 Today we're back, we're live, Energy in America on a given Wednesday afternoon, I'm Jay Fiedel. At the other end of the pipe, if I may, is Glu Pugliarisi, he's the CEO of Ebrink in Washington, joins us by VMIX call. And I am happy to discuss with him today climate change, and that is our, the storms, the extreme weather, is it really getting worse, and he has some implications on that and we need to study that with him. Welcome back to your show, Lou. Okay, I'm glad to be here, Jay. So, you know, it's interesting that, you know, inevitably you do have to link up energy and climate change. There is a, you know, inevitable relationship between the two. So I'm happy to discuss with you today about extreme weather because somehow that's linked up. What do you think the link up is? So, if we take sort of the narrow issue of hurricanes, violent storms that land in the United States, I think it's very important to distinguish what does the historical records show, particularly when we adjust it for where people live and where people have moved to and the value of their housing and to what the modeling tells us prospectively. So I get quite annoyed whenever there's a large hurricane and the press talks about, well, this is evidence of climate change. Well, it is not, unfortunately, nobody ever takes the time to look at the data very carefully, but we're quite lucky because Mr. Pelkey and a large body of academics from working at the national climate, at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado plus other institutions have done a deep dive on this issue. And the story is regarding, it's an article published in the Journal of Meteorology and you will see the source to that on some of the slides today. And Pelkey himself is a very interesting character because he is not a climate denier. He is in fact a member of the IPCC, yet he has been pretty well attacked because he did the terrible thing of actually looking at what the data show. And we're going to look at some of his data today and plus then talk a little bit about what might be a topic of more interest going forward, which is the emerging crisis in the US automobile industry. Before we get into the data loop, I guess although we cannot tell without checking the data, whether a given storm is an expression of climate change, the issue is always raised. Is that a fair statement of it? The issue is raised by people at CNN and the press who have never read an academic article in their life or ever spent a chance to do any back checking. So, yes, it's raised by people all the time and people are confounding, I believe, what some of the modeling shows will happen in the future. And let me rephrase that. What some of the modeling efforts project could happen in the future with current events. But if we are going to look at the historical, if we are going to say something that's occurring now is a result of X, one of the things we should do is go back in time and see, well, has that been increasing or decreasing over time? That's fair. Let me also add this. You start out with saying, and in fact, our title of the show is our extreme storms increasing and the underlying assumption seems to be it's digital. It's like this is either a result of climate change or not a result of climate change. Isn't it more nuanced than that? I mean, there's a gray area, right? Climate change would be a factor even if it's not the biggest cause. Well, we're going to just address a narrow issue with this topic today. Does the data show they're increasing or not? If they're not increasing and 100 years ago, climate change was not an issue because CO2 loadings were much lower, then we have to ask ourselves, OK, what might be the forces that are showing us no increase in the storms? In other words, you will see in the data that we cannot detect a measurable increase in violent storms, which are experiencing landfall in the United States. That's just what the data showed. We have to look at the data so people can question it and ask what this group of scientists have missed or not missed. But it's very important to do some systematic thinking once in a while. God forbid policy makers would just try to do everything. What some, you know, what their 14-year-old daughter told them was happening. So you've got some charts to show us the data to make these comparisons. Let's take a look at some of the data. It's pretty interesting. So, yeah, so this is a kind of picture of a big, big storm and we can go to the next slide. OK, so now this slide here shows the continental US economic loss from tropical cycles. In other words, for hurricane. And this data is adjusted, right? For, this data is adjusted to look at the annual loss. And you can see as you work it out that the dollar loss for this data has increased, right? So you would say, well, yeah, look, the dollar loss from the hurricanes have been rising over time, right? But that just tells us how much damage is taking place. So one of the things the researchers asked themselves, well, maybe there were storms before that hit in Orlando or Miami, but nobody was living there or relatively few people were living there. So we need to adjust those losses, right? So if you go to the next slide, this is actually a very interesting picture. This shows you the continental US landfall of hurricanes from 1900 to 2017, right? And that little black dotted line from 1900 to is in fact the trend line. So you can see there's a couple of spikes here and other spikes there. But basically the trend line has been declining over time. So from 1900 to 2000, and I can't actually read this here, 215, not only has the storms not been increasing, but they've actually been, they've actually slightly declined. One of those marks on the chart, what do they reflect? Is that the number of storms, the damage from the storms? How do you measure intensity? The category of the storm. Those are storms of a more modest category. We're going to go to another chart and a second to see more major ones. So those are categories 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, right? The basic category we use to measure the strength and severity of the storm. And those categories have been the same for the past 100 years? Yeah, I actually don't think that's true. I think they had to go back and take the data and then fit it to what people's description of the storm was like. I mean, there's a fascinating book. Anyone's never read Isaac's Storm, which is about a turn of the century storm that essentially wiped out Galveston, Texas, right? And actually is why Houston exists today because after that storm, I think it was in 1904 to Galveston went away for a long time. Okay, now let's look at the next one. That's sort of a modest one. The next slide shows major hurricanes, 1900 to once again to 2017. This is pretty careful data, right? You have a couple of spikes there, but you had some pretty big ones. But once again, the trend line over that time is, you know, it's not rising. It's continuing to decline. It's declining slightly, but it appears to be a relatively stable data set for this 117 year period now. Once again, it's, you know, there's always limitations to the data and there's always issues on how the researchers are categorized and stuff. But, you know, this is a pretty careful group of scientists that worked on this. And as I say, I think at least I know at least one member is a member of the IPCC. So once again, they're just trying to test the data against what people say, what people say. Okay, but looking back at that chart, the trend line as it was in the previous chart is nearly flat or down. It's almost a straight line as far as I can see. Exactly. It doesn't show a big change. But what troubles me about it is it seems unaffected by these jumps in intensity. In other words, if you look at that chart one more time, you see this, you know, toward the right there's this huge jump. I don't know what storm that was, but it looks like it was... Yeah, there's a big jump there, but you know, that's a single event like that. You don't really have a record going back 300 years. A single event like that does not... there's nothing in that data that really suggests that there's a trend. You can't as a scientist go around saying, well, we had an event that was pretty hot today. Well, let's transform our entire economy. It must be bad. And we know what's causing it. I think I would be a little cautious before I did that. Okay. All right. Well, so what we have is trend lines in both of those charts that seem flatter down. Yeah, but these are not produced by some big deniers. That's the thing about it. These are serious people, including Belki. Now, Belki has a small book that's very worth reading. And it's about how, when he did this, because he's like a scientist. He just looks at how he was pilloried. And much of the climate community tried to get him fired from the University of Colorado. And the Regents looked at his research, his whole body of research and said, you know, we're not doing that. This guy's a serious researcher. We're sorry you don't like the results, but we don't fire people because you don't like the results. Well, I think what I hear you saying though is that he's in the minority and that you could find other researchers. Let me stop you right there. There's nobody else who's published any data. Okay. He's not in the minority. He's the only one who's actually done something systematic. Everyone else is just pulling this out of some other parts of their body. Okay. Now, I am not arguing what the models are showing will happen. Okay. That's a separate issue. But modeling is not the same as historical data. Of course. Okay. Actually, I'm not even drawing any big conclusions from this. I'm just saying this is what the record shows to date. Okay. All right. You can argue, yeah, okay. Record shows to date this, but it's going to be really bad in the future. Why were his peers attacking him if there was nobody else who was making these data analyses? Well, first, he had five colleagues help him write the paper. But I think some people, if you look at his book, some people felt that political people would misuse this data and claim that climate wasn't real or that global warming wasn't happening, which Peltke has never said. Right. He has never said that. He thinks there are lots of bad problems from climate. He just says, historically, we don't see it in the frequency and intensity of storms yet. Well, I think his colleagues have a logical problem. They would attack him, but they can't provide any evidence to show that on that data, it's any different from what he says. No, no, I don't think anyone's, no one's arguing with this data as well. I haven't seen anyone say Peltke is wrong. I've heard people say we don't like him. Okay. All right. Now let's look at the normalized damage. So this is a very interesting problem. So this is, and I'm going to show you why you need to normalize the damage. It is true that if you did not adjust for the change in the housing stock, or the, you know, the value of the housing stock, the value of the infrastructure, this number would spike. So what the question is, you need to adjust the data, not just for the, you know, not just for the storms, but how valuable is the property when the storm hits? So a lot of people, Peltke, for example, argues that if a hurricane that hit Miami in the 20s, which did several hundred million dollars worth of damage, were to hit Miami, that same storm were to hit Miami today, the damage would be 80 billion. Okay, that's fine. But that isn't the same as saying the storms are getting more intense, right? We get the same intensity of storms, but people are building into the storms. Yes. If you get a part of the country that gets slammed periodically, and actually when I was in the Navy and I flew with the Hurricane Hunters, we forecasted several landings. First, we weren't very good at it then. We would miss and people would be very upset. But also we would see storms hit, big storms hit Florida. And well, you know, this is in the late 1960s. Nobody was living there, so okay. There's a few, you know, beach comers and stuff. So you have to keep this in mind. So you can see this in the next set of data. Well, now, when you say you adjust, when you first said that, I think the first slide I said myself, it's adjusting for inflation. But it's much more than inflation. It's much more than inflation, which I'm going to show you in the next data set. Okay. Okay, so this shows you the amount of housing units constructed by decade and region of the US. And you can see the colors, the orange has to do with the Atlantic and the red is the Gulf Coast. And it's a kind of simple chart. All it does is show you that, oh, by the way, these parts of the country, the Gulf Coast and the Atlantic, which tend to get hit by storms from time to time, also have a rising volume of housing stock, right? So this just makes a simple point that I made earlier, which is, okay, we used to have storms. They weren't much different than the past and they are today. But when those storms landed, nobody was living there. Now lots of people are living there. And we shouldn't be shocked that there's a lot of damage. So these charts are on the analysis that housing stock is being damaged. It's the money damages to the infrastructure, to the housing that we are measuring here. And if you adjust for the amount of housing that exists at a given time or given storm, that explains the flat line in terms of the trend line for the intensity of the storms. But let me, can I throw one at you? Sure. And that is, you know, maybe it's only sort of common discussion, media discussion. But usually the comparison is not on housing stock or damage in the media, in the news. It's on the intensity of the storm by virtue of wind. I forget what you call it, surge, surge. When the storm comes to shore, how big are the waves? It's on the intensity of, say, wind, rainfall, rainfall. Yes. And all these things are numerical now. I would encourage your viewers to actually, it's not that long a piece. You can pull it up off the internet. And the site is on the charts to read the entire document, because Pelkey does address those issues. And they find, once again, they find no evidence that that is, there's any sort of particular unique problems. We have had storms in the past that have been very intense. That's the category. But also we've had storms with huge amounts of rainfall. I mean, I do think you have to address this problem that we've had storms that landed where nobody was living. But we've had these storms before. The other thing is, go to the next slide here. And there's a typo here. It should be single family home by region. That should be an end. But anyway, the other interesting thing about in each of these regions of the country, including the Atlantic, as you can see here, people keep building bigger homes. Right. And they tend to be more expensive. So once again, I think if you, and there's a lot more of this paper, it's actually probably only 10 to 15 pages long. But it's a really interesting read. And I do think we need to do more of this stuff. And this is also the case with fires in California. California has an arid, dry climate with periods of drought. This has gone on since way before the Spaniards were there. And that climate and eco-ecocycle usually took care of itself by big fires. And I have a personal view that in California, they have drained away all the manpower. I'm not just talking about money here, from all the normal kinds of things, like managing dams and managing the forests and reinforcing the grid to work on exotic and esoteric climate issues with very small returns. And they're kind of reaping what they sowed. I really think there's no excuse for the dam disaster that occurred in California, which I think they were quite lucky it didn't go to full scale. And for the fact that 2 million people in California had to be pulled off the grid over concern over fire. The folks, the political establishment that manages the resources in California are well aware this is a long-term problem. And instead of fooling around with a lot of low return projects, which was fascinating for the Californians, they abdicated their responsibility on a lot of fundamental issues, including forest management. And this should be a warning to governments everywhere. Okay, you want to do some new and innovative things, but you still have to take out the trash, repair the roads, and educate the kids. You can't really start to do all this other stuff if you decide to abandon the stuff that people actually elect you to do. Absolutely, absolutely. But if we take these trend lines and demonstrate that the storms actually are not getting more violent, that there is not a noticeable increase in the storms. Historical, yes. And really the underlying question here is, what effect does climate change have, if any, on the storms we are reading about and sometimes which hit our neighborhoods? But if you take those trend lines as flat or down, then what the implication is, part of our inquiry today, is that, well, climate change is not affecting these storms. They are not, according to the trend lines, not getting worse. Now, if Belki would say, climate change is not affecting those storms yet. That's what he would say. I think he's a very much of a scientist. And he would say that the modeling for the future is uncertain, and there are bad things that will happen if you continue to load. I mean, I'm sort of channeling him now, CO2 in the environment. And part of the things that will happen with that is a shift in the climate. It's unclear whether it means that storms will be worse. You may get sea level rise. And the debate over that is how fast will that sea level rise will be. But, and some modeling does show an increase in storms and intensity over time. But that's modeling. That's not the historical record. So I don't have that problem with those two worlds. I'm just saying that if you can't show it in the historical record, you shouldn't go around saying, oh, this storm shows we're in a big climate emergency. No. Isn't modeling, doesn't it include the component of historical data, or is it completely, you know, shoved off from historical data? Well, that is a whole new program having to do whether the models are properly validated. And, you know, the people argued that the Russian model is superior because it's highly and completely validated within the historical model. And the many U.S. models are not now. That is actually probably debate somebody else ought to have on your program. I can get you some of the talk to you about that. But I think that that is not actually what the models are doing. The models are trying to describe the physical world in a mathematical sense and the interactions of this very complex physical world and then give us an estimate of what that world will look like if these trends continue. Well, it sounds very, it sounds complicated. It also sounds like reasonable scientists may not agree on exactly how to model it. So you could have multiple scientists coming to multiple modeling conclusions, no? You can, and actually someday I will show you why this idea that 98% of scientists agree on X is just incorrect. 98% of scientists don't agree on anything. That's the nature of science. They're competitive. So one last point to cover, though, is this. So if you say that the trend lines are flatter down, if you say that there's no scientifically demonstrated... First, let me just say I didn't say it. Well, if he says it, you know, however, then that takes the pressure off doing things about it. Because I think a lot of people who argue that the storms are getting worse and, you know, that we have to prepare for the next one because there's always one in the pipeline that could really demolish your neighborhood like in the Bahamas, like in Puerto Rico. Those places are really demolished. And we don't have a plan necessarily for either making communities and islands like that more resilient, including Hawaii. And we don't actually take action on plans to make things more resilient. And so if you follow this analysis, not to say it's yours, but if you follow this analysis, the pressure is off then. You don't have to do anything. What is that inform us in terms of public policy on resilience-type projects? So I think the historical record shows that storms are frequent, frequent enough, and that they can cause a lot of damage. Now, if that historical record is not enough for the political establishment to encourage policies for more resilience, I don't think I can do much to, I can add more to that. So I just think the historical record says, oh, we do have these storms on a rather recurring and predictable or sort of maybe not, but intermittent basis. And we probably should prepare for them. And some communities prepare for them. And some do not. I mean, there's a classic story about this before I think it was Katrina up in New Jersey, up the coast of North Carolina, a builder built his home to be, you know, did a lot of separate features to prevent the roof from falling off and everything. And you can see the house still standing there, virtually no damage. All the homes in the neighborhood wiped out. So yeah, there are things we can do. And by the way, you don't need climate change for a reason to do that. These storms are coming. That's what the historical record shows. Yeah, that reminds me of a show we had a year ago with a fellow who had studied Puerto Rico. He studied solar installations on Puerto Rico. And he had photographs of a large field of solar panels, community solar, you know, utility-scale solar. And half the field had been installed by one installer with one kind of fastener. And the other half the field had been installed by another installer with another kind of fastener. And you can see it on the photograph. One part of the field was destroyed, same storm. Other part of the field was still working. It's really interesting how, you know, a few changes, and you have a big result, you know, a big difference in result as in when a storm hits. There's a very active program at the University of Florida throughout the state of Florida Research Program with no one other on materials and construction strategies. Yeah. Well, it's a very interesting, you know, countervail, if you will, through what we've been hearing about how the storms are getting worse and there are more of them and they're more intense and they're coming our way to know that there's an analysis here which shows that we're no worse off. And, you know, I guess we've all thought this thought that, hey, you know, if you can, you make this argument in the press and so forth and with the weatherman, so to speak, that the storms are getting worse. But in fact, there have always been storms. You know, back into history and prehistory, there have always been storms. The only problem was we were not making a record of it back when. We don't have data at all back when. And some of those storms had to be pretty intense. Absolutely. You can, as I said, if you want to read a fascinating story, read this book called Isaac Storm. And it will be just stunned by the potential damage. And this is over 100 years ago, you know, Galveston. Well, thank you for shedding light on this. Really appreciate the discussion and the charts and the numbers and the whole approach. Something we should be looking at and something we should be demanding data about so we know where we really are. We have to get an accurate position of where we really are. Right. But at the end of the day, though, given that modeling... We should still prepare for bad storms because they have been happening for over 100 years, for sure. Yeah, especially in islands. Thank you so much, Lou. Appreciate it always. We'll be back with you a couple of weeks. We look forward to another eye-opening discussion with you, Lou. Lou, put your hands together. Thank you so much.