Exploring Climate Change: Full Length Interview with Kerry Emanuel

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Over here this morning with Carrie Emanuel from MIT, and we're talking, I guess, about hurricanes and also about climate. But to start off with hurricanes, one of the big things, I guess, we've noticed over the years is that we're pretty good at track forecasting, but intensity forecasting is still difficult. And do you see any signs of that improving in the near future? [00:00:32] Carrie Emanuel: Well, so researchers are keenly aware of what you just said, that intensity forecasts have not improved very rapidly at all, not nearly as fast as the track forecasts. And NOAA had a special program, a research program to improve intensity forecasts, and it was just announced a couple of weeks ago that they've cut this severely, this program. That's not good news. So there are several issues. One of them is that hurricanes, particularly strong ones, churn up cold water from below. But in practice, we don't usually know very much about the temperature of the ocean below the surface in real time. We know the climatology, and we use that in our models, but we don't know the real time temperature. So that limits how you can actually forecast this effect. There is a fundamental issue of predictability. Ed Lorenz taught us that for most weather systems, there's a kind of predictability time horizon. No matter how good you get with models and observations, you can't make a forecast beyond that. But for most weather systems, we think it's long, like a week or two. But in the special case of hurricanes, where things are happening very fast, it may be, we don't know this, that particularly when the storm is in an environment with wind shear, that you may have a fairly low fundamental predictability horizon. And that's what we're up against. That's the pessimistic view. It might be right, which means we're never going to, if that's true, we wouldn't get much better than we are now. I have a feeling we will improve it, but my guess is that the improvement will continue to be slow. [00:02:12] Speaker 1: Okay. With regard to a changing climate and a warming climate, what is our best guess, what is your best guess as to how the overall hurricane landscape will change? Will there be more? Will they be stronger? Both? Neither? [00:02:33] Carrie Emanuel: Well, you know, it's interesting, there's a pretty good community of scientists working on these issues now. When I started doing this in the '80s, I was pretty much by myself. And we have, our research has in important ways converged on kind of an answer to your question, not that we aren't played with a lot of uncertainty. But the consensus, the fairly strong consensus now, is that generally around the world, as a consequence of global warming, you're going to see an increase in the frequency of the high category, you know, the cat three, four, five storms. And there is some indication and observations that we're beginning to see such increases. The other thing that everyone agrees on, without exception, who works on this, is that a given hurricane will rain more in a warmer climate. That's just sort of very basic physics. Warm air holds more water. So you have more water going up in the clouds and coming back down as rain. And that's a big deal because rain is a big killer. You remember Hurricane Mitch in 1998, Central America, 12,000, all from freshwater flooding. So it's a big concern. The other matter, the other big killer in hurricanes, of course, is the storm surge. And that depends not just on the wind speed, but on the geometric size, the diameter of the [00:03:54] Speaker ?: storm. [00:03:54] Carrie Emanuel: And also, of course, sea level. And the fact that sea level is going up is all by itself going to make the surges worse. There's some indication, but we're not very far along this path, that storms' diameters will get larger. But we're not all that sure of that. The disagreement is fortunately on metrics that don't matter a whole lot to society. So that's what we spend our time as scientists arguing about, of course. So we don't really know what's going to happen to the frequency of low-category hurricanes. Most models suggest, and some theory suggests, that those will actually get less numerous, that the weaker storms will get less frequent. So we can't really so simply divide it into frequency versus intensity. It's better to say high-category events will become more frequent. Low-category events we don't know as much about, but the weight of evidence is they might actually become less frequent. [00:04:56] Speaker 1: So that would imply that there's a chance of more catastrophic hurricanes. [00:04:59] Carrie Emanuel: Well, this is the thing that's interesting. When you start looking through the eyes of an economist, I've been privileged to work with some very high-profile economists on this problem about what it is about hurricanes that do a lot of damage. And it's very interesting, because it entails a lot of human cultural history. By and large, building codes and just building practices, you know, even in cultures that don't have building codes, reflect recent experience, right? You know, well, my grandfather lost his house in a big blow, and then they build it back stronger, and then the culture adapts, and it adapts roughly speaking to a hundred-year storm. So if you have a kind of storm that you might experience every 50 years, most places, the buildings and the infrastructure will take that. But if you have a 200-year event, like a Sandy, it overwhelms everything. So it's not like damage just goes up with a wind speed and some nice smooth curve. It's not even, as the economists used to think, an elbow. It's more like there's not much damage until you get to a threshold and then boom. So the issue is that if suddenly the 200-year storm becomes a 50-year storm, you go through a period of mayhem, right? Right. Lots and lots of damage until the culture adapts and says, "Oh, well, we've got to build stronger." So it's that change that's so destructive. [00:06:25] Speaker 1: Okay. Now, sea level is a big deal in North Carolina, sea level rise. Can you, in terms of a time frame, I mean, can you see the Outer Banks being in danger within the century, or would it take longer than that? [00:06:41] Carrie Emanuel: Oh, I think absolutely they're in danger. I would say they're in danger now. And the reason is that if you look just at history, right, without even taking into account climate change, we've had 18-foot surges on the Outer Banks. And we have surges that would pretty much put the Outer Banks underwater today. Now, they'll emerge as a sandbar, of course, later. But with sea level rise and with the possibility of increased storm intensity, that threat just goes up very quickly. And so the question is, what do you do about that? And you have to try to come up with a graceful adaptation strategy, right? What do you do? And this is argued about the city. As you know, Michael Bloomberg commissioned a whole group of people to look at this very seriously for the city of New York, which obviously has a problem, too. It's not the same kind of problem. [00:07:37] Speaker 1: Right. [00:07:38] Carrie Emanuel: But they're considering everything from building seawalls, which is an option there, which is obviously not an option for the Outer Banks. Right. So how do you adapt? And that's a local thing. It depends on what you're doing. And most of the people, and I'm not one of them who study this seriously, say it's a matter of graceful retreat. Right? You have a policy that if the house is damaged and reinsurance pays for it to be rebuilt, you insist that it be built back further and not in the same place and higher. So you try to, without disrupting people too much, you try to come up with a graceful adaptation strategy that makes economic sense and is fair. It's really tough. [00:08:21] Speaker 1: Well, a well-known person down here, Oren Pilkey, has argued for years that you can delay nature winning, but, you know, eventually nature will win, no matter what you do. And, you know, the Outer Banks are only so wide. It's like, you know, at what point do you say you can't move back anymore? Because if you move back anymore, you're into the sound, you know? [00:08:45] Carrie Emanuel: Well, my memory is that for a while in South Carolina, there was a law that if your home was more than 80% damaged in a storm, the property reverted to the state. They would reimburse you, but you weren't allowed to build there at all. And that may be in an extreme limit of an adaptation policy if you can't move back. If there's no place to go, the state says, look, you know, we have to give up with this piece of property. We'll pay you for it, a fair market price, but that's it. Right. So this is caused a lot of thought from thoughtful people of goodwill to try to work this all out. Okay. [00:09:23] Speaker 1: Getting into the whole climate change, I guess you have to call it a debate, because if you look at the language that's used by some members that participate in this, it's pretty nasty. It would appear like the science is very sound about how different gases keep our planet inhabitable, even before the Industrial Revolution. And so with the science being sound, how have we gotten to this point where there are people arguing that the whole thing's a hoax, it's a political agenda, it's one world government, on down the line. How did this happen? [00:10:08] Carrie Emanuel: The way I look at it, Greg, is that, and I've asked professional historians this question. My take on it is there's never been a time in history when the human race has confronted a really big challenge on a hundred year timescale and responded to it. We are genetically programmed to respond to immediate threats. If there's an explosion out in the street, we duck, right? Or if our house gets flooded, we pump it out and we think about what to do to rebuild it. We don't have any practice with this. And so I have great sympathy for people who, even for people who say it's a hoax, simply because to understand what we understand about it requires really understanding physics, understanding the history of science, understanding the history of climate. You can't just explain to people on a bumper sticker how this works, unfortunately. Of course I try. But it's a really tough problem for civilization to deal with this. Now, in professional circles, that is all the people who have to deal right from the scientists to the engineers to the policy people, there isn't much debate anymore about the reality of climate change. That's not seriously debate. We've moved on from there. The public hasn't, but we have. And it's all about solutions. What's the best sensible way to confront this problem without wrecking the economy or doing something? And there it's a lot of good news that I think hasn't really gotten out in the public about technical solutions that may cost a little bit up front, but in a fairly short time, like 30 or 40 years, would actually be very good for the economy. Like if we can get off of depending on unstable foreign regimes for our energy supply, we'd all be better off, for example. [00:12:07] Speaker 1: How do you respond to the argument that you still have these developing countries? In fact, when we were up in Alaska, one person described rural Alaska as being a third world country. And that they haven't gone through their 100-year revolution like we did. And so they're looking at cheap energy costs so that they can experience that progress, too. And they're scared of things that are more expensive than that. Is there a way that we can allow these people to enjoy the benefits of advancement that we have over the last 100 years without crippling them economically? [00:12:51] Carrie Emanuel: Over and over again, the recent history of civilization teaches us about leapfrogging technologies. You know, the countries that invented technology sometimes find themselves at a disadvantage because the next country says, "Oh, well, these guys could have done it better, or we now can do it better." You know, France developed this Minitel thing before the Internet. It was, compared to the Internet, very clunky, but it was very advanced for its time. And they put all this money and resources into it. And then the Internet came along. Of course, they were naturally a little bit reluctant to abandon this, ultimately. The rest of the world sort of leapfrogged over them. Okay. There's an opportunity for the third world to do this leapfrog. So, just to be clear, in my opinion, we should do nothing to curtail their development. That's not fair. We couldn't even if we wanted to. They're not going to listen to us. Why should they? What we can do is, if they are burning fossil fuels, we can figure out how to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And the richer countries should do that. We're getting close to being able to do that economically. We can do it technically already. You take it out and you sequester it underground. And that would be, you know, a service, if you will, that the developed world can do for the developing world. But the other thing we can do is develop cleaner, better, and ultimately cheaper technologies. Next generation fission nuclear reactions that are safe, clean, and by the way, can take care of all the waste that's accumulated from the older generation reactors. That's almost a no-brainer. We should do that. And if we develop the technology here, we'll be selling it to China, and we'll be selling it to India, rather than having to be buying it from them 10 or 20 years from now. Right. Ditto with renewables. Right. [00:14:42] Speaker 1: Okay. We may have already addressed this in a different form before, but with regard to -- I'm having a senior moment here -- the political divide. But I've seen examples of hearings in the Senate and the House and so forth where it's clear -- and to be fair, I see this on both sides -- that I'm not sure that the representatives actually understand enough about the science to, you know, to be making a decision, an intelligent decision on it. And with the advent of social media and these, you know, internet blogs and so forth, there appears to be evidence that maybe these folks are no longer defaulting to going to the scientific community for answers, that they're going other places. And that scares me as a scientist, as I'm sure it does you. It's like, how can we, you know, get back to the point where they're going to the right sources? [00:15:48] Carrie Emanuel: Put yourself in the shoes of a representative or senator from a big coal state like West Virginia or Wyoming, right, where a big chunk of the state's economy is riding on this, right? Okay. And your constituents voted you into office, and they didn't vote you into office to kill their economy, right? So, how can you really argue for the science in that case? They're in a very tough spot. They may personally, for all I know, believe the science, but it's hard to argue with it. So, it's a slow process. Remember that scientists, doctors, medical, had already by 1953 nearly unanimously agreed that there was a connection between smoking and lung cancer. Now, tobacco is a big industry. It's not nearly as big as fossil fuels, but it was big. And they had a campaign to try to convince people that the science wasn't any good. And per capita smoking in the United States sailed right through that 1953 announcement by the New York Times and continued to increase, right up until the 1980s, when it finally reversed and started going down. So, it was a 30-year lag between when scientists knew there was a risk and people reacted. Part of that lag was a very successful campaign of disinformation, very well documented now by the tobacco industry, to convince people. And they had a lot of money. Marketing works, you know? Every day, we are subjected to marketing forces we're not even aware of. Did you know that when you go to a supermarket, the first thing you're likely to see are flowers? And that's because a marketing study showed that if you see and smell flowers, you'll buy more groceries. Wow. Did you know you were being manipulated that way? I didn't. But we probably are, right? It's a very powerful force, marketing. Okay. [00:17:40] Speaker 1: And then, I guess, the other source of division on this, at least to some degree, is religious-based. That you will hear the argument that how can we be so arrogant as to think that we could modify something that God made. And my personal answer to that is when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, we proved that if we want to destroy this place, we probably can. But there was a time when a lot of religious people, if you will, for lack of a better term, seemed to encourage science. And now we've gotten to this point where you have to, you don't have to, but a lot of people pick between science and faith. Do you have any ideas as to, you know, how that came about? And what can we do, both from the science community reaching out and the faith community reaching out to each other, so that we can find some mutual agreement on something? [00:18:45] Carrie Emanuel: Well, it's a very interesting question, and I have participated in Massachusetts in all kinds of interesting meetings, usually sponsored by churches, involving theologians and scientists on science and religion in general, not just this issue, but the conflicts and the fact that they actually, in the end, mesh rather well. Amongst a lot of Christians, there is the notion that's strongly supported by the Bible itself that we are custodians of the earth. We're supposed to take care of it. We're supposed to farm it. We're supposed to reap its benefits, but also to take care of it. And we have done some very wonderful things that people don't really necessarily remember about. We got rid of some of the most toxic aspects of air pollution. And if we hadn't done that, we'd be in tough shape today. The Montreal Protocol, right, that was advanced under Ronald Reagan and signed by the first George Bush to curb the things that were destroying the ozone layer. We now know from lots of scientific research, if we hadn't done that, we would be in serious, serious trouble today. I mean, really serious trouble. And so there have been times where we have very successfully fulfilled our role as custodians of the planet. We're not supposed to be, I mean, the people I talk to and I myself will read the Bible. And the notion that we're supposed to take care of our planet comes through loud and clear to me anyway. So I don't quite understand this idea that it'll take care of itself. We're supposed to take care of it. [00:20:34] Speaker 1: Be good stewards. [00:20:35] Carrie Emanuel: Yeah, we're supposed to be good stewards. [00:20:37] Speaker 1: Is it, and I hate to bring this up, but I will. I have even heard people when they get into this whole liberal conservative thing saying, well, you know, the whole academic field is the academic left. Yeah. Do you really believe that's the case or is, and in the end, does it really matter? I mean, or is the scientific community, whether or not they're politically leaning one way or the other, they're still obligated to deal with the basic science? [00:21:07] Carrie Emanuel: Well, it's certainly true that the academics are overwhelmingly on the left, but not uniformly. For example, I regard myself as a fairly conservative person politically. There are a lot of moderates and so forth. But even though it's weighted heavily, scientists are professionals like other professionals, like doctors. And if somebody said that most airline pilots were on the left, would that make any difference to you in flying on an airplane? Or if you found out that your surgeon had opposite politics to you, would you say, I'm going with another surgeon? No, because you sort of expect them to be professional, to separate their politics. Scientists are trained to be highly on guard of all prejudice, not just political prejudice. But there's much more common prejudice that's poisonous to science, that science has tried to set up safeguards for. For example, my pet theory. You know, I have this theory that this is the way it should work. And you can't help, because you're a human being, you say, well, I, you know, I want my theory to be right. Sure. And so that's why the culture in science is for rigorous testing and other people coming in and saying, can we replicate what you've done? And if we can't, it's not true. So there are these safeguards, and none of them are perfect. But I, you know, I don't see any signs, really, amongst individual scientists. I know that whatever their politics are, and in most cases I don't even know what they are, but in the cases I do, that it's in any way affecting their professional work. I don't see that. There are all kinds of ways you can be wrong. And what we do as scientists is, when we're doing our job correctly, we paint a whole sort of probability curve of outcomes. We don't just say, this is the answer, right? From, in the case of climate change, over a hundred years, from relatively benign on one side, to a kind of a peak in the middle, which has serious consequences, to a long tail, which if we go out there, is truly catastrophic. And our job is to present that whole curve. And there are risks. So if we gamble on the high side, which is what most people do, right? They're trying to avoid something that's really bad. If there's a 2% chance that your daughter will be run over if she's going to cross a busy street, you don't let her go, right? Even though there's a 98% chance to make it, you make a lot of sacrifices to evolve that. And then if it turns out that everything's okay, right? Well, you've made a little bit of investment to walk up to the corner or whatever it is you have to do. If it turns out that this is not such a problem, what are we going to find ourselves? That we've invested in clean energy, that we're not polluting the environment as much, that we're not as dependent on foreign oil as we used to be? So there's not a whole lot of downside to that, I would say. [00:24:13] Speaker 1: I mean, when you hear the argument about we simply can't afford to, you know, financially to come up with these energy alternatives, is that really true or would it be true for a short period of time but then as we got more knowledgeable about it, it would quickly cheat them? [00:24:33] Carrie Emanuel: So the question about affordability depends, the answer to that question depends on the time scale. If you mean right up front, right now, it's a cost, almost no matter what you do. Although there are certain things that have benefits right away like conservation, a better battery, a more efficient light bulb. So you spend 10 cents more on the light bulb, big deal. Over his life, you get that back and a lot more. Where it becomes serious is in really high-powered investments. So if we undertook a grand plan to build thorium-based molten salt reactors in the United States, we could do that. If we put a man on the moon, it's possible. There would be a lot of upfront costs. No question about that. But over the lifetime of those plants, our energy savings would be rather spectacular compared to, say, solar and wind or other alternatives. So it depends on what you mean by cost. And it sort of brings me to the question is, how much is this generation willing to sacrifice so that our children have a better life? I think that's what it boils down to. Some people will say, I don't care, right? Well, I'm going to drive my three-mile-per-gallon vehicle. And, you know, they'll have to deal with that. Other people, you know, it's a matter of opinion. We'll invest a lot in that. But historically, in the U.S., we care a lot about what happens to our kids and our grandkids. And we're willing to make some sensible investments on their behalf. [00:26:03] Speaker 1: And this sort of ties back, I think, to what you said before about this is a new type of thing in terms of the timescale we're dealing with. That it isn't something that necessarily is going to affect some people in their lifetime. But it is something that could have a big effect on people after that. [00:26:21] Carrie Emanuel: I'm often asked, you know, what will it take to get this country to really change, to really start to respond to this? And the answers that you usually get to that is, well, you know, we finally have to get around to passing a carbon tax or there's some specific thing but no route to doing that. And my answer is that things will change quickly when the generation of American citizens now in their teens and 20s get together and say things have to change when they insist upon it. Mm-hmm. Then their parents, us, are going to do something about it. If they remain silent, then nothing will happen. Now, they haven't remained silent. They've organized huge marches, which to my mind got unbelievably little press, you know, compared to, say, the civil rights movement. But they will keep trying and there'll be more and more and more young people. And, you know, if we don't do something about it, they're going to get angrier and angrier and louder and louder until things change. I just hope we don't have to go down that road. Right. Too far. Right. [00:27:32] Speaker 1: Yeah. Exactly. I should have asked this earlier, but we can always go back and piece it together. There appears to be a group of people out there that think that this whole climate change thing is based entirely on computer models. And as soon as the computer models show any error, then it's like, you know, you want us to make this investment based on something that's already proven to be flawed. Right. There's obviously some really good, hard science that has gone into this above and beyond modeling. And I just wonder if you could expound upon that a little bit. [00:28:11] Carrie Emanuel: Sure. First of all, it is far from true that what we understand about climate and climate change depends on these models. In fact, largely, it doesn't. Svan Harinius was a Swedish chemist who wrote about the dangers of putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and made a very accurate prediction by today's standards of how much the globe would warm for a given amount of carbon dioxide. There were no computers back then of any kind. It was pencil and paper. This is just plain physics. Okay. Physics tells us this has to happen. We don't need computers to tell us that. Computers, on the other hand, are good at sort of trying to flesh out some more of the details about, you know, where is it going to get warmer faster? Where will it rain harder? Where will it rain less? So, and they're, you know, they have a long ways to go, let's be honest. I'm not a big fan of the large computer models myself. I am a big fan of continuing to work on them. Let me take an analogy that I'm sure dear to your heart, which is the big models upon which weather forecasts rely these days. Now, you know, that's only been true for less than 50 years, that that's, you know, a lot of what we do in forecasting rely on models. And nobody with any experience in the models would ever claim that they're other than flawed. Right. And they're different from each other, which, you know, you know that they can't be all be right. And yet, they are, produce better forecasts than we could possibly produce by other techniques. And they're useful forecasts. Otherwise, people wouldn't watch weather for it. You know, I've noticed, I'm sure you've noticed, that the people who often complain loudest about weather forecasts and weather forecasters are the ones who watch it most religiously. They vote with their feet in the end. And so models, somebody, I can't remember who said, but I think it's true, said all models are wrong, but some models are useful. Right. [00:30:07] Speaker 1: Exactly. And when, you know, when I talk to kids just about modeling in general, I say, you know, it's not that computers are smarter than human beings, because human beings taught the computers how to think. It's just that they can think a whole lot faster, you know, than we can. [00:30:24] Carrie Emanuel: But the evidence, you know, the observational evidence from satellites, from melting glaciers, from rising sea level, and the response of the global mean temperature to carbon dioxide, pretty much exactly as was predicted a hundred years, more than a hundred years ago by a man who had no computers, it's all very powerful evidence. Not any one piece of it is bulletproof, right? Right. A trial, a legal trial is usually the case, it's not one, you know, bulletproof piece of evidence. But taken, the mass of it taken together is very, very compelling. I think it's terribly important that we scientists talk directly to people. First of all, they have to understand that we're human beings. They have to hear it directly from us, what we do, and what turns us on, frankly. Because, you know, there's a big campaign out there to cast doubt about our motives. And, you know, you can say something in print, but it doesn't have the effect of direct communication with people where they can see what's exciting you about it. That we're driven almost entirely by intellectual curiosity. That we would be studying climate and getting a lot out of it if there was no such thing as global warming. Okay. Some people think climate science is all about global warming. Well, we're paying a lot of attention to it because it's a risk for civilization. But climate science existed long before we recognized this as a serious problem. And it will continue to exist. There's lots of really, really interesting science. Okay. And I think it's important for us to convey that. If for no other reason than to get kids turned on to it so that they also can become climate scientists. Again, I would feel that way if we didn't have a problem with climate change. [00:32:19] Speaker 1: And you, I mean, you're obviously very comfortable and, I mean, you've written books on a level that the, I hate, the common man or, you know, the non-scientists can understand. Do we need, should this be part of the training for upcoming professors in this field that they're better communicators, that they do get out more and interact with the general public? I think so. [00:32:46] Carrie Emanuel: I think so. I think so. I've seen in a number of contexts, not just in climate science, but just general attempts by scientists to give public talks that they're not trained to do that. And they can sometimes lapse into jargon or they think they're talking to their colleagues. And it's tough. It's tough. It's tough. And not everyone is good at it. But I think it would do us a lot of good to be able to do that. I'd like, I'd go so far as to say that, you know, thinking about and trying to explain what you're doing to a smart person who is not an expert in your field will make you understand what you're doing better. Okay. [00:33:28] Speaker 1: Just by having to think about how you explain it. That's right. [00:33:31] Carrie Emanuel: If you really can't explain something to a person, then maybe you don't understand it yourself. Right? I really think so. I mean, I've been a big advocate and I'm a lone voice out there that we should be teaching quantum physics to high school students, all high school students, because it is so rich. It has so many different implications for how we think about our world than classical Newtonian clockwork physics. The philosophical implications are enormous. The fact that we're not teaching kids science much beyond the year 1900 is something we've got to fix. [00:34:05] Speaker 1: - Okay. - Okay.