 Greetings, everyone. Thank you for coming to what I hope will be an interesting and edifying evening. I once again, as it passed the events, secured the concurrence of our medical advisory team that given the height of the room, vaccination status, and the distance from all of you that it was okay in the interest of you hearing us clearly to demask for the evening. So we are exceptionally glad to have you all here this evening and also a very interesting guest. His book is now sold well over 100,000 copies. It deals, of course, with the issue of climate, but I think, and I really invited him here because of the broader issues which it raises about the role of science, the proper role of science, the proper role of places of science like this in helping inform public decisions and in advancing knowledge generally. So to discuss both those topics, please welcome Dr. Steven Coonan. Welcome Dr. Coonan. He's on his way tomorrow to MIT and then shortly thereafter to Stanford, but he's taking his universities in the proper priority and prestige order, so let that be noted. For those who haven't read the book, again, I'm frankly more interested in the broader questions, the more general questions that the book illuminates, but to get there, it's important to have your views on the record for those who haven't had a chance to read it, as I know many of your critics didn't get around to reading it. So let's just start sort of lightning round style. Is the world's climate changing? Of course. Is it getting warmer? Yes, it's gotten about one degree centigrade warmer in the last 120 years. And does humankind have a lot to do with that? Certainly humans are influencing it exactly how much remains to be determined. Okay. The censure book came out. The UN has issued another report. Again, for those who haven't yet had the chance, Dr. Coonan has not done original research for this. All of the assertions and findings in the book come from the government's own reports, including the UN. Now they have issued a subsequent report. Anything about that new report change your views or cause you to modify them? I have of course looked very carefully at it. The report is 4,000 pages long, so it's taking some time for me and others to digest. But there isn't very much at all that I would change about what I've written. Okay. Now, a number of people have taken strong exception to things you wrote. And some of that, by the way, another reason that I want to focus on the larger topic some is the way some of our student participants are going to ask you questions very specific to climate toward the end. But one of the most common criticisms is that you cherry-picked the data. Now, from having read the book, you found some instances of that happening among those who differ with you on the issue. But talk a little bit about- You know, as you mentioned, everything I've written in the book, 95%, is not my words, not my science, but the official science from the IPCC. And I tried to stick with summary statements. You know, the statement that there are no detectable trends in hurricanes over a century. I would say that's not a cherry pick. That's a pretty important observation. And similarly, that there's minimal economic impact for warming much more than what Paris is aiming for. That's not a cherry pick either. That seems to me that's pretty important. And those, once again, are you saying our statements lifted directly from their course? Right out of the book. Sometimes they are directly implied rather than said, because they don't want to say them. But certainly the hurricane statement is there. It's just buried in the text. Okay. One of the themes that the book deals with and dwells on for a while is the distinction between climate and weather. We all hear on a very frequent basis about various weather events. And now they are routinely associated in a causal way with climate. You have a slightly different view of those subjects. Well, again, not my view, but the official statements. For example, the World Meteorological Organization says climate is the statistical properties of weather over a 30-year period. And so what happens this year or what happened last year or in the next three years is still weather. If you saw a succession of storms over the last few decades that were more intense, then you could talk about a changing climate. But until you get that long baseline, the latest flood, the latest storm, the latest heat wave, it's weather. Well then, but just spend a little time and be more specific if you can back that up. So first, temperatures. We hear very often about the highest temperature, the highest average. These aren't invented numbers. No, of course not. But if you look in the U.S. government report in 2017, the so-called climate science special report, it says that the warmest temperatures in the U.S., continental U.S., the lower 48 states, have not gone up in the last 60 years. And the incidence of heat waves is the same as it was in 1900. And that's not a one-year statement, but it's a statement of an average over the last 10 years or something and the average of 10 years. So no. Now globally, the IPCC says it's either likely or very likely that the incidence of heat waves has gone up, but that's not surprising if the temperature's gone up. Just today, I read that California is experiencing its longest drought or worst drought in quite some time. This must mean something. So California and the West Coast generally have seen a succession of droughts. We have records of them from the tree rings and from other paleological climate studies. There was a big drought in the 12th century, I think, that wiped out the Anasazi in the southwest of the U.S. So these droughts happen. The real question is what role are humans playing in the droughts that we've seen on the West Coast right now? Okay. How about wildfires? We've certainly seen some big ones. We've heard a lot about them. Are these not related to changes in the climate? So wildfires are particularly complicated? Are there several causes? I think the first cause is U.S. Forest Service practice. When you look at the incidence of wildfires in the U.S., you saw about 1920s, it dropped precipitously until about 1970. Why did that happen, even though the climate was warming? And the reason that happened was the Forest Service instituted a deliberate policy of fire suppression, Smokey the Bear and all of that. And then in the 70s, they started relaxing the policy and it started getting somewhat drier. And so you see fires starting to creep up in the last four decades or so, but still at one-fifth or less of what they were in the 1920s. So forestry practices is one. The second practice is human development. You get towns like Paradise, California, smack in the middle of a forest, which is chock full of fuel just waiting to be dry enough to ignite. And so humans are certainly playing a role, not maybe in the way you think from climate, but also the drying and warming climate does play a role as well. We saw some big hurricanes again this year and have certainly heard that they are more numerous, they are worse, they are more costly than in the past. This must mean something. Well, if you look at the most recent IPCC report, which came out in August from the UN, and I want to pick up my phone because I want to get the words exactly right when we talk about these things. There is low confidence in most reported long-term multi-decadal to centennial, 100-year trends in tropical cyclone, hurricane, frequency or intensity-based metrics. The IPCC says maybe we've detected a growing fraction of strong storms. That was on the basis of one paper about a year ago, but then there was another paper that says not so fast. We think it's just natural variability. So I would say, at least with respect to hurricanes, it's unsettled. That can make a nice book title. Yeah, not a bad idea. So let's change the subject slightly to something that is relevant across so many disciplines, certainly at this campus, and that's modeling and computer modeling. Much of the case and much of the concern that a lot of us feel about climate is necessarily based on, not on hard empirical evidence, but on modeling and of what this might be leading to. You wrote one of the earliest textbooks a long time ago in your Caltech days on modeling, so it's not a new subject to you. You mention in the book the old aphorism, all models are wrong but some are useful, which is a good reminder for us all. But you have some pretty strong things to say. You say that some of the models, at least, have cooked the books, and you also point out that they have not been successful at what you call hind casting. So would you just explain a little bit more about this because the validity of those models is really important to us? Climate modeling is one of the grand computational challenges. It has a number of problematic aspects, and the people who are doing it are trying to do the best they can. It's just really hard. Let me start with a few of the problematic aspects. One is that human influences, while perhaps important, are physically small. It's like a half or 1% perturbation on a chaotic system where we have limited observational data. The second is the way these models work is that they cut the atmosphere and the ocean up into boxes, and about a million boxes in the atmosphere and 100 million boxes in the ocean, and they follow the flow of air and water and radiation through and salt and so on through these boxes. The problem is that's a lot of boxes, and even the biggest computer has a hard time dealing with that much computational effort, particularly when the time steps are 10 minutes and you got to step it for centuries. So the boxes in the atmosphere are 60 miles on a side. The problem is that there are lots of other things that happen in the weather that happen on much smaller scales than 60 miles. Think about a thunderstorm, for example. And so the models have to make assumptions. How many thunderstorms are in this box, depending on the temperature, how many clouds are there at one layer, another layer, and another layer, and so on. Different models make different assumptions, and so they get different answers for this very tiny perturbation from humans on the big system. That's the second problem. A third problem is that human influences are two countervailing kinds. One is the greenhouse gases, CO2, but also methane, nitrous oxide, that we're adding to the atmosphere that exert a warming influence. But then there are the aerosols from burning dirty coal, other things that we do that are in the first couple of kilometers of the atmosphere, and they exert a cooling influence, and untangling the two of those from the net is pretty difficult. So as a result, the latest generation of models, 40% of them are just ridiculously sensitive to CO2, and the IPCC just throws them out. That's a little sobering. The world's best modelers are getting it very wrong 40% of the time. You do suggest or you do say that some of the models are adjusted. Is this not unheard of or is it ever appropriate adjusted, that is to say when they don't produce what they expected or perhaps the hoped for result? In all simulations of complicated systems, you have to adjust. I have experience in watching people simulate nuclear weapons, and there are parameters there. But for those, you can do experiments, and you can adjust the parameters to get it right. In the climate models, there are so many different parameters and so many things to try to get right, that different groups will adjust different things to try to get it exactly right. Remember, half a percent kind of effects, and some of the things they adjust are ridiculous, right? So one of the models, I think it was the UK model, they tuned the way in which partial snow cover affects the reflectivity of forests, and they also tuned, you know, microorganisms on the surface of the ocean when it gets too warm, they emit a chemical that makes a haze and creates a sunscreen for them. Wonderful biological feedback. Small effect, but that's what they tune in order to get the model precise enough to where they have confidence in it. And hind casting? Ah, not good. They match, on average, so there are like 40 different models, they take an average of all the models. On average, they match the last four or five decades pretty well in terms of the global temperature, but they miss. There was a warming from 1910 to 1940 that was about as rapid as we have seen in the recent decades. It was probably mostly natural because human influences were much smaller than, the models miss it entirely. And they just say, we don't understand why, but then they say it's not important because it's only 30 years. Well, we're getting excited about the last 30 years, so you wonder what happened to that natural variability which is not there in the models. Let me just say, those are statements about global models. And if you read what the experts publish in the journals, Tim Palmer and Graham Stevens, to acknowledge consensus experts, published in, I think, 2018, a statement that the models give us only a very fuzzy global picture, and they're entirely unfit for regional description. And then Helen Nisson in 2019 and collaborator Shiza Columbia wrote a paper saying, people place too much confidence in these regional predictions. They're likely to be very wrong. And in fact, when you look at what the IPCC does about regional descriptions, it's not very good at all. I couldn't help noticing that the Nobel Prize was recently given to three gentlemen who work in this very area. I was interested to know some of your many critics will mention that, you know, you're a physicist by training, not a lifelong climate scientist, but these gentlemen were all physicists, so apparently it's not a disqualifier. No, not at all. Work in the area that got them a Nobel. And did anything about that change your view? No, but let me just say a few words about the prize, and then I can come back to my climate credentials for a second. Parisi, who was the complex systems guy, not really climate, but Minabi at Princeton built the foundations for modern climate modeling, and Hasselman in Germany developed techniques for extracting patterns out of complicated weather data. Those guys laid the foundation. That was a number of decades ago, and what I like to say is, even if the foundation is firm, it doesn't mean that the edifice is high quality, nor that the occupants are well behaved. So just in terms of my as a physicist working in climate, you know, we just published a paper, I was a co-author, on the results of a 20-year program of observations of the moon to determine the Earth's reflectivity, and we published that in geophysical research letters. It checked it a fair bit of press coverage, and so I do work in climate. But also the kinds of things I point out in the book, you don't have to be an expert in. I've got the following analogy. If I were to order carpet for a room that's eight by 10, and the carpet guy who is an expert came back and said, you need 200 square feet of carpeting, I would know that something's wrong. And those are the kind of errors that I point out in the book. It seems to me, and you've already stipulated to agreement with the, I'll call it the diagnosis, that we have a real problem, and that man is contributing to it and so forth. It seems to me that the harshest criticism level that you really go more to your divergence as to prescription, what should be done, what things make most sense, you know, how urgent or not the need to do that, those, therefore how much, how costly they should be and so forth. You are pretty optimistic about adaptation. We have a number of people Purdue here who are working on that issue. You've described it as the most likely societal response. Why do you think that and can we really afford to work on adaptation as opposed to trying to get at the causal CO2 at the front end? Yeah. Let me just say first about impacts and then we can get on to whether we could really mitigate emissions or not. At the high level, we've seen a warming of 1.1 or 1.2 degrees Celsius over the last 120 years and during that time since 1900, the population has gone of the globe from 2 billion to the current 8 billion four times and we've seen the greatest improvement in human welfare that we've ever seen for the greatest number of people. Nutrition, health, literacy, you can go on and on. It seems absurd to think that another one and a half degrees, which is about what the IPCC is predicting over the next century, is going to significantly derail things. And in fact, when you read the IPCC report, it says that there are many other factors that are more important for the economy than climate. Climate will only be a minor factor of modest, I don't remember exactly what the numbers are. And when you look at the graphs they show and subsequent research papers, we're looking at about a 4% impact on either the US or the global economy in 2100 for a warming as much as 6 degrees. Now remember, Paris is talking about 2 degrees, so 4% for 6 degrees. What does 4% mean? What it means is that if the economy is growing at 2% a year, we will be delayed in our growth at the end of the century by only two years. Or equivalently, if the US economy were to grow from the present 20 trillion to 80 trillion at 2% over 70 years, instead of 80 trillion, we would be down at 76 point something, all right? It's in the noise as far as the projection goes. In terms of the urgency with which to act, William Northhouse won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2018 for his work on climate economics. And his fundamental realization is that if you decarbonize too rapidly, you incur costs. Disruption, we'll talk about that in a minute, and deployment of immature technology. But if you decarbonize too slowly, you incur greater climate risk or greater climate damage. And so there is an optimal pace for decarbonization. There is a lot of assumptions into trying to figure out exactly what that is, but if you look at his 2018 Nobel lecture and the papers on which that's built, he says you could let the global temperature rise to 3 or 3.5 degrees in 2100 before you bring it down. And again, remember Paris is talking about 2 degrees max. So I think the politicians have gotten out over their skis in terms of the urgency and scope that they're trying to decarbonize or proposing to decarbonize the economy. That decarbonization is really tough. That's why I'm skeptical it's going to happen. Energy use increases strongly with economic development. We in the U.S., Europe, Japan, we use a lot of energy. And it makes our lives much better than if we didn't have it. But we're only about 1. something billion people. Most of the world needs more energy in order to improve their lives. There are currently, let me see if I remember the number right, about 3 billion people who do not have adequate energy. And the most reliable and convenient way to get them that energy is fossil fuels. Wind and solar for various reasons won't cut it. And so are we going to deny them the opportunity to have that energy by telling them they can't use fossil fuels? And in their own self-interest, you see the statements from China and India in the run up to the Glasgow conference in a week and a half. We need the energy and that's what we're going to do. And maybe we'll talk about this a couple decades from now. You raise the question in the book or you really cite others and making the point, but I'll pose it as a question. What is a greater threat to the poor and the developing, those people in developing nations of the world, temperature or poverty? Yeah. And I've never fortunately never been in that situation. I've talked to a few people and from the governments and countries like that. I think the choice is clear. And you want the energy first, let's deal with the more immediate needs and then we can worry about something that's uncertain a couple of generations in the future and maybe distant. But there's also a threat in the developed world from decarbonizing too rapidly. When you look at the proposals that people have put forward, that the grid go emissions free by 2035, that we ban the sale of internal combustion engines by 2035, that we curtail oil and gas production. There are 11 million people who work in oil and gas in this country. Those are major changes in society. Maybe they are warranted, but I think people are going into this without a real sense of just how disruptive it's going to be. Well, we're getting a little look right now. Europe is in a real fix. They are buying coal, buying natural gas, having tried to ban them because otherwise they're going to freeze all winter and their economies will stop. Renewables haven't sufficed not yet. So I think that we don't have to look far to know that you want to be careful about these things. Not to draw too loose an analogy, but there were a lot of extreme measures taken in the pandemic that caused more collateral damage than any good they did. And I think the world's going to want to be careful to move toward decarbonization in a way and at a pace that isn't counterproductive. Or at least I think that's what you're saying. That's very true. A lot of the decarbonization plans are put together, and you'll excuse me, I've been in academia for 50 years except for the time in BP and government, that put together... But audiences, that wouldn't be excused. This is one where you can brag about it. So the decarbonization plans are logically put together by a bunch of academics and who have no feel for the real energy system or for the societal importance of energy. I talked to people in other parts of my life who used to run major utilities whose names you would know. And while they're not trogodites, they say this is just not going to happen, at least at the pace that's being proposed. You need to integrate the technology, the economics, the regulation, the perception and behavior all together. Nobody has done that kind of comprehensive plan. I think it would be a wonderful study for the academies or the universities to undertake that. But so far it's just we put on this carbon tax and the emissions go down at this rate. Well, now that you've taken a shot at academics, let me invite you to talk a little about a major theme, an entire chapter or more of the book. And that's the way the lay press, the media, has been dealing with this issue and whether it is, whether it's done an adequate job of properly informing the public or not. It's terrible. Okay? And I've really discovered... That's clear enough. Yeah. That there are two media worlds in this country when I published the book, The Wall Street Journal was kind enough to do an interview, a review, allow me some space to write. Similarly, on the conservative side, those media are quite happy to hear me. On the liberal side, apart from an occasional slip like your wonderful column in The Washington Post a little while ago, there's been essentially no notice of the book. Wash Post, New York Times, CNN, even though the book has sold more than enough copies to make the best soloists in those publications. It's like this fingers in the ears, eyes shut attitude about it. There have been some prominent critiques of not the book, but what people said in the reviews of the book that have gained prominence, a bunch of fact-checkers, 11 academics who criticized not what I wrote, but what the reviewers said I wrote. And one of them didn't even read the book. He told me, I have a chance to talk to him in MIT tomorrow. Okay. Have a conversation. Well... So it's just really terrible. Well, leaving aside media treatment of the work itself, how about the issue itself? For instance, I mean, I just went looking for a, I won't say typical, but I want to hear from that eminent scholarly journal, the USA Today. I read this, Hurricane Ida drives home hellish battle with climate change. It has his words like horror show, a nightmarish parade of monster hurricanes will endure a hellscape. The person actually there quoting for most of this is a political consultant he's not even a physicist. But in the book, you do talk about what you perceive to be misleading, sensationalist, and coverage of the issue, which is where most of us and most of our fellow citizens have to go to try to understand what the right thing is to do. And then you also, I think, give some sense of why you think this coverage occurs. So if you're a reporter on the climate beat, maybe you've got a background in science, but maybe not. And your job is to get stories on the front page. And if the statement is that there's not much happening with hurricanes or droughts or floods or so on, that doesn't make news. But you'll look for drama. And there are always extreme weather events somewhere. But it's even worse than that, because there's an organization called Covering Climate Now, which can only be described as a collusion among major media outlets. You can look at who's on their roster, Scientific American most prominently among them, that have basically said, we're not going to cover anything that goes against the consensus or the perceived consensus. And so they are really doing a disservice to their readers by basically putting forward just one side and, in fact, a rather inaccurate side of the story about climate. Is it good business for them to do that? Oh, absolutely. If it bleeds, it bleeds, right? Fixed in eyeballs. Absolutely. And there's just no sense of, at least if I encountered it, no sense of ethics or trying to get the story right. A lot of reporters have gone into this business in a sense of activism. And it is so dangerous to mix activism with either reporting or even worse with science and not get the right story out to people. So I wrote the book to try to get around this whole chain that goes from the basic literature to the government reports to the summaries to the media and give people a sense of what the reports really say. So let's switch now to, again, the subject that most interests me because I don't know whether you will be proved right or completely wrong about your reading of this data. But I do think that it's important to pay attention to the mission you thought you were on as a scientist, challenging the accepted wisdom of the time, and also then the reaction to it. Many people saying that's not appropriate or that you should even be silenced. So I'd like to hear you talk a little about that. You talk a lot in the book about whether science should be used to inform or to persuade. You say at one point there's people who believe, let's accept their sincerity, that you said no harm and a little misinformation if it helps save the planet. So if it helps, as they see it, save the planet, can it possibly be justified? Well, I don't think so because these are complex decisions that society has to make. They will involve policies of one sort or another, and those policies will express values and priorities, but they have to be founded on a clear picture of what the science says and what it doesn't say. And if the scientists and the media, with the help of the media, spin the story one way or the other, we are usurping the right of the public to make fully informed decisions. We are distracting from other priorities or other threats that are more immediate, more obvious, and more tractable, and you can probably list them as well as I. We are tonishing the reputation of science in other important matters, like pandemics, and finally we are really depressing young people, and I think that that is one of the most criminal things that has gone on is to give young people little hope for the future when the reality is we're going to do just fine. The world is not going to end in 12 years. You have experienced at hominem attacks, not on what you found, not even on what you argued, but on you for having done so, maybe for the effrontery of having done so. You quote in the book, and we've seen this sort of phenomenon elsewhere, you quote an earth scientist who wrote to you that I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, but I don't dare say it in public. That doesn't sound much like the sort of informing science and scientific climate that some of us thought was the standard in your professions. I've heard that from more than a few people, that Steve you're right, but I don't dare say it, or I'm just going to keep quiet. You know, that's one of the reasons I frame the book as, this is not what Steve says, not Steve's science, it's what the reports and the literature say, and I would hope that that would make me relatively immune. Can you imagine being bashed for simply revealing that the report says that heat waves are no more common now than they were in 1900? What kind of world are we living in when you're afraid to tell the truth like that? You were in the political sphere, and you know that one of the columnists a while ago said a mistake in Washington is when someone accidentally tells the truth, and okay, that's fine for politicians, but we scientists are supposed to be a little bit different. Yes, well, as a non-scientist, I've always revered you and your colleagues for exactly that. We expect our politicians to bend the truth. We expect the interest groups to tell the story their way and only their way, and cherry pick where necessary. We've come to expect the media in pursuit of clicks and dollars to do the sort of things that you described, but we have trusted many of us that science would pursue the truth wherever it went and would encourage those even in refuting them who were doing that. That doesn't seem to always prevail these days. I think when you're in private sessions with the scientists, almost all of them will be pretty frank. It's when you start to get more public and even to this formal advice to governments that the corruption happens. And so before we go to our student participants, just this one more, and to me, most basic question, and it is what is the proper role of science and those who adopt that as their profession? Here's my question. Is it not just okay but inherent in the scientific enterprise to doubt, to be skeptical, to challenge what is believed to be true at the time? Let me just read you a couple of sentences and you can react to them. Paul Graham, who's the entrepreneur and a computer scientist and believed to be the founder of the software as a service business, says, I like, he said, a good scientist does not merely ignore conventional wisdom but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds right. You found some. I found some. Yeah. I knew what I was getting into. Yeah. Not quite, but I had a pretty good idea. Look, the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific society in the West anyway, founded in the 17th century, their motto is, know us in Verba. Latin for take nobody's word for it. Okay. Find out for yourself. There are some things for which we scientists have pretty good confidence in. You know, the apple is going to fall from the tree, et cetera. In climate science there are some things we do know. But there are other things that are kind of at the edge of our understanding. And that's where you want to challenge. You want to say, how do you know that? And what happens if and so on, that's what we do. We're trained to do that. And it should not be a sin to be doing that. I remember as a grade school or it was the consensus was Pluto was a planet. Right. Then a previous guest here was one of those who informed me several decades, 76 years later, that science had changed its mind. Yep. Yep. It does happen. Right. Yeah. One other quote. Richard Feynman generally viewed as I think, I mean, I think you actually crossed with him as a young physicist and Caltech. And then he was a Caltech colleague for a decade or so before he for that long. Yes. And, but generally viewed as the father of quantum mechanics and possibly the finest physicist. I don't know what post post World War two. Yeah. World War two. Also very eloquent, famous for some of his quips and so forth. Yep. But he said, at one point, we must try to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible. Because only in that way can we find progress. I think it's pretty clear what he's saying, but why don't he gave a wonderful speech at the 1974 Caltech commencement cargo cult science. And he talks about the steps that a scientist has to go through to avoid fooling themselves, but also to avoid fooling others. And he gives this wonderful example about the difference between truth and scientific truth. He says, I just saw an ad on TV for Wesson oil. And the ad says, Wesson oil doesn't soak through foods. But he says the truth is that oil oils soak through foods at a certain temperature. And so what they say is right, but it's not the truth. And that's the difference between a scientist speaking and an ad man speaking. I mean, the notion, at least many great scientists have espoused is that it is always incumbent on the on the them to challenge to be skeptical to even of those things they believe to be accurate and true. I believe I'm right that Einstein reached the right letters to Niels Bohr or somebody urging them to disprove the general theory, if they could, to run experiments that might disprove it. He wanted it tested. He wasn't trying to silence those who turned out he was right. But he wasn't trying to silence those who might demonstrate that he was right by trying to prove he was wrong. Is that a good scientist wants to be proven? I mean, you have beliefs, but you want to keep testing them against different challengers. And you're always willing. All understanding is contingent. It's subject to revision. But if you try to revise some well accepted principles, then you've got a much higher barrier to go through. So yeah, I mean, skepticism challenge is in the nature of the scientific enterprise. And if it weren't there, the enterprise would not be as powerful as it is. We have with us tonight four student volunteers who have given us part of their evening and have brought questions. And actually, we have a fifth question that came from someone who fell ill of some of a non COVID infection today. So we hope we have time for them all. Can we start please with Joe Poshia, a senior from College of Agriculture. Thank you, President Daniels. Thank you, Dr. Cooner for joining us this evening. You are known to assert climate change is occurring. However, where you differ from the wide majority of climate scientists is in the severity and speed of such a change. How does this difference in opinion impact the practical solutions that humanity must undertake as it's inevitable that our detrimental consequences still must be managed. So eventually the world will decarbonize if only because we will have better sources of energy. But the question is the pace and scope. It's really hard to decarbonize the developing countries right now because they need the energy and they account for the majority of the emissions currently and going on into the future as they become more prosperous. The good news is again the economists project that the economic impacts of warming of a couple of degrees, three, four degrees are really minor on the global economy and also on the U.S. economy. Yes, places that are less developed will bear a greater burden and I think the best thing we can do in the developed world is help the poor countries become more resilient, help them better governance the ability to execute national strategies, lifting them out of poverty, getting rid of indoor air pollution would be really important. It kills a couple million people a year. It doesn't have to be doing that at all. Those things we can be doing and gradually change the energy system. You know I like to say if you look historically energy systems change only over decades and there's good reason for that because they need to be reliable. They involve large investments that get paid off over 40 or 50 years. What's being proposed right now is like tooth extraction rather than orthodontia which is what you want to do, slow pressure and I think if we don't do it right it's going to be very disruptive and ineffective. We had a guest three or four years ago, Bjorn Lomborg who has done and continues to do work measuring the relative contribution to human health, longevity and prosperity of a variety of interventions and so decarbonization is on that list but it's not at the top of the list. It's way behind things like eradicating malaria or tuberculosis, indoor air pollution and so many other things and these are the sort of measured judgments I think you're calling for. Yes we have to move on these things but if we move on one to the exclusion of others we may do damage that we never meant to do. And even in this country or developed country we've got many other really important priorities. You can just read about them in the newspaper every day. This is several generations away at the soonest. It's vague, uncertain and a lot of it is going to happen not in the U.S. the impacts but around the world so we really want to get our priority straight. We have not had that political discussion. From the College of Science tonight Amanda DePoyen has come to join us. So my question is about the models that you were discussing before that there's some limitations in the data and experiments. What kind of experiments do you think we need to do to be able to improve those models because experiments in our computers are improving every day so what can we do now to better understand those models? So we can't do actual experiments on the climate. It's just too big. I mean somehow you were doing an experiment by emitting greenhouse gases and aerosols but we can't do controlled experiments. What we can do is intense observations of an area the size of a grid box. So 100 kilometers on a side 60 miles on a side. That program has been going on for a couple decades in the Department of Energy. It's called ARM the Atmospheric Radiation Monitoring Program and they have done campaigns of observations in the southern Great Plains in Oklahoma, the North Scope of Alaska, the Tropical Western Pacific which is a very important region climatologically and a couple of other places I can't remember now. The sad part is up until very recently the modelers have essentially ignored all that observational data. Very recently people are starting to think about applying artificial intelligence methods to understand what's happening in a grid box and how we can describe it and so these data are becoming of more use. Thank you. Thank you Amanda and Jezmina Davis also from the College of Science. Thank you. In the past we've claimed that new sources do not accurately portray climate reports and we see the same for many peer-reviewed journals in biology and in medicine. So how do you recommend that we close the gap between the broader American population and ourselves of the scientific community to make the most progress? One of my hopes is that non-climate scientists will read the book and get a sense of the kind of distortions that's happening and driving the societal discussion and maybe rise up a bit and say we've got to get our institutions right to do that. One of the things I have proposed which hasn't found much traction but I think it's a very good idea is an adversarial review, a red team review of these reports before they're issued where you get a set of credentialed experts who go through the report as a draft and say or try to answer what's wrong with this picture and I've done some of that in the book. I can give you an example if you like of a really terrible misrepresentation in the latest UN report. So the issue is sea level rise and with sea level rise the issue is not whether sea level is rising it's been rising for 20,000 years since the glaciers started to melt but whether it's been accelerating in the last half a century or so due to human influences. You find no graph in the report of the rate of rise which is what the issue is but they have some text and what they say is between 1900 and 1970 it was rising at this average rate from 1970 to 1990 it got a little bit faster and in the last few decades it's gotten faster yet. When they do that they obscure the scientific point that there was an acceleration from 1910 to 1940 or 50 a deceleration and then it was rising again from 1970. That's important because if it was changing a lot in the early part of the 20th century when human influences were a lot smaller how do you know what's happening now is due entirely to human causes. They entirely ignore that in the latest report although it was there in the previous report about seven years ago. I would fail a student at least at Caltech if they had done that sort of thing and I would hope it would happen here at Purdue as well. Remember this is alleged to be the best advice from the world's best scientists. Thank you Jasmine a great question and Jared Bland also from the College of Science. So you've mentioned that there's a basically a disagreement over the validity of regional versus global effects but you know to take a data point from what you talked about earlier you mentioned that the warmest point in the US hasn't changed much but it's something like Death Valley really predictive or a good indicator for say Indiana. Yeah so it's not that the warmest point hasn't changed it's that when you take the warmest temperature of the year averaged over the US that hasn't gone up okay over the last many decades. Thank you. There are many different temperature measures and people often you know accuse me of saying one thing when I'm really talking about a different measure anyway what I've been saying about heat waves and the average highest temperature of the year is manifest in two graphs in the report and actually there's a an interesting story about that when the draft was prepared by the government committee it gets sent to the National Academy of Sciences for a review by a committee and about heat in the US in that report the review committee wrote back and said you know you keep talking about extreme heat but the report data doesn't show that at all and they sort of said okay well we moderated things a little bit and put in a new figure which turns out to be both incorrect and even more alarming than what they had in there. I talk about that in the book. Thank you. Thank you Jared and since Joe Robinson was unable to make it at the last minute but we didn't want his question to be missed somebody brought I think it's Joe Posha did you bring it can you be our can you stand in for Joe Robinson please. Absolutely he's a close friend of mine so I'd be happy to. He said your position on climate change in carbon emissions is very clear but your book does not make much mention of the health effects due to pollution cars factories and power plants emit pollutants such as ozone carbon monoxide and nitrogen dioxide to name a few these can impact the health of those living in the local area especially with asthma how would you suggest addressing these problems in order to minimize the health risk. So absolutely but you know local pollution is not climate change right it's a local problem it is serious so I lived in Los Angeles for 30 years and during that time or even starting from 1960 the population of basin doubled a quadruple the LA basin but the air pollution went down and that was because we put catalytic converters in the cars and we cracked down on the stationary sources we have the technology to do this in the west it's a question of getting people to deploy it and I think for local pollution in the west we've done a pretty good job the problem is you go to China you go to India Egypt and they have not put those controls in because they're expensive it requires good government regulation which is difficult to do in the Chinese system eventually they'll get there the local indoor pollution you know 10 of the world's energy mostly in poor countries comes from what's politely called traditional biomass and that means burning wood and dung in houses for cooking and heating and simply by giving folks like that propane lpg you would save a couple of million lives a year from that kind of adverse health condition so yeah we can do a lot and we should for pollution thank you thank you joe and thank the other joe for a great question so let's end on what what to me maybe more fundamental and in some ways a summation of things that you've you've talked about dr. Kuhnen but it has to do with the whether certainty or as some will now say consensus is ever appropriate and ever realistic in science in the last few days I know an entirely sincere member of our community says not a good idea to have dr. Kuhnen here because it might leave the impression of uncertainty which you know I hope we will all reflect on as as a really an unfortunately wrong-headed idea of what a university is about across all its disciplines hard science or not so let me just read one more of of dr. Feynman's statements wonderful and see if maybe you hadn't heard this and absorbed it in your career he said if you thought that science was ever certain well that's just an error on your part yeah yeah you know we're taught science in grade school as a collection of facts earth goes around the sun dna is the genetic blueprint and so on that's not what science is science is a process for reducing uncertainty and it works well in many cases but there are still some things we just don't know or don't know how to do and so for we scientists the known stuff is interesting it's the foundation that we work from but it really is the unknown that is most important and fascinating for us scientists well dr. Kuhnen you have stirred a debate in the country and and one I hope here tonight I have no way of knowing or evaluating whether your critics may very well be proven right and you wrong but the the larger point that we ought as Ben Franklin said doubt or resolve to doubt our own infallibility and to recognize science as the constant quest not for impossible certainty but for constantly improving reducing understanding of our of our world and how to make it better right and for for both those contributions we thank you and we thank you for being here tonight and please thank Dr. Stephen Quinn