About this transcript: This is a full AI-generated transcript of Climate Change: What to Know/What to Do with Climate Scientist JAMES HANSEN from Climate Chat, published November 13, 2026. The transcript contains 15,785 words with timestamps and was generated using Whisper AI.
"let's see if it goes um got it dan can you check the summary the ai summary i was clicking off the and i i hadn't seen that one before i think we're um can you just hold on i think i did it said yes to me here we are we are live oh okay so here we are and let me do a well we don't even have to do..."
[00:00:00] Speaker 1: let's see if it goes um got it dan can you check the summary the ai summary i was clicking off the and i i hadn't seen that one before i think we're um can you just hold on i think i did it said yes
[00:00:14] Dan Miller: to me here we are we are live oh okay so here we are and let me do a well we don't even have to do the the slide let me get back to zoom um and okay everyone oh the ai is on it says okay there we go hello everyone and welcome to climate chat i am your host dan miller and today we have a very very special show for you we have the one and the only james hansen uh renowned climate scientist who's been telling us for a very long time about the dangers ahead and what we should do and somehow people haven't listened enough and we're going to talk about that in many many other subjects today but uh first of all welcome jim i have a very very brief uh bio for those who don't know jim uh dr james hansen studied at the university of iowa under dr james van allen of the van allen radiation belt fame i don't know how many people know about that but i certainly knew that name for a very very long time he started studying the atmosphere and climate of venus but then switched to studying the earth because he realized that the climate of the earth was changing before our eyes and that would be something really interesting to do and uh he then became the director of the nasa goddard institute of space science uh he retired from that and is now an adjunct professor at columbia at the columbia earth institute where he directs the program on climate science awareness and solutions besides studying climate science dr hansen has been advocating and protesting for climate action and as a result has been arrested multiple times that you told me once how many i was kind of amazed uh dr hansen has an amazing background that we're not going to have a chance to cover here so i if you are interested in that i recommend that you read his book storms of my grandchildren and that has some great incredible stories actually of his uh time at nasa advocating for climate change resistance that you that you ran into and what you did about it and maybe we'll cover a few of those tidbits uh today but with that first of all welcome jim it's great to have you here and to start off i have just a really basic question for you what message would you like to send to young people about climate change oh your audio well all of a sudden jim wait wait wait check your audio not working no no there you go
[00:03:03] James Hansen: okay oh i see i think i i cut it off by putting my notepad on my computer so let me ask you that it
[00:03:10] Dan Miller: well let me ask you that again jim uh what message would you like to send to young people about
[00:03:15] James Hansen: climate change yeah yeah thanks dan so i i requested that you uh let me start with the bottom line because you know what always happens i give a talk we get into all this stuff that's going on with climate and it sounds not too good and so people get depressed but actually i don't think that young people should feel depressed i think they should recognize there's a challenge and i think they should be invigorated to do something about it and they can and that's what i i hope to get them to understand now i i recognize my audience is seldom young people you know even if i give a talk at university it is often i look out of the audience and it's a lot of older people students come if they have to come for course credit and and i you know i understand i was a student once too and you're you're kind of overwhelmed just by doing a good job as a student but let me let me let me uh let me give you the bad news first the bad news is that our climate system is characterized by a delayed response and amplifying feedbacks which makes it a very dangerous system and this has been understood for a long time because at in in the paper pipeline global warming in the pipeline i start out with describing this conference or symposium in 1982 where the president of exxon research and engineering correctly described the situation because of the ocean's thermal inertia you get a delayed response when you change the forcings the composition of the atmosphere and you get amplifying feedbacks so his conclusion was with such a system you need anticipation you have to take action before you get the full responses or you're in trouble and what so what uh but but this delayed response is good news and bad news because the delay does give you an opportunity to make changes before you get the full response and in particular although jewel charney estimated in his famous report in 1979 he said well the response may be delayed a few decades by the inertia of the upper layers of the ocean well now we know the delay is longer than that and and furthermore the delay depends upon climate sensitivity if the sensitivity is higher the delay is longer and the reason is that the feedbacks don't come into play in response to the forcing they come into play in response to the global temperature and therefore the response time the response time actually showed this in a 1985 paper analytically that if the mixing into the ocean is approximately diffusive then the response time goes like the square of the sensitivity okay that's
[00:07:04] Dan Miller: i that's we're trying to avoid the uh the geeky stuff today i want to maybe just talk a little bit but when you say delay and inertia what does what does that mean uh like just for for the average person doesn't know about climate science in terms of like are you you're i think you're saying when we put some co2 emissions in the air we don't actually see the impact of that for quite a while so we have to really be careful because the full impact comes decades later and yet you're committed to it by that time is that what you're saying
[00:07:39] James Hansen: well if you leave the forcing there and if you leave the change in the atmosphere's composition in place then uh our estimates are that in it takes a hundred years just to get sixty percent of the response and it takes a thousand years to get ninety percent so and and that's for what we call the fast feedbacks uh i kind of i feel some i may have introduced that terminology but they're actually the slow feedbacks are things like the chains of the ice sheet size well some of that can actually occur faster than than some of the fast feedback response so it's a little confusing yeah okay but uh but the point is that we have only experienced a fraction of the warming due to the gases that are already in the atmosphere okay and uh some of that response is coming pretty soon so therefore when the secretary general of the united nations tells us that we can still keep global warming below one and a half two degrees or below two degrees that's that's not correct you know so i said they're lying well maybe they're not lying maybe they're just ignorant they haven't been informed but they've got this huge scientific organization intergovernmental panel on climate change somebody should be telling these policy makers the truth and the truth is we we can no longer avoid one and a half degrees in fact we're going to experience one and a half degrees within a year or so it's the average temperature over the last 12 months is 1.39 1.4 degrees and it's going to go up above 1.5 degrees in over the next several months because we're still in this el nino uh and furthermore it's going to go to two degrees celsius uh that's that's going to happen unless we take purposeful action to affect the planet's energy balance we cannot do it by reducing emissions fast enough we cannot reduce emissions fast enough if if we if we reduced emissions to zero today then okay we wouldn't go to two degrees but we're not going to do that you know eighty percent of our energy is still coming from fossil fuels you're not going to instantly reduce that to zero uh so that's a problem so this is the this is the bad news well let's keep
[00:10:47] Dan Miller: going on the bad news for just a moment because um you as you just said we're going to uh unless we change plans and we're going to talk about like what things we can do but for now on the path we're on we're going to go over two degrees and you mentioned in your most recent letter that that could happen in the 2030s which is much sooner than most people are saying but the goal of the paris accord and and generally in ipcc is to hey let's set this target of two degrees and we'll try and even though you're saying they're wrong let's say we even hit two degrees tell us a little bit about two degrees because they make it sound like it's a it's a holy land you know it's like a good thing to be able to stay
[00:11:30] James Hansen: at two degrees but isn't two degrees pretty bad yeah well we published a paper in 2016 which was titled ice melt sea level rise and super storms evidence that global warming of two degrees celsius is extremely dangerous that was supposed to be the title the paper was reviewed by four referees three of them one of them an ipcc lead author didn't want the paper to be published but the other three all said it should be published but the editorial board got involved and insisted we change the title um and i i wrote uh a letter they said i could not say that it is extremely dangerous and so i uh proposed as a compromise that two degrees celsius is dangerous i removed the adjective uh adverb uh extremely uh but they would not accept that and i said well the public understands the word dangerous if you look down a street if uh as the newspapers have told you that this street has had a lot of crime and uh and you look down that street and you see a gang of of people uh and look like they're holding a blackjack you you would decide to take a different street home because that you would say that street looks dangerous and and strangest thing they the editor told me if i wrote included that explanation in my letter i wouldn't be able to publish the paper but this is supposed to be a journal in which your your even your discussions with the editors are publicly available so i don't understand that but in any
[00:13:48] Dan Miller: but what what what does two degrees i think for like a person who doesn't know anything about climate science what what will the world of two degrees look like well what we concluded in that paper is that
[00:14:01] James Hansen: that that's enough to shut down the overturning ocean circulations the north atlantic meridional overturning circulation or amok and the similar circulation in the southern hemisphere and um within on a time scale of 50 to 150 years you would get sea level rise of several meters which
[00:14:25] Dan Miller: you're would mean you're several meters so like we're talking about 10 feet kind of order of magnitude
[00:14:30] James Hansen: more yeah or more than that because if you if you lose west antarctic ice sheet see what our basis for that we were looking not just at the model but also at the history of the earth and the last time it was more than one degree warmer during the emia there was sea level did go up several meters in less than 100 years which indicates the west antarctic ice sheet collapsed and that was at a temperature less than two degrees warming and we can see what's happening the other the other thing is our our science is is combination of looking at paleo climate looking at global models and looking at what's happening in the real world right now and what's happening in west antarctica is that the ice shelves are melting the grounding lines are moving inland and uh in particular the thwaites glacier has been the grounding lines been moving about a kilometer for a year and if it goes another 20 kilometers it hits this canyon where you would suddenly get very rapid change you would get collapse of that portion of the west antarctic
[00:15:54] Dan Miller: ice sheet and the whole thing would go you can't so you're saying you're saying 10 feet plus the several meters would happen this century by the way they say on the time scale it you know we looked
[00:16:06] James Hansen: at doubling times of 10 years 20 years 40 years if it were 10 years you'd be talking close to 50 year timescale uh from now from now yeah from now so that would be this century if it's 20 years it would be into the next century but you would be locked in once once we push this grounding line beyond uh the canyon then it's kind of out of our control so we don't want to do that that's why it's really important to get these things understood and to get actions on the time scale of the next several years
[00:16:43] Dan Miller: you know okay and but besides besides sea level rise which is certainly a huge huge thing what other kind we've seen lots of floods and droughts and that kind of thing extreme weather is it linear it's like we're at like one degree of war is two degrees twice as bad or is there or is it much much worse than at one degree for two degrees of warming in terms of all those other impacts all those other
[00:17:06] James Hansen: impacts the increases in the extreme events that that was that was understood also decades ago that as the planet gets warmer and the atmosphere holds more water vapor you know you get more extreme events and i i don't know i don't think that's terribly non-linear it's not linear in the sense that you for each degree you get i think a seven percent more water vapor on average um and so that's not quite linear but um but the point is we're already at a point where those effects are non-negligible and so you don't want to double this and that's at a global warming of 1.2 degrees which is what we had up until this year so you don't want to go to two days you don't want to double those effects
[00:18:11] Dan Miller: so so the goal this goal the ipcc or paris accord goal of hitting two degrees but not going over that's not really a good thing it's not it's not a good goal it's kind of a bad goal we should not go
[00:18:24] James Hansen: there is what you're saying that's right and for the sake of maintaining our coastal cities maintaining our shorelines approximately where they are we need to go back to a temperature that we've had for the last 10 000 years we really should uh if we want to keep our shorelines two degrees is not a good target
[00:18:52] Dan Miller: it's now in your 2012 ted talk you also said that the last time co2 was today's value which back then was i think less than 400 parts per million it's now 420. but even back then uh that last time it was that high sea levels many millions of years ago were 75 feet higher than today or yeah we're we're warm enough now for the pliocene and and yeah so that's the long term that's not 100 years but that's the
[00:19:19] James Hansen: long term sea level rise we're shooting for is like 75 feet or so yeah 15 to 25 meters was the plio was the early pliocene so we we don't want to go there and we we're now getting a taste of where we're headed and we're going to need to understand this so it's it's going to take a while to educate the public about what the situation is but we had better be ready to take actions within within several years within less than a decade well one of the things i think that people don't fully understand so i i i sorry dan i made a mistake oh okay i should have let you take me down this let me let me finish my introduction okay keep going keep going all right okay so uh so uh yeah so i was uh headed to uh cop 28 and i got as far as amsterdam and i decided why am i going there because my ex-student and postdoc serbie menon was one of the main people making the agenda and she had was putting me on the agenda but she was overruled so i was not going to be able to present anything anyhow so why so i i i i i got it i stopped at amsterdam and i got a new hat from the hatter which is my which is my hatter in amsterdam uh but that was all and then i i decided to go back and and work on sophie's planet um that's what i'm doing now yeah my next book but now but now let me give you the good news we still live on a spectacular planet it's it's unbelievable just think i always like to give as an example of the monarch butterfly so amazing um but it's just one of the thousands of amazing things on our planet so we've got this great planet that we want to preserve and we still can do it and another good thing is young people have enormous political power you know i when i was speaking on campuses in 2008 young people were coming out in support of barack obama while hillary clinton was the expected democratic nominee but because of this enthusiasm for obama he actually overtook her and and he you know he spoke about a planet in peril and um they just assumed that that he would address this issue um but what did he actually do he went to the big banks and the big green big banks for solving the financial crisis and big green for advising him on climate policies i tried to send him i mean i sent him a letter well after he was elected before he took office but he had selected um a science advisor from harvard uh who would not deliver my letter because he thought he knew everything that obama would need to know but he he was basically uh following the big green um policy uh goals and and uh so my my my first uh uh advice was you have to put a price on carbon and you can do it in a way that that uh the public would like would with this carbon fee and dividend but anyway that was never that could have been part of this bill which congress had to pass to avoid uh financial calamity uh but anyway that didn't happen but uh so what is the fundamental problem the fundamental problem is the role of money in our government you know benjamin franklin said that uh well every 200 years you're going to need a revolution because by that time graft will have taken over corruption will have taken over well that was a remarkable prediction because that the time scale was about right in fact uh president eisenhower uh president eisenhower in his farewell address warned about the military industrial complex and after his speech his brother asked him why did you leave out the the draft of the speech spoke about the military industrial congressional complex uh eisenhower said well there was too much to take on all three of them i couldn't take on congress also but that's the basic problem that congress is now takes money from to take on all three of them to take on all three of them to take on the military as well as if there's
[00:25:16] Speaker ?: some special interests and both parties do this so if you think about it first of all there was the there's
[00:25:16] James Hansen: the militarism where we are the defense industry advocates for a big military budget and we have military people in something like 70 countries and we periodically overthrow governments that we don't like but that's one problem another the pharmaceutical industry they keep the price of uh drugs and uh medical health uh artificially high uh then there's the unfair tax laws wealthy people lobby they bribe congress to keep the tax structure very unfair um gun laws we we what why do we allow machine guns to be available or assault weapons to be available to just about anybody it doesn't make sense climate policy fee and dividend is with all economists now have signed on to a statement that we should do that but we don't get it because the fossil fuel industry doesn't doesn't like that idea it would cause phase out of fossil fuels so tell people what that means
[00:26:42] Dan Miller: because i think a lot of people listening so in carbon fee and dividend you put a rising fee on the extraction of fossil fuels at the well mine or port of entry and it goes up every year and it's a tax essentially on fossil fuels and you take a hundred percent of the money collected and give it back to every legal resident on an equal basis so the bottom 70 percent of households actually make more money on the money they get than what they pay in higher prices so they support a very high fee which helps phase out fossil fuels did i get that get that right yeah and there's a link in the description by the way for youtube of a paper that jim and i wrote on fee and dividend and why it's the best policy so you can click on that and read that report that we sent to congress so
[00:27:27] James Hansen: well my my conclusion is that um we're not going to you know so so young people have done things like oh trying to lobby congress to get a reasonable gun loss and they get very very little progress you i i don't i don't see how we solve these problems and the climate one in particular without having a political party that takes no money from any special interests and look at how it wasn't just this barack obama thing but bernie sanders almost overtook hillary simply because in all the college campuses all these young people were coming out in support of bernie sanders
[00:28:16] Dan Miller: but you said we have a few years to act are you suggesting that to fight climate change in the next few years step one is to come up with a new political party i don't think that's going to happen
[00:28:25] James Hansen: i think i think i think but by 2028 we had better have well look how fast those political actions that i talked about how fast they occurred you do have to have uh you have to get the third party on the ballot and you need to have ranked voting so there is there is this homework that needs to be done and that and you we you don't want to be a spoiler in the 2024 election uh we have to preserve our democracy so that we can have a party that takes no money uh but uh but we need benjamin franklin said we need a revolution every 200 years and that and i don't mean a revolution with guns blazing but it needs to be a of maybe a voting revolution a voting revolution a party that takes no money from special interests the center would flock to such a party that's the reason that we oscillate between these political extremes because the public doesn't like results from one party so they then they go to the other extreme but most a lot of people are in the center and we they would support a good uh third party if you need to have a jfk type uh political candidate well jim are you ready to run are you uh i'm 82 years old
[00:30:05] Dan Miller: you're close to biden biden 82 or 81. i anyway yeah i'm really invited let's let's get back we're going to keep talking about what to do and and this is a very big picture of what to do we're going to get hopefully a little more specific on technically what we should do just one one more thing on
[00:30:21] James Hansen: that just okay i i young people should not be depressed yeah this is a job but it's it's a uh it's it's great uh challenge uh and compare it you know when i when i was a college student i had to check very with great interest every year the letter from the draft board i didn't want to go to vietnam but i but and fortunately i got good grades and so then i didn't they didn't uh draft me but in my the generation before me they went to uh fight in europe or in in the pacific during the world war two many of them didn't come back you know so this is not harder your your young people's job is not harder than
[00:31:14] Dan Miller: prior generations um and so uh yeah but so let's spend a little time trying to understand the challenge and then let's get back to what needs to be done but i want to start off because you came up with what i consider a landmark paper recently global warming and the pipeline and one of the things you said in there is that the uh the warming we get and you talked about this with delay and inertia but the warming we get with the fast feedbacks from a doubling of co2 is 4.8 degrees celsius where the ipcc uses a value of three degrees so that's a big difference so what uh just very quickly you know how did you come up with that you know very briefly and why why doesn't the ipcc agree with you even though you
[00:32:03] James Hansen: provided the scientific evidence yeah it's um it's a pretty simple story uh there there was a mystery um 40 years ago when we first got the ice core data and realized uh that greenhouse gases had changed we very accurate data for how they had changed between the glacial periods and the interglacials like the the president hollow scene that we live in which we're now leaving but um so that if you compare the last ice age with the current warm period you can infer empirically how sensitive the climate system is because we know how the atmospheric composition change and we know how the albedo the reflectivity of the surface change because we know how big the ice sheets were during the ice age but we in order to infer that you need to know what was the temperature during the ice age and there was this big project climate funded by the national science foundation which concluded that the sea surface temperatures were such and such leading if you put those in a model you get the world was three and a half degrees colder during the last ice age that would imply a climate sensitivity of only about 2.4 degrees or doubled co2 but we were very suspicious that that was not right because the paleoclimate the paleoclimate evidence on land implied it was actually a lot colder than that and the the uh ice snow line on the mountains uh had descended a kilometer which was it should have only gone a half a kilometer if the world was only three and a half degrees older well finally that um but the way that this nsf project got the sea surface temperatures was to assume that the microscopic biology in the ocean surface would migrate to stay within the same temperatures that they prefer today but what if on the millennial timescales this biology can partially adapt to the temperature change rather than migrate it just adapts to it well uh so about three years ago jessica tierney uh omitted the biology data because there's now enough chemical data for proxy temperature change and she found that the ice age was six to seven degrees colder not three and a half degrees colder and if you isolate it to just the lgm glacial maximum 18 to 21 000 years ago it was seven degrees so it's twice as cold as what we had estimated 40 years ago and that's what changed it from 2.4 to 4.8 and 4.8 is within the total range that ipcc estimates they always give a very big range their best estimates three degrees right and most of the models tend to give three degrees because most of the models have little cloud feedback the 2.4 degrees is consistent with fixed clouds of course very little cloud change but now some of the more sophisticated cloud modeling are actually coming up with four or five or six degree double co2 warming that is pro and that's consistent with
[00:36:19] Dan Miller: what we now infer so to summarize what you just said we we thought that we we know how much the co2 dropped in the ice age but and we had data on the temperature but we didn't think it was a big change which would mean that the climate's not too sensitive to a drop or increase in co2 but now we've learned it was actually much colder twice as cold in the ice age than we previously thought so that look that that 100 parts per million drop was very sensitive in getting colder and therefore our 140 increase so far will be very sensitive or increase more warming than we thought right yeah but the other thing you found in your paper was that cooling from aerosols or things like coal plant smoke smoke from ships and other industrial processes that you put particles in the air that the cooling we get from that partially because the clouds is much higher than what the ipcc also assumes is that is that correct
[00:37:22] James Hansen: yeah so the the thing was how did if the typical ipcc model had too low sensitivity how how does that how can we reconcile how can both an ipcc model and our model which is more sensitive both agree with observed temperature change over the last century well there's an independent variable and that's the amount of of uh aerosols in the atmosphere because there are two important forcings one of them is greenhouse gases and the other is the small particles which reflect sun and they cause a cooling and uh of course the modelers tended to choose the amount of aerosol since it's unmeasured that's a whole another story uh but it should be measured but it's not uh and uh they used a relatively small aerosol amount but in fact uh we present evidence in a number of ways but for example again going back to the paleo climate we know that over the last six thousand years the um greenhouse gases increase uh probably because of deforestation and rice agriculture which produced methane deforestation produced co2 but the temperature did not go up it just stayed about the same and that's presumably because in addition to producing greenhouse gases we're producing aerosols because humans 6 000 years ago began to deforest and their fuel was wood and burning wood produces a lot of aerosols as well as producing co2 which reflects the sun and and cools cools yeah and so so but this uh these aerosols are very harmful for human health they killed six to eight a million people per year so we're trying to reduce them and there's this very specific very uh well-defined inadvertent experiment caused by the international maritime organization when it made new rules for the sulfur content of uh fuels on ships with uh in with the rules introduced in 2015 and then strengthened in 2020. and that uh that has a noticeable we can see from the satellites that the the contrails that you usually see behind the ships in certain parts of the ocean are not there anymore because those clouds cloud trails are produced by these aerosols serving as condensation nuclei for cloud drugs so that's that has reduced the albedo the reflectivity of the earth by about four tenths of a percent which is a big change as if as if the albedo change from 29 29 of the sunlight getting reflected by the planet has now become 28.6 that additional four tenths is being absorbed by the earth instead and that's equivalent to a co2 increase of about 100 ppm wow it's it's a big deal so so what you were
[00:41:33] Dan Miller: saying then is and i just to summarize it what your your data says the the warming from greenhouse gases is much more than what the ipc says but the cooling is also much more so the actual temperature we have today you both show the same thing because i'll pick i'll pick an example let's say we hit 1.5 next year and then it's the ipc saying well that's two degrees of warming from greenhouse gases and and minus half a degree from aerosol that gives you 1.5 but you might be saying well we really have three degrees of warming from uh picking these numbers three three degrees of warming from greenhouse gases and minus 1.5 from aerosol also 1.5 so if they cancel each quote cancel each other out why should people care about that what what what impact will your new data have on their lives over the next 10
[00:42:25] James Hansen: or 20 years well what is going to happen um you know it's a different way to to analyze it is in terms of what is the forcing caused by the greenhouse gases and the aerosols the greenhouse gases we can calculate very accurately that it's four watts approximately four watts per meter squared of forcing and we would say that the aerosol forcing is probably about minus two so it's reduced it's cut the net forcing in half while the ipcc's number is more like minus one watt for the aerosols so their net forcing is is three watts and and uh now so if the real world is uh that the aerosols are minus two watts then we have now reduced that to more like minus one and a half so we're going to get warming due to the aerosol reduction as well as the warming from the greenhouse gas increase and so we're going to get an acceleration of warming over the next um 10 or 20 years um and we we will see it even in the next couple of years we're beginning to see it already so i the so i argue that you know there's a huge natural variation of temperature and that's what makes it difficult to see the impact of uh forcing change but because the aerosol amount peaked in about 2010 we we predict that the rate of global warming is going to increase by 50 to 100 percent post 2010 and within a few years that will be clear whether in fact that is happening
[00:44:44] Dan Miller: okay um all right um well i got so many questions to ask so basically by the way you predicted in your recent paper that the the this acceleration is happening now and that the i forgot 2000 what was 2005 to 2000 2015 number was 0.18 degrees per decade of warming and now we're going up by 50 to 100 percent of that even right i think you were kind of implying in your very last writing 0.49 a half a degree per decade of warming almost which would be a huge amount more which means we would reach two degrees far far sooner than what the ipcc is saying which i assume they're continuing assuming 0.18 degrees per the
[00:45:32] James Hansen: number the number that you referred to is not a prediction that's the reality we just compared the uh temperature now to the temperature during the prior el nino and the rate of change between those two el
[00:45:48] Dan Miller: ninos is uh 0.49 degrees per decade which is a much faster crazy high warming yeah okay um so let's talk of another thing you mentioned in your global pipeline paper which worries a lot of people so i want to get your clarification on it you talked about the fast feedbacks but then you also looked at the long-term feedbacks as you said the change in ice sheets over the earth over long periods of time and you said that the based on uh the forcing today if it stayed constant that we would hit eight to ten degrees celsius and then we would hit eight to ten degrees celsius celsius celsius celsius celsius celsius celsius celsius so that got a lot of people worried so is that something we're committed to or is the future still in our hands and what does that mean but how should people think about that number that that would be the
[00:46:46] James Hansen: equilibrium response if you left the atmospheric composition in place permanently but it would you would end up without any ice sheet on antarctica or greenland so obviously this is going to take time uh so it's not something that you need to worry about happening this century or even next century it takes longer than that because as i said just the thermal inertia of the ocean means that it takes a hundred years just to get 60 percent of the fast feedbacks it takes a thousand years to get 90 percent so the equilibrium warming is not something that you have to worry about happening in your lifetime or your
[00:47:39] Dan Miller: grandchildren's lifetime but that that atmosphere is not going to stay constant right either we're going to keep working to increase the composition of sea or we're going to decrease it over time and hopefully we're going to decrease it right so that's more like a scenario that you were looking at not you weren't
[00:47:54] James Hansen: predicting the future it's the it's the classical uh problem to look at that's what charney looked at what is the equilibrium response to a given uh forcing and this was useful because it's the relevant response when you look at the entire cenozoic era the last 66 million years and a reason that it's useful to do that is it it uh one thing that we show is that the point the co2 amount at the time the planet went from ice free to beginning to have ice on antarctica was at about 450 ppm so and and so which we're almost at yeah but the the thing is and the ice sheet models would tell you oh no you need 800 ppm in order to melt the antarctic ice sheet well that's not what the cenozoic data tells us so it it's uh an indication that ice sheet models are not realistic they're not realistically sensitive to uh change in the forcing
[00:49:16] Dan Miller: okay which is how much uh can we go over an hour by the way because you don't have another interview coming up because yeah that's right i want to get through a lot of things here and and i want to get back to the solutions and especially the technical but i do have a couple more like you know climate sciencey questions for you and uh you mentioned this earlier so i want to get to it a little more detail in in in your previous papers and writings and what uh as well as a recent paper from ditlasen and ditlasen if i'm saying that right we're going to interview one of them in a few weeks on climate chat you and they warn of a collapse around mid-century of the atlantic meridional overturning circulation or the amok or the ocean conveyor belt that takes heat from the tropics and brings it up to northern europe keeps northern europe in a nice climate uh and you're saying that you and they are saying this could shut down around mid-century like around 2050 time frame so first of all what does an amok shutdown mean to people what what are some of the things that will happen if that does shut down and i understand it's irreversible if it does and uh what should we do about that what should we do to
[00:50:25] James Hansen: try to prevent an amok shutdown okay so the reason uh yeah we yeah that was this uh ice melt sea level rise in superstorms paper is something that we worked on for a decade uh because it done an experiment in 2006 which suggested that the realistic rates of fresh water injection from increasing polar ice melt is going to uh cause this shutdown of the deep water formation and i you know the other models were not getting that and so i really had to figure out what's going on in our model and we were trying to reduce i i think that there's a common problem in most models and that is excessive mixing especially small scale mixing which is parameterized in ways which are partly intended to stabilize the models and unfortunately the real world doesn't do that so anyway we we tried to minimize um unphysical mixing and found that in our model that if we start with observed rates of fresh water rejection and let that increase with a doubling time of 10 years or 20 years that within a few decades we actually get the amok shutting down and i think that's the right answer and i think the real world uh is beginning to show signs of that it's it's slowing down and the southern meridional overturning circulation also is slowing down for the same reason uh and that what does that
[00:52:33] Dan Miller: mean because let's assume you're right okay let's assume you're right and it and we stay on the path we're on which is not the right path to be on we'll talk about getting off that path but we get to two degrees boom it shuts down that amok doesn't mean anything to anyone you know outside of climate circles so what should a regular person be should people should be worried about that will that change our lives in any
[00:52:56] James Hansen: way well it's going to make a climate very chaotic in the north atlantic region you know it will tend to cool the ocean in the north atlantic it will make much more stormy we showed that in our ice melt paper uh very general ways you can uh infer that it's going to get much stormier and we have evidence from what happened late in the emian period as it uh cooled off and started heading toward uh ice age uh but uh one implication is that the normal transport of heat from the southern hemisphere into the north atlantic will stop or slow down which makes it warmer in the southern ocean and increases this melt of the ice shelves around antarctica so it it also has undesirable consequences for the stability of the west antarctica ice sheet so it's both uh bad for climate in in the north
[00:54:16] Dan Miller: atlantic and it's uh bad for the sea level issue we actually interviewed matthew england on climate chat uh last year i guess it was and uh or earlier this year i can't remember uh he did a study of what what happens not not not uh when the amok will collapse or what happens once it does and he he was also saying that there would be much lower rainfall across the entire northern hemisphere uh that would impact agriculture productivity so let's see he said very stormy in the north atlantic storms bigger than we've ever seen i think you mentioned at one point uh england's going to get northern england uh northern europe's going to get very cold but now you also mentioned that this warm water will stay around antarctica and accelerate sea level rise so we'll get much higher sea level rise faster um storminess and also don't you also get more water on the east coast almost immediately because of the well we're getting the flashback the flashback we're getting
[00:55:19] James Hansen: that a little bit already but the real issue is of course whether we're going to lose the west antarctic ice sheet whether we uh set in motion the loss of that for our grandchildren uh regardless of what they do so that's why we need to begin to take action soon if we're going to uh have a chance
[00:55:44] Dan Miller: of keeping our coastlines where they are okay so we talked i mean i could spend hours talking about the climate science side of things i want to move a little bit more into policy your what how you're perceived your uh the ipcc doesn't think the amox is going to collapse soon they say it's going to be you know next century uh they also don't agree with the findings of your pipeline paper they think you're three degrees instead of 4.8 um and you've written long ago about the scientific reticence you said why do you think first of all the the why what what do you mean by scientific reticence number one and why do you think the ipcc is having trouble and the ipc scientists are having trouble accepting
[00:56:31] James Hansen: your research what what's going on um i think there are a number of factors in scientific reticence there's this uh article by barber published in science in 1961 so it's more than 60 years ago and it's uh one of the factors is the preference for immediate rewards over delayed rewards so there's the the penalty for crying wolf for warning that there's a danger is immediate but there's no penalty for fiddling while rome is burning so it's it's there's a reluctance to to cry wolf and you'll find it's hard to get funding if you do yes so uh i think there's there the the incentives do not do not line up for um for uh warning of a problem like this but you provided the
[00:57:56] Dan Miller: scientific bait you know you didn't just say hey i think it's 4.8 degrees climate sensitivity you said here's the data here's the ice age here's this here's that you laid it all out in the well-researched paper yet many climate scientists are i think without even really reading the paper in detail are kind of saying nah we we like our other numbers does that you're right does that make sense
[00:58:23] James Hansen: they didn't have time to read the paper it is a long paper their their comments came out so quickly i couldn't possibly have read the paper um yeah but so for example when i testified in congress in 1988 there was then uh an article written by richard kerr in science magazine which was called hansen versus the world on global warming and there there was a statement by one scientist that said well if there's a secret ballot at this meeting we would probably agree the greenhouse effect is actually changing the climate and then another one said what bothers that is that we have scientists telling congress things that we are reluctant to say ourselves it it kind of is an example of their reticence to say everything that they know i think the scientific community knows just how dangerous the situation is the situation is right now and is not fully um describing that um it's um yeah there there are various reasons for reticence but um i think um we will you know as uh scientists we have a moral obligation to to uh young people to tell everything that we know and i i think the situation is pretty clear so you kind of answered the next one i was going to
[01:00:19] Dan Miller: ask you about you know you testified 1988 you said what would happen you said we had to you know reduce fossil fuel emissions instead we increased them tremendously since that time everything you said would happen at least by this point has already happened the opening northwest passage the the emergence of the global warming signal from the noise and on and on um you were all right and yet the world still is not acting on what you said back then or what everyone is saying even if you say the ipcc scientists don't agree necessarily with how bad you say it is they still say we need immediate action we have to do all these things and the world still isn't really doing much of anything it can you've been probably frustrated about this for for many many decades but do you have any insight you can share on why you think the world and i don't mean just again specifically scientists sure policymakers even the public is sort of ignoring this great this great problem before us yeah it's
[01:01:20] James Hansen: because the emissions are primarily from burning fossil fuels and fossil fuels have been very useful they've raised the living standard of much of the world uh they're still providing 80 percent of our energy one one gallon 3.7 liters of gasoline or petrol as the equivalent of several hundred hours of work by a healthy adult that's extremely valuable and unless you have an equally good alternative uh and equally priced you're not you they're going to keep using that because there are other parts of the world china india africa who want to raise their living standards that makes it um difficult um well we have alternatives
[01:02:16] Dan Miller: now we have alternatives now of course right i mean we have uh renewable energy which is actually for electricity generation is getting to be less expensive than fossil fuel generated energy so that's good
[01:02:27] James Hansen: um yeah now let me uh comment on that uh the uh sure solar panel if you look at how many kilowatts you can get out of the solar panel when the sun is shining it seems to be inexpensive but you have to take account of the whole energy system you have to uh have reliable energy uh 24 7. and you know there are countries that are trying very hard germany denmark and if you look at their electricity prices those two countries have the highest electricity prices uh it's not and it's a lot of work they've been it's they've got very good engineers in germany and they're working very hard on this you need transmission lines from the places where you have your renewable energy your windmills or whatever uh you need battery if you're not going to have a dispatchable energy source you're going to have to have batteries or something to store the energy for when the wind isn't blowing and that turns out to be expensive and it's also but dropping
[01:03:48] Dan Miller: incredibly dramatically dropped 90 percent in the last you know 10 years and it's continuing to drop dramatically well the battery in my car was a thousand dollars a kilowatt hour when i bought my car in 2012 and now it's 88 or something like that yeah so but yeah but we could i'd love to we could spend a whole hour on that so i don't want to but we're going to get to nuclear power actually in a moment but i think before we do that you said in your paper and this is a pretty dramatic statement i think that uh you you called for the need to purposely lower the earth energy imbalance that means that the difference between the energy coming in the energy going out we have a problem where there's more energy coming in than going out earth is warming and you think that's very dangerous and you say we have to purposely change that can you talk about first of all how can that be done how can we purposely change the earth energy imbalance what kind of things are you uh suggesting there yeah so
[01:04:54] James Hansen: you know it's understood that we have to if we want to avoid warming that exceeds limits that everyone agrees would be dangerous two degrees for example we've got to do something so ipcc concocted scenarios and in particular it it made one that was intended to keep warming have a two-thirds chance of the warming being less than two degrees that's called rcp 2.6 but that scenario you can make up any scenario but they they did it by means of burning biofuels in power plants capturing the co2 and storing it permanently that is employed on a scale on an enormous scale and it's just not happening so what we see is that we're exceeding that scenario and you'd say okay well then we've got to get some of that co2 out of the air well we know how to do that and it's it's at the moment it's quite expensive in fact just talking about things like direct air capture yeah carbon dioxide removal that kind of thing right so direct air capture of co2 at the level that would be needed to keep on the scenario the two degree scenario is now three and a half to seven trillion dollars a year at the current price of extraction so that's simply not going to happen but
[01:06:37] Dan Miller: that's also at but literally literally at kiloton scale and we want to be at gigaton scale a million times more than that price will probably drop significantly if we scale from kiloton to gigaton
[01:06:47] James Hansen: don't you think oh well but we can't
[01:06:51] Dan Miller: and we gotta probably start it it's like solar panels were super expensive so that's what so those
[01:06:58] James Hansen: so they're assuming so if you want to stay under two degrees you need a miracle and we we don't know that mirror we that may happen so that's why it's going to take several years to for the socialization for the public to understand and accept the fact that if we want to keep a climate that is hospitable for young people we're going to have to do something because we know that we're not going to turn off fossil fuels instantly so we're now at a point where we're going to have to do something in addition unless a miracle occurs so but if that miracle had better to appear within the next few years or uh or we get ready to do something to rebalance the planet's
[01:08:02] Dan Miller: energy balance and that is called uh what i like to call sunlight reflection methods also called solar radiation management or srm is that i assume that's what you're speaking of that we have to reflect more sunlight away from the earth and there are proposed multiple proposed ways to do that i'm wondering if you have any favorites of those um well we know
[01:08:30] James Hansen: i i i don't have a a favorite but we do have the example that when pinatubo volcano went off it it it reduced the energy coming in by three watts per meter square or a year that is more than double that's about double our current energy imbalance so and okay uh so you could so with the stratospheric aerosols you could reflect away the sunlight and actually cool down the planet
[01:09:06] Dan Miller: so people know what that means that means we would purposely put sulfur particles in the stratosphere where they last about a year or so and and that would reflect the sun we are doing that today at the low those coal plants and the ships are putting it in the lower atmosphere where they last about a week i understand um so you're saying we did it on a purpose that that's one method but mimic a large volcano puts sulfur up in the stratosphere reflects sun away cool the earth and that could be done
[01:09:38] James Hansen: that could be done or you could have autonomous sailboats that are spraying uh salt water say with salt particles that would serve as condensation nuclei for clouds and the clouds were marine cloud brightening yeah another method so we we have what do you think about the mirrors putting mirrors on the ground you know about the mirror project so they're all all you have to look at them in terms of what that is practical from a financial standpoint uh they're relatively equivalent but and any of them you could stop if you wanted to uh but we have to look at that i'm not saying we're going to do that today but we have to seriously think about doing it on the time scale of a decade
[01:10:33] Dan Miller: so do a lot of research right now right and and and figure out which one's the best one to do or maybe by the way you can do multiples you don't have to do one i mean you can and of course the highest
[01:10:44] James Hansen: priority has to be on reducing emissions as fast as you practically can uh and i don't do not think that but i think that's what i think that's what i'm talking about uh reflection of sunlight is going to cause emissions uh us not to work on emissions i think actually that'll cause people they don't like the idea of of uh doing aerosol reflection so therefore they'll work harder on trying to reduce
[01:11:16] Dan Miller: emissions i think yeah the people say that's a moral hazard to talk about that but then again i i always think well what you're saying is you're not taking climate seriously in other words you're going to ask fossil fuel companies to pretty please reduce their emission rather than tell them that they have to and if i guess you know if we're assuming we don't take climate change seriously then then we're not then we really have to take it seriously but uh all right so so that's a little bit on that by the way there's another method we didn't mention that a space space reflector at the l1 point between the sun and the earth eli here our co-mod on on this call uh has done a lot of research on the economics of that and the technical feasibility of that so but that's where we've we've had long discussions on climate chat about that but uh so there are these different choices and you're basically saying let's let's do some research right now so we are ready within this decade of starting one of
[01:12:12] James Hansen: these to cool the earth off that's what you're saying yeah if we're if we're right that we see global warming acceleration past one and a half degrees within a year or so then a year or so well on the way to two degrees we we will and we see that the that the grounding line of the ice sheets is continuing to go toward a very dangerous level a point uh we had better be ready to take some action or we're going to lose our coastal cities and more than half of the coastal of the large cities are on coastlines as well as all the other things that we're seeing increasing with uh with the global warming
[01:12:55] Dan Miller: so a lot of people concerned about the side effects from the solar radiation management but basically what i think i hear you saying the side effects of not doing that are really catastrophic losing all our coastal cities and etc versus you know maybe some shifts in rain patterns or something
[01:13:14] James Hansen: like that that might happen yeah of course you you know you flap a butterfly's wings and you change the weather patterns so we we cannot predict exactly where how climate patterns might shift if we affect change the planet's energy balance but we know that overall the climate is going to be much more improved better if we don't have this excessive warming so in any case we need to have a global fund to to uh to help the places where climate anomalies occur and the magnitude of those anomalies will be much less if we keep get the planet back in energy balance and uh get the temperature down a bit okay so let's talk
[01:14:09] Dan Miller: about some of the the broad solutions that you propose in your paper uh one is you called for um for increased cooperation between the east and the west and especially between the u.s and china what would this cooperation look like and how would it benefit action on climate yeah i think a good example
[01:14:28] James Hansen: was uh was uh i was invited to by the kissinger institute on climate in the u.s to attend a uh a meeting in beijing this was in 2013 or 2014 um and i it was on climate and infectious diseases but uh i was the climate scientist from the u.s and um they china was working very hard on developing solar panels and windmills and trying to bring down the cost of those and they're they were very successful at that but at the same time we saw that all the coal emission coal use was continuing to skyrocket there and so i proposed that we have a workshop on uh modern nuclear power and we and uh china hosted this workshop in hainan china and i i proposed that we although the workshop and i we brought the best experts from the united states and uh the top nuclear experts in china and talked about ways that we could make the next generation nuclear power which would be inherently safer than the old technology in the sense that it would shut down in case of uh emergencies or earthquake or whatever and uh but um i suggested that we invite the chinese expert on energy their energy plans and their energy efficiency and and and he did come to the meeting and i talked with him about um fee and dividend and said well that would that would be great for china also because it has the same problem that we do where the wealth disparity is growing and fee and dividend benefits low-income people and he he agreed he said oh let's write a paper together on that well when i got back we had so much trouble uh publishing our paper on the paper on the nuclear uh where there's such a prejudice against it in the united states it it took a year but uh that but we proposed in that that we should u.s the u.s needs to have modern nuclear not the old technology and it but it needs to be cheap it needs to be inexpensive and it should be because as we pointed out the amount of material steel concrete that goes into a nuclear power plant is actually smaller than any uh the competitors the energy costs should be small that from do you like small modular
[01:17:47] Dan Miller: reactor because one of the problems with nuclear is that it every time you build it it's a custom building and building and building costs go up over time not down no exactly wrong uh the uh it should
[01:17:58] James Hansen: not be a custom building so that's what we said you should you should have a a product type uh approval and so you don't have to go back and spend uh five years asking the uh nuclear regulatory commission for approval for approval for a new one it should be identical to the prior ones you make them in a shipyard or in a factory that's the reason to do it smaller and then put together several of them when you want a big plan right so but it it should but uh in order to have the market for driving down the cost the same way we did with renewables where you're making so many it started out renewables were more expensive but it was a lot more expensive more and more they get cheaper and cheaper and we don't have the market in the united states right now for nuclear power plants because of the resistance
[01:18:54] Dan Miller: uh to them it's very expensive i mean i mean for all the reasons you mentioned that it's an expensive
[01:18:59] James Hansen: technology especially there's no reason that it should there's no fundamental reason that it should be
[01:19:04] Dan Miller: expensive are there any particular small modular reactor companies or technology that you've looked
[01:19:11] James Hansen: at that you think are exciting there there are several that are exciting but they have to be they have to be tried they have to be uh developed that's what we could have done in cooperation with china and we're starting to you know bill gates it was building one type of modern nuclear power plant in china but then uh trump said no more technical cooperation so they had to close it down we china is good at driving down the price and partly because they need a lot of them we would like to see them replace their coal plants with no carbon energy sources and they are building renewables they're building windmills and solar panels faster than any other country but they also need energy that's not intermittent they need uh reliable 24 7 energy so they would like to build nuclear but they want to make sure it's good and we could do better if we work together i i should point out by the way there are
[01:20:22] Dan Miller: some uh academics like mark jacobson at stanford that say we can actually do 100 percent 24 7 365 power using renewables and there are some places getting close to that actually in some places no no that's
[01:20:35] James Hansen: wrong that's wrong that's wrong the the serious studies by mit even by google include that you need that 100 renewable is going to be very expensive and it's proven by denmark and germany look at their electricity prices and they're not getting there look how slow it is you know you know the country that did great sweden they decided oh we need to have a hundred percent carbon-free electricity they decided on the design they built 10 nuclear power plants and they went in a decade to carbon-free energy well germany's been working for decades and they're not anywhere near they're still now they're backing off on the
[01:21:21] Dan Miller: nuclear they had because of fukushima and things like that so yeah there's a lot of yeah people have an irrational fear of nuclear i think they should have that fear of coal coal is really dangerous every possible way and will kill you 100 more we're not helped we're not helped by our media which has a bias
[01:21:46] James Hansen: and uh you know for example nuclear waste you know it's contained in these containers uh it doesn't harm anybody and yet it's got this terrible reputation but the waste from the other energy sources is
[01:22:03] Dan Miller: dispersed and mercury in the ocean from the coal waste and gets into rivers it's really awful um but i want to keep going on what young people can do so you've been arrested many times protesting fossil fuels there's a now a growing movement of people especially young people using non-violent civil disobedience to highlight the need for climate action what message would you like to send to those those people or the people considered considering joining them
[01:22:40] James Hansen: that you know as you mentioned in the introduction i was arrested several times because we were trying to draw attention to this issue which was not yet well understood by the public i think now what is more important is to affect the political system if there's a i i'm not too supportive of actions which disrupt the public in ways which then causes the public to be angry and it can be counterproductive i think that what we have to do is have the revolution that benjamin franklin said we need because if we don't solve the problem in the united states i don't see us solving the global problem we need to be the example that i think we were providing at the end of world war ii when we provided the the leadership that um helped uh you know use the world bank the universal declaration of human rights the united nations there were a lot of things the the uh funding for europe for reconstruction we we were a very positive example but now we've we've become with our special interests with the fact that our democracy is not functioning the way it was intended by the founders of our government which now one dollar replaces uh it gives you more sway than the your vote so we have to fix the democracy
[01:24:43] Dan Miller: and that's actually going unfortunately going in the opposite direction right we're we're fearing on losing our democracy there's a large segment of the population well and they're willing to vote for
[01:24:52] James Hansen: authoritarian kinds of things why why is that because they know that washington is a swamp it we throw out one party the other one comes in they take money from special interests and we don't have a government that's serving the interests of the public that's what i think we have to fix and i don't see how we do that unless we have a party that takes no money from special interests and that's
[01:25:19] Dan Miller: where but but but you said we only have years and i i don't unless i'm wrong i don't see this uh groundswell be even beginning yet uh do you have any suggestions on how we kick start that or or get it to grow to prominence against by the way two parties who each will not like that right even though they're the opposite to each other they still both won't like a third party coming in uh so what what well but it
[01:25:46] James Hansen: could it could happen very rapidly i mean you saw how it gave you the examples of uh obama bernie sanders uh where just just the support it can change can happen very rapidly and i think the public can appreciate that what the problem is it's the role of money in our government and we've got to take that out and you know when john mccain talked about campaign finance reform he found neither party would support him republicans wouldn't support him uh so but so we have to do it uh and but to to get a third party we do need to work on this rank voting so that we're the third party is not a spoiler that ends up electing the worst candidate we have that adding oakland
[01:26:38] Dan Miller: here and i live in berkeley you know work in berkeley but nearby oakland has it and some places are
[01:26:43] James Hansen: starting to do it but i don't think it's really caught on yeah there are efforts now it's there are there's uh sorry i don't have the the link but there is an effort to try to get it in all states unfortunately you have to do a state by state but um i think that if you had a third party that took no money the public would flock to that party you know even when we had this this uh little texan who saw martians on his front yard he got 19 of the vote i'm talking about ross perot
[01:27:22] Dan Miller: uh if we had a good candidate you know third party i don't know jim you gotta get your your stump speech written um i'd like to go back to another climate science issue one that i actually haven't heard talked about since your your paper uh your your global warming of the pipeline paper and that is there's this concept of zero emissions commitment like if we go to zero emissions today or 20 years from now let's say or at 2050 then the the theory goes that warming will stop because even though there's global warming in the pipeline the oceans will continue to take up co2 just like they did before and that those two things would cancel out and and while uh aerosols would also go away and cause warming methane and other short-lived gas uh greenhouse gases would dissipate over 10 20 years and that would offset the aerosol uh uh warming so you know so those four two things and two things cancel each other and you end up with hopefully a temperature roughly stable after we get to zero emissions but with your paper you're kind of saying well wait a second the warming's more and the cooling's more than before would that screw up the zero emissions uh idea or if if we can go to zero emissions we've solved the
[01:28:47] James Hansen: problem whether it's kind of slightly warm for a few years and then go down it is not the issue the point is okay zero emissions in even in 2050 which is now 27 26 years from now is not going to happen the the people are talking about zero emissions they're saying oh zero net emissions well what does that mean they're all saying oh they know that they're not going to zero and so they're saying oh we'll do something else we'll plant some trees well well carbon capture i think is part of it yeah or carbon capture which is uh not shown to be economically feasible but if you did carbon capture okay so then real carbon capture and storage you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and then you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture
[01:29:45] Dan Miller: and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture and you're going to have a lot of carbon capture the cost is 500 a ton but i believe it'll get down to 50 to 100 a ton but even so don't tell me about what's going to happen at 2050 we gotta no no my point is is it more expensive not to do it though what is the cost of not of letting climate change continue is very expensive isn't it
[01:30:10] James Hansen: yeah so the point is we have to do something now don't don't give me a promise for what you oh yeah
[01:30:16] Dan Miller: yeah i agree with that you're talking about now do the uh the some kind of solar management well no
[01:30:22] James Hansen: i'm saying no i get our emissions down to zero i'm not talking about solar management i'm talking about emissions okay you don't say that oh i'll promise you that in 2050 i'm going to have net emissions zero that's hogwash that's that's that's what they've been getting away with and then we allow the stuff to continue it's it's uh we're going to see effects way before 2050 so we've got to look at what's happening um and we've got to we've got to get emissions uh to go down they're still going
[01:31:04] Dan Miller: out so one of the ways you said we can do get our emissions down quickly is the uh carbon fee and dividend and again to remind people in in the youtube uh write up uh there's a link to a paper that the shim and i did on that you can hear what it's all about what that means but um i also think that the obvious answer is to phase out fossil fuels and we're doing that with peers at least some places doing that with cars right california has a 2035 no more ice cars europe a bunch of places have that too so on cars it seems to be going well but but why don't we have it on electricity generation
[01:31:41] James Hansen: go down it's not it's not it's not going well on vehicles okay one because because fossil fuels are inexpensive so it doesn't matter if you if you in california you say okay we're not going to we're going to have all electric vehicles in california doesn't solve the problem because you haven't made the price of fossil fuels honest and if you all you've done by stopping your emissions in california is reducing the demand global demand for the fuel make it cheaper and somebody else will burn it okay so the only way you can do it is to have a price that's why number one requirement if you look at the three essential requirements at the end of our pipeline paper the first one is you have to have a price on carbon okay and if you if you have that if the united states and china would have that and say we're going to have border duties on products from countries that do not have a carbon price then that would encourage most countries to have their own carbon price so they can collect the money themselves rather than us have us collected at the borders that's if you don't have that you haven't solved the problem so you're just kidding yourself by saying that i'm oh i'm i'm now clean i'm now driving an electric car that that's not solving the problem if we don't have a price on carbon the global emissions are not really going to go down significantly if we don't have a price on carbon
[01:33:27] Dan Miller: so this is the paper the the white paper that you and i did i'm sharing that right now so people can see that the link is in the description so that's great what other what other ways to um uh to reduce file i mean i i i thought that you know essentially banning you know over at a certain time frame like electricity all has to be non-fossil fuel in 2035 is what i would say there are 200 countries dan yeah
[01:33:54] James Hansen: yeah how are you gonna how are you going to ban it in iran how are you going oh that's a good question
[01:34:00] Dan Miller: because i'll go to cop and get it done so with that you set yourself up i want to get your take on cop 28 you didn't you didn't go uh you heard what's going on there was led by a fossil fuel executive is the head of the cop what are your thoughts on cop 28 and how effective it it's going to
[01:34:20] James Hansen: be or you know afterwards i i decided not to go because they're not addressing any of the three requirements they're they're not you know at uh cop paris cop in 2015 the the head said well people say we should talk about a price on carbon but it's not so simple well it's it's uh it's actually pretty simple um it is if you carbon free and dividend is about as simple as you can get and then you need a border duty and that's that's uh that's yeah it's so simple that the number one objection i get when i
[01:35:05] Dan Miller: give a talk on and dividend and by the way i should mention i should put it in maybe the link i have a tedx talk on carbon fee and dividend that explains it but the number one objection i get is that people don't believe that the government will do what i just said in other words it sounds so good that people can't believe a government would actually implement such a good policy and that seems to be the number one objection they want oh the government will keep all the money the government will do this
[01:35:31] James Hansen: you know well no that's not the problem the problem is the fossil fuel industry won't let them because our governments are influenced by special interests and there's no special interest more powerful than the fossil fuel industry okay so unless we have uh a government that does not take money that's that's that's what benjamin franklin is called corruption he said within a couple hundred years you're going to have that problem you're going to have to have a revolution well that revolution has got to be a political party that takes no money from special interests and that revolution could happen very rapidly but it's got to get people behind it in order to happen so um that that's that's that's going to be the bottom line of sophie's planet i have to get people to understand that if they if we don't get money out of our government we're not going to solve the problem the special interest the ones with the big money and fossil fuel industry has so much money that
[01:36:43] Dan Miller: it's uh very difficult to uh overcome that so normally on climate chat we have a whole bunch of audience questions but we've been getting those sent to us and everything and we have our two co-mods here so i'd like to bring them in for a question that they'll ask you uh first is stacy randecker uh who's who'll ask you a question i think it's maybe related to what you were just talking about hi stacy
[01:37:06] Speaker 1: welcome thanks um dr hanson very very nice to be in your presence um so the u.s we're i keep saying we're the problem um when you testified to congress in 1988 the u.s was responsible for nearly one-third of all historic co2 emitted to date now we're down to about a fifth of all co2 people on the other side will say will point to china and other nations as their emissions will exceed ours today but on a per capita basis ours is nearly double that of china and on a historic basis no nation can even touch um that combination of um historic emissions and on a per capita basis in the paris accord uh they we said we need to reduce emissions of the world by 43 percent of 2010 levels the u.s has reduced about 12 it looks like but and we have what six years to get down we're not doing it and even if we did reduce ours to the full 43 percent how can we turn to other countries who have been traditionally conservative have not blown at all and the ones at the bottom of the pile that are trying to get a better way of life how can we ask them to cut when they're already pretty much at the bone and here we are with our what um 18 tons per person how do we address this how do we address one we're not doing anything and two even if we did like oh our
[01:39:16] James Hansen: share it's not our share what do you think yeah well well that's exactly right that and we are more more responsible uh than anybody so we have to have an approach which will work for the rest of the world as well as for us and again going back to carbon free and dividend is you know when when i met with the chinese energy expert he agreed see their emissions are now like two and a half times hours they're by far the biggest source and they're and
[01:40:08] Speaker 1: they're still increasing their coal use um also china is mainly making stuff for us to buy yeah yeah i mean so it's not like oh you know my equivalent in china it's just like jet setting and doing all this crazy stuff it's the factories making stuff for but largely us yeah so you see what happened then
[01:40:33] James Hansen: president biden was president biden was elected what did he do as almost the first thing was to call taiwan the the worst thing he could do in terms of if he wanted to cooperate with china but why did he do it because he wanted to appear strong compared to the other political party and you know in a sense china has become almost an adversary certainly a competitor and that uh but that's that's because you know you uh but we have to work together we're we're in this sailboat together and and it's leaking and we've are we going to fight each other are we going to fix that
[01:41:21] Speaker 1: leak but don't we have a moral obligation to do more than what china does well and how can we do that how
[01:41:30] James Hansen: can we actually affect the global emissions that's we're working with china so we together can reduce their emissions as well as our own that's why i went to china proposed a workshop there we went there and they and they actually agreed but our politics doesn't allow it our politics says we got to treat china as an enemy as if we expect chinese soldiers to be charging up the california beaches and attacking the united states i mean it's screwing but that's what we're doing that's where that's what we're acting like and ignoring the global the fact that we're going to go down together so did we declare war on the climate instead yeah so that's why we need a third party we our two parties are just are just uh competing with each other to see who's tougher on china when in fact we need to work with china very good so now
[01:42:30] Dan Miller: i want to turn to eli robani who's the other co-mod here and uh eli what's your question for dr hansen
[01:42:36] Speaker 4: so um they're kind of two closely related questions um in in your your most recent paper you you talk about you know predictions that are uh of higher temperatures than the ipcc predicts as as a modal prediction um are there significant uh uh temperatures even beyond that or uh those temperatures occurring sooner than you predict um you know in in the range of risks that are uh maybe not as likely but also things we can't uh safely neglect um and related to that going back to one of your comments uh earlier um about uh uh if we reached uh zero absolute emissions you know soon you know in the next couple of decades for example we'd be okay do we really have enough certainty about feedbacks and how they interact to support with high confidence that we'd be okay with absolute zero emissions
[01:43:42] James Hansen: um well i'm i would be very happy if we went to zero emissions and i would take my chances but we're not doing that we're not going to uh zero emissions um the the the earth's energy imbalance is just such a valuable diagnostic of where we're headed we're already as warm as we should be so we've got to actually reduce that imbalance to zero and and instead of reducing it it's going up you know it's doubled in the last decade so we've really got our work cut out for us um but that requires the combination of all the above it requires reducing emissions as rapidly as practical uh and it uh probably is going to require purposeful actions to affect the planet's energy balance but that will be it but it is we can't do that tomorrow we're not ready to do it we've got to conduct this socialization we've got to get people to see they're going to see what's happening they're going to see the climate is getting worse they're going to see these extreme events being more extreme uh so they will but they uh so we need to be ready to take additional actions but in the meantime we've got to reduce emissions as rapidly as possible and the only way that that is going to happen is if we put a price on carbon and frankly a corollary to that is we need complement to intermittent renewable energies and i think that we should be putting a high priority on developing a next generation nuclear power but it's uh it's uh it's uh it's going to be a tough job and as long as long as the as the special interests are controlling our government uh we're not going to
[01:46:11] Dan Miller: solve it do you think that the impacts from climate change are going to as you're predicting going to get you know much worse quite soon do you think that will help i mean it as you said next year we'll we'll know whether your your numbers are right in your pipeline paper around may of next year and then it's going to be a very warm year it's going to be a lot of destruction then we need we
[01:46:34] James Hansen: need to see how far the temperature falls with the el nino with the la nina that follows but i i expect it's not going to fall as much as you would otherwise have expected because of the large planetary energy imbalance there's more energy coming in than going out so it's hard for the la nina to cool it off as
[01:46:57] Dan Miller: much as it used to so given all of this and thank you so much for your time by the way one of the i should say one of the quote questions i got and asking for questions from the public was to say thank him from all of us so let me thank you not just for being on this interview but for all of the work you've been doing since the 1980s on this and trying your best to alert alert us all about what's happening and even though we weren't listening enough i think it was still a very yours was a very
[01:47:31] James Hansen: powerful voice in helping us understand the dangers well well well thanks for arranging this man and actually i have to apologize i'm not a good communicator but i think that i'm going to make the story clearer in this book that i'm writing because which i'm finally sophie's planet yeah because i you know it got delayed because i realized that there was this issue about aerosols and climate sensitivity which i disagreed with ipcc decided i had to finish that and it took like two and a half years to do that paper now i can finish the book and i'll try to make it clearer that's great and and i want to
[01:48:12] Dan Miller: give you this last moment here to you started off with a message to young people you said hey here's the bad news here's the good news maybe you could uh just reiterate some of the good news about what you think could be done maybe even addition to the political side that the technical solutions the the fact of making their voices heard and what do you want to say to young people they should not young
[01:48:36] James Hansen: people should not underestimate their political power and they will not only have their own voice but so many of us older people who are concerned about their future so don't don't be discouraged or depressed by the fact that we're in a situation where the climate is getting worse and worse and people are making bad predictions for the future we can still deal with that if we get control of the political system but right now we don't have control the people with money who are bribing our congress people and it's both political parties we have to solve that problem and i think that young people are the ones who can push the system to have the revolution that benjamin franklin says we need so i i will try to make that story clearer in my book but i don't underestimate your power to change the political system it has to be fixed and i think that young people can provide the spark that makes it happen okay well with that i want to thank you
[01:50:08] Dan Miller: so much for your time and going over time actually to continue this conversation longer than we originally planned and thank you so much for your help you you are obviously welcome back any time and maybe next time we'll really do some geeky deep dive into climate science that trying to hold off a little bit today um and thank you again for all the work you've done and well thank you dan and thanks to everyone here this is the climate chat i'm your host dan miller we were speaking with dr james hansen about a wide range of topics and this will be available we're doing this live right here but it will be available later thanks everyone for coming and we'll see you