Marian Tupy: Hello, and welcome to a new episode of the Human Progress Podcast. Today I’m joined by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. He’s a professor emeritus at the University of Colorado Boulder, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and author of influential books like The Honest Broker and The Climate Fix. He’s a leading voice on the politicization of science and climate policy. And Roger’s scholarship is known for being rigorous, data-driven, and impartial. For all of those reasons, I am delighted to have him on the podcast today. Roger, welcome.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Thank you. And thanks for that very gracious introduction.
Marian Tupy: Well deserved. As you know perfectly well, very few things in this world are as controversial as climate change, global warming, the science as a whole. So why don’t we basically start by just looking very briefly at your academic bona fides. Can you basically very quickly sum up your career and also your scholarly interests?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I’m getting old enough now that it’s very difficult to quickly summarize it, but I’ll give you in a nutshell. I’m lucky. I grew up in a household where my father was a famous atmospheric scientist. And I always thought I was gonna be an atmospheric scientist or go in some scientific direction. Always worked on math and computer programming. When I was a kid, my dad taught me how to program in Fortran, which I thought every kid learned how to do, but that gave me some skills that turned out to be useful. In college, I worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder in the Atmospheric Chemistry Division as a Fortran programmer. And I got to be in the presence, in the shadows, of great atmospheric chemists at that time in the 1980s, who were working on the ozone hole issue. And I thought, all right, if I’m gonna do this science thing, I should learn something about policy, because obviously science is important. So after I got my math degree, I went in to get a master’s in public policy. Long story short, that took me to Washington, D.C. And I had a position at the House Science Committee.
Roger Pielke Jr.: My mentor was the chief of staff. So he basically said, follow me around and pay attention. And I got to see how the scientists at NCAR thought the problem was with politicians. When I went to Washington, I saw how policymakers thought the problem was with scientists, and I decided to have a career where they meet. And so I got a PhD in science and technology policy. And for the past 30-plus years, I’ve worked, as you say, a lot on climate change, on energy, but also on other topics like the politicization of science, gender controversies in elite sport. Anywhere where science is picked up and abused and misused, sometimes well used. But it seems that science is a locus of political conflict these days.
Marian Tupy: Very good. So in this podcast, I want to spend most of our time talking about climate change and global warming and where we are. But I think probably the best thing to do is to start with the two extremes in the climate change debate. I don’t like to use the word denialist, but let’s look at that side first. So people who are critical of the dominant view that climate change is a crisis or even a problem will say things like CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are much lower than what they were in the distant past of the planet. CO2 is vital for life, it is plant food, and it has led to global greening, which is a good thing. So nothing to worry about. What is wrong with that point of view?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of what you say the science supports global greening and the fact that CO2 levels were higher in the past but where that goes away from scientific understanding is the “nothing to worry about” part. Anyone who claims to have certainty about the future, either we’re headed for the apocalypse or “don’t worry, be happy,” that’s not consistent with understandings of how humans are affecting the climate system. It always was and always will be a risk management problem. The late Steve Schneider, who was a famous climate scientist and climate activist I have this in my book he said at one time, the fundamental challenge of climate change is that outcomes could be very benign or they could be very serious and consequential, and we won’t know the difference during the time that we need to prepare. So both sides, I think, on both extremes the apocalyptics and the “don’t worry, be happy” folks are guilty of selectively interpreting evidence in a way that they think is favorable to whatever cause they want to advance. And the reality is that they’re both in that spectrum of possibilities, but smart decision-making has to consider that entire spectrum, not just one tail of the distribution on either end.
Marian Tupy: So sticking with people who are basically saying let’s embrace CO2, it is vital for life, it is making the world greener. Is there such a thing as an optimal amount of CO2? We know that if you put more CO2 into the atmosphere, plants love that, right? More food. So is there also such a thing as too little CO2 where the plants would start dying off? So what is the barest minimum? And is there such a thing as an optimum?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, it’s a great question. And it’s not just CO2. There’s a lot of debate about temperature targets and the idea that a world that’s two degrees under the Paris Agreement is better than a world that’s 2.2 degrees or 2.5 degrees, and 1.5 degrees would be even better. And those are associated with different levels, amounts of CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. The simple answer is, as a risk management problem, the emission of carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels which is certainly not the only human influence on climate but that leads to changes in the energy balance of planet Earth where we live. And with that comes risk of change, and those risks could be profound. And so I focused more on the rate of change rather than whether 425 parts per million is better than 350 is better than 575. The idea behind risk management is that we want to limit the human perturbation of the system. And limiting it focuses on that marginal input that we’re putting in into emissions, not trying to find a perfect number we can dial to try to make things as perfect as can be.
Roger Pielke Jr.: That said, our ability to modulate the atmosphere in such a way that we hit a particular concentration target or temperature target is pretty limited.
Marian Tupy: Right. So it is a question of trade-off. One of the trade-offs that I hear very often would go something like this. By emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere we are still talking about the people who are largely unconcerned, right?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Right.
Marian Tupy: We’ll get to the other side very soon. But the trade-off would be something like this. By emitting more CO2 into the atmosphere, we are making the world much richer so that even if we do have more CO2 in the atmosphere and it leads to some climatic problems down the line, the society is going to be so technologically advanced and so rich that we’ll be able to take care of it. Is there any evidence for that or is it mostly wishful thinking?
Roger Pielke Jr.: So humans are a fantastically inventive species. A lot of your work and a lot of the stuff I read that you put out emphasizes the progress that’s been made in making our material environments that much better off. And it’s absolutely true that fossil fuels, which have the side effect of emitting carbon dioxide, have been central to all of that progress. One data point, a trend that I think many people aren’t aware of, is that the carbon dioxide intensity of economic activity so technically it’s carbon dioxide per unit of GDP that has been steadily going down for as long as we have records, 60, 70 years. So as we’ve become wealthier, we’ve also become much less carbon intensive. And there are good reasons for that, and we could go into that, but it turns out that as a species we really like getting more output for less input, and that includes fuels. And we like cleaner burning fuels in terms of particulates in the atmosphere and other metrics. And so if that trend were to continue, then at some point we do go over the hump of increasing carbon dioxide emissions and it starts going down.
Roger Pielke Jr.: In fact, right now over the last decade, emissions have plateaued in the sense that there are small increases, but they’re within the margin of error measurement. And if you look to 20, 25 years ago, emissions were really going up fast, particularly due to coal consumption in China. So there is a background force that has nothing to do with climate policy that our economies have been decarbonizing. And so for those people on that side of the debate who really love CO2, we would have to intentionally take action to pump CO2 into the atmosphere because the long-term economic trends are in the other direction. I know it’s not as fast as some would like and it could be faster, but the decarbonization of the economy is just a fundamental reality of life on planet Earth.
Marian Tupy: I want to talk a little more about this decarbonization process. So capitalism and the profit motive obviously forces companies to use as little input in order to make the output cheaper. So I grew up under communism in Eastern Europe and our environment was shockingly horrible because we didn’t have the price mechanism. But as a general rule, a company X, instead of burning 10 tons of coal in order to produce a product, they would rather burn 5 tons in order to save that money, make the product cheaper, make bigger profits, et cetera, et cetera. So it seems to me that capitalism plays a part in making decarbonization possible. But there is an alternative view, which is that most of the decarbonization was actually driven by policy change, specifically by making it too expensive to burn more coal or more energy. So do you have any sense of whether this is capitalism at its best or companies are being forced into these energy savings because of government mandates, because of additional taxes on energy and things like that? Can we disaggregate the two or are they so closely interlinked that we cannot tell them apart?
Roger Pielke Jr.: So yes and yes, I guess is the answer. In my classes, I teach my students that there’s no such thing as the free market. Policy, politics, capitalism, markets, they’re all intertwined. But if you take a look historically at what has driven the decarbonization trend, overwhelmingly it has been gains in the energy efficiency of the economy. So we are getting more output for less input. There’s two big parts to that. One is true efficiency in how we produce steel or cement or very carbon-intensive activities. But also the nature of the global economy has changed. It used to be that most people were in agriculture, and now we have a massive services industry that is very light on its consumption of energy and results in a lot of material gain. So historically, efficiency gains have driven that. And there have been notable examples like the Top Runner program in Japan, which is an efficiency-supporting policy that mandates regulations that industries have to follow the most efficient that’s been demonstrated in their industry. For example, fuel economy standards in the United States after the Arab oil crisis in the 1970s. So there are plenty of examples of policy-motivated efficiency gains.
Roger Pielke Jr.: But as you say, there is also a very strong backdrop. If you want to make money in the economy, the US economy or the global economy, if you can produce better goods with less energy inputs than your competitors, you’re gonna have an advantage. But that same math if we just take a look at that math if we want that decarbonization trend to continue going forward, it can’t only be based on efficiency. It has to also be based on lowering the carbon intensity of energy production. And so take, for example, coal. Coal is the most carbon-intensive of the fossil fuels. It emits twice the amount of carbon dioxide that natural gas does for the same energy produced. The United States has seen a very steady, pretty much linear decline in carbon dioxide emissions since 2005. And that is driven two-thirds of that, roughly, is due to natural gas, which low-price natural gas from fracking has contributed to displacing coal, and that has led to emissions reductions. The other third is from the expansion of solar and wind, which also obviously have a lower energy production carbon footprint. Those factors together have displaced coal such that coal is you could make a case that it’s on its way out in the United States no matter what any president or Congress decides to do.
Roger Pielke Jr.: That’s just an economics question. Globally, coal accounts for the burning of coal for energy about 40% of carbon dioxide emissions. And I often argue that coal is the lowest-hanging fruit because we can replace coal. We can replace it with natural gas. We can replace it with nuclear. Coal is very important to the economies of India and China. It has energy security implications. South Korea and Japan just announced, following the Iran war, they’re gonna increase coal consumption. But if the world was really serious about aggressively decarbonizing, coal would be the sweet spot that I would focus on because we do have the technological alternatives. But to close the circle, if we want deep decarbonization, then going forward we’re gonna have to expand low or carbon-free sources like nuclear power or natural gas with carbon capture and storage.
Marian Tupy: Or fusion.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Or technologies that don’t even exist. Exactly.
Marian Tupy: Very good. Okay, so we promised to go back to the other side of the extreme, and that is, of course, people who believe that climate change is an existential crisis, not just a problem, an existential crisis for which some people believe we need to sacrifice our current standards of living, not even plateauing the global economy, but actually degrowing the global economy. Is there anything wrong with that picture?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Well, those people exist. I encounter them sometimes in academia. But the big problem with that perspective is that the vast majority of the 8 to 9 billion people on this planet have no interest in degrowth whether it’s personal degrowth or economy-wide degrowth. The idea that we can make ourselves poorer as a way to reduce emissions, if you run the math, it doesn’t change the basic math about the importance of efficiency and the importance of decarbonizing energy supply. So there is a strain of environmentalism that goes back to the population concerns of the 1960s and ’70s who believe very much that it’s too many people, it’s too much affluence, too much technology that’s the problem. There’s not very many politicians I haven’t come across any that have won an election campaigning on making people poorer. It’s just those ideas are pretty fringe. And I’ve written about this. They have an outsized presence in the climate movement, which I think has warped how that movement engages with the broader population. But the reality is that any successful path to decarbonizing the economy has to be accompanied by greater growth and wealth for most people around the world who there’s 5, 6 billion people who do not enjoy anything like the energy services people who are watching this podcast get to enjoy every day.
Roger Pielke Jr.: And so the world’s gonna consume more energy no matter what the degrowthers say.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, I find it so interesting that in this country, my adoptive country of the United States, people hold both views often in their heads at the same time, arguing that we are super affluent and consequently it’s okay for us to compromise on our economic growth, and at the same time maintain that the United States is getting poorer and that people are living paycheck to paycheck, et cetera, et cetera. But then again, one would never expect the median voter to be perfectly logically consistent, I think.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Right, right, right.
Marian Tupy: Anyway, I want to now turn to what I would consider to be the main part of this podcast, and that is to talk about specific concerns that people have when it comes to climate change. And I’m gonna throw at you these concerns individually. And if you could please just tell us, what does the latest research on this say? So let’s start with the rising global temperatures and extreme heat.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so what I normally do and I think this is a good practice in any area where science and politics meet is I start with assessments that have been put together by authoritative bodies, in this case the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is a sprawling, massive thing. It’s not one thing. It’s got three working groups and many dozens of chapters and hundreds of authors. But it’s a touchpoint for assessing the science. And people would be shocked to learn how much climate research is published every year. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of papers. Maybe with AI, we’ll be able to sort through those more systematically. But up to now, we rely on these large bodies to assess the science. And the IPCC, which in my areas of expertise so like extreme events, climate scenarios it’s gotten some things right, some things wrong. But in general, Working Group 1 and its focus on extreme events has pretty much called things straight over the 30 years. And the IPCC says that there has been an increase in heat waves around the world. It’s been detected, to use their language, and they attribute that increase of heat waves to human causes, including increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.
Roger Pielke Jr.: But there’s also other factors, like urban heat islands, that make things worse. So the strongest evidence for changes in extreme events are, in fact, with heat waves.
Marian Tupy: Okay, just in one or two sentences, give me a sense of what a heat wave why is that bad? Is it simply bad because people feel more uncomfortable on any given day? Maybe it increases the death rate. Is it concentrated in particular parts of the planet, that sort of thing?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple answers to that. And it’s different, obviously, if you’re in Phoenix versus if you’re in Portland in the United States, for example. The World Health Organization has argued that with effective adaptation, the number of people who should die from excessive heat is zero. We have air conditioning, we have weather forecasts, we have good warnings. The challenge is that those adaptations to heat forget about changes, just existing heat are not well implemented everywhere around the world at once. If places that are adapted to one level of temperature start seeing a greater frequency of heat waves, say New York City, for example, policies are gonna have to be put in place to help people deal with that heat. People can put a value judgment on whether it’s good or whether it’s bad, but it does require us to be nimble to change. The other factor is ecosystems are far less adaptable than humans are. We can go, if it’s 110 outside, I can come inside in the air conditioning. Ecosystems can’t do that. So when there are material changes in the physical environment, it has consequences for ecosystems that are maybe profound. And again, I get back to the risk management issue, that when you do force those changes, things may turn out in a way that you don’t like or are bad for people, even though we may not be able to predict that with certainty.
Marian Tupy: Yes. And of course, healthy ecosystems is something that is part of human progress. We do like being surrounded by natural beauty and animals and so forth. And if extreme weather, heat waves, for example, compromise that, it is a deterioration in our own well-being, I would argue. Okay, changes in precipitation patterns.
Roger Pielke Jr.: So there’s a few things there. One is that the extreme weather phenomenon that the IPCC has, I would say, the second most confidence in are increases in heavy downpours, what they call extreme precipitation. People have to be really careful with that. And the IPCC, to its credit, is very careful. That is not the same thing as flooding. There’s a number of reasons for that. Here in Boulder, Colorado, if we got 2 centimeters of rain today, that would be extreme precipitation. It’s not gonna be a flood. I wish we would get 2 centimeters of rain. And so there has been a documented increase in the activity of the hydrological cycle around the world due to increasing temperatures. So that is one. And it hasn’t been detected everywhere, and the numbers are not super large in the context of natural variability, but they’ve been detected and attributed. I want to be very clear, there is no confidence that there has been detected an increase in flooding around the world. And the IPCC is also very clear about that. Flooding is very difficult to document because we manage so many river basins.
Roger Pielke Jr.: We change runoff. When you pave cities, more water runs off. When you do agriculture, you do irrigation. So flooding is a much more confounding issue than precipitation itself.
Marian Tupy: Okay. And in an ideal world, if we were gods, we would say, okay, that part of the world has too little precipitation, we would like to ideally increase it there, maybe reduce it somewhere else, but we can’t and we don’t. So as a consequence, there may be areas in the world which are already getting plenty of rain and which are now getting more rain, and that again contributes to problems. It can create additional problems.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I mean, there are all sorts of problems that can occur. In the western United States, we had a very low snowfall winter, which means there’s very little runoff, and that’s gonna affect the large hydroelectric dams downstream on the Colorado River, for example, which is gonna affect electricity production, it affects agriculture. And we humans, we seem to want to live places that don’t have the sort of natural resources that we might think would support human settlement. So take Phoenix, middle of the desert, and it uses water from my backyard here in Colorado. So we try to adapt to very volatile, very harsh parts of the world, and we do so successfully a lot. But climate variability just by itself, forget about the change part, means that we’re gonna always come up against some hard times.
Marian Tupy: Extreme weather events, especially hurricanes, cyclones, wildfires, and droughts.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so I always say we gotta take these one by one. I’ve studied tropical cyclones for 30 years, which includes hurricanes, and the IPCC gets this one right also. There is not any convincing evidence that there’s more hurricanes, more intense hurricanes over the period of record. The IPCC is clear on that. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, very clear on that. Hurricanes have become kind of a poster child. They’re very photogenic. Al Gore had one coming out of a smokestack in his famous movie. And hurricanes are probably one of the worst places to look for any signals of climate change. Simply, the numbers are small. There’s only 60 to 80 hurricanes on planet Earth in any given year. That’s a small number of events when you compare it to the millions and millions of temperature measurements we have everywhere every year. And the more measurements you have, the easier it is to detect small signals. Flooding, as I said, no detection or attribution. Drought, for most metrics of drought, again, no detection or attribution. The one distinction that the IPCC makes is soil moisture deficits, so think of dry land, which is associated with warming more than it is with precipitation. Winter storms, again, no detection or attribution there. What other events…?
Marian Tupy: I guess wildfires. I recently saw a stat from Bjorn Lomborg showing that it’s been actually declining.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so you have to be careful with the stats that Bjorn shares because he shares a stat that talks about burning on planet Earth. And a lot of that burning is burning that is done in Africa, South America to clear land for agriculture. And so wildfires are a subset of that. And the wildfire record is confounded because, again, humans manage the land surface and there are invasive species. And so teasing out trends in wildfires, we might be able to do that, but attributing causality is much more difficult. The IPCC doesn’t even take on wildfire. It describes a quantity called fire weather, which again is hot and dry, but they do not even take on wildfire. There are some published studies out there that say that the warming, particularly in, say, the western United States, attributed to human causes, has led to an increase in conditions that make themselves more likely to have fires. There is also good research that says before human settlement of, let’s say, North America, the intensity and scale of wildfires was much, much greater than anything we’ve seen, partly because we spent the better part of a century trying to suppress wildfires.
Roger Pielke Jr.: And so that analysis says that we have a fire deficit. And one of the things that’s I guess it’s an irony, it’s uncomfortable, particularly for people like me in the West if we want less intense fires, we need more managed fires. And so we need more fires to have less fires. And that means that summers are gonna have a lot of smoky air. Fire suppression, putting every fire out when it starts, has turned out not to be a good policy because it encourages the growth of underbrush and forests that are very combustible.
Marian Tupy: Okay, so that obviously became something of a political hot potato in California with Republicans claiming we have to talk about it in political terms because that’s what happens basically Republicans claiming we have too much underbrush, when there is fire, it’s much worse than it would be otherwise than it would be controlled fire, and the Democrats basically saying there is no problem there, there is no smoke and there is no fire. So it seems like in this particular case, the science on this is settled.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s a pretty good understanding that forest management needs to improve to reduce fires, including prescribed burns. But that doesn’t take away the fact that, yes, of course, we’re warming the climate and there are more heat waves and that leads to more conditions that are conducive to fires. So I think there’s an element of truth all around. Wildfire I don’t really view as a climate change issue. We’re not gonna start driving electric cars and it’s gonna prevent forest fires. That’s not how it works. And so efforts to have that debate, I think, are less useful than how do we want to manage the public lands. And I guess the other factor is people like to live in the woods. And the expansion of what’s called the urban-wildland interface has been massive. And so there are many places where in Canada, we saw in Alberta, massive wildfires burned, but didn’t have any human or economic impact. If you’re in California, there’s a lot of people who live in the woods, some with very expensive houses. And that’s what leads to a lot of the crisis, is the impacts, not just the event.
Marian Tupy: All right, moving swiftly onto ocean warming and acidification.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so there’s two issues there. One is and I’m glad you brought that up if to detect a signal of human warming of the planet, there’s a lot of arguments that have been made over the decades about the surface air temperature and the location of thermometers and things like that. It turns out that the best place to look for warming is actually in the oceans. And over the last several decades, there have been very good measurements, something called the Argo floats, which collect temperature measurements down to 700 meters of the global oceans and has shown that most of the energy imbalance that’s caused by our emission of greenhouse gases is actually going into the oceans. There’s been a steady warming of the oceans. That’s one factor that leads to expansion of the water because it’s warmer and sea level rise. And we can talk about that. But what was the other factor you were…?
Marian Tupy: I was acidification.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Acidification, yeah. So about half of the carbon dioxide we emit is actually taken up by the oceans and it changes the chemistry of the oceans. Not like super… Acidification I have this in my book is a term that was coined by a scientist well over 20 years ago to make it sound scarier than perhaps it was. But anytime you change the chemistry of the ocean, that will have impacts on sea life. And so there is this debate, I guess, out there. On the one hand, it’s a good thing that the oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide because then there’s less of a radiative effect in the atmosphere. But on the bad side, it means we’re changing the chemistry of the ocean. And if you go through all that math, this is where you get to net zero. The idea that, well, if we want to stop perturbing the global system with carbon dioxide emissions, we can’t just reduce it to the amount that the oceans are taking up, which itself is a variable. We have to reduce it to zero so we won’t change the chemistry of the ocean, radiative forcing of the atmosphere.
Marian Tupy: So fish life is something I do care a lot about and I want to know this is taking us a little too far afield, I realize, but I mean, the sea life evolves as well. If these things change very, very slowly, then it’s not gonna be like on certain Thursday, all the fish are gonna die. Right? If this happens over a period of decades or maybe centuries, the sea life will also adapt or won’t. I mean, we do have evolution going on, right?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah. I mean, so this is a fundamental question and this is something that the IPCC takes up and it’s in the literature. I am less worried about limits to adaptation of the human species. We can adapt really fast. I can move to Oslo tomorrow and I’d have a pretty profound change in climate. And we can build, we can implement air conditioning and so on. The pace at which we’re altering the global system my understanding, and again, I’m this guy that sits in between science and politics but my understanding is a lot of the concern is that the pace with which we are altering the Earth system is much faster than evolutionary timescales. And so that’s, again, it’s a risk management problem because if we alter things faster than ecosystems or fish can productively adapt, then that’s a problem.
Marian Tupy: Very good. And I think that my next concern, melting ice and glaciers, that’s also sort of tied to the rising sea levels and so forth. So maybe you can talk about that.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, absolutely. So runoff from glacial melt and also melt from Greenland, to some degree from Antarctica, is contributing to increasing sea level rise. That’s tightly associated with warming. That also has been attributed to human causes. There are other factors beyond just warming. Something I was fascinated to learn about from one of my colleagues at the University of Colorado was that when we put particulates in the atmosphere, pollution, and it precipitates out, let’s say in snow, if the snow is a little darker because it has soot in it or some other something that changes its color, it changes the albedo and it melts faster. And so there are various human influences on the climate system beyond just carbon dioxide that contribute to these processes. So it’s wickedly complex. And anyone who thinks on the apocalyptic side that, well, if we just get rid of fossil fuels, we’ll stop climate change, it’s a lot more complicated than just that.
Marian Tupy: Have I missed any concern that people have that you would want to address or can we move on to other questions?
Roger Pielke Jr.: No, I would say all of these individual areas are important. But I think for me the real concern is not what we know, what we don’t know, what’s uncertain, what’s certain, it’s ignorance. It’s that we have to be careful that we don’t think that we know everything. And when you’re influencing a system as complicated as the Earth system, there are going to be surprises out there. And if you want to take surprises off the table, this is where risk management becomes really important. And any cost benefit analysis of emissions reduction is necessarily going to be incomplete. And so I always argue for a no regrets, let’s take those steps to decarbonize that make good sense for other reasons. And if we get less impact on the planet as a side benefit, then yeah, let’s do that.
Marian Tupy: What do you think about the sort of very out there techno optimist view, which is that what we should be aiming for is to have the kind of technological sophistication and the kind of wealth which will allow us to completely control the planet’s environment? In other words, the planet would turn to basically like the temperature control on the wall where you can toggle different things and you are going to get the perfect climate everywhere at all times. That’s a kind of sci-fi scenario that I sometimes hear. Seems far-fetched, but I thought I would bring it up anyway.
Roger Pielke Jr.: No, I think it’s great that we should get as wealthy as possible and be able to make our way through a volatile environment as safely as possible. The idea that there’s going to be a control panel where we can perfect climate conditions, yes, that’s science fiction. I have no expectation we’ll ever be doing that. The track record of humans trying to influence ecosystems is pretty horrible. I bring up cane toads in Australia, which were introduced and somebody thought it was a good idea for some reason at one time and now they’re running around everywhere. So again, minimizing impact. The way to do that is by getting wealthier. And so if some point in the future somebody thinks… I mean, we hear about this with proposals to quote unquote geoengineer the climate.
Marian Tupy: Yeah.
Roger Pielke Jr.: That we’re going to modulate it. And I, full disclosure, I signed onto a geoengineering non-use letter calling for it not to be used because it’s the height of arrogance for us to think that we can control the climate system. The chances of doing something with really, really bad outcomes… The analogy I use, it’s like gain-of-function research on viruses. Yeah, maybe you’ll learn something but maybe you’ll kill 20 million people also. So I’m not a big fan of the control panel approach to climate.
Marian Tupy: Okay, understood. Let’s talk a little bit about the different climate change scenarios. How much warming have we experienced? What are the worst and the best case scenarios? And what does the most likely scenario mean for the planet?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so it’s a great question. The discussion has really moved to center around talking about an index, global average surface temperature, which we could talk about its strengths and its weaknesses, but since that’s what’s used… The world has warmed from pre-industrial times from the baseline typically used is 1850 to 1900. We’re at about 1.5 degrees Celsius plus or minus above that baseline.
Marian Tupy: Right now.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Right now, yeah. And the projections are, as you say, scenarios. They’re a function of what we think the global population will be, how big the economy will be, where we’re going to get our energy from, how we apply that energy out in the economy. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change last December in Brazil in its final statement said the world’s headed to 2.2 to 2.5 degrees C by 2100. That was their argument. It just so happens that aligns very nicely with a paper I did with Justin Ritchie and Matt Burgess. I call this one of the best kept secrets in all of climate science. It wasn’t so long ago that those same type of projections were looking at 4, 5, 6 degrees Celsius by 2100. They’ve come down dramatically, not because of anything to do with the physical science of climate, but because our expectation for future emissions has come down dramatically, largely because there was an assumption everything was going to go towards coal. Coal, the most carbon-intensive fuel, was going to fuel everything around the world. And it turns out we’re not going in that direction. Another big factor and it’s one that really hasn’t made its way into climate projections yet are changing outlooks on global population.
Roger Pielke Jr.: The leading climate scenarios still have 12, 13 billion people on the planet in 2100 and still growing. And demographers are now seriously talking about a global population peak soon after mid-century, not reaching 10 billion and then going down to maybe 7 billion in 2100. Once those get factored in, projected temperature ranges are going to go down also. And so it’s not the 2 degrees or 1.5 of the Paris Agreement, but it’s also not the apocalypse either. And so climate change has morphed from something that was plausibly extreme I don’t think existential threat was ever the right language, but possibly extreme to something that looks a lot more manageable going forward. So it’s a troublesome condition that will require a lot of action, but it’s not gonna be the end of the world.
Marian Tupy: There’s a picture emerging here as I was listening to your last answer, and that was that you actually had a paper some time ago where you nailed the trajectory of global warming with greater precision than most people out there. And I wouldn’t call that kind of fantastic academic performance to have saved your job at Boulder or for that matter protected you in the American academia. Whereas on the other hand, people who still wheel out the RCP 8.5 scenario this is the scenario of global warming of 5 degrees centigrade, Celsius, a world where everything is run on coal those people still get feted, still get praised, still get columns in major newspapers. What on earth is going on?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, Justin Ritchie and I wrote a paper where we it’s just a massive nerdy paper that looks at the history of climate scenarios, where they came from. And we try to unravel why the most extreme, it turns out implausible, climate scenario is the most popular, most widely used in research. And we call it an emergent property because there’s a lot of interlocking factors. One is if you publish extreme results, it’s a lot more attractive to journals to publish them. If you use an extreme climate scenario, you’re gonna get extreme results. And journals like to put out press releases, university press offices like to put out press releases. We academics like to get into the most prestigious journals. And so the more shocking the headline, the more likely it is it’s gonna get picked up. At the same time, climate advocacy for decades now has focused on the notion of an existential threat. What feeds that notion is extreme studies. Another factor is that and people will be shocked to learn this the climate community updates its scenarios only every 10 to 20 years. Imagine doing economic policy with data from 2006 in 2026.
Roger Pielke Jr.: It’s crazy. One reason for that, scientifically, there’s good reasons. It takes a long time to run these climate models, and if you update them every year, you’re gonna have to scale back your ambition in what you’re doing. The energy system modelers, they update their energy scenarios every year. That’s one reason why it’s easy, I would say, to come up with better projections than you find in the IPCC or literature, because they’re using scenarios from two decades ago. And if you use a more updated scenario, as we did, for energy consumption, for population, for GDP, you’re gonna constrain the scenario space going forward, and you’ll be much more accurate than one that was based on 2005 data.
Marian Tupy: So one person who has obviously been pivotal to increasing the concern over the environment on the apocalyptic side of things was, of course, Al Gore. This year we commemorate 20 years since An Inconvenient Truth, the movie seen by tens of millions of people around the world. What did the movie get right and what did it get wrong?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so there’s… I mean, we’re entering in this retrospective period. I did my own. I argued Al Gore got some big things right. Humans are emitting carbon dioxide through the burning of fossil fuels and that’s influencing the planet and that’s leading to warming. A lot of the particulars he got wrong. You start with the hurricane coming out of the smokestack. That movie focused a lot on Hurricane Katrina and hurricanes, but he had other howlers in there, I guess. The timescale of sea level rise. He showed imagery of seas encroaching on New York and Florida in the near term. Most of Florida went away. He attributed dryness, drought, and a reduction in the size of Lake Chad to human-caused climate change, when in fact it was withdrawals for agricultural purposes. Now they have flooding problems. So a lot of the particulars he got wrong. But I think the big thing it’s not the science questions, and people can talk about those and what he got right and what he got wrong the big thing he got wrong was the idea that climate change is a morality tale, that there are good people, there are bad people out there, and we need to convert.
Roger Pielke Jr.: It was almost if you look at the movie from today, as I have recently it’s a secular sermon. It has a religious arc. There’s sinning, there’s salvation, there’s ways to redeem ourselves. And climate change is real and it is a technological challenge. It is not a morality tale. There’s no bad person on planet Earth who wants to make their life better by consuming more energy. And if all you have available is dung or coal or whatever it happens to be, you’re gonna use it. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It turns out that fossil fuels have been enormously important in bettering human lives. And because there are externalities and they have some unintended consequences, that makes it a technical challenge. So I do think this idea, which really was adopted broadly in the climate movement, but also in the scientific community, that this is a quasi-religious morality tale there are good guys and bad guys. The bad guys are associated with fossil fuels. The good guys are associated with wind turbines and solar panels. That didn’t help. And the piece I wrote looking back at Al Gore talked about how the scientific community really embraced that framing.
Roger Pielke Jr.: I’ve lived it in my career and I’ve seen it, and science has gotten wrapped up in this moral crusade. And the reality is we should call things like we see it. We got into this problem by technology and we’re gonna get out of it with technology, not by morality.
Marian Tupy: Yeah, the Oxford University astrophysicist David Deutsch likes to talk about, you’ve got problems, you’ve got solutions to those problems, but you’re probably gonna end up with a new problem. So you’ve gotta have a solution for that problem. And hopefully those problems become lesser and lesser. But one reason why I was always upset by the extreme environmentalist emphasis on presenting themselves as moral and everybody else being the evildoer is because there is morality in having children not die because there is no electricity, or drugs not being able to be distributed in poor countries because you can’t refrigerate them. There is morality in people not living on $2 per person per day. There is also that moral component which was never factored in. Nonetheless, in the last few minutes that we have, it seems to me that the extreme environmentalist viewpoint has dominated for about 20 years and that has now either come to an end or it has begun to come to an end. It seems to me that the break really came in 2022 with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and a tremendous spike in energy. And for some reason the environmentalist movement in Europe, which was driving extreme environmental policy around the world, seemed to have deflated as a result.
Marian Tupy: That’s just my sort of observation. Do you agree with that? Am I getting it completely wrong? So in other words, is the extreme environmentalist movement losing steam and what happened to make it lose its steam?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think the price shock in Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine really was an eye-opener. Europeans are like everyone else, that people really do want action on the environment, they want action on climate, but they don’t want to do it at the expense of their monthly utility bill or how much things cost in normal life. And people want the conveniences of cheap holiday trips to Spain and Portugal, even in Europe. And so I do think when there are economic ramifications, that really influences how people think and who they vote for. And I don’t think that the extreme environmental movement is on its way out or on its last legs. Paul Ehrlich, the famous neo-Malthusian, he just died last month at 93, ripe old age of 93. Good for him. But if you look back at the concern about overpopulation and you said, well, where did that go? What happened to that? Because we really don’t have an anti-population growth movement around the planet, but it never really ended. It kind of faded away. I think that’s the best model for extreme environmentalism focused on climate. There will, of course, continue to be a segment of people, particularly in the scientific community, which turns over very slowly, that emphasize apocalyptic scenarios and this idea of existential threats.
Roger Pielke Jr.: But the reality is that and I think this is true everywhere policymakers around the world have become much more focused on the security of energy, the price of energy, accessibility. Many places don’t have access to energy, as you say. And what has changed is that for a long time, energy policy was discussed as if it was a subset of climate policy, and climate policy was the dominant framing. I think now that has reversed. Climate policy is now rightly viewed as a subset of energy policy. It’s not gonna go away. It’s still important. Decarbonization still matters. But I do think policymakers all around the world if the Chancellor of Germany is saying that the nuclear phase-out was a mistake, something’s changed radically. So I do think we’re in a situation where maybe a more pragmatic, maybe a more realistic approach to energy policy that includes climate policy is taking hold.
Roger Pielke Jr.: But don’t make any mistake. The radical wings on either side are gonna always be with us.
Marian Tupy: All right, last question.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yes.
Marian Tupy: So if you were talking to somebody who is completely open-minded but ignorant about the science itself, doesn’t pay attention, what would you tell him or her about the state of the planet and where it is likely heading by 2100?
Roger Pielke Jr.: Yeah, so I mean, I would start and I don’t start with the science of climate change I would start with the economics of energy and that curve we discussed right at the top of this discussion of the decarbonization of the global economy, and why that trend exists, why it’s real, what’s behind it, and why it’s a good thing that it would continue. People can think whatever they want to about climate. For me, the climate science element as it relates to policy is ridiculously simple. We’re emitting greenhouse gases, we’re doing other things that affect the climate system. We’re not smart enough to know exactly how that’s gonna pan out, if we’re gonna be at the benign end or the more serious end. So the best thing we can do is to reduce that influence we’re having on the system. And the only way we do that is we take actions that make sense for other reasons, whether that’s affordability, access, security. And if it turns out those help us accelerate that decarbonization, so much the better. If people want to argue about hurricanes or floods and all that, they can go do that over in the corner.
Roger Pielke Jr.: That’s not gonna make better energy policies for anybody.
Marian Tupy: Well, thanks for bringing the conversation in a circle back to where we started. I appreciate your time and good luck with your future endeavors.
Roger Pielke Jr.: Thanks for having me. Great discussion. We covered a lot of ground.
Marian Tupy: Thank you very much. All the best.