but to go back further in time, we need to rely on what we call climate proxies: things like ice cores, tree rings, coral sediments, pollen in lakes — various natural factors that are in some way related to the temperature when those things occurred.Those have much higher uncertainties, of course, but we do know using those reconstructions that current temperature levels are probably unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years and are at the high end of anything we've seen in the last 120,000 years or so. Certainly if current temperatures were to stay at today's levels for another century, they'd be higher than anything we've seen in 120,000 years. But it's harder to precisely make those claims because the time resolution of these indirect proxy measurements is very coarse when we go back further in time. You might have one ice core measurement reflect a hundred-year average period, for example, rather than a specific year. We know from the temperature record that the world has warmed. How do we know that human activity is playing a role? Well, we've known since the mid-1800s, due to pioneering work by folks like John Tyndall or Arrhenius, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane are critical to maintain a habitable planet. Without greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, the Earth would be a snowball and life would probably not exist.We also know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased pretty dramatically. We have measurements from ice cores going back about 800,000 years of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a reasonably high resolution. And because carbon dioxide is well mixed, knowing it in one location in one ice core gives us a good picture of carbon dioxide for the whole planet. And we know that prior to the year 1850, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere varied between about 170 to 280 parts per million. They're lower during ice age periods; they're higher during warmer interglacial periods. But since the 1850s, that value has increased dramatically. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased by about 50 percent. It's gone from 280 parts per million, which was over the last 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age, up to about 420 parts per million today.And that reflects a huge amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I don't think people realize quite the magnitude we're talking about. The amount of carbon dioxide that humans have added to the atmosphere by digging up stuff from underground and burning it is roughly equal in mass to the entire biosphere. We took every single bit of life on Earth and burned it. That was about how much CO2 we put up in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Or to put it another way, it's equal in mass to all of everything humans have ever built: the pyramids, every skyscraper, every road. We took all that mass and put it up into the atmosphere. That's the amount of CO2 we've emitted. And so that's had a pretty big effect on what we call the radiative forcing of our climate, essentially the amount of outgoing longwave radiation — or heat, in common parlance — that gets absorbed and reradiated back toward the surface. And the estimate…That's the key mechanism we're talking about here, right?Yeah. Sunlight comes in from the sun, which provides pretty much all the Earth's energy. It gets absorbed by the surface of the Earth and reradiated as heat. That heat goes back out to space. Ideally, those two things should be an equilibrium: The amount of energy entering the Earth system matches the amount that leaves the Earth system, and the Earth stays a happy, healthy temperature. What we've seen in the last century, and we can verify this over the last few decades directly through satellite observations, is the amount of heat entering the Earth system is larger than the amount of heat leaving the Earth system. So the Earth is out of thermal equilibrium and is heating up. Most of that heat is going into the oceans, about 90 percent of it. But about 10 percent of that heat that's trapped goes into the atmosphere, and that's responsible for the warming we've seen.The climate is a hugely complex system, and when you're trying to project the response of the climate to our emissions, you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty around what we call feedbacks in the climate system.Global temperature forecastingLooking forward, various climate models, which is what we use to forecast what's going to happen next, look at what we've already put into the atmosphere and what we're continuing to put into the atmosphere, and they make a forecast about how that will impact temperatures going forward. Do I have that part right?Yep.Okay. So based on what these models are saying, what is reasonable to expect in coming decades as far as temperature increases and their impacts?The amount of future warming we end up having depends largely on how much CO2 and other greenhouse gases we emit. If we keep emissions roughly at current levels for the rest of the century — we're emitting about 40 billion tons of CO2 per year — if we keep that steady, we don't increase it at all, we expect somewhere in the range of 3 degrees centigrade warming by the end of the century, so that would be a bit above 5 degrees Fahrenheit warming globally, relative to the pre-industrial period or 1850. We've already experienced 1.2 degrees C. We'd have another 1.8 degrees C or so on top of that by the end of the century. If we emit more, it could be higher than that. If we emit less, it could be lower than that.That said, that's sort of the average estimate across the 40 different modeling centers around the world that do these sort of exercises. In reality, the climate is a hugely complex system, and when you're trying to project the response of the climate to our emissions, you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty around what we call feedbacks in the climate system. As an example: As we warm the surface, we get more evaporation and the atmosphere can hold more water vapor before rain falls out as the air is warmer. This is a fairly well-known physical relationship. And so for every degree of warming, you get about 7 percent more water vapor in the atmosphere. Now, water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas, and so that enhances the warming the world experiences. Because it's warmer, that water vapor can stay in the atmosphere — because usually the water vapor itself is very, very short-lived and can't force the climate by itself because it just rains out if you get too much.There are also uncertainties in how clouds respond to our emissions. More water vapor in the atmosphere leads to more cloud formation in some regions. Higher temperatures and changing wind patterns lead to changing cloud dynamics. Our emissions of other things like aerosols, small particles from burning fossil fuels also affect cloud formation. And how that all pans out and how those clouds change the balance of heat trapped versus heat reflected varies a lot across models. And for all these reasons, we like to give a range of what we call climate sensitivity, which is essentially, how sensitive is the climate to our emissions? And we usually define that as, if we double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere — which is roughly what we're on track for by the end of the century today, we've already increased it by 50 percent — how much warming do we get at equilibrium? And that value is generally around three degrees C per doubling of CO2, but with a pretty wide range. In the most recent IPCC report, we said it could be anywhere from 2.5 degrees C at the low end of the likely range to about 4 degrees at the high end, 2 degrees to 5 degrees is the sort of very likely range that we gave in the most recent IPCC report.I recently watched an Apple TV+ miniseries called Extrapolations, and it looked at climate change and how it would affect us over the entire century. That was the number they really fixated on: 3 degrees Celsius. The environment they showed was pretty chaotic: lots of very, very bad heat waves, hurricanes, flooding. Civilization wasn't going to get wiped out or anything, but it seemed pretty nasty. So are we talking kind of really nasty climate effects from three degrees of warming Celsius?When we say 3 degrees, it sounds like a very small number, especially to us Americans are used to talking about things in Fahrenheit. But even when we think about the temperature from day to day, it might change, let's say 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit tomorrow, and that's noticeably warmer; 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit is the difference between 85 degrees and a bit above 90 degrees, but it doesn't sound huge. But the problem is, that's a global average number and no one lives in the global average. In fact, the global average is mostly the ocean. It turns out that where people do live, on land, is warming about 50 percent faster than the world as a whole. So if we talk about 3 degrees centigrade — or let's talk Fahrenheit for a moment, let's say 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit — over land, increase that by 50 percent, so let's say 8 degrees Fahrenheit globally over land where we all live. Even higher than that in high-latitude regions like the Arctic. We have bigger feedbacks associated with snow melting and exposing darker surfaces, so some regions are going to see really big changes.To put this number in perspective, the last ice age, which I think everyone would acknowledge was a very different planet than we have today, was only about 6 degrees centigrade colder than current temperatures globally. Obviously it was much colder in the northern latitudes, which were covered by ice sheets, but the tropics were not that much colder. And so it averages to about 6 degrees difference. So that would have impacts. Exactly what those impacts would be depends a lot on the systems we're talking about and the adaptive capacity of those systems. The natural world, I think in many ways, is going to be the worst hit by these changes. There are a lot of plant and animal species that live in fairly narrow ecological niches. And particularly in a world that's very fragmented by roads and human habitation, it's a lot harder for those plant and animal species to migrate to more temperate regions to be able to survive. So certainly there's a concern around large-scale extinction of many plant and animal species that can no longer live in the ecological niches that they've adapted to over the last tens of thousands of years and can't migrate quickly enough to adapt to that.In terms of impacts to human systems, there's a lot of different impacts from climate change and the degree to which those are catastrophic is going to depend a lot on how wealthy we are and how well we can adapt to it. If by the end of the century we're in a world that's similar to today, that has huge amounts of inequality with billions of people living at a dollar a day, I would worry a lot about the ability of people in those societies to adapt to more widespread extreme heat events, larger floods associated with more water vapor in the atmosphere, sea level rise, some of these other impacts. If we live in a world where we're all very wealthy and relatively equal on a country-by-country basis and within countries, then we have a much bigger ability to build sea walls, to have air conditioning inside, to genetically engineer crops to be more heat tolerance, the many other ways that humans can adapt to these changes. And so I think in many ways I see climate change less as an existential risk by itself and more as an existential risk multiplier. If we are in a world of weak institutions, of failing governments, of high inequality, I see climate as something that could help push societies over the edge. But I don't necessarily think at least a 3-degree world would be one that is the end of civilization by any stretch of the imagination, if we get our act together on these other issues.What is what you described as what is sort of the “business as usual” forecast, and then what is the, we really get serious about policy, and we can talk about what those policies are, that reduce carbon emissions?The good news is “business as usual” has already been changing a fair bit. Nowadays, it looks like business as usual is global emissions staying relatively flat. A decade ago, it seemed like doubling or tripling global emissions by the end of the century would not be out of the question. Certainly if you extrapolated the trends from previous decades, that's where we were headed. Nowadays, global coal use has largely plateaued and arguably is going to shrink in coming years. We have cheaper alternatives. Electric vehicles are taking off. There are many other technologies that are being developed and becoming increasingly cheap. And so it's harder to imagine a world where we're still burning massive amounts of coal, oil, and gas in 2100.We can reduce emissions, we can develop new technologies, and we can get them widely adopted. And if we do that and if we get emissions to zero by, say, 2070 or so globally, then we limit warming to below 2 degrees.Low-probability, high-risk scenariosDoes that make the very worst-case scenarios that maybe we were talking about a decade ago just highly unlikely?It certainly makes the worst-case emission outcomes highly unlikely. If we look at 3 degrees, for example, that could really end up anywhere between 2 degrees and above 4 degrees if we get unlucky because of the uncertainty in how the climate system responds to our emissions, because the Earth is such a complex system. Climate change is both planning for the central outcome but also trying to mitigate those risks. In some ways, we want to reduce emissions not just to get that mean down, but also as an insurance policy against the 5 or 10 percent more catastrophic potential outcomes there. I don't think we're necessarily completely out of the woods on a 4 C world by the end of the century if we roll sixes on all the proverbial climate dice, but I think we have made a lot of progress in making those outcomes less likely.Today we're headed toward, as I mentioned earlier, about 3 degrees of warming if emissions stay relatively constant, or a little bit below 3 degrees. But we can do much better than that. We can reduce emissions, we can develop new technologies, and we can get them widely adopted. And if we do that and if we get emissions to zero by, say, 2070 or so globally, then we limit warming to below 2 degrees. If we get emissions to zero by 2050, which is going to be a much harder lift given the amount of infrastructure in place today that relies on fossil fuels, then we could limit warming to maybe about 1.6 or 1.7 degrees. And if we build lots of machines to remove carbon from the atmosphere, plant lots of trees, do other things to actually get negative emissions, models suggest we could get temperatures down to 1.5 degrees, only 0.3 degrees above where we are today, by the end of the century.We are really on this acceleration of private sector and government spending on these technologies. But I think government does play a role here. I think most economists would acknowledge that what we're dealing with here is an externality. Reducing carbon emissionsWhen I look at what our responses might be, I tend to think, what will happen to emissions in a world where our responses will be constrained by our low collective tolerance for suffering and pain and deprivation and sacrifice? To me, that's a pretty important constraint. If there's one lesson I think we learned from the pandemic, it's people don't like shortages. We don't like to rough it in any way. In a world where, at least in the West, that's our attitude, how do we get emissions down in a somewhat timely manner?I think a lot of it relies both on the combination of human ingenuity and governments playing a role in catalyzing that ingenuity and allowing these technologies to scale. We've seen the biggest successes in mitigating climate change in technologies that slot in nicely to replace things that we enjoy today. We don't talk about it much, but Texas is the renewable energy capital of the US today, because it's cheaper to generate electricity with the wind and sun there than it is to burn coal and gas. Similarly, we've seen an explosion of electric vehicles in places like China and Europe, and the US is catching up, not necessarily because everyone there is a tree hugger, but because they're really fun to drive and they perform better and are lower cost in some cases than conventional vehicles. The more we can follow that model of developing new technologies that don't involve sacrifice, that don't involve necessarily giving up things we enjoy today, I think the more successful we're going to be.And that's led to a lot of money being spent on these things. In the last year, the globe spent about $1.1 trillion on mitigation technologies: renewable energy, electric vehicles, nuclear power, heat pumps, all that sort of stuff. That's up from $200 million a year or so a decade before or 15 years before. And so we are really on this acceleration of private sector and government spending on these technologies. But I think government does play a role here. I think most economists would acknowledge that what we're dealing with here is an externality. And by an externality, I mean it's something that has a social cost, but no one individually pays for it when they put carbon dioxide or other emissions in the atmosphere. So there has to be some role of internalizing that externality, either through (as economists would like to do) a price on carbon, or in a world where you can't do that for many reasons, subsidizing the good stuff to essentially account for the benefits it has of displacing fossil fuels, both in terms of their affecting climate change, but also conventional pollution. I think we discount a lot, particularly living in a place like the US, which has done a lot of work on this, how disastrous fossil fuels are for public health. There's somewhere in the range of a couple million people dying prematurely globally from pollution, particularly outdoor air pollution. And if you go to a place like India or China and walk around outside, it's pretty catastrophic some days in terms of the brown soup that is the air. We get a lot of co-benefits by cleaning up these conventional pollutants, particularly in places like Southeast Asia or South Asia, as well as reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.Reducing emissions, going to zero emissions, pulling emissions out of the air: Do these scenarios work with just renewable energy sources or is this a world that's using nuclear energy in some form far more than we currently are?So I think we necessarily need a variety of energy sources here, and there's been a lot of work done in recent years by the energy modeling community on this front. Renewables are great. Solar is super, super cheap; to be honest, a lot cheaper today than any of us thought it would be a couple decades ago. Wind is increasingly cheap. But they're also intermittent. The sun doesn't shine all the time; the wind doesn't blow all the time. Batteries are part of the solution to deal with that, but they're not a perfect solution. We tend to find that you get a much lower cost in scenarios where you also have a sizable chunk, maybe 20, 30, 40 percent, of your energy coming from what we call clean firm generation. Things like nuclear, like enhanced geothermal, potentially fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage, though those have some challenges in implementation, to support large amounts of renewable energy on the grid.You end up with a much more expensive system if you try to shoehorn in 100 percent renewables, and to be honest, it's pretty unnecessary. So I think we are going to see, and we're already starting to see, bigger investments in things like next-generation nuclear. I think we just need to figure out how to build them on time and on budget. The biggest problem with the nuclear industry in the US — certainly regulations have contributed to it — but I think it's just our inability to build these giant, bespoke megaprojects. Nuclear goes super over budget for the same reason the “Big Dig” in Boston does: You have this 10-year-long, many, many billion-dollar megaproject that has construction delays and all these other problems. The more we can learn from what renewables have gotten right, make things small, modular, pumped out in an assembly line, and less contingent on these giant construction projects, I think the better outcomes we'll see for things like nuclear.There's an economist, he passed fairly recently, Martin Weitzman from Harvard, and he wrote about the economics of climate change. And there's one quote that always sticks in my mind. He wrote that “Deep structural uncertainty about the unknown unknowns of what might go very wrong [with the climate] is coupled with essentially unlimited downside liability on possible planetary damages” and a “non-negligible” probability of a “collapse of planetary welfare.” He's talking about, you can't write off the possibility that we get some very bad outcomes. And I guess that's what worries me: If we're doing something to the atmosphere that we've never done before, what if the models are wrong and we get something really catastrophic, that really becomes a true existential risk? How much should I worry about that?I think we're all worried about unknown unknowns. For me, the odds of those happening, which are somewhat unknowable by definition, increase the more we push the Earth out of the climate we've seen for the past few million years. Right now we're around the range of what we saw in the Last Interglacial Period, about 120,000 years ago. If we get temperatures up to 3 degrees centigrade globally, we will be out of the range of anything we've seen for the last two million years or so, if not further back. And we know if we go further back into the Earth's history, there's some scary stuff back there. There are periods where we see very rapid increases of temperature associated with 90 percent extinction of all life on Earth, like the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum. And we don't have great explanations for all these things. A good example is, for warmer periods in the Earth's past, we think there's a mechanism where if temperatures get high enough, maybe 5 degrees above where they were in the pre-industrial period or a bit above 4 degrees above where we are today, suddenly all the stratocumulus cloud decks that cover much of the Earth's oceans disappear. And that leads to another 4 degrees warming on top of that. That sort of behavior seems to help explain some of these rapid warming events in the Earth's more distant past.Now, we think we're pretty far from experiencing something of that today. But maybe our models are wrong, or maybe the Earth is much more sensitive than we think. And again, rolling sort of sixes on the climate sensitivity and carbon cycle feedback dice leads us into those sorts of conditions. And so Marty Weitzman, who I did have the pleasure of knowing before he passed, had a great phrase to sum up that quote, which is that “when it comes to climate change, this thing is in the tail,” which is a very nerdy way to put it: The tails of these probability distribution functions, the low-probability but high-impact events, are really what should drive a lot of our concern around this and push us to reduce emissions more than we otherwise would if we were just planning for the most likely outcome.But whenever we talk about carbon dioxide removal, it is always important to emphasize that this stuff is expensive and it only makes sense to do at scale in a world where we're already cutting emissions dramatically. Carbon capture and carbon removalPeople will say, “What if the models are wrong?” and they assume they're only going to be wrong to the benefit of humanity. Maybe they're wrong to the detriment of humanity.We talked a little bit about reducing these emissions. You have carbon capture, where you pull it out of the air. How close is that technology to being something that can scale?When we talk about carbon capture, that's often a different thing than when we talk about carbon removal. Carbon capture generally means taking an existing fossil fuel plant…That could be trees too, right?Yeah, but carbon capture is mostly taking an existing fossil fuel plant like a coal, oil, and gas plant, sticking a unit on that captures the carbon coming out of it, and putting that underground. And there's a lot of funding for that in the new Inflation Reduction Act. The record on that over the last few decades has been a bit mixed. It's been hard for folks to make the economics work in practice. It's really complicated technically, but a lot of folks are confident that we can get there with some of those technologies. If a coal plant with carbon capture is going to be cheaper than a nuclear plant or renewable plant is a separate question. And I'm a lot more skeptical on the economics of carbon capture there.Now, carbon dioxide removal is a slightly different thing. And there we're talking about technologies that don't stop emissions from coming out of a smokestack, but instead take carbon that's already in the atmosphere and pull it back out. And most of our models suggest that we are going to need a lot of that down the road, in part because we can't fully get rid of all of the emissions from all of the parts of our economy. And the real challenge with climate change, or what I like to call the “brutal math” of climate change is that as long as our emissions remain above zero, the Earth continues to warm. CO2 remains in the atmosphere for an extremely long period of time; it takes about 400,000 years to fully clear out a ton of fossil CO2 we emit today through natural processes. So we end up needing a lot of carbon removal to both balance out what we call residual emissions and potentially to deal with overshoot. If we figure out that we really don't want temperatures to go above 1.5 degrees, but they're headed toward 1.7, we're going to have to pull a bunch of carbon out of the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. It's only a small part of the solution. Maybe 10 percent of the solution to climate change writ large is carbon dioxide removal. But for a problem as big as climate change, 10 percent still matters a lot since solar is probably 20 percent, electric vehicles are probably 20 percent, heat pumps might be 10 percent. And there's a lot of technologies people are developing to do that. Direct air capture is the one that gets a lot of press: the sort of big fans that suck carbon out of the air, though they're incredibly energy intensive. But there are a lot of ways that leverage natural processes as well. Planting trees is a good one, though it has a lot of challenges in keeping the carbon in those trees in a warming world, particularly as we see more wildfires, more pine bark beetle outbreaks that used to die in cold winter temperatures and don't anymore. And so it's hard to justify planting trees as a way of permanently taking carbon out of the atmosphere, but it's still quite valuable. There's also a lot of interesting work being done around using biomass to sequester carbon, so taking residues from commercial timber operations, burning them, and putting their carbon content underground. Something called BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, that a lot of people are excited about.Then there are other interesting ways to leverage the natural carbon cycle. For example, over long periods, the weathering of certain types of rocks like basalt or olivine drives a lot of atmospheric CO2 absorption over the course of millions of years. And so a lot of scientists are trying to figure out ways to speed that up. If you take rock dust and spread it on farm fields, it can help manage the pH of soils, it can add some nutrients. And it turns out that as that basalt dust weathers, it absorbs carbon to the atmosphere, it turns it into stable bicarbonate and then flows out to the ocean and eventually forms limestone on the bottom of the ocean. Stuff like that, or adding alkalinity directly to the ocean to counteract ocean acidification, can also lead to more CO2 uptake from the air, because the amount of carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs in the atmosphere depends on how acidic the surface level of the layers of the water are. Scientists are working on tons of different technologies here. And actually my day job these days with Stripe and Frontier is helping support companies to do that. So there's lots of exciting stuff there. But whenever we talk about carbon dioxide removal, it is always important to emphasize that this stuff is expensive and it only makes sense to do at scale in a world where we're already cutting emissions dramatically. If you keep burning fossil fuels willy-nilly and spend a ton of money on a bit of carbon dioxide removal, it's not going to make any difference.Why are you interested in this subject?I think it's an underexplored area. Certainly until the last few years, no one was really putting any money or resources into it at scale. And it's something that is going to have to be an important part of the solution in the next few decades, and so I think this is the decade that we should be spending resources to figure out what works and what can scale for decades to come. We probably should spend about 1 percent of the money we spend on reducing emissions, but historically we've been spending a lot less than that.And why are you also more broadly interested in the entire topic of climate change rather than, I don't know, tax policy or something?I come to it from a scientific background. I just find the Earth's climate fascinating. It's super complex. It's hard to fully understand. We've really made leaps and bounds in progress over the last few decades, but there's so much we still don't know. And so it's just a fascinating area from a scientific standpoint, but it's also one where the importance to the society is quite large. I try not to wade too much into the policy solutions to it, but certainly helping understand the likely impacts of our actions affects a lot of choices that policymakers and others make. There's no one right answer. To your question earlier, people debate renewables versus nuclear and all these other things. Knowing what the impacts of climate change are, what the risks are, and how we can actually get to certain outcomes based on our decisions, I feel like is really important to set the stage for people to use the science in the real world. And it's exciting to work in an area of science where there is a practical, real-world application of it. And not just studying one plant species that lives on top of one mountain in a remote part of the world. We're looking at these big questions that affect everyone over the next century. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit fasterplease.substack.com/subscribe

Heat this summer has not been normal for most of the world. Globally, July 2023 was the hottest month on record, mainly because the oceans are at record-high temperatures. This week the team talked with climate scientist Zeke Hausfather about the short term and long term reasons why. They also discuss how we get the ocean data, whether that be from satellites, remote controlled ocean floats, and in some cases — seals. Yes, seals. We want to hear from you! Have a question for the meteorologists? Call 609-272-7099 and leave a message. You might hear your question and get an answer on a future episode! You can also email questions or comments to podcasts@lee.net. About the Across the Sky podcast The weekly weather podcast is hosted on a rotation by the Lee Weather team: Matt Holiner of Lee Enterprises' Midwest group in Chicago, Kirsten Lang of the Tulsa World in Oklahoma, Joe Martucci of the Press of Atlantic City, N.J., and Sean Sublette of the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Virginia. Episode transcript Note: The following transcript was created by Adobe Premiere and may contain misspellings and other inaccuracies as it was generated automatically: Hello everyone. I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette and welcome to Across the Sky our national Lee Enterprises weather podcast. Lee Enterprises has print and digital news operations in more than 70 locations across the country, including at my home base in Richmond, Virginia. I'm joined by my meteorologist colleague Matt Holiner in Chicago. My pals Kirsten Lang and Joe Martucci out of the office today. Our guest this week is Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist. Very deep into the data, has a wealth of information about how much warming is taking place globally. And we really wanted to pick his brain about what's going on in the oceans this year in particular. There has been so much buzz, Matt, about how hot the oceans are right now. So we wanted to kind of get into some of the reasons for that. Yeah, that's the headline I think grabbed people's attention. Of course, you know, as soon as there was those 100 degree temperature readings off the coast of Florida, then immediately all the headlines were Hot Tub water and everybody knows what a hot tub feels like. It's like, yeah, I don't think the ocean should just be naturally that hot if it's, you know, not being artificially heated. But I mean, it is just getting warmer. But I also think that sometimes, you know, and that's the challenge, you know, where there's, you know, still doubt, unfortunately, that comes up with climate change because then certain things get exaggerated because there is something because they're also following that. Lots of headlines about the thermal hailing circulation shutting down. And what I liked in our discussion coming up with Zeke was he really dived into that and explained how likely it is and what's really going to happen, because immediately all the means of the day after tomorrow came and it's like, oh, the ocean current shuts down. It's going to be a global ice age, you know? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's talk about what's really going to happen, how likely the circulation shutting down really is. That was just one of the things that we discuss about with them. But it's always good to come back to the experts that really know what's going on rather than just people just throwing stuff out there on social media because there's a there's still a lot of bad stuff on social media. Yeah. And he talked about, you know, if you've never heard of the thermo heal hailing circular ocean, sometimes it's called the MOOC. It has a lot of different nicknames, but he talks about what that is why it's important. He also addressed that 101 degree water temperature, some some things that are going on with that. And we just talked about where we're climate changes now and how much more warming we should expect. So lots to get to with our conversation with Dr. Zeke Zeke Hausfather, let's go right to it. Dr. Zeke Hausfather father is the climate research lead for STRIVE and a research scientist with Berkeley. Earth is a climate scientist and IPCC author whose research focuses on observational temperature records, climate models, carbon renew, removal and mitigation technologies. Zeke also serves as science science contributor to Carbon Brief and was previously the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, the lead data scientist at SS, the Chief Scientist at Sea 3ai and Co-Founder and Chief Scientist of Efficiency 2.0. And on top of all that, in his spare time, whatever spare time he has, he runs a very excellent substack with Andrew Dessler over at Texas A&M called the Climate Brink. So we are just pleased as punch as Mama used to say, to have Zeke Harris father with us on Across the sky. Thanks so much for joining us. Noah is excited to be here. All right. So let's jump right into the whole oceans thing. This has been on top of everybody's climate weather minds for several weeks now about how warm the oceans have been this year with regard to the longer term record. So before we get into the specifics about why they're so warm this year, talk a little bit about, I guess, the metadata, the data sets that we are using and why we are so confident about making such a statement about the oceans being as warm as they are right now. Sure. So we've collected ocean data for a long time. It was, in fact back in the 1840, as there is an international convention to standardize the collection of temperature data from ships, in part to better understand shipping routes, weather conditions to make ship journeys more predictable. In fact, the reason we start global temperature records like those we produce at Berkeley Earth or NOAA's or the UK Met Office record in 1850 is because that's when we start getting enough ocean data to at least, you know, with reasonable errors, estimate global temperatures. So in the early days we used to measure ocean temperatures by throwing wooden buckets over the sides of ships, pulling them up, sticking a thermometer in and writing it down in the captain's logbook. Funny story that actually had some biases because as you're pulling a bucket up the side of a ship, it evaporates. Some of the water evaporates off the top and that cools the remaining water in the bucket. And so you actually get slightly cooler temperatures with buckets around World War Two. We switched primarily to ship engine room and take ballast where the water goes through the whole of the ship to cool the engine. You know, these are steamships or, you know, more modern diesel ships. And it turns out engine rooms are a little warmer. So you have some biases there and translating from buckets to ship endurance. And then starting around 1980, we really transitioned in large part to automated systems that, you know, there's thousands of them. They float around the ocean, they send data up to satellites. And in more recent years since the nineties, we have satellite radio monitors that can measure the ocean skin temperature directly. And it turns out that all these different sets of instruments largely agree with each other. You know, you have to correct the biases when you switch from one to the other, of course. But if you do that, you get a pretty good consistent, high quality record of ocean temperatures since at least 1850. And certainly, you know, we have incredibly good records, you know, for the last few decades when we have satellites and buoys and ships and these awesome robots called Argo floats that float around the ocean and dive down to 2000 meters and sample all the ocean heat content and other variables on their way up. So we're really in the golden age of climate data, particularly when it comes to the ocean today. Real quick, before we talk a little bit more about this year, just for my own thing, in my own mind, I know the Argo floats have become very popular recently. Off the top of your head, an approximation, the you know, to a first order of magnitude about how many of these Argo floats are kind of out there right now. The latest number I heard and it's a couple of years old at this point, but it's about 3500 Argo floats and they're pretty well distributed around the ocean. There's a few areas they don't get, so they're not great at going under sea ice. In fact, scientists have figured out a pretty cool hack for that. And they actually put thermometers on the top of SEAL's heads like wild animals. And they dive under the sea ice to get temperatures there. The Argo plates can't go easily. Wait, wait, wait. They put a thermometer on top of the head of a seal. Yep. A couple hundred seals have thermometers on their heads and they're taking measurements. They're very small there. I'm guessing this is a very tiny electro radio transmitter is not something like that. Yeah, it's a liquid and glass thermometer sticking on there, Ed? No, no. There's a like a little transmitter on the SEALs head that's, you know, pretty small and unobtrusive, but takes measurements when the seals under the ice and then sends it off to a satellite when they get back to the surface and they track the seals and, you know, take it off their head after, you know, a year or so and then, you know, rotate new seals into the the seal temperature monitoring core. So that's one area that scientists had to fill in the gaps a little bit. The other is the deep ocean. So our current Argo network mostly goes down to about 2000 meters or, you know, 6000 feet or so below that. We haven't had as many measuring systems historically. But there's a new deep Argo program that's trying to fill in some of those gaps. That's amazing. Matt, you want to jump in with anything? Yeah, I'm still wrapping my mind around seals taking temperature readings for us. That is, if you Google it, there's some very, very adorable pictures of seals with little instruments on their heads. I'm sure. I'm sure. You know, my my question is, you know, as far as the coverage goes and I mean, we're talking about, you know, it seems like in many locations, you know, sea surface temperatures on the rise. I mean, a combination of El Nino and but also in the Atlantic, seeing the sea surface temperatures on the rise. But I'm trying to kind of get into more of the details about instead of just saying sea surface temperatures are on rise everywhere, are there certain locations where we're really seeing a particular rise more so than other parts of the planet? Yeah. So historically, you know, over long term changes, you know, some parts of the ocean warming slightly slower than others, like southern oceans. Ocean is always a bit wonky because it has, you know, a lot of overturning circulation and a lot of deep mixing. There's a weird cold patch off the southeast of Greenland that may be related to a slowdown in the thermal handling circulation, though there's a lot of debate around that. But historically, the oceans have generally warmed at similar rates. This year, though, we've seen this really crazy warmth in the North Atlantic that is far beyond, you know, the level of warming we're seeing in other ocean basins. And so that's that's been really remarkable. And a lot of people have, you know, focused on that as a, you know, very unusual thing and tried to look at different potential explanations for it. And I kind of want to follow up with that thermo hayling circulation, because immediately when you talk about that, I think of the movie the Day After Tomorrow and how the ocean currents shut down and then suddenly there is this mass blizzard. We went into an ice age. So can you talk about the likelihood of this ocean currents shutting down and what would actually happen if it did happen? And is it going to be at the scale of the day after tomorrow? Sure. So let's start with the likelihood and then we can talk about the day after tomorrow. So scientists have historically thought the likelihood of a shutdown this century is quite low. You know, most of our climate models show it slowing down, in part as you have a lot of freshwater runoff from Greenland. So to back up a little bit the way the thermal handling circulation fundamentally works is that as water is traveling north in wind driven currents in the Atlantic, more and more of the water at the surface evaporates, which means that what's left over gets more and more salty because the salt stays when the water evaporates. And as it gets salty enough, it gets denser. And once it gets dense enough, it starts to sink. And so that drives one of the big ocean circulations is the sinking of saltier water in the North Atlantic. But it turns out if you start melting Greenland really quickly, you dump much of freshwater into the North Atlantic and that can make it less salty, which then makes it not sink, which then can slow down and eventually shut down the circulation. So climate models historically have not expected a shutdown this century, though they had expected to slow down in the last few years. There's been a couple more speculative papers suggesting that the models might be missing some things and that, you know, the possibility of a shutdown this century is is higher than previously anticipated. That said, this is still a very much on the bleeding edge of science. So I don't think any of us can say with confidence what's likely to happen this century. We just can't rule out a shutdown. Now, if a shutdown were to occur, it's important to emphasize this doesn't mean the Gulf Stream is shutting down. The Gulf Stream is driven by the rotation of the Earth and winds. It's not going anywhere, but the thermal healing is still very important for heat transfer, particularly to northern Europe. And so if we were to see a shutdown, we would see temperatures drop, you know, over, you know, coastal northern Europe, probably by, you know, three or four degrees centigrade on average. Some parts around Iceland, you know, you might even get to like eight degrees C drop compared to current temperatures. Not quite day after tomorrow levels, you know, we're not going to see the oceans freeze or, you know, New York become a a winter permanent winter arctic. You know, we're really talking more about the European side of of the North Atlantic, where the biggest effects could be felt. And over the long term, you know, the effects of warming for most countries in Europe would outweigh the cooling issues associated with the shutdown. It still be bad. You know what affect rainfall patterns a bunch in problematic ways. You know, it would mean it was a lot cooler, particularly in places like the UK. It wouldn't be a good outcome, but at this point, you know, we're still very much digging through the data and modeling and and trying to get a clearer picture of what exactly is happening with it and what is likely to happen as Greenland melt picks up. Yeah, I know there was a lot of buzz about this in the last couple of weeks with that I think was a nature communications paper that came out to kind of reignite that conversation back to the to the North Atlantic and the overall global oceans. Well, obviously, climate change is a big issue, which kind of the overall background driver. But talk a little bit about a couple of these other things that have kind of bubbled ahead or forward. On top of that, you know, obviously El Nino is going on, but there are there's discussions about an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, how fuels and shipping lanes in the North Atlantic might have changed. Could you just talk a little bit about those other kind of mitigating factors and what how much they may or may not be playing a role? So let's start with the volcano and then talk a bit about sulfur. So there was a very large eruption in Tonga in 2022 of of an underwater volcano. And it affected the climate not by providing key to the oceans because the amount of heat provided by volcanoes, the oceans is actually pretty negligible on a global scale compared to the amount of heat that's being trapped by greenhouse gases. But what this volcano did that was really weird compared to most volcanoes we see is it shot an incredible amount of water vapor, incredibly high into the atmosphere. It put about 150 million metric tons of water into the stratosphere, which is a part of the atmosphere that doesn't have much water vapor in it usually. And that matters a lot to the climate because water vapor itself is a strong greenhouse gas, But because water vapor, you know, rains out, if you get too much in the atmosphere, it it doesn't last for long. So it can't really accumulate. But the stratosphere is a little different because there's so little water vapor up there. If you put water vapor up there, it doesn't rain out. And it can stay in the stratosphere for a lot longer than you'd have water stay in the lower part of the atmosphere. It takes a couple of years to clear out, you know, water vapor and into the stratosphere. And so while most volcanoes actually cool the planet by putting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, if they're really big volcanoes, this one unusually actually likely warmed the planet by putting a lot more water vapor in than it put in CO2. Now, there's been a couple of papers on this that estimated that globally, the magnitude, the effect is probably somewhere in the range of 0.15 Watch per meter squared. That's a very wonky number. We used to estimate the amount of energy trapped in their system, but to convert them to numbers, people might understand, You know, we're probably talking about somewhere in the range of, you know, five hundredths of a degree centigrade of warming associated this volcano. So 0.05 C, which is not nothing but is not nearly as big as the, you know, excursions and temperature we're seeing globally. Is there a limit to these temperatures? Is there a threshold like, you know, is there a certain level where the oceans can't get any warmer or are we going to continue to just sled? You know, now an X is going to be 101, 102. I mean, is there a threshold about a limit to where we're going to go and just kind of talk about how exceptional that 100 degree temperature really is? Yeah. So I think the provisional record was actually 101. Now, granted, it was in an area of very shallow water with a lot of like biomass in the water that can absorb sunlight. So those areas do get in the high nineties pretty frequently. But this was very, very high. And we've seen, you know, high 90 degree temperatures around the Florida Keys a lot this year. So I think that's, you know, another sign of this exceptional thing that's happening in the North Atlantic in terms of temperatures as far as like how hot it can get, you know, there's not a functional limit that says like when the oceans reach, I don't know, 102 degrees, they don't increase anymore. But what you do have is this sort of relationship where the hotter a surface is, the more heat it radiates. And it actually radiates heat at the fourth power of temperature to get a little wonky. So you have this Stefan Boltzmann equation at work. And so what that means is that the hotter it gets, the more heat it's getting up to the atmosphere, the harder it is to warm up further because it's giving off more and more heat as it gets hotter. And so that there ends up being a bit of a negative feedback, as we call it, a countervailing factor of it's just hard to get things that are already hot, hotter compared to getting up cool things. And so that does help provide a bit of a limitation to how hot it can get. I guess on some point it it's a limit of diminishing return once you gets to a certain temperature profile, I'm assuming. Yep. All right. Good deal. It's one of the reasons why climate change doesn't run away as easily on Earth, which is a good thing. Yes, we like to tell people the planet's not going to turn into Venus any time soon. We got to take a quick break. We'll have more with Zeke House father when we come back on the Across the Sky podcast. And we're back with Zeke House Father, a climate scientist with numerous organizations. There's a lot of work. Also has a wonderful substack for for folks who aren't very deep into climate science. He runs out with Andrew Dessler over at Texas A&M called the Climate Brink. I want to go back to the the current state of the oceans. We talked a little bit about the underwater volcano in the South Pacific, but there's been a lot of buzz on how fuels used in shipping. Traffic in the North Atlantic may have played a role. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Sure. So when we think about climate change happening more broadly on Earth, you know, we know that the greenhouse gases we're putting in the atmosphere are warming the planet, but it's not the only thing that humans but the atmosphere. We also put a lot of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. You know, it comes as a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, primarily in sulfur dioxide, it turns out, is actually a strong cooling effect on the climate. And that's through two different mechanisms. The first is what we call the direct effect, which is that it's very like sulfur dioxide particles are very reflective. So some sunlight hits those particles in the atmosphere. It bounces back up to space and it just dims the sun essentially at the surface. You know, some people call it global dimming and in areas that are very polluted because of that. The second is the indirect effect where sulfur dioxide particles and aerosols in the atmosphere can serve as cloud condensation nuclei and so can increase the amount of cloudiness in regions where you have a lot of CO2. And you see this, you know, in contrails from planes and ship tracks, from ships that are going over the ocean where you see like clouds forming in the wake of the ship because of all the CO2 that's coming out of that stack. And it turns out those sort of clouds are good at reflecting sunlight and cooling the surface. So historically, we've used pretty dirty fuel for ships. You know, it's sort of the fuel that's leftover from oil distillation that's too dirty to burn on land because it would tell us how old are clean air rules. We actually call it bunker fuel. So it's very like tarry goopy stuff that's leftover at the bottom of the stack after oil distillation, and it turns out is a very high sale for content. And the reason ships are allowed to burn it is because they're mostly far from shore. And, you know, you have less air pollution concerns in the middle of the Atlantic or middle of the Pacific. But unfortunately ships are still using it near port. And a bunch of studies in recent years have found that it has some pretty nasty health impacts on people who live near shore. There's one study estimated that something like 60,000 people worldwide die prematurely a year because of ship based sulfur pollution. And so because of that, there's been a big push over the last decade to try to phase out sulfur in marine fuels to reduce the harmful human health impacts of burning it. But about 10% of all global sulfur emissions come from ships. And in the year 2020, the International Maritime Organization put in a new set of rules, essentially reducing the amount of sulfur that ships could emit by 90%. So if you think about 10% of all of our sulfur emissions globally coming from ships, we reduce that 90%. You get, you know, somewhere around a 9% reduction in all global aerosol CO2 emissions, sulfur dioxide emissions. And that's a pretty big deal. You know, in the recent IPCC report, our best estimate was that, you know, aerosols cooled the planet by about half a degree. C And so if you have a 9% reduction in one year going forward and all of aerosol emissions, you know, 9% of half a degree, C is still a pretty big number. You know, it's like .05 C And so there is likely roughly that level of additional warming globally from reducing these aerosol emissions. But the thing is, these ships are not emitting globally. They're emitting in particular regions, particularly the North Atlantic, in the North Pacific. And so in those regions we expect a much bigger climate effect from removing these aerosols, reducing the amount of ship tracks and cloudiness in those shipping corridors. So my colleague at Berkeley Earth, Robert Rohde, he did an analysis where he looked at essentially what's the difference between the temperatures we're seeing over the shipping tracks after the year 2021, the face of this fuel and the other parts of the ocean. And he found that after 2020, those regions warmed about 0.2 see more than the rest of the global ocean. And so we can say, you know, the sort of shipping track regions in the North Atlantic, North Pacific are probably had at least 2/10 of a degree warming in the last few years because we phased out this low sulfur or sorry, we based off the high sulfur fuel required muscle fuel. All right. So I'm going to turn this over to Matt before I do, I have two quick follow ups. One is for my own mind, when we think about CO2 being kind of reflective, are we are you saying the CO2 molecule or as as an aerosol with other impurities and too, what is the the the general lifetime of CO2 and those aerosols in the atmosphere before they finally settle out? The reflectivity is primarily the sulfur molecule itself, but it is in an aerosolized form when it's sort of moving around the lower atmosphere, the troposphere, the lifetimes are generally talking about on the order of weeks. You know, it falls up pretty quickly in the troposphere. If you were to put it in the stratosphere, as we see with like large volcanic eruptions like Mount Pinatubo, there you have the resonance time in the short years. You know, most probably about half of it falls out in the first year. But there's a bit of a tail before it all falls out of the stratosphere. That's why, you know, we saw something like half a degree C cooling globally the year after Mount Pinatubo erupted. It's because it put so much CO2 up into the stratosphere and that hung around for, you know, couple of years after that, suppressing temperatures. And while we're looking at these other issues that are that are playing into this, you know, another story and that's what I want to kind of focus on. It is a completely separate story, is it's tied together is the plastic pollution problem in the oceans. We keep hearing about the increasing amount of plastic in the oceans. And of course, there's lots of negatives associated with that. But I wonder if there's been any research at all. Is the plastic, the amount of plastic in the ocean having an impact on the sea surface temperatures, whether lowering them or raising them, or does it seem to not have an impact and it's just a separate environmental issue? It's a great question. You know, I haven't seen any research on no beetle effects of plastic. I think that even places like the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a very evocative name, you know, it's not that dense. It's not like if you're going in a boat through there, it's just the surface of the ocean is covered with plastic. It's like there's pieces here and there. So I'm sure it has an effect because seawater is dark and absorbs sunlight. Plastic is generally not as dark as seawater and reflects sunlight. You know, there probably is on the margins, a cooling effect, but I suspect it's not particularly strong. But it is a big issue, obviously, for for wildlife. And I'm sure a lot of your listeners have seen, you know, David Attenborough's documentaries of like seabirds and remote islands with plastic in their bellies. And you know, these tragic pictures of, Yeah, let's think forward a little bit. We have made globally some progress in terms of of emissions at least regarding coal. Coal is in decline, at least in a lot of places. My understanding is that China is throwing everything out there, solar and coal and everything. But the demand for coal isn't as high as it used to be. Having said that, we still are burning a lot of fossil fuels that aren't necessarily coal. So some of the worst case scenarios we imagined 15, 20 years ago don't appear like they're going to be coming to fruition. It doesn't mean it's not going to be bad. But when we look at where policies have kind of evolved to now, how much warming you know, now in the pipeline should we kind of expect in the coming several decades? And that's a broad question, but let's just just kind of attack where we've come, how far we've come in the last ten or 20 years and and how that might translate forward. Yeah. So so a decade ago, things looked really dire for the Earth's climate in terms of where we were heading. You know, global coal use had doubled over the course of a decade. China was building a new coal plant just like every three days. And the idea that the 21st century could be dominated by coal, where we'd, you know, double or triple our emissions by 2100 didn't seem that far fetched. You know, today we're in a very different world. Thankfully, you know, clean energy has gotten cheap, but most of the new energy being built worldwide is renewables today, or at least clean energy. That's it's low carbon. And, you know, global coal use has pretty much flatlined since 2013 or so, which also means that global emissions of CO2 have more or less flatlined over the last decade. The problem is that when I say emissions of flatland, it sort of makes you think, oh, that means global warming is stopped too, Right? But it doesn't quite work that way. The world is going to keep warming as long as our emissions of CO2 remain above zero. That's really the brutal math of climate change, is that it's not enough just to stop emissions from increasing. You actually have to get them all all the way down to zero to stop warming. If we just line emissions like we are today, what that means is that warming continues at the rate that we've been experiencing for the last decade or 2.2 C per decade or so. And so if you look at a bunch of different assessments of where we're headed today, and it's been done by the International Energy Agency and the United Nations Governmental Program and groups like, you know, Climate Action Tracker, they all more or less agree that, you know, we're headed for a world of of around three degrees C, maybe slightly below by 2100. That compares to a world of, you know, four or five C that seemed possible a decade ago. And so that does reflect progress. You know, if we've bent the curve downward of future emissions, we've, you know, made some of these really, really catastrophic high end scenarios a little less likely. But a3c world is still a really bad one. I mean, we're experiencing a lot of severe impacts of climate change already in terms of heat waves and wildfires and, you know, extreme precipitation events just at 1.2 degrees today. And so if you, you know, more than double that, it's it's a pretty terrible world for for a lot of people and for a lot of nature to, you know, the natural world is a really tough time adapting to very rapid changes in temperature like we'd see. So three degrees is certainly a lot better than where we're headed, but it's by no means anywhere close to where we want to be. The good news, for me at least, is that the fact that we have started to make some progress means that it's a lot easier to imagine a world where we actually do make more progress. We continue to these positive trends and accelerate, and we actually do manage to limit warming to at least below two degrees by the end of the century. And I think unfortunately, 1.5 degrees is probably in the rearview mirror at this point, unless we, you know, do some crazy scenario where we pass it and then remove, you know, ridiculous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere to bring temperatures back down. But but certainly, I think you could say that limiting warming to two degrees or below two degrees is quite possible from where we are today. It would involve getting all of our emissions of CO2 to zero by, you know, 2070 or so globally, which is a big lift, but it's by no means impossible. And it's good to hear a little bit of good news because it is definitely by far mostly bad news. It comes to climate, but it's good that we're going in the right direction and hopefully the trend will continue. I want to kind of look in the short term, though, you know, we're in this El Nino and that's what's contributing partially to the high sea surface temperature that we're seeing and high global temperatures in general. But looking ahead to 2024 houses, El Nino going to play out. And what impact is it going to have on 2020 for us? Temperatures? Sure. So there is a growing strong El Nino in the tropical tropical Pacific right now that's really developed rapidly in the past few months. What was interesting is that we switched quite quickly from an unusually long La Nina event. We called it a triple dip, Nina, because it's when you sort of started to come out of La Nina conditions and then dipping back in. And that happens, you know, two more times after the initial one. Nina But because we rapidly transitioned from La Nina, conditions down, you know, conditions, you know, it's really added a lot of heat, particularly to the oceans. We expect the current El Nino events to continue and strengthen through the end of the year and, you know, stay fairly strong at least through early to mid 2024. There is some differences in the various modeling groups looking at El Nino, the dynamical models, the more like climate models tend to predict a stronger nino than the statistical models, which are more trying to infer based on you know, the statistics of past El Ninos. What's likely this time around. And that divide is actually kind of remarkable this year compared to the most past years. I, for one, probably would bet on the dynamical models because they think they capture more of the underlying processes like statistics only bring you so far. But in terms of the effects of the El Nino, you know, it's going to bump up global temperatures as well as sea surface temperatures for the remainder of 2023. You know, it means that this year is now the odds on favorite to be the warmest year since records began, since 1850. But it's really going to have a big effect next year. And so for 2024, it's likely to be even warmer than 2023 for the year as a whole. And we've seen historically that there tends to be a bit of a lag between when El Nino conditions peak in the tropical Pacific and when the global temperature response to that El Nino event peaks. And that lag is about three months. So three months or so after you hit peak El Nino conditions, then you have the peak surface temperature response globally across the land and the oceans. And that's been a pretty consistent relationship for the past, you know, 80 years or so at least. So if that holds this time around, you know, and the El Nino peaks in the near the end of 2023, we expect sort of the biggest push to be on early 2020 for temperatures. So what we'd probably be looking at is a particularly warmer end of winter and into the spring months. So I guess, you know, the groundhog would be predicting an early spring might be what we're seeing in a lot of places would be kind of an idea if this El Nino plays out as it's expected to. Yeah, that's globally like, oh, Nino has very specific patterns of heat and cool associated with it that may affect different regions differently. So you can't necessarily say like every part of the planet is going to be warmer because of the El Nino. It really ends up depending a bit. Like in California, we tend to get a slightly cooler and Rainier weather with an El Nino years, for example. So the overall pattern of what the impacts that El Nino bring is going to be overriding. But looking at the big picture, that's probably when temperatures are going to peak would be late winter, early spring. Yeah. All right. Let's go back south again. I was looking at a plot today, I think you actually shared about the Antarctic Sea ice and how it is way below the last 45 years of records. Is there anything that we should take away from that? I mean, it's kind of a frightening plot or is it just one of those things like we really don't understand the Antarctic ice surrounding the continent as well? It's a signal, but we we really shouldn't panic about it. I mean, what is your take when you see that that kind of graphic of what's going on in the sea ice around Antarctica? So it's it's definitely disconcerting. Like we've never seen anything like this in the historical record for Antarctic ice. At the same time, Antarctic sea ice has always been a lot more complex, heated and unpredictable than Arctic sea ice. The Antarctic sea ice. If you look at the data since 1979, which is when we first got good satellite coverage to get high quality Arctic wide records, it's pretty much been going down consistently. Like some years are higher, some years are lower, but there's a very clear linear downward trend as the Arctic warms Antarctica at least through 2020 or so, was bucking that sea ice was increasing overall in Antarctica between 1979 and 2020. And there was a lot of work among scientists to explain why that was. You know, part of it has to do with prevailing wind patterns, part of S2 actually, with the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica, which has a cooling impact for the region. And so, you know, it was always sort of a much bigger question mark of the climate impacts on Arctic sea ice compared to the Arctic words. It's much more straightforward. And so then we get to the last three years where that slight upward trend in sea ice, Antarctica suddenly reversed. You know, it went down, you know, pretty far in 2021 and 2022 and then 2023 hit. And we really have been at unprecedented lows for the entire year, particularly now, when sea ice should be growing rapidly. And it really isn't. And so there just needs to be a lot more work by scientists to untangle, you know, what are the drivers of this? You know, is it unusual warmth in Antarctica? Is it warm sea surface temperatures? Are air temperature is is it changing wind patterns that might be breaking up sea ice in ways that we haven't seen before? Like part of the problem is we only have a record going back to 1979 for this region. And so it may well be that there's some modes of variability that could lead to big shake ups in Antarctic sea ice that might have happened before, but just hasn't happened since 1979. So, you know, I don't think we can rule out that it's primarily caused by human activity. And certainly we expect long term as the Antarctic region warms to sea less sea ice there. But this is so far below what we'd expect to that. I think, you know, we need to take a close look at it and figure out all the different potential causes. And before we wrap up, every time we get someone on, you know, talking about climate change and what we're seeing out there and all the various issues, I think when it always comes back to is, you know, people read all these articles and it's all doom and gloom, but then it's like, well, what what can I do? What what can I do to make it better? I think when it comes to the oceans, this is a particularly unique because we don't live in the oceans, we're on land. And so people kind of see the impacts of what's happening on land and where. So I think so many of us are ignorant about what's going on in the ocean. So if you're if someone's listening to this and is alarmed and wants to make an impact and wants to again look at the whole issue, but let's just look at the oceans itself and what are things that individuals do if they want to see these sea surface temperatures not be as extreme? What are some things that are some proactive things that are people just reading this and saying, well, what do I do? What is your answer for when somebody asked that question? So I think one of the and it's fun, funny to use the word comforting in this environment given everything happening. But one of the more comforting findings out of the recent IPCC report was that if we can get emissions all the way down to zero, warming will stop. There's not a huge amount of warming in the pipeline that is inevitable, which means that ultimately, like humans are at the drivers wheel here, you know, are in the driver's seat. We get to determine based on how much fossil fuels we burn over the next century, exactly how warm it gets. You know, we're sort of stuck with what we have today regardless. But we can determine, you know, if it just gets a bit worse or if it gets catastrophically worse. And that's mostly on us in terms of how quickly we reduce our emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels and how quickly we switch switch to the clean energy alternatives. So as an individual you know, obviously it's a huge problem that requires collective action globally. But at the same time, you know, you can do a lot by supporting clean energy technologies because the more people who buy things like heat pumps or electric cars or put solar panels on the roof, the more the price of those technologies go goes down and the more other people can afford to adopt them and know we've really seen that with electric vehicles, which ten years ago were incredibly expensive and today are actually cheaper to own than a gas vehicle over the lifetime. You know, similarly, solar panels were nine times more expensive a decade ago than they are today. And a big part of what's driven those cost declines is just economies of scale, more and more being built, people learning how to build them more cheaply. You know, it's not fundamental breakthroughs in the physics. It's learning by doing. And so individuals making decisions to, you know, you know, pay a small premium to get clean energy in their personal lives. But hip hop and electric vehicle solar panel, you know, is an important way to to make it easier for other people who might not be as motivated to be able to adopt those or just make it the default because it's the cheapest thing for people to do. I think the other thing I'd say is that at the end of the day, individuals voluntarily taking action can only take us so far. You know, we need a stronger policy response by governments to make clean energy cheap and to hold polluters to account. And so I think, you know, at the end of the day, one of the most impactful things you can do on this issue is vote. Tell politicians what you think because they're going to have to help us address this. So I think you you hit the nail on the proverbial head. There is nobody can fix this all by themselves. But collectively, we can we can make a lot of progress. And there's a lot of good reasons to be optimistic. Before we let you go, in addition to people reading your stuff on Carbon brief and and the Substack, where else can people find your work if you know they're not true wonks or they're not policy wonks or they're not deep into the science, where else can people find what you have to say? Yeah, so you can you can always follow me on Twitter or whatever it's called this week, right? Or on Threads, which is the new matter owned Twitter competitor. You know, if you can also just read the coverage of climate that's going on in places like The New York Times, The Washington Post or the BBC, it's it's all quality. And, you know, they they talk to me occasionally and a bunch of other climate scientists, period of of mine who also a great insights in the stuff. So it's a you know it's hard to find good discussions of climate on TV these days. But you know if you turn to the news, you know it's it's dominates the headlines and a lot of it is really well written and really good. Yeah. One of the things that we've seen in polling is that people trust climate scientists, not so much people on TV. So that's why I always try to refer people directly to you, to Andrew, to Katherine, and have those kinds of folks ask again. Thanks so much for joining us. We appreciate it. And we hope that we get a chance to talk to you again soon. Definitely. It's great to chat. That is so much good information, Matt. I mean, every time I talk to see I've talked to him two or three times before this and I've been following him on Twitter and you heard me just kind of going on and on about the subject. But he has so much good actionable information. He's able to put so many myths to rest very quickly. And I could just talk to him all day long. But a lot of a lot of wonderful information about where we've come and where we're going. And he's got the data to back it up. Yeah, it really is a fascinating discussion because we re so, so much of the focus is on land and what people are experiencing. But the majority of the planet, 70% of the planet is the oceans, and they're absorbing a lot of heat and they're getting warmer as well. And when you're calculating these global temperatures, we talk about, you know, this is the warmest year on record, which 2023 seems to be on track to do. So it's not just all the thermometers on land that we're calculating, that we're using all of these booties to measure the temperature of the oceans. And that has a big impact. And that's why the fact that we're having an El Nino, it's an El Nino year when I mean, already we're talking about sea surface temperatures getting warmer and warmer. But during El Nino, they get even warmer than normal. And so that's what's going to contribute to seeing the high 2023 is going to be so warm. And then it was also interesting how we're kind of teasing ahead to 2024. There's potential for 2024 to be even warmer because we're especially going to start 2024. It seems so warm. And how even if El Nino starts to wind down the lag in the global temperatures because it has a global impact, will continue. So that's going to be something to watch. You know, it was it was disheartening to hear that about getting even warmer. No, but at the same time, I did like the where he did bring back, you know, it's good to find the positives where we can where we're at where it looks like though, his most dire predictions for what could happen not to play it down and so not to let people's guard down because he has emphasized, you know, three degrees of warming would still be really bad. But if we're going in the right direction, maybe avoiding that four or five degrees of warming by 2100, at least, that's progress. So let's not let our foot off the pedal. Let's let's keep working. Let's see if we can bring that trend out. How about two degrees instead of three degrees? I mean, the more we can do, you know, it's good to get some good news. But remember that three degrees is bad because we're already seeing, what, less than one and a half degrees is doing it. It's not good. Yeah. And that's three C, which is five and a half Fahrenheit. So we need to remember that sometimes we are deep into the science that we we kind of fall into the metric, the metric system, which is great. I love the metric system as a scientist, but a lot of people aren't as familiar with that. So yeah, three C that's about five and a half degrees Fahrenheit. And I was also very grateful that he went back and talked about how we know what the oceans were 150, 175 years in the past when we had some ocean temperature records directly. But now we get so much of it from satellites and these cool Argo floats spend a little time in Google, Argo floats because they're really, really cool pieces of equipment. Help us see what's going on into the oceans. Matt. You know, next week we've got, you know, football seasons coming. So let's go back on land. Right? But we're into August now and football practices are full tilt at this point, getting ready for four opening opening day in a few weeks and it's still hot. So we're going to talk to two Douglas Cossa at the Korey Stringer Institute up there at University of Connecticut and talk about the impact of heat on on football players. It can be a very sneaky killer, unfortunately. So we're going to talk to him about that and some of the best practices to keep our players safe so we can enjoy what they do a later on in the fall. Anything else? But before we take off, then I'll also be interested the impact of folks on the stands, because I've been at some awfully hot, late August, early September games in Texas. And, you know, especially if it's a middle of the day game, I mean, the crowd is in bags. Well, of course, the players absolutely the most, but the crowd as well. So that'll be an interesting discussion. And then also, you know, we're going to promote it again, if you ever have any questions for us, weather questions, things you'd like to hear us discuss, ideas for the podcast, shoot us an email podcast at Leeds dot net or begin to comment on the show we love to hear. All right, that all sounds good. I with that we are going to wrap for this week. So for Matt Holiner in Chicago, I'm meteorologist Sean Sublette in Richmond, Virginia at Lee Enterprises, thanks so much for listening. And we will talk with you again next week.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A recent study says there are enough rare earth metals on Earth for new “low-carbon electricity generation” technologies. Rare earth metals come from minerals found in countries around the world. The researchers said more mining is needed to make more of the valuable metals available to industry. Rare earth metals are in demand for products such as magnets, wind turbines, solar panels and computers. All are part of the “green energy” push to remove carbon gases from electricity generation. The researchers said the amount of minerals available is enough to supply a switch to renewable energy. They wrote that the carbon gasses “related to electricity infrastructure may be substantial.” But the study said it would be between one and nine percent of the world's budget for carbon gas production.最近的一项研究表明，地球上有足够的稀土金属用于新的“低碳发电”技术。稀土金属来自世界各国发现的矿物。研究人员表示，需要进行更多的开采才能为工业提供更多有价值的金属。磁铁、风力涡轮机、太阳能电池板和计算机等产品对稀土金属有需求。所有这些都是推动从发电中去除碳气体的“绿色能源”的一部分。研究人员表示，可用的矿物质数量足以提供向可再生能源的转换。他们写道，“与电力基础设施相关的碳气体可能很多。”但该研究称，这将占世界碳气体生产预算的 1% 到 9%。The study came out recently in the science publication Joule. Zeke Hausfather helped write the study. He is an expert who works at a technology company called Stripe and at Berkeley Earth, a non-profit climate research group. He called the process “big and messy.” But he thinks reducing carbon gases, or “decarbonization,” can be done. He said he is not worried about the long-term supply of rare earth materials. However, the scientists warn that in the early days of the switch to green energy, there will be shortages. For example, there could be a shortage of the element called dysprosium. It is used to make strong magnets. Industry will require three times more of the metal than is produced now. However, there is 12 times more dysprosium available than needed, the researchers said.这项研究最近发表在科学出版物《焦耳》上。Zeke Hausfather 帮助撰写了这项研究。他是一名专家，在一家名为 Stripe 的科技公司和非营利性气候研究组织 Berkeley Earth 工作。他称这个过程“庞大而混乱”。但他认为减少碳气体或“脱碳”是可以做到的。他表示，他并不担心稀土材料的长期供应。然而，科学家们警告说，在转向绿色能源的初期，会出现短缺。例如，称为镝的元素可能会短缺。用于制造强力磁铁。工业对这种金属的需求量将是现在生产量的三倍。然而，研究人员表示，可用镝是所需量的 12 倍。Another element is tellurium, which is used in large groups of solar panels, called solar farms. There is just enough of that material available if the world makes a fast push to solar power, the researchers said. In addition, there are other materials that can be used instead of tellurium if needed. Daniel Ibarra is an environment professor at Brown University. He did not take part in the study but knows about lithium shortages. He told the Associated Press that the study was “robust” and “debunks” concerns about running out of rare earth materials. He said the main question is if production of the materials can keep up with demand. The United States Geological Survey reports that the countries with the largest supplies of rare earth metals are China, Vietnam, Russia and Myanmar, also known as Burma. The study also noted that mining causes pollution. But the scientists said that if the world switches to green energy, the mining will not be a problem.另一种元素是碲，用于大量太阳能电池板，称为太阳能农场。研究人员说，如果世界快速推动太阳能发电，那么可用的材料就足够了。此外，如果需要，还有其他材料可以代替碲。丹尼尔·伊巴拉 (Daniel Ibarra) 是布朗大学的环境教授。他没有参加这项研究，但知道锂短缺。他告诉美联社，这项研究是“稳健的”并且“揭穿”了对稀土材料耗尽的担忧。他说，主要问题是材料的生产能否满足需求。美国地质调查局报告称，稀土金属供应量最大的国家是中国、越南、俄罗斯和缅甸，又称缅甸。该研究还指出，采矿会造成污染。但科学家们表示，如果世界转向绿色能源，采矿将不会成为问题。Rob Jackson is an energy expert and studies how humans affect the earth, but was not involved in the study. He is a professor at Stanford University. He said even with evidence that there are enough rare earth materials, humans should still be concerned with creating less pollution. “Along with mining more, we should be using less,” he said. The study centered on the creation of electric power and did not look at the materials used in electric car batteries. Hausfather said that study is too complicated and will be examined by the team next.Rob Jackson 是一位能源专家，研究人类如何影响地球，但他没有参与这项研究。他是斯坦福大学的教授。他说，即使有证据表明有足够的稀土材料，人类仍然应该关注减少污染。“随着开采更多，我们应该减少使用，”他说。该研究以电力的创造为中心，并没有研究电动汽车电池中使用的材料。Hausfather 说这项研究太复杂了，接下来将由团队进行检查。

Science agencies in the US and Europe this week released their temperature data for 2022, revealing what has become an annual headline: Last year was one of the hottest on record. 2022 tied for fifth hottest, according to NASA. The US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, which uses slightly different data, said it came in sixth.That's even though La Niña cooled the equatorial Pacific, which typically turns down global temperatures.  “This was, in fact, the warmest La Niña year in the whole record,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.Earlier this week, Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service revealed 2022 was that continent's second-hottest year ever, and hottest summer.Last year was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the preindustrial average, or 1.1 or 1.2 degrees Celsius, depending on whose data you use. That's edging closer and closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a limit most countries in the world have pledged not to exceed. That goal is written into the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, alongside a less-ambitious target of limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. But it's the lower target that has taken hold in recent years as both a goal and a rallying cry for aggressive climate action. Keeping 1.5 “alive” became the mantra of Alok Sharma, the UK politician who served as president of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. UN Secretary General António Guterres also frequently references the figure, among many others.  A coalition galvanized by low-lying island nations lobbied to get the more-ambitious target written into the Paris climate deal, arguing that exceeding that threshold represented an existential threat for their counties."It means we are dead. Just simply dead," former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed told The World in 2021. “A whole country gone. A whole people gone. A whole society gone. A whole community gone. And this is the case with many, many low-lying islands.”That target has always been wildly ambitious. But in the last seven years, as carbon emissions have continued to rise, it has gotten even more so. Global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed 45% by the end of this decade to meet it, and a UN report published in October said there was no “credible” pathway to 1.5 in place.Many climate scientists say that they don't believe the target will be met.  “I'm pessimistic for the 1.5,” said Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern who co-led an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the physical basis of climate change in the years leading up to the Paris agreement's creation. “We're not on the pathway to actually keep the warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said. “We [would] be extremely lucky to hold the temperature warming below 2 degrees.”Three scientists involved in tracking the global temperature data that was released this week also said they saw limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as unlikely.  “I think it's very challenging to stay below 1.5,” said Schmidt, saying he was speaking only for himself, not NASA.  “My expectation is that we will hit 1.5 degrees sometime in the 2030s,” said Samanath Burgess, deputy director of Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service.“I think it's very unlikely that we avoid overshooting that level of warming,” said Zeke Hausfather, with Berkeley Earth, an independent research group that also released its 2022 temperature data on Thursday.It's technically still possible to keep warming at 1.5 degrees, according to the science of atmospheric warming. But a recent IPCC report shows it would require a massive shift away from coal, oil and gas at a speed that's hard to imagine. And it almost certainly would require overshooting the 1.5 limit for a time, then removing carbon from the atmosphere again before the end of the century to bring the globe's average temperature back down.Still, Hausfather said he thinks that the goal itself has been useful.“Even if it's a target we don't hit, I feel like the fact that we are trying means we'll probably end up in a better place than if we were aiming higher,” he said.Hausfather points out countries responsible for around 80% of emissions now have targets to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Whether they meet them, of course, is an entirely different question, but the goal itself is based on the science behind the 1.5-degree goal.  The target being written into an international agreement “holds political leaders accountable,” Burgess said.  Even as 1.5 continues to be held up as the goal by political leaders and activists, scientists aren't exactly shouting from the rooftops how much of a stretch it really is.Swiss scientist Thomas Stocker said there's a concern that doing so would stymie ambition.“I disagree,” he said, arguing it should instead galvanize even faster action.“The consequence should be that under no circumstances will we lose the second target and make the same mistakes again.”  Some scientists worry that the 1.5-limit has been framed as a kind of tipping point, a make-or-break goal.“The reality is that every single fraction of a degree matters; 1.5 isn't a cliff edge where bad things will happen. Bad things are already happening,” Burgess said.Keeping warming below 1.7 degrees, say, would be better than 1.8 — 1.9 would be better than 2. Each 10th of a degree could cause more extreme rainfall, like the kind flooding California right now, and worsen heat waves, droughts and hurricanes, and further push up sea levels imperiling low-lying island nations.  Leaders and activists in those vulnerable countries largely are not ready to talk about a post 1.5-world, at least to reporters. "I can't afford to think that 1.5 degrees is not attainable," former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed said in 2021. “That would be a death sentence on our countries, and many low lying islands and coastal regions.”With current pledges made under the Paris agreement, the UN Environment Program estimates the world is on track for 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming by century's end.   

Science agencies in the US and Europe this week released their temperature data for 2022, revealing what has become an annual headline: Last year was one of the hottest on record. 2022 tied for fifth hottest, according to NASA. The US National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, which uses slightly different data, said it came in sixth.That's even though La Niña cooled the equatorial Pacific, which typically turns down global temperatures.  “This was, in fact, the warmest La Niña year in the whole record,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.Earlier this week, Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service revealed 2022 was that continent's second-hottest year ever, and hottest summer.Last year was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the preindustrial average, or 1.1 or 1.2 degrees Celsius, depending on whose data you use. That's edging closer and closer to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a limit most countries in the world have pledged not to exceed. That goal is written into the 2015 Paris climate change agreement, alongside a less-ambitious target of limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius. But it's the lower target that has taken hold in recent years as both a goal and a rallying cry for aggressive climate action. Keeping 1.5 “alive” became the mantra of Alok Sharma, the UK politician who served as president of the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. UN Secretary General António Guterres also frequently references the figure, among many others.  A coalition galvanized by low-lying island nations lobbied to get the more-ambitious target written into the Paris climate deal, arguing that exceeding that threshold represented an existential threat for their counties."It means we are dead. Just simply dead," former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed told The World in 2021. “A whole country gone. A whole people gone. A whole society gone. A whole community gone. And this is the case with many, many low-lying islands.”That target has always been wildly ambitious. But in the last seven years, as carbon emissions have continued to rise, it has gotten even more so. Global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be slashed 45% by the end of this decade to meet it, and a UN report published in October said there was no “credible” pathway to 1.5 in place.Many climate scientists say that they don't believe the target will be met.  “I'm pessimistic for the 1.5,” said Thomas Stocker, a climate scientist at the University of Bern who co-led an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the physical basis of climate change in the years leading up to the Paris agreement's creation. “We're not on the pathway to actually keep the warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said. “We [would] be extremely lucky to hold the temperature warming below 2 degrees.”Three scientists involved in tracking the global temperature data that was released this week also said they saw limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as unlikely.  “I think it's very challenging to stay below 1.5,” said Schmidt, saying he was speaking only for himself, not NASA.  “My expectation is that we will hit 1.5 degrees sometime in the 2030s,” said Samanath Burgess, deputy director of Europe's Copernicus Climate Change Service.“I think it's very unlikely that we avoid overshooting that level of warming,” said Zeke Hausfather, with Berkeley Earth, an independent research group that also released its 2022 temperature data on Thursday.It's technically still possible to keep warming at 1.5 degrees, according to the science of atmospheric warming. But a recent IPCC report shows it would require a massive shift away from coal, oil and gas at a speed that's hard to imagine. And it almost certainly would require overshooting the 1.5 limit for a time, then removing carbon from the atmosphere again before the end of the century to bring the globe's average temperature back down.Still, Hausfather said he thinks that the goal itself has been useful.“Even if it's a target we don't hit, I feel like the fact that we are trying means we'll probably end up in a better place than if we were aiming higher,” he said.Hausfather points out countries responsible for around 80% of emissions now have targets to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury. Whether they meet them, of course, is an entirely different question, but the goal itself is based on the science behind the 1.5-degree goal.  The target being written into an international agreement “holds political leaders accountable,” Burgess said.  Even as 1.5 continues to be held up as the goal by political leaders and activists, scientists aren't exactly shouting from the rooftops how much of a stretch it really is.Swiss scientist Thomas Stocker said there's a concern that doing so would stymie ambition.“I disagree,” he said, arguing it should instead galvanize even faster action.“The consequence should be that under no circumstances will we lose the second target and make the same mistakes again.”  Some scientists worry that the 1.5-limit has been framed as a kind of tipping point, a make-or-break goal.“The reality is that every single fraction of a degree matters; 1.5 isn't a cliff edge where bad things will happen. Bad things are already happening,” Burgess said.Keeping warming below 1.7 degrees, say, would be better than 1.8 — 1.9 would be better than 2. Each 10th of a degree could cause more extreme rainfall, like the kind flooding California right now, and worsen heat waves, droughts and hurricanes, and further push up sea levels imperiling low-lying island nations.  Leaders and activists in those vulnerable countries largely are not ready to talk about a post 1.5-world, at least to reporters. "I can't afford to think that 1.5 degrees is not attainable," former Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed said in 2021. “That would be a death sentence on our countries, and many low lying islands and coastal regions.”With current pledges made under the Paris agreement, the UN Environment Program estimates the world is on track for 2.4 to 2.6 degrees Celsius of warming by century's end.   

La crise de l'énergie n'a pas fini de faire la une de l'actualité, notamment autour du gaz. Si la Russie a cessé de délivrer du gaz à l'Europe via les gazoducs Nord Stream 1 et 2 , ces deux lignes d'approvisionnement sous la mer Baltique sont toutes les deux touchées par des fuites gigantesques. Quelles sont les conséquences de cette pollution massive au gaz ? C'est ce que je vous propose de voir dans cet épisode.C'est à la toute fin du mois de septembre, lundi 26 et mardi 27, qu'on été repérées trois grandes fuites de gaz au large de l'île de Bornholm au Danemark, entre le sud de la Suède et la Pologne. Ce triste phénomène est même visible depuis les airs puisque la surface de l'eau bouillonne par endroit sur un diamètre de 200 mètres pour la plus petite fuite, et jusqu'à 1 km. Si de nombreuses voies déplorent des sabotages, difficile de savoir comment se sont réellement produites ces fuites aux conséquences très sérieuses pour l'environnement. Car le gaz qui s'échappe contient du méthane, l'un des pire en terme d'effet de serre. D'après le dernier rapport du GIEC, le groupe d'experts sur le climat, un tiers du réchauffement déjà constaté serait dû au méthane dont les taux d'émissions ont atteint des niveaux record en 2021.Je cite Marielle Saunois, chercheuse au Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l'environnement (LSCE), « même s'il est émis en moins grande quantité que le CO2, le pouvoir de réchauffement [du méthane] est bien plus fort. Sur une échelle de 100 ans, un kilo de méthane est équivalent à 28 kilos de CO2 en termes de réchauffement de l'atmosphère », fin de citation. D'après les spécialistes, une grande partie du gaz relâché par les fuites se retrouveraient directement dans l'atmosphère. À noter que lorsqu'ils ont été percés, les gazoducs étaient à l'arrêt, mais contenaient tout de même du gaz. Difficile de savoir précisément quelle quantité de gaz s'est échappée jusqu'à aujourd'hui, car seule la société Gazprom, basée en Russie a la main sur les chiffres, qu'elle ne communique pas pour l'instant. D'après une ONG allemande, la fuite avoisinerait plus 356 000 tonnes. Pour le climatologue Zeke Hausfather, cette quantité représenterait 6,4 millions de tonnes de CO2, soit je cite « l'équivalent des émissions d'un million et demi de voitures sur un an » fin de citation. Pour le LSCE, cette fuite ne serait pas nulle, mais n'aurait pas de conséquences majeures pour autant. À voir si des conséquences inattendues ne pourraient pas être observées dans les semaines à venir. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

In this episode of Energy Transition Now David Linden speaks with Zeke Hausfather, the climate research lead at Stripe, to discuss the role of climate science amidst the real-world action on climate change. Hausfather is a climate scientist whose research focuses on observational temperature records, climate models, carbon removal, and mitigation technologies.

Last summer, former Outside/In host Sam Evans-Brown quit journalism to become a lobbyist for clean energy.He's not alone. Millions of people left their jobs or changed careers in the past couple years. But is the field of climate journalism going through its own “Great Resignation?” In a moment when the stakes are so high, are the people who cover the climate crisis leaving journalism to try to help solve it?Producer Justine Paradis talks with two reporters who recently found themselves re-evaluating their personal and professional priorities: one who left journalism, and another who stayed.Featuring Sophie Gilbert, Sam Evans-Brown, Stephen Lacey, Julia Pyper, Meaghan Parker, and Kendra Pierre-Louis. SUPPORTOutside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In. Subscribe to our (free) newsletter.Follow Outside/In on Instagram or Twitter, or join our private discussion group on Facebook. LINKSThe podcast episode of Warm Regards that Justine mentions is “Apocalyptic Narratives, Climate Data, and Hope, with Zeke Hausfather and Diego Arguedas Ortiz”The history of objectivity is arguably one of the “great confusions of journalism.” In the early 20th century, reporter Walter Lippman and editor Charles Merz contended that objectivity is a practice akin to the scientific method. “The method is objective, not the journalist.”More recently, plenty of folks have commented on problems with “bias” in journalism, including Lewis Raven Wallace, Wesley Lowery, and Sam Sanders, who wrote, “The avoidance of the ‘perception' of ‘bias' ultimately means the only reporters to be trusted are those whose lives haven't been directly touched by the issues and struggles they're covering. And you [know] what that means.”Julia Pyper's podcast Political ClimatePost Script Media, Stephen Lacey's podcast companyHow cable TV covered climate change in 2021.Nate Johnson, a former journalist who left Grist to become an electrician, featured on How to Save a Planet.Kendra Pierre-Louis spoke in greater depth about her career and what it's like to be a Black woman in journalism with Mary Annaïse Heglar and Amy Westervelt on Hot Take.The Yale Climate Opinion Maps find that 72% of Americans believe in global warming, although just 33% report hearing about climate in the media at least once a week. You can explore the data and see how climate attitudes vary by state and county.For Sarah Miller, all the right words on climate have already been said. “I could end this story by saying ‘We kept swimming and it was beautiful even if it will all be gone someday,' or some shit, but I already ended another climate story that way. I have, several times, really nailed that ending… Writing is stupid. I just want to be alive.” CREDITSSpecial thanks to Nate Johnson and Peter HoweHost: Nate HegyiReported, produced, and mixed by Justine ParadisEditing and additional mixing by Taylor QuimbyAdditional editing: Rebecca Lavoie, Nate Hegyi, Felix Poon, and Jessica HuntExecutive Producer: Rebecca LavoieMusic: Sarah the Illstrumentalist, Daniel Fridell, baegel, FLYIN, Smartface, Silver Maple, By Lotus, 91nova, Moon Craters, Pandaraps, and Blue Dot SessionsTheme Music: Breakmaster Cylinder

Max Osbon is a mathematician, an athlete, and the founding partner at Osbon Capital Management. This conversation covers: 02:10 – State of the crypto market (and KMO's alt-coin portfolio) 05:00 – Tokenizing real assets and the significance of USTC 06:45 – Lack of safe havens and inflation hedges 10:50 – Linking stagflation and complex systems theory 12:45 – Impact of geopolitics on the global economy 16:30 – Need for leadership, libertarian ideals, Stanley McChrystal's "Team of teams," and George Friedman's “The Storm before the Calm” 22:30 – (De-)globalisation, COVID-19, ASML, TSMC and why it's not so easy to re-localize semiconductor manufacturing 24:15 – Risks of an off-shored high-tech industry 29:40 – Zeke Hausfather's view of climate science and the doomsayers' secret desire for collapse 33:55 – Putting worrisome things in perspective 35:25 – Whether we've already experienced the bulk of the tech revolution 38:10 – The promise of tokenization with NFTs 41:10 – Regulating crypto and why regulation is needed for wider adoption 43:25 – Securities vs commodities 45:10 – James's question re: fighting corruption with the blockchain 46:30 – Balaji Srinivasan's upcoming book and why the bitcoin and the dollar are opposites 49:15 – Swallowing the pill and sticking around cities 50:40 – What Web3 really means 58:00 – Permissionless Swift alternatives 60:10 – Decentralization vs fragmentation on the blockchain 63:10 – Some men just wanting to watch the world burn and the promise of globalization Links: Max: mobile.twitter.com/maxosbon Osbon Capital Management: osboncapital.com KMO: mobile.twitter.com/Kayemmo | en.padverb.com/kmo Comments? Join the Padverb Podcast Telegram channel: t.me/padverbpodcast

This episode is about environmental alarmism. Alarmism means exaggerating danger and thereby causing needless worry or panic. These days the media is flooded with proclamations and predictions of ecological catastrophe. There is no doubt that our environmental challenges are many, and huge, and they certainly do present dangers. But are they being seen in the context of broader developmental challenges and associated trade-offs? Or in the context of humankind's past achievements, and our ability to adapt? And is alarmist rhetoric the best way to motivate action to deal with them? Among the people offering answers to questions like these, is this month's guest on The Case for Conservation Podcast, Matt Ridley.Matt was, until he retired last year, an elected member of the UK Parliament's House of Lords. He's been been writer and/or editor for The Economist and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications, and his non-fiction books have sold more than a million copies. They include "The Rational Optimist", "The Evolution of Everything", "How Innovation Works" and, most recently, "Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19". His 2010 TED talk, "When Ideas Have Sex", has been viewed more than 2 and a half million times, and he's spoken on various other popular forums including, quite recently, the Jordan Peterson Podcast.Links to resources:Mattridley.co.uk - Matt's website, where all his other books, his blog, and other information can be foundThe Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves - Perhaps the most relevant of Matt's books to our conversation - published in 2010How Innovation Works: Serendipity, Energy and the Saving of Time - another of Matt's books relevant to our discussion - published in 2020Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19 - Matt's most recent book, co-authored with Alina Chan (2021)When ideas have sex - Matt's TED talk in 2010, which has had more than two and a half million viewsEmissions – the ‘business as usual' story is misleading - 2020 article by Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters in the journal, "Nature", about RCP 8.5Time stamps:02:50: Matt's response to a Guardian article about climate change terminology06:59: Species conservation and reports of species loss due to to climate change13:35: A counsel of despair15:32: The possible influence of funding in environmental rhetoric17:40: How innovation helps conservation24:40: How ecological footprint calculations may be misleading; finite resources34:23: The Jevons paradox35:42: The evolution of lightbulb technology; prehistoric technology without innovation38:12: Which environmental issues are being neglected?42:14: Invasive species as a driver of biodiversity loss45:32: Is deforestation the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic?48:27: Is there a link between environmental alarmism and theories of Covid-19 origins?Visit www.case4conservation.com

Written into many of the promises made by countries about how they intend to achieve their UN climate pledges to reduce emissions is an assumption that technology will help them make this happen. But this technology either does not currently exist or is in its infancy. This includes schemes to take carbon out of the air via carbon capture and storage or direct air capture and to replace our dependency on fossil fuels with green hydrogen. We visit the world's largest direct air capture plant in Iceland and speak to the person in charge of Namibia's grand plans to become the green hydrogen production hub of the world - can both really be scaled up in order to meet our current needs? Presenters Kate Lamble and Jordan Dunbar are joined by: Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy at the Breakthrough Institute, Victoria Gill, BBC's Science Correspondent, Christoph Beuttler, Head of Climate Policy at Climeworks, and Jane Olwoch, Executive Director of South African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL) Producer: Dearbhail Starr Researcher: Tatyana Movshevich and Zoe Gelber Reporter: Magnús Geir Eyjólfsson Series Producer: Alex Lewis Editor: Emma Rippon Sound engineer: Tom Brignell

Zeke Hausfather is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst whose research focuses on observational temperature records, climate models, and mitigation technologies. He spent 10 years working as a data scientist and entrepreneur in the cleantech sector, where he was the lead data scientist at Essess, the chief scientist at C3.ai, and the cofounder and chief scientist of Efficiency 2.0. He also worked as a research scientist with Berkeley Earth, was the senior climate analyst at Project Drawdown, and the US analyst for Carbon Brief. Follow his Twitter for his climate thoughts. We discuss: What is most misunderstood about climate science today. Why many doomsday scenarios are unlikely but yet serious damage from climate is happening now. Why scientists have been poor in communicating what is mean by tipping points with respect to climate. How he thinks about climate “tail risk” and how tail risk diminishes the less heating happens. The problems with “averages” and how there is uncertainty not only about our amount of emissions, but the sensitivity of the climate to our emissions. Why climate is better thought of as a gradient rather than point thresholds. The problem with climate economics due to time horizons, long time horizons and the discounting models economists use. Zeke's view on the range of different projections coming out post COP26 and what they mean. Zeke's thoughts on: -degrowth -carbon tax -techno-optimists -nuclear power -carbon offsetting -divestment movement -gas as a transition fuel -green New Deal -Bjorn Lomborg Zeke finishes with advice for people who want to be involved in climate. Video/Transcript available here. Ben's Twitter here.

In this episode Ben convinces Vaden to become a degrower. We plan how to live out the rest of our lives on an organic tomato farm in Canada in December, sewing our own clothes and waxing our own candles. Step away from the thermostat Jimmy. We discuss: - The degrowth movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth) - The basics of economic growth, and why it's good for developing economies in particular - How growth enables resilience in the face of environmental disasters - Why the environment is in better shape than you think - Availability bias and our tendency to think everything is falling apart - The decoupling of economic growth and carbon emissions - Energy dense production and energy portfolios And we respond to some of your criticism of the previous episode, including: Apocalyptic environmental predictions been happening for a while? Really? Number of annual cold deaths exceed the number of annual heat deaths? Really? Your previous episode was very human-centric, and failed to address the damage humans are causing to the environment. What say you? Are we right wing crypto-fascists? (Answer: Maybe, successfully dodged the question) Social media everywhere Follow us on Twitter at @IncrementsPod, @BennyChugg, @VadenMasrani Check us out on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4wZzQyoW4s4ZuE4FY9DQQ Come join our discord server! DM one of us on twitter, or send an email to incrementspodcast@gmail.com to get a link References Two natural experiments on curtailing economic growth. Energy Crunch (https://www.business-standard.com/article/international/energy-crunch-hits-global-recovery-as-winter-approaches-report-121102000021_1.html), and the effect of Covid-19 on developing countries (world bank) (https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/799701589552654684/pdf/Costs-and-Trade-Offs-in-the-Fight-Against-the-COVID-19-Pandemic-A-Developing-Country-Perspective.pdf) 10x more cold deaths than heat deaths. Original study (https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext&sa=D&source=docs&ust=1636434110138000&usg=AOvVaw0Uas83UjktfZhIqzNOyMTQ) in the Lancet. Chilling Effect (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/chilling-effects?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjozNDgwNTU5LCJwb3N0X2lkIjo0MjYwOTE3NCwiXyI6InVqQ3VpIiwiaWF0IjoxNjM0Nzg2MDY1LCJleHAiOjE2MzQ3ODk2NjUsImlzcyI6InB1Yi04OTEyMCIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.oIH0tvBYkHK5PfbmmqLdNVO0-U46kRy54CSjZlEC0ec) by Scott Alexander. Decoupling of economic growth and pollution (https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/absolute-decoupling-of-economic-growth-and-emissions-in-32-countries) by Zeke Hausfather of the Breakthrough institute. Air Pollution Trends data (EPA) (https://www.epa.gov/air-emissions-inventories/air-pollutant-emissions-trends-data) Number of deaths from natural disasters (https://ourworldindata.org/natural-disasters#number-of-deaths-from-natural-disasters) (Our World in Data). Original data taken from the EMDAT Natural Disasters database (https://www.emdat.be/). Increase in global canopy cover (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0411-9) 99 Good News Stories in 2018 you probably didn't hear about (https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0) ...and 2019 (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2019) ...and 2020 (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2020) (also sign up for the FutureCrunch newsletter!) The Environmental Kuznets curves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve) Quotes On Degrowth This would be a way of life based on modest material and energy needs but nevertheless rich in other dimensions – a life of frugal abundance. It is about creating an economy based on sufficiency, knowing how much is enough to live well, and discovering that enough is plenty. In a degrowth society we would aspire to localise our economies as far and as appropriately as possible. This would assist with reducing carbon-intensive global trade, while also building resilience in the face of an uncertain and turbulent future. Wherever possible, we would grow our own organic food, water our gardens with water tanks, and turn our neighbourhoods into edible landscapes as the Cubans have done in Havana. As my friend Adam Grubb so delightfully declares, we should “eat the suburbs”, while supplementing urban agriculture with food from local farmers' markets. - Samuel Alexander, Life in a 'degrowth' economy, and why you might actually enjoy it (https://theconversation.com/life-in-a-degrowth-economy-and-why-you-might-actually-enjoy-it-32224) It would be nice to hear it straight for once. Global warming is real, it's here, and it's mind-bogglingly dangerous. How bad it gets—literally, the degree—depends on how quickly the most profligate countries rein in their emissions. Averting catastrophe will thus require places like the United States and Canada to make drastic cutbacks, bringing their consumption more closely in line with the planetary average. Such cuts can be made more or less fairly, and the richest really ought to pay the most, but the crucial thing is that they are made. Because, above all, stopping climate change means giving up on growth. That will be hard. Not only will our standards of living almost certainly drop, but it's likely that the very quality of our society—equality, safety, and trust—will decline, too. That's not something to be giddy about, but it's still a price that those of us living in affluent countries should prepare to pay. Because however difficult it is to slow down, flooding Bangladesh cannot be an option. In other words, we can and should act. It's just going to hurt. - Daniel Immerwahr, Growth vs the Climate (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/growth-vs-the-climate) On Perennial Apocalypticism My offices were so cold I couldn't concentrate, and my staff were typing with gloves on. I pleaded with Jimmy to set the thermostats at 68 degrees, but it didn't do any good. - Paul Sabin, quoting Rosalynn Carter in The Bet (https://books.google.com/books?id=nVd_AAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false) Mostafa K. Tolba, executive director of the United Nations environmental program, told delegates that if the nations of the world continued their present policies, they would face by the turn of the century ''an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.'' - New York Times, 1982 (https://www.nytimes.com/1982/05/11/world/un-ecology-parley-opens-amid-gloom.html) A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of "eco-refugees", threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP. He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control." - AP News, 1989 (https://web.archive.org/web/20201113001053/https://apnews.com/article/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0) On Environmental Conservation It's not the case that humankind has failed to conserve habitat. By 2019, an area of Earth larger than the whole of Africa was protected, an area that is equivalent to 15 percent of Earth's land surface. The number of designated protected areas in the world has grown from 9,214 in 1962 to 102,102 in 2003 to 244,869 in 2020. - Michael Shellenburger, Apocalypse Never, p.75 Thanks to habitat protection and targeted conservation efforts, many beloved species have been pulled from the brink of extinction, including albatrosses, condors, manatees, oryxes, pandas, rhinoceroses, Tasmanian devils, and tigers; according to the ecologist Stuart Pimm, the overall rate of extinctions has been reduced by 75 percent. - Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now, p.160 On Environmental Optimism Following China's ban on ivory last year, 90% of Chinese support it, ivory demand has dropped by almost half, and poaching rates are falling (https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/conservation/china-has-banned-ivory-but-has-the-african-elephant-poaching-crisis-actually-been-stemmed/news-story/b086f6a0e61acfcc15abeed18f899136) in places like Kenya. WWF (https://www.wwf.org.uk/updates/what-impact-chinas-ivory-ban) The population of wild tigers in Nepal was found to have nearly doubled in the last nine years, thanks to efforts by conservationists and increased funding for protected areas. Independent (https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/tigers-nepal-double-wwf-conservation-big-cats-wildlife-trade-a8551271.html) Deforestation in Indonesia fell by 60%, as a result of a ban on clearing peatlands, new educational campaigns and better law enforcement. Ecowatch (https://www.ecowatch.com/indonesia-deforestation-2595918463.html) See the remaining 294 good news stories here (https://medium.com/future-crunch/99-good-news-stories-you-probably-didnt-hear-about-in-2018-cc3c65f8ebd0), here (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2019), and here (https://futurecrun.ch/99-good-news-2020) Set your thermostats to 68, put those gloves on, and send an email over to incrementspodcast@gmail.com

This weekend kicked off COP26 — the United Nations Climate conference in Glasgow. The country commitments made this week could determine what the world will look like in just a few decades. And those countries are turning to advanced climate models to imagine that world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist and is the Director of Climate and Energy for The Breakthrough Institute, about these models.

This weekend kicked off COP26 — the United Nations Climate conference in Glasgow. The country commitments made this week could determine what the world will look like in just a few decades. And those countries are turning to advanced climate models to imagine that world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist and is the Director of Climate and Energy for The Breakthrough Institute, about these models.

This weekend kicked off COP26 — the United Nations Climate conference in Glasgow. The country commitments made this week could determine what the world will look like in just a few decades. And those countries are turning to advanced climate models to imagine that world. Marketplace’s Kimberly Adams speaks with Zeke Hausfather, a data scientist and is the Director of Climate and Energy for The Breakthrough Institute, about these models.

What does a world below 1.5°C actually look like? Ahead of the beginning of the much-anticipated COP26 climate change conference, in this episode of the Data Points podcast Berkeley Earth Chief Scientist Dr. Robert Rohde, and Research Scientist Dr. Zeke Hausfather dive into your questions about COP26 and the climate science of a world below the Paris Agreement targets. Topics covered include equitable emissions reductions and industrialized vs developing nations, methane and melting permafrost, climate models and warming forecasts, climate feedback loops, global emissions caps and climate dividends, climate disinformation, housing policy in the context of climate change, and how actual emissions reductions can be measured and enforced. Again, we can't thank you enough for your outstanding questions. Be sure to follow Robert, Zeke, and Berkeley Earth on Twitter for the latest from the COP26 conference in Glasgow.

Cows are...a problem. Especially when it comes to global warming. With an assist from Zeke Hausfather, In this installment of our explainer seires we do our best to answer (quickly) why exactly cows and beef are such a big deal.

The IPCC has released their first major update in 8 years, the sixth assessment report (AR6.) IPCC and @carbonbrief contributor and @BTI climate and energy analyst Zeke Hausfather joins us to help us make sense of it all. AR6 provides greater resolution and precision in terms of our understanding of climate sensitivity and the resulting temperature ranges we can expect moving into the future. It also gives us a more confident estimate of climate impacts like sea level rise and the effect of climate change on extreme weather events. Zeke's contribution to AR6 demonstrates that most of our historic climate models are performing well by accurately predicting the trends of the last two decades. We explore the claims of climate change lukewarmists and sceptics such as Steve Koonin whose recent book “Unsettled” has been making waves and explore the implications of ecomodern vs. degrowth responses to climate change.

This week marked the publication of the much anticipated IPCC Working Group I Report, a global, multi-year effort on the part of more than 200 scientists worldwide to describe the physical science underlying the current state of climate change and global warming. In this episode of Data Points, Berkeley Earth Lead Scientist Dr. Robert Rohde and Research Scientist Dr. Zeke Hausfather answer your questions regarding the IPCC report. The conversation includes discussion of carbon cycle and carbon cycle feedback loops, emissions and various emissions scenarios, net-zero and net-zero commitments, as well as discussion of sea level rise and ice sheet behavior. Many thanks to everyone who submitted questions for this Q&A; unfortunately we weren't able to answer all of the questions that were submitted, but hope to do additional Q&A's in the future. The full text of the IPCC Working Group I Report can be dowloaded here.

Fire season is starting up once again in parts of North America, just two weeks after a heatwave which killed hundred across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada. Some of the hottest temperatures on earth have been recorded over the weekend. So for some insight into the climate effects and what governments have to do to manage the consequences of extreme climate change, we speak to Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy of the Berkeley Earth. Image credit: Shutterstock.com

Humanity has emitted over 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, raising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 from 280 to 417ppm. Every year, we add another 50 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent, meaning that in 20 years we will double our total emissions. There are signs that global emissions are plateauing, and many governments around the world have penned ambitious commitments to reach net zero. However, talk is cheap, and many plans hinge on dubious assumptions around the role of bioenergy with CCS for example. There has been a shift in the climate debate with by and large an abandonment of the “denier” position and a growth in the lukewarmist camp, which acknowledges the reality of anthropogenic climate change but minimizes its consequences. In a previous episode with Mark Lynas, we explored what 1-6 degrees of warming looks like in terms of its impacts on humanity and the environment. Today, we do our best to understand the probabilities of reaching 3+ degrees of warming. How has climate modeling held up over the years? How likely are phenomena like methane clathrates to act as a significant positive feedback mechanism? Will the climate stabilize if and when we reach zero emissions? Zeke Hausfather is a climate scientist and energy systems analyst whose research focuses on observational temperature records, climate models, and mitigation technologies. He was the senior climate analyst at Project Drawdown, and the US analyst for Carbon Brief. He has master's degrees in environmental science from Yale University and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a Ph.D. in climate science from the University of California, Berkeley.

EPISODE 8: Thinking Big. How Government and Markets Can Work Together on Climate Solutions. Climate change is a complicated web of science, politics, technology, economy, and controversy. Where do we begin in building a solution? In this Episode: A discussion with Dr. Zeke Hausfather about realistic greenhouse gas emissions trajectories. The challenges of predicting human behavior. Can we rely on markets and companies to innovate ourselves into a net zero economy? Where does the government fit in? Dr. Hausfather's take on the role of carbon emissions capture technology. Episode Links: Zeke on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hausfath Carbon Brief: https://www.carbonbrief.org/ The Breakthrough Institute: https://thebreakthrough.org/ Welcome back to another episode of Climatrends. I'm meteorologist Susie Martin. At the time we've recorded this, news of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaching levels 50% higher than during the industrial revolution hit the headlines. This is according to measurements from the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii… https://www.carbonbrief.org/met-office-atmospheric-co2-now-hitting-50-higher-than-pre-industrial-levels The data is clear. This is an urgent matter and unfortunately, there is no quick solution to the climate crisis. Climate change is a complicated web of science, politics, technology, economy, and controversy. With oil as the lubricant of the global economy, how can we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels? Coal supplies roughly half of the electricity used in the U.S. and nearly that worldwide. Then there's the matter of infrastructure. Approximately 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions come from infrastructure construction and operations such as power plants, buildings, and transport. There are layers upon layers upon layers to this. There are two main players to the solution: the government and markets. There is a growing expectation that your company be not only prepared to handle the business implications of physical and transitional risks associated with climate change, but also do your part to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. It's tricky because this is a moving target as policies shift and new science emerges. Our goal with the podcast is to have meaningful discussions with true experts with a business lens and peel the layers. I'm particularly excited about our guest today. We're going to be discussing the complicated dynamics of climate change and what this means for businesses. What technologies may be part of the solution? What is the role of government? How is this going to affect markets? One thing is for sure: going into this blindly is a dangerous proposition for your business. Note that in this episode, we mention the IPCC AR5 report. For those that don't know, it is the Fifth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released in 2014. We also briefly discuss RCP scenarios that were used in the IPCC AR5. RCP stands for representative concentration pathway. The RCP scenarios are an attempt to predict future greenhouse gas emissions trajectories based on human behavior. The four RCPs range from very high (RCP 8.5) to very low (RCP 2.6) future concentrations. Without further delay… let's begin.

Featured interview: Analysis on the weakening connection between economic growth and carbon emissions -경제성장률과 이산화탄소 배출량 간 관계 분석 Guest: Dr. Zeke Hausfather, Director of Climate and Energy, Breakthrough Institution

…have to come from the arc of Asia facing the bullets, because the American century is over… It's possible to be increasingly optimistic about climate change and to recognize that we still have a huge way to go… If you want to see a coral reef other than with your VR goggles, start scuba diving now…Zeke Hausfather: Climate scientist working on temp records, climate and energy system models. Director of Climate and Energy at The Breakthrough Institute Global Warming:We are now at 1.2℃—2.15℉ above preindustrial, with temperature rising at 0.2℃—0.36℉ every decade, with a lot of momentum behind that rise…Key Insights:Brad DeLong: ‘Fifteen years ago solar power was going to be burning switchgrass in a closed carbon cycle…. We thought that Nikola Tesla had won the battle of the systems against Thomas Edison because battery technology is  poisonous, corrosive, and incredibly difficult—as opposed to Tesla winning the battle of the system, simply because he was an absolute amazing genius who could make electrons get up and dance in high-power alternating current in ways that should not have been possible. Now we know better…’Zeke Hausfather: ‘Technology is the sauce: 15 years ago we were talking as if it was this giant trade-off between the economy and and the environment… hat was baked into these climate economics… the entire assumption…. In 2009 solar was $350 a megawatt-hour…. The price of solar has fallen 10 fold. The price of wind has fallen threefold, the price of batteries has fallen tenfold. Do not underestimate the extent to which technology enables…. It's possible to be increasingly optimistic about climate change and to recognize that we still have a huge way to go… even if we have started taking the worst possible outcomes off the table…. We shouldn't give up hope…’Brad DeLong: ‘The American century is over. The United States has broken so many promises over the past four years. No fraction of the Republican party will commit to being “globalist” ever again. Global political leadership will have to come from the arc of Asia from China through to Pakistan—the six great river valleys of Asia plus the monsoon regions with all their subsistence farmers who are in the frontline and will be taking the bullets of damage from global warming as they need the right amount of water at the right time to live, The minds of these Asian governments will be concentrated over the next 60 years. And when they say “bark “,I think the rest of the world will have no choice but to go “ARF!”Noah Smith: ‘Everything's downstream from technology. Technology determines the possibilities of politics, the trade-off functions of economics—all the entire terms of debate. And that technology does not fall from the sky. We live not in Ed Prescott world but Paul Romer world, where technology is something that we choose to make. We do not think enough about purposeful making of technologies that changes the game and our constraints…’Brad DeLong: ‘If you want to see a coral reef other than with your VR goggles, start scuba diving now…’All: ‘HEXAPODIA!…’On the Front Lines & Likely to Take the Bullets:The 2 billion of the global poor who currently live in the six great river valleys plus the monsoon lands of Asia are (a) among those most at risk from global warming, and (b) the object of concern from states—China and India—highly likely to be global superpowers and thus in positions to act come mid-century.Drone strikes on the coal-fired power plants of countries that do not play ball with China and India? They have every incentive to try to keep the monsoons in the right place at the right time with the right amount of water—plus trying to keep enough but not too much and not too irregular water flows through the Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Yangtze, and Yellow Rivers:References:Kevin Cowtan & al.: Robust Comparison of Climate Models with Observations Using Blended Land-Air & Ocean Sea-Surface Temperatures: ‘Estimates of recent surface temperature evolution fall at the lower end of climate model projections… a systematic bias in model‐observation comparisons arising from differential warming rates between sea-surface temperatures and surface-air temperatures…. A further bias arises from the treatment of temperatures in regions where the sea ice boundary has changed… 38% of the discrepancy in trend… LINK: Lijing Cheng & al.: How Fast Are the Oceans Warming?: ’About 93% of the energy imbalance accumulates in the ocean as increased ocean heat content…. Models reliably project changes in OHC… LINK: Zeke Hausfather & Glen P. Peters: Emissions: The ‘Business as Ssual’ Story Is Misleading: ‘Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome—more-realistic baselines make for better policy… LINK: S. C. Sherwood & al.: An Assessment of Earth’s Climate Sensitivity Using Multiple Lines of Evidence: ’Earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity per doubling of atmospheric CO2, characterized by an effective sensitivity S… [via] feedback process understanding, the historical climate record, and the paleoclimate record. An S value lower than 2 K is difficult to reconcile with any…. The amount of cooling during the Last Glacial Maximum provides strong evidence against values of S greater than 4.5 K… LINK: Zeke Hausfather & al: Evaluating the Performance of Past Climate Model Projections: ‘Climate models published over the past five decades were skillful in predicting subsequent GMST changes, with most models examined showing warming consistent with observations, particularly when mismatches between model‐projected and observationally estimated forcings were taken into account… LINK: Noah Smith: Economists Are Out of Touch With Climate Change: ‘Researchers strive for contrarian insights. They should get the science right first… LINK: &, of course:Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep (Remember: You can subscribe to this… weblog-like newsletter… here: There’s a free email list. There’s a paid-subscription list with (at the moment, only a few) extras too.) Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe