0:33 Intro. [Recording date: December 17, 2013.] Russ: We're going to talk about climate change, what we know and what we don't know. But before we do, I want to talk about why I invited you to the program. A listener recommended you, so I checked out your web page and I found something very surprising. There wasn't any yelling there--at least apparent yelling. There were thoughtful comments by you and your readers. And I read your rules for posting comments; they are a fantastic guide to civility. They seem to be working, and I was struck by how rare that environment is, especially in the area of climate change, which is so contentious. So, in the spirit of civility, which I like to think is the spirit of this program, let's talk about climate change. In 2010 you testified before Congress and called climate change a 'wicked problem.' What does that mean? Guest: Well, basically it means that it's even hard to constrain it in terms of the dimensions. The more you consider the problem, the more dimensions and complexity the whole issue seems to have. And this is true not just of the physical and chemical and biological system that comprises the earth's system and contributes to its climate, but also the social and economic dimensions that seem to feed back onto the physical climate system through our use of burning of fossil fuels, the decisions we make. All of this is connected in a very complex way. And another characteristic of the 'wicked problem' is that there's no simple solution. And that every solution you propose seems to have unfortunate unintended consequences. So, climate change to me seems to me to be the archetypal wicked problem. Russ: So, a lot of economists say it's an easy problem to solve: all we need to do is put on a carbon tax. We may struggle to figure out what the right amount is. But that seems like a fairly narrow solution. It will have some consequences that are negative. There may be some unintended ones. But what's your take on that approach of, 'Well, we just need to reduce the amount of CO 2 (carbon dioxide), and we know how to do that; we'll make it more expensive artificially through a tax. Guest: Well, two things. Even if we were successful at reducing the concentration of CO 2 in the atmosphere to the desired levels, we might not see any impact on the climate for 50 years or more. Further, the issue of extreme weather events such as more hurricanes, more floods, more droughts, whatever, it remains unclear as to what extent those are actually becoming worse in any way that we can attribute to greenhouse gases. So even if we are successful at reducing CO 2 emissions, exactly what impact this is going to have on our climate on time scales over the next 50 years is probably not very much. Russ: Why is that? Why would it take 50 years? Let's say we did a fairly--I should tell you, Judy, that my background is I'm an economist, which I think you know. And I'm a very, very casual consumer of the literature in this area. I'm a skeptic about our ability to model complex processes. So I come to the data and the models with some skepticism to start with. I'm skeptical of centralized solution. So you are going to educate me today; and I assume I have some listeners who are in the same boat as I am. But why would it take 50 years? If we are going to reduce the amount of CO 2 won't that slow things down and bring them to a halt or even reverse them fairly quickly. Guest: Well, CO 2 : some people talk as if CO 2 is a control knob, you know, of the climate. But that control knob really works on time scales more like centuries to millennia. Because of the way the earth's system metabolizes, stores, and releases carbon into the atmosphere. The ocean stores a lot of heat. And it takes, in terms of the turnover time of the ocean it takes a while of heating to be realized in the atmosphere. So there's a lag in the system associated with the way the oceans store heat and the way carbon is stored in the atmosphere and the way carbon is stored in the oceans and the land vegetation. So there's a lot of long-term feedbacks in the system that don't really allow changes in carbon dioxide to fine-tune your weather or your climate. So, there's a lot of natural variability that contributes to climate variability and change related to the sun, volcanoes, and the ocean circulation system. So all of these things are going on, on top of greenhouse warming. And greenhouse warming actually projects onto these other modes of variability. So the whole system is very complex--wicked, if you will. Based on our understanding there's really no way to fine-tune the weather and climate by changing carbon dioxide concentrations.

7:41 Russ: Well, it's funny you say that. Because the thing that comes to my mind as an economist is the way some macroeconomists talk about stimulus spending or government spending: we just need to--or of the money supply depending on what flavor of economist you are--we just need to tweak this variable; we have a control knob, they tell us; we've just been ignoring it or we haven't been tweaking it the right way or turning the knob the right way. And what you are suggesting is that there is something similar in climate. In the case of economics, when I say things like that, a lot of economists say, 'Oh, you just don't understand. It's not your field. There's all these studies that show that government spending stimulates the economy, and when we're in the doldrums like this, we just need to increase government spending.' And I say, 'Well, what about this event? What about that event? What about the models that don't predict so accurately?' And I assume in your field, there are people who act like there's a knob. Are they wrong? Or am I wrong about that analogy? Guest: Okay. Well, actually, it's a slow control knob. It's more the advocacy groups and Al Gore, you know, will talk about it as if there's some sort of fast control knob. But I think that people in the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ) and the climate scientists don't regard it as a fast control knob. And in fact you might have heard that the carbon dioxide that we've already admitted--there is warming in the pipeline for the next 50 years even if we stopped emitting carbon dioxide. So if you've heard 'warming is already in the pipeline' that's another way of reflecting that it's not a fast control knob. That we're stuck with what we already have in terms of atmospheric CO 2 , and that's going to be contributing to a warming effect for the next 50 years or so, even if we were to immediately, drastically, reduce CO 2 emissions. Russ: Do we know how big that warming effect would be if we did level things off? Let's just say we could hold the amount of CO 2 emitted by human beings constant. Do we have a prediction for what would happen 50 years from now? I'm sure we do. I'm sure we have many. And I'm sure they have decimal points, like they do in economics. My question is: How accurate do you think those predictions are, and what kind of consensus? Even though I don't think science is done via consensus. Is there any consensus at all over the predictability of that change? Meaning, let's lock things in like they are now; 50 years from now what will we get? Guest: Okay. The climate models are narrowing in, and they all have a sensitivity to carbon dioxide. But how much the climate would warm if you doubled, and whatever. And the climate models generally give you, in the first half of the 21st [changed from '20th century--Econlib Ed.] century, it would be about 2-3 degrees Centigrade per decade [?century?] of warming that we should expect from the climate models. And the fact that we really haven't had any warming since 1998--the global temperatures have been essentially flat for that period--tells us that the climate models aren't accounting for certain things. There are a number of explanations for why we haven't warmed for the past 16, 17 years now. And people usually talk about, well, it's unpredictable variability. Well, okay; a lot of climate variability is unpredictable. And mostly when they say 'unpredictable climate variability,' this refers to the natural internal oscillations of the ocean atmosphere system. Well, what does that mean? You've heard of El Niño and La Niña. Those are relatively short-term natural internal oscillations. And on longer, decadal time scales, there are things like the North Atlantic Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that are long-term, multi-decadal--variability on time scales of 60-70 years--that have a very large impact on the climate. And what we've been seeing over the last period that we haven't had any cooling is a shift to the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. And this is largely regarded to be a major contributor to why we haven't had any warming. Now the climate models don't do a good job at all with, say, the multi-decadal variability. So, the climate models really haven't predicted something like this to happen in the presence of ever-increasing carbon dioxide. And then we're in a cooling phase for the sun. This is working out to be the coolest sun that we've seen in 100 years. And this is contributing to the warming. And this is something that the climate models can't predict. So, these climate models are very good at predicting one little piece of it--what the increasing carbon dioxide will do. But the problem is all other things aren't equal. We have the sun doing something unusual, we have the Pacific decadal-- Russ: Just like economics. Guest: Yeah. Right. If you are looking at just one piece of it and trying to make it a simple problem, then they have a solution: of this 0.2 degrees Centigrade per decade of warming. But the climate system is much more complex, with natural internal variability, particularly these multi-decadal oscillations in the ocean, solar variability, volcanoes are always a wild card. And things like changes in air pollution, changes in the regulatory environment like continued decreasing of the chlorofluorocarbons to help with the ozone problem. All of these things also change the composition of the atmosphere in ways that are influencing the climate. So all of this adds up to no warming for almost 17 years now. And climate scientists are still debating and trying to figure out what's going on. We have some subjective explanations and possibilities for what's going on, but something quantitative or having the models actually be able to predict something like this--well, no, we're not there yet.

15:29 Russ: I'm glad you brought that up. Because I was going to bring it up. As a data person, interested in how people build hypotheses around data, when I went to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) site before our conversation just so I'd get a so-called unbiased, so-called objective measure of the climate; and you look at the data and, as you say, the late 1990s to today, it's flat. There's ups, there's downs, but it's basically flat. If you are looking at any other data besides climate data you'd say, whatever was causing--there are two possibilities. Either we don't fully understand the mechanisms, which is almost always the case to some degree. Or, possibly, the forcing variable, carbon dioxide in this case, hasn't been increasing--I went to another site and found that that's not the case. Or maybe there is something else that has changed that, as you say, is causing cooling that, in the absence of that, there would be warming; so because of that factor we can't see the warming in the data. And that's of course possible. Hard to know for sure but it's always possible. But when you mention that flat temperature reading over the last 15 years or so, people get really mad at you. I mentioned it to Jeffrey Sachs in a recent episode of this program and he laughed at me and sneered and said--I can't remember what he said; I didn't look that up; but he thought that was an incorrect way to think about things. I've been on the web because I've found this so fascinating and you hear things like, 'Well, but the last decade is the warmest decade in recorded history.' I think, well, but it's not supposed to be flat; it's supposed to be rising because of CO 2 was the cause. And in general, the whole attitude, to even suggest that there has been a stagnation in global temperature change is considered--I don't know--heretical. People get really mad. They don't go, 'Well, it's really complicated,' in the nice tone of voice you just used. They get mad at you. Do they get mad at you? Guest: Oh, yeah. Russ: What do they say? And what do you say back? Guest: Oh, well, I don't say anything back, actually. I just let them say what they want. There are several blogs--well, one blog that's just devoted to trashing me; and several other blogs where it's a major part of their discourse, trying to take every statement I make, place it in a different context, and say very negative things about me. There's a number of people who don't like what I'm saying. But what I'm trying--the thing that I've been saying for the past four years now is that we've oversimplified the climate problem. By thinking everything is caused by CO 2 , we're missing a big part of the story. And this hiatus in warming, these flat temperatures since 1998 and even earlier, tells me that we have to pay a lot more attention to this natural internal variability and also solar variability in terms of explaining the past climate variability and also projecting into the future. And that's been my main message, and as a result of saying this I show up on various people's lists of climate deniers and things like that. And so my message, I think, is the appropriate one scientifically; and people who are making policy decisions need to have this more nuanced understanding. Because if they are wanting to do something to help reduce our vulnerability to climate variability and change on time scales of a few decades. By focusing on this very long-term issue of carbon dioxide they are going to miss opportunities to deal with problems like reducing our vulnerability to hurricane landfalls or to addressing issues of potential water shortages. By only focusing on the greenhouse warming aspect part of the problem, we are missing opportunities to really reduce our vulnerability to these kind of issues which have the largest economic impact associated with climate variability and change. So that's been my message, and it's not a popular one because it goes contrary to the IPCC consensus. And any climate scientist who criticizes the IPCC or its consensus is automatically branded as a heretic. And I don't think that's a healthy situation either for the science or for the environment for making policy decisions. Russ: So, I'm going to read something. I was going to read it later but I'll read it now. I personally find the term 'denier' repugnant for a whole bunch of reasons. But I'm going to read this quote. This is from the Society of Environment Journalists, which is a guild of sorts. It's a club of journalists who write about the environment. And someone there wrote, on their website I think, Judith Curry's blog, Climate Etc., is an exception to the stereotype of denier blogs. Curry is a real climate scientist with strong credentials. Committed to reason, evidence, and open inquiry, she is willing to examine legitimate points the climate skeptics may be making--as well as the evidence and arguments from mainstream climate science. I don't know what the opposite of damning with faint praise is, but that's it. That's a pretty good way to be described, it seems to me, as someone who writes about this topic. Guest: Well, yeah; I could almost put that in my mission statement for the blog. It describes perfectly what I'm trying to do. But the irony of that is that they accept, without question, that my blog is a denier blog. So that really points out, sort of, in my opinion, the stupidity of applying the word 'denier' to somebody who is trying to open the dialog, to discuss climate science and the policy implications beyond the narrow framework of the IPCC. Russ: Well, keep it up, is all I'll say.

22:19 Russ: Let's talk about the water shortage issue you mentioned a minute ago. What is the issue there? Guest: We've had droughts, in the United States and globally; every recorded history, pre-recorded history is documented by tree rings. Droughts are nothing unusual. However, as population increases and energy systems rely on water availability for cooling, etc., our vulnerability is increasing. So our vulnerability to diminished water resources is one of the key concerns about climate variability and change. But I should add that overall increasing carbon dioxide is expected to increase precipitation globally--although there are places where this might decrease. It's not uniform globally, but overall you expect more rainfall. But that doesn't stop people from inferring that global warming is going to cause more drought. Even the IPCC doesn't find huge evidence in most regions for any increase in droughts. And even if you do find an increase in droughts in a certain region, it's very difficult to attribute that to greenhouse warming. These multidecadal ocean oscillations like the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation are very powerful controls on the decadal variability of droughts. And this really swamps anything that we can identify as a drought that we can identify that might have been caused by global warming or by greenhouse gases. The other issue is that in many cases--I'll speak to the Southeast United States, which is my home territory. You think of the Southeast United States as a place with plenty of water. But actually in Atlanta and Alabama and Florida, the river basins that feed the fresh water actually have a small catchment and are very susceptible to drought. And so the region is very concerned about any possible change associated with greenhouse warming. And the models, the climate models, are very ambiguous about whether it's going to increase by 20%, decrease by 20%. And the regional planners are very worried. And when I met with them, I think it was in 2011, to discuss this issue, I said, 'Why are you worried about plus or minus 20% when the population of metro Atlanta is scheduled to double on a time scale of 30-40 years?' We're talking about 100% change, as opposed to this plus-or-minus 20% that they're worried about. And also they are big-- Russ: Meaning there's bigger things you've got to be worrying about than that. Guest: There's bigger things to worry about than climate change. There's also the tri-state water wars about how to share water between Alabama, Georgia, and northern Florida; and that has the potential to change the water availability far more than anything related to climate change. So in a lot of these issues, when we think about our vulnerability to climate change, our vulnerability to climate change is really only a small piece of what should concern us. And people have an outsized worry about it relative to other things that they should be worrying about. So blaming everything on greenhouse gases and thinking that by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases we are going to solve all our problems, that to me is a naive fantasy, in terms of not really understanding the full nature of our problems. And also it's naive about thinking we have this fine control knob on our climate with CO 2 , which we don't. Russ: Should we worry about sea level? Is that a legitimate worry, do you think? Rising tide? Guest: It is. Sea level is probably the one global issue that you can attribute to an extent to greenhouse gases. But sea levels have been rising for several centuries. People talk about coming out of the Little Ice Age, and that's sort of a nebulous term, but sea levels have been rising for several centuries. And the big question is whether there is any acceleration that you can identify from greenhouse gases. And that's something that's hotly debated. In terms of looking at local sea-level rise, say, if you are looking at the New Jersey/New York area, which is highlighted as a result of Hurricane Sandy, well there are some natural land subsidence; and then there's also subsidence associated with land use. As we build heavy buildings, as we withdraw the groundwater, there's a human-induced sinking. So a lot of the local sea level rise can often be attributed to either natural subsidence or to human land use. And in many places this far overwhelms any sea level rise we are seeing associated with greenhouse warming. The whole sea-level rise issue is quite complicated. You have to untangle the local natural and human land-use contributions. And then you also have to, when you are looking at global sea-level rise issues, you have to understand how much of this is sort of natural, associated with natural internal variability and this long-term coming out of the Little Ice Age versus something that is being accelerated by greenhouse gases. It's hard to untangle it. But looking forward, if you are overall warming the climate, you have a thermal expansion effect in the ocean, where it makes it expand; and so sea level rises, and that's not too much. Again, the bigger wildcard is how much the glaciers are going to melt. So, once you melt the great glaciers, it's like adding more ice cubes into your glass of water, once they melt it causes the level of water in your glass to rise. And so that's the wildcard. Russ: If it gets warmer, they are going to melt, right? Guest: Yeah, they are going to melt. But it's not that simple. Often as it gets warmer there is more snowfall in the high latitudes, so you can be accumulating glacier mass. So, trying to look at the mass balance of the glaciers--accumulation, melting, and then calving, where pieces actually break off--is a complex problem. And it's really only for the last decade or so that we've had really good satellite observations that help us keep track of the mass balance. But even then it's not simple to interpret these satellite observations and to infer glacier-mass balance. And so, like in Greenland, where we are actually having some accumulation, a lot of snowfall in the Northern part, it seems like there is melting in the Southern part; and on the Southeastern part there is a lot of calving of glaciers. And trying to understand how this all adds up to--is it losing mass? Well on Greenland it does seem to be losing mass. But to what extent is this natural variability, associated with the ocean oscillations or greenhouse warming? Again, sorting all that out, you know, is still fairly ambiguous. So, how to attribute this to greenhouse warming is very tricky. There is a still a lot of uncertainty in how to attribute all of this, and how to--even if we can identify, okay, the glaciers are losing mass, to what extent is this simple warming from carbon dioxide or related to these natural internal variability? So there's no simple interpretations to all this that are unambiguous in terms of what carbon dioxide is doing. We have a sense that in general this would be melting, warming. So there would be melting glaciers; that would contribute to sea-level rise. But there is also increases that are potentially associated with greater snowfall. And how to sort out that out remains rather unclear. And there are differing interpretations in the scientific literature. So that's a sign that this is still a relatively--it's not a very mature field in terms of our understanding.

33:02 Russ: I'm going to ask you a more general question, but before I do, I want to stick with ice for a minute. Do you want to say something about the polar bears? Guest: Okay. The polar bears have been an icon for global warming. And in some regions the populations are increasing. In other regions, they seem to be decreasing. There is a hot debate amongst biologists as to exactly what's going on: what's the populations and then how to attribute any changes in the populations, to global warming. So I think a lot of people have dropped the polar bears as an icon for global warming because it doesn't really seem that the populations are shrinking at all, or at least in any way that can be attributed to global warming. I think you are seeing a lot of people drop the polar bear icon for global warming. Because that doesn't seem to be holding up. Russ: I think it's Happy Feet, is the movie where the polar bears are having a tough time. Maybe they'll issue a sequel.

34:16 Russ: I want to ask a general question, because again, a lot of what you are saying reminds me of the way I feel about macroeconomics. So, when I think about macro-economics, I want to like to call a 'late Hayekian'--the early work of F. A. Hayek, who was trying to create a general, global, micro-based model of business cycles and how the economy varied. And he gave up on that for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is just that it was too hard. And in his later years--certainly in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He's much more agnostic--'skeptical' would be a better word--about our ability to model the macro economy in any precise way. We understand general trends, certain forces that are at work. But to suggest that we can steer it or manipulate it is a fantasy. And when I say things like that, people say--or when I say things very similar to what you just said--I want to say the economy is complex, we don't understand all the causal forces, we can't control it--they say, 'Well, that's just an excuse. You don't want to do anything. You are just saying that it's all complicated.' I'm going to throw that back at you. I have my own response on the economics, which is my own response, which is: First, do no harm. And I see a lot of evidence that when we think we can control things and we can't, we actually do a lot of harm. But in the climate area, a lot of people say, 'It's better safe than sorry.' So, okay, we're not sure; you say we're not sure about the sea level, what causes it. We're not sure if Greenland and glaciers are melting or not shrinking; there's snowfall. The polar bears are shrinking and expanding in some places. We're not sure of the role of volcanoes and the sun and the ocean effects. But isn't it better safe than sorry? Wouldn't it be better to--okay, so it's not a tight knob, it's not a great control knob, carbon dioxide. But since we know it has some effect, uncertain perhaps in terms of the magnitudes, wouldn't it be better just to, as an application of precaution, let's dial it down? Better safe than sorry. And this is, by the way, the position that Robert Pindyck, the economist on this program earlier this year. He said, 'Yeah, we don't know; there's a lot of uncertainty; the models are mediocre. But better safe than sorry. We know it's some effect, and so we may not know the perfect way to cope with it, but we know we should do something. What's your reaction to that? Guest: I guess I'm in the same camp as you: First, do no harm. And I think the push to biofuels is an example where we thought we could do something that was relatively quick and easy and there seemed to be a lot of unintended adverse consequences. Soils, food prices. And it seems that overall it's not even reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The net change on all this might not be anything. So that's an example of doing something that you thought would help, that actually has harmed. If you step back for a minute about the precaution of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as a precaution: well, if clean, green energy is the same price as dirty energy, I think people would naturally prefer to use the cleaner source of energy. I mean, that's just--I think people prefer clean energy. But they don't want to sacrifice the abundance or the ready availability of the energy; and they don't want to pay too much more for it. So, until we figure out how to make sure the clean energy would be abundant and cost competitive, I think it's going to be a very tough sell. Are we going to sacrifice the availability--especially in the developing world? There is a very different problem in the United States. They don't have enough power as it is, and part of their--a key element--of their development goals is more abundant power. And there's no obvious way to provide all that they need with purely green energy. Although some countries like India are making really good progress in terms of implementing solar power and things like that, it's just a very tough thing to do. So we have to look at the unintended consequences. When you are implying the precautionary principle, it's a mistake just to look at one piece of it and not consider the unintended consequences. Again, that's one of the hallmarks of the wicked problem framing, is that no matter what you propose to do, there are unintended consequences and you have to ask, is the cure worse than the disease? Even with--until we get better battery storage for wind and solar, it's not clear that those power sources are actually--at least, say, in the United States--helping us reduce CO 2 . Because when the wind dies out you have to quick crank up the gas burners. And the spin-up for that--using as much fossil fuels as you might have been saving from when you did the wind energy. So, you know, what the actual savings are isn't always obvious. And what the unintended consequences are need to be looked at. So, again, the key issue is if we can figure out technologies and infrastructures to make clean energy available at approximately the same costs as fossil fuels, then we are ready to make the transition. But until then, it's hard to justify this on a very massive scale. Various regions, experiments--some things will work and some things won't. I think it's very interesting what California is trying to do, etc. Again, that's a very wealthy state. They can afford to experiment in ways that Africa may not want to experiment, because they are desperate for energy and coal is the cheapest and most obvious way to provide them with that energy. So, how do make those calls? When you balance all the various issues? Again, I'm just waffling and saying, you know, complex problem, uncertainty, whatever. But at the end of the day I think we are transitioning to cleaner energy, and there are lots of reasons beyond greenhouse warming to transition to cleaner energy. Especially coal burning and the small particulate issue. That's a major health issue. It's a huge health issue in Asia, in China, in Bangladesh, in India. It's just a huge issue in terms of air quality. It's a massive health issue. So I think they are motivated to try to get away from coal burning as a public health issue. Not only are they poisoning the air but also even the water and the soils. Their soils are losing productivity because of all the pollution. So, if you have another reason for moving to clean, green energy besides just the greenhouse warming issue, then I think you have, I think, a winning solution. So, trying to bring in other aspects--whether it's economics or environmental quality, public health, national security. If those issues are also drivers for going to clean energy, then it doesn't seem like such a potential risk, just going to clean energy over the global warming issue. That's my take on how to think about the problem. And again, it's mushy but I think it's consistent with global warming and energy issues as being wicked problems.

43:17 Russ: So, you've been--I want to wander to a broader topic; we'll get back to some climate issues in a minute. You've been out of graduate school for about 25 years or so. That's how long I've been out. When you come out of graduate school, I think inevitably you have some romance about the enterprise you are involved in. There are many, many nonmonetary aspects of being an academic that are inspiring and exciting. But I wonder how you feel about how your particular field has changed as you've grown up in it and been out for 25 years. Do you think that the academic world as it's currently constituted, the returns to publishing and the way that academics are successful--are they conducive to truth-seeking? Do you feel that we are making progress in the scientific world on this particular topic? Or are we in trouble? Guest: I think we're in big trouble. When I left graduate school, nobody called themselves a climate scientist. They were an atmospheric dynamicist or a geochemist or a physical oceanographer or things like that. And we were all focused on increasing fundamental understanding. And that was the focus. It was the breakthrough in understanding, changing the way people think, was what mattered. And somebody who published too many papers was probably looked at with suspicion--they are doing the quick and easy stuff; they are not really digging in. It was potentially superficial. The other thing that was looked down upon, say in the 1980s, was doing something that was too applied, working to deal with regional problems or something like that. That was viewed as soft core; it was what the people did who couldn't really make fundamental contributions to understanding, so they moved on to some of these applied topics, which were useful in some way to regional decision-makers. I would say in 2000--it was a gradual transition, but I think circa 2000 there was a switch to people finding it beneficial to self-label them as a climate scientist. There was a lot of money, research dollars in this area; there was a lot of influence to be had, in terms of sitting on panels and boards and committees and being interviewed by journalists and being invited to testify in front of Congress. And so the value and the influence of the scientist sort of switched into that dimension where your measure of influence was not so much how you increased our fundamental understanding of how the oceans worked, but it was really to what boards and committees you sat on, your press, and your influence in policy, being invited to testify in front of Congress, and whatever. So I've seen that switch. The problem is, the concern that I have for the health of our field, is that there's still a lot of fundamental things that we don't understand. The climate models aren't good enough. We need to go back to basics, increase our understanding about the non-linear dynamics of all these ocean oscillations and complexity of the system and things like that. There are a lot of fundamental things that are getting short shrift, that the sex appeal in our field right now and a lot of funding is to do what I call mock[?] 'climate model taxonomy', where people are analyzing the output of climate models and finding something interesting, alarming, or using them to infer that we won't be able to grow grapes in California in 2100 or something like this. This is the stuff that gets published in Nature and Science and PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). People get a press release. Russ: The New York Times. Guest: Yeah. They get a press release and there's a lot of funding in this area. And I call this climate model taxonomy because I don't have confidence in climate models on regional spatial scales, so I think the whole impacts game related to climate models is rather pointless. And also they really don't get that natural internal variability so they can't really say anything on time scales of 50 years. So I think there's this whole field of climate model taxonomy that's very well funded and gets all the headlines that is pointless scientifically. It's not increasing our understanding of anything and I think is fundamentally misleading to decision-makers because the climate models aren't good enough on those space- and time-scales. And so the newer generation of climate scientists broadly defined are seeing a lot of rewards in the climate taxonomy area, and it's relatively easy work. And I think it's, personally, pointless. It's not fundamental useful to the decision-makers and it's not increasing our fundamental understanding. So I'm not happy with the way all this is going. I have been Chair of the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech since 2002, and I've tried to do my hiring in what I would call the fundamental areas, trying to increase our fundamental understanding rather than what I would call climate model taxonomy. And there is pressure for me to hire 'climate modelers', not so much people who are working to develop fundamentally new types of climate models--I'd be definitely interested in that--but people who are just using the output of climate models. And I don't think that's a useful way for our science to go. So, I fight that on my own little square of turf. But it's very hard to find even good people to hire who are doing fundamental work. There's a lot of people in what I would call the 'chemistry aerosol cloud interactions' doing very fundamental work that I think is very exciting; and I think this is where a lot of the good physicists and chemists who are interested in climate are working in that area. So that area is very vibrant. But what I would call the more climate dynamics, the fundamental more fluid dynamics of the atmospheres and oceans, I've found it very hard to find good people who are making fundamental advances in our understanding. Russ: Well, I'm not surprised. Right? Those are the hard problems. When you are fresh out of graduate school you are told, 'Don't work on those; you won't get tenure. You might work for 10 years and get nothing and you're going to be out of a job. Guest: Exactly. You can get lots of publications and lots of citations by doing climate model taxonomy. So that's a concern that I have. And it's the older--I never thought I'd live to see the day when I am one of the old farts, the older generation, but a lot of the fundamental wave dynamics and fluid dynamics that was emphasized in the 1970s and 1980s--those people are on the verge of retirement. And in terms of even educating the new students in these areas--I'm just wondering where that's going to come from. So I am concerned about--and the awards that are given in professional societies. This past year I was on the Fellows Award Committee for the American Geophysical Union, and the first knee-jerk reaction is the look at the number of publications in the so-called H Index, which is related to people's scientific citations. Russ: That makes it scientific. Guest: Yeah, right. It's quantifiable. But the people who are working on the very hard problems and don't have that same kind of productivity or citations, it's harder to push them through. It's a lot harder to make the case. And personally I work hard to make the case for people who I think are doing a good job in those areas. But again, the recognition is skewed towards number of publications, citations; and people who are doing something that catches the attention of the media. And again, climate model taxonomy is a very easy path to fame and fortune in climate science. But it's not getting us where we need to go, ultimately in terms of increasing our fundamental understanding and really giving decision makers something that they can use.

53:47 Russ: So, let's look at the other side. So, same thing happens in economics. If you can make a case for government intervention you are usually going to get invited to the better cocktail parties and you are going to be more--politicians are going to pay more attention to you and you are more likely, perhaps, to get quoted in the media, which is always pleasant and adds to your pocketbook in various ways--not directly but indirectly. And the grant-making obviously has something to do with that as well. And I look at climate science and I see that phenomenon and I see people who have the opportunity to be on the right side, the side that has the moral high ground right now, and I understand the incentives that people face in how to think about what to work on and what side they come down on, what evidence to consider. But on the other side, the climate advocates, the people who advocate intervention and action, they say, Well, it's just as bad or worse; they'll say it's worse on the climate skeptic side. Those folks, people who are skeptical about climate or think we don't know what we're talking about or talk about complexities as you do, they are just pawns of industry. They are people who get a lot of money from, typically, the fossil fuel industry and they are just saying what they are paid to do, and of course being paid by an oil company is much worse than being paid by the EPA or a government agency in terms of prestige. So, what's your response to that? Maybe you are one of them. Maybe you are a pawn of industry, Judy. I like you, you seem nice; and I want to believe what you say; but maybe you have the same issues. Is that true? And do you think that's true--people who generally are skeptical about climate? Guest: Okay. I think this whole 'pawns of industry' thing is just a red herring. The Merchants of Doubt, a book by Naomi Oreskes--she identifies some people like Fred Singer and people that really aren't big players in the public debate on climate change at this point. The only person that I know that's making money off of being a climate skeptic is Pat Michaels. He's managed to make money off of it. That's not his primary motivation, but he has managed to make money off of it. Russ: And it doesn't mean he's wrong, by the way. I think it's always important when you point out these things--it's an interesting argument; it's not decisive. Guest: It doesn't mean he's wrong. He's just sufficiently, how shall I say, stubborn, loose cannon, say-what-he-thinks. He's not going to be bought by anybody. But what he says is found attractive by certain people and he's attracted some money that way. So, Pat Michaels is the only person that I know of that makes money off of this. In the interest of disclosure, I--my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network--the target of a lot of what we do is the energy sector. But it's really short-term weather forecasting, time scales of days to weeks. And so there's nothing that I do for the energy sector that has anything to do with climate change and I don't think any of my clients have ever actually even asked me about climate change, although I know a few of them follow the blog. So, I do have some contracts with regional power providers and even one big energy company to do short range weather forecasting--of heat waves, of hurricane landfalls, things like that, that are of relevance to the energy sector. But my position either way, the one big oil company--actually this contract started in 2006; and we got this contract, they were attracted to our position on hurricanes and global warming, a big paper that we had published from Georgia Tech where we saw an increase in the percentage of Category 4 and 6 hurricanes; and they thought that we had some new insights to understand how to predict hurricanes. So that actually attracted them to us in the first place. Although what we ended up doing for them actually had nothing to do with global warming. And since then my position has shifted to be more skeptical about the global warming issue. So ironically the contract that we have with a big oil company was originally attractive by the position that we had that warmer temperatures were causing an increase in hurricane intensity. So, that's a full disclosure of my connection with oil companies. But my opinion about global warming obviously has nothing to do with the fact that I have some oil company clients. So I think that to me that is a big red herring, this issue, that the scientists that I talk to--and there are many people that do not make public statements about global warming but remain quite skeptical of the IPCC, but they don't speak publicly because, among other reasons, they have no inclination to. But they also see what happened to me when I spoke out on this issue, in terms of being labeled a denier and a heretic, and they don't want to, you know, bring that sort of thing down upon their own head. Russ: I think the whole issue of the social factors are quite significant, beyond the monetary ones. The IPCC is just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for those of you who want to look it up on the web. It issues reports on the state of the climate and makes policy recommendations as well.