Conversation with global warming skeptic Anthony Watts

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: So let's start out with the basic idea that there's this debate in this country over global warming. There's some people who call it a complete hoax, and there are some people who completely embrace it, so forth. Where do you stand in that spectrum? [00:00:15] Speaker 2: Well, I at one time was very much embracing the whole concept that we had a real problem, we had to do something about it. Back in 1988, James Hansen actually was the impetus for that for me in his presentation before Congress. But as I learn more and more about the issue, I discover that maybe it's not as bad as it's made out to be. Some of it is hype, but there's also some data that has not been explored, and there's been some investigations that need to be done that haven't been done. And so now I'm in the camp of we have some global warming, no doubt about it, but it may not be as bad as we originally thought because there are other contributing factors. [00:00:54] Speaker 1: What bothers you most about the arguments that there is serious global warming? [00:00:59] Speaker 2: Well, they want to change policy. They want to apply taxes. And these kind of things may not be the actual solution for making a change to our society. [00:01:09] Speaker 1: What are you saying? That they're biased essentially or motivated by something else? What? [00:01:16] Speaker 2: Well, there's a term that was used to describe this, it's called noble cause corruption. And actually I was a victim of that at one time where you're so fervent in your belief that you have to do something. You're saving the planet. You're making a difference. You're making things better. You're so focused on this goal of fixing it or changing it that you kind of forget to look along the path to make sure that you haven't missed some things. And I started looking into the idea that weather stations have been slowly encroached upon by urbanization and siting issues over the last century. Meaning that our urbanization affected the temperature. And this was something that was very clear if you looked at the temperature records. But what wasn't clear is how it affected the trend of temperatures. And so that's been something that I've been investigating. Anyone who's ever stood next to a building in the summertime at night, a brick building that's been out in the summer sun, you stand next to it at night you can feel the heat radiating off of it. That's a heat sink effect. And over the last hundred years our country, in fact the world, has changed. We've gone from having mostly a rural agrarian society to one that is more urban and city based. And as a result the infrastructure has increased. We've got more freeways, you know, more airports, we've got more buildings, more streets, all these things. Those are all heat sinks. During the day solar insulation hits these objects and these surfaces and it stores heat in these objects. At night it releases that heat. Now if you are measuring temperature in a city that went from having maybe 10% of non-permeable surface to you know maybe 90% over a hundred years, that's a heat sink effect and that should show up in the records. The problem is, is that it's been such a slow, subtle change over the last hundred years, it's not easy to detect and that's been the challenge and that's what I've been working on. [00:03:14] Speaker 1: Essentially you're saying that the records they're using for documenting the temperature at any given time aren't exactly accurate? [00:03:22] Speaker 2: I'm saying that the data might be biased by these influences to a percentage. A percentage. Yes, we have some global warming, it's clear the temperature has gone up in the last hundred years. But what percentage of that is from carbon dioxide and what percentage of that is from changes in the local measurement environment? [00:03:41] Speaker 1: I'm going to go back to what we were talking about a little bit earlier. You say that there are people invested in promoting the concern about global warming. Is there a lot of money involved? [00:03:52] Speaker 2: Well, global warming has become essentially a business in its own right. There are NGOs, there are organizations, there are whole divisions of universities that are set up to study this factor. And so there's lots of money involved and so I think that there's a tendency to want to keep that going and not really look at what might be different. [00:04:14] Speaker 1: Dr. Muller at the University of California at Berkeley had similar concerns, went back and looked at the data, took much more data than anybody else had and concluded, well, maybe there were some problems, but basically the conclusions were right. There is global warming and it comes from carbon dioxide which is made by man. [00:04:37] Speaker 2: Do you buy that? Unfortunately, he has not succeeded in terms of how science views, you know, a successful inquiry. His papers have not passed peer review. They had some problems. Some of the problems I identified, others have identified problems as well. For example, he goes much further back, back to about 1750 in terms of temperature. Well, from my own studies I know that temperature really wasn't validated and homogenized where everything was measured the same way until the weather bureau came into being about 1890. Prior to that, thermometers were hung in and exposed to the atmosphere in all kinds of different ways. Some were hung under the shade of trees. Some were on the north side of houses. Some were out in the open in the sun. And so the temperature fluctuations that we got from those readings prior to 1890 was quite broad. And I don't believe they provide a representative signal because the exposure is all wrong. And Dr. Muller did not take any of that into account. [00:05:33] Speaker 1: His conclusion, though, is that basically global warming exists and that the scientists, no matter what the problems were, were pretty much right on. [00:05:44] Speaker 2: I agree with him that global warming exists. However, the ability to attribute the percentage of global warming to CO2 versus other man-made influences is still an open question. [00:05:55] Speaker 1: I want to ask you a little bit about attitudes toward this among the public. We talked to a public opinion specialist at Stanford who says there's been 80 percent belief in global warming and man-made global warming throughout this country for the last 15 years. Do you buy that? [00:06:16] Speaker 2: Well, I've looked at a number of opinion polls. You'll find a lot of them on my blog that we've covered. And depending on how you ask the question, we'll sometimes give you a different answer. What my view is is that the view of global warming peaked about the time that Al Gore came out with his movie, An Inconvenient Truth. But ever since then, other factors have kicked in, Climategate, for example. And it has become less of an issue. In fact, you hardly see politicians talking about it anymore or pushing it as an issue. What's been happening now has just become a regulation issue. It's gotten away from the political arena and into the bureaucratic regulation arena. And so people, I believe, based on the polls I've seen, aren't quite as believing as they used to be. And I think the trend is downward. [00:07:01] Speaker 1: What do you think is the upshot of your attitude toward this? Should the Congress, should the American public say, "You know, nothing's been proven yet. We should wait," or should we go ahead with trying to solve what many people consider a really scary problem? [00:07:19] Speaker 2: Hmm. You mentioned a really scary problem, and I think that's part of the issues. Some people don't respond well to scare tactics, and there have been some scare tactics used by some of the proponents on the other side of the issue. And that's where the overselling of it comes in. But this is a slow problem, and it requires a slow solution, I believe. For example, our infrastructure for electricity and so forth and highways didn't happen in five years or ten years. It happened over a century. We can't just rip all that up or change it in the space of five, ten, or fifteen years, because it'll be catastrophic to our economy. We need a slow change solution, one that is a solution that changes over time at about the same rate as climate change. More efficient technologies, new technologies, use of more nuclear, for example. There's a nuclear type of reactor that's more safe called a liquid thorium reactor that China is jumping on right now. And we should be looking into things like that. [00:08:25] Speaker 1: Has this issue, I know you think it's been oversold and scare tactics have been used, do you think it's become too politicized? [00:08:32] Speaker 2: Oh, it's definitely become too politicized. In fact, some of the scientists who are the leaders in the issue have become, for lack of a better word, political tools on the issue. [00:08:44] Speaker 1: Do you consider yourself a skeptic on global warming? [00:08:48] Speaker 2: I would call myself a pragmatic skeptic. Yes, we need to make some changes in our energy technology. More efficient technology is a good thing. For example, I have solar power on my home, you know, I have done energy reductions in my office and in my home to make things more efficient. So I think those are good things, those are good messages that we should be embracing. But at the same time, I think that some of the issues have been oversold, and they've been oversold because they allow for more regulation to take place. And so the people that like more regulation use global warming as a tool and the means to an end. And so as a result, we might be getting more regulation and more taxes that really aren't rooted in science but more in politics.