[Scott] On this episode of "Energy Switch," we'll conclude our look at extreme weather.

- I think largely what we're seeing is mostly Earth's pre-existing extreme weather hazards interacting with vastly increased exposure over time and then disseminated to us much more efficiently than ever before through the internet and algorithms, yeah.

- What every community on the planet needs to understand is what is putting me at risk?

- Right.

- And what that does is it opens up this whole landscape of stories, and they're important ones, but those stories get hidden if it's just the climate crisis.

- Yeah.

[Scott] Coming up, part two, exploring the connection between extreme weather and climate.

[Narrator] Major funding for this program was provided by Arizona State University.

Shaping global leaders, driving innovation, and transforming the future.

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[upbeat music] - I'm Scott Tinker, and I'm an energy scientist.

I work in the field, lead research, speak around the world, write articles, and make films about energy.

This show brings together leading experts on vital topics in energy and climate.

They may have different perspectives, but my goal is to learn, and illuminate, and bring diverging views together towards solutions.

Welcome to the "Energy Switch."

Last episode, our expert guests referenced IPCC data to explain that heat, heat waves, and precipitation are trending up, while floods, fires, and storms are flat or down.

However, on this episode, we'll see that risk and damages from these events have increased, mostly because of growing population, development, and wealth in harm's way.

And as always, we'll look at potential solutions.

My expert guests again are Andrew Revkin.

He's an environmental journalist, a 20-year veteran of the New York Times, and founding director of the Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at Columbia University.

Patrick Brown is a climate scientist, the head of climate analytics at Interactive Brokers, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins, and a former co-director of the Breakthrough Institute.

On this "Energy Switch," extreme weather and its relationship to climate change, part two.

Let's just recap it a little bit.

We've talked a lot about weather and extreme weather.

Patrick, which weather events have emerged from an historical signal?

- Yeah, so we see the strongest signal in the direct temperature types of extreme weather, so warmer heat waves, warmer cold waves.

Those are both about two degrees Celsius, so far warmer, although cold waves are warming faster than heat waves are warming.

And then we see more coastal flooding because of sea level rise, and we see a pattern starting to emerge of more extreme daily and hourly precipitation.

When it comes to the other things, floods, droughts, wildfires, mid-latitude cyclones, severe thunderstorms, those don't really show much trend, and so it's much more muddled.

- Okay.

Are there anything that could be driving these changes we do see in what's coming other than human-forced warming, or what else besides human-forced warming, if anything, is playing a role here?

- One factor is you have landscape change like the asphaltification of America.

And any time you're covering a porous soil with structure or cement or asphalt, you're creating a more severe flood from the same rain, so that's been happening for a long time.

You have the heat island effect.

Cities create their own weather.

They're hotter than surrounding landscapes.

- 'Cause it just absorbs more.

- Yeah, so there's lots of things humans have done, along with agricultural extension across huge parts of the world, changes in forests that can have local impacts.

- Okay, interesting.

We've talked about the IPCC in some depth, really, and the different working groups.

Would other journalists, other climate scientists, would they agree with what you're citing from the IPCC on these weather kinds of things, Patrick?

- Yeah, I mean, I think there's a huge gap between the IPCC Working Group 1, Chapter 11, which is the chapter on extreme weather, a huge gap between what you'd read there and what you see in the media, in a lot of cases, or by people in the climate movement, especially the sections on observations, which is what I've been talking the most about, rather than projections into the future.

And so I think that the reason for that is that people in the climate movement have found it very useful to connect extreme weather to elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, that they've found that to be a very useful rhetorical tool in their toolbox to advocate for decreasing emissions.

Just as an example of this, the cover of "An Inconvenient Truth" had a hurricane coming out of a smokestack, so that's a real example of connecting extreme weather to these emissions.

- Okay.

- I wrote about Al Gore's presentation, which was the focus of that film, as being like a lawyerly summary at the end of a murder trial, where you're picking, very artfully, positions and facts to make a conclusion, that is, but it's very much a function of shaping the argument and not always presenting the full story.

- Right.

- It was emerging science, early-day science, and as Patrick knows, science is this herky-jerky learning process.

- Process.

- It was in 2008 for "The New York Times," I wrote an article warning about what I called a whiplash effect for the media, for us, for people, where, "Well, wait, what?

You told me hurricanes are connected to climate and now you have a story that's saying it's not so clear and now you're saying this," and the whiplash effect is a result of factions trying to drive arguments using selective approaches to the science, and it wasn't like Al Gore, he wasn't lying, but he was presenting an argument.

- Completely factual, but not factually complete.

- Yeah, there you go.

- Something I've noticed with these climate desks is the "LA Times," if you look at their top nav, they don't have a weather tab, but they have a climate tab, and so as an organization that's committed to high-frequency coverage, they're basically pre-committing themselves to kind of covering whatever bad weather that day is through this climate lens, and so then they'll use these words like climate-driven or climate-fueled or supercharged by climate change, and it's not technically wrong, but it's using that angle, it just takes something that's relatively minor and exaggerates the amount of change that we're actually seeing.

- A good example is this thing, AMOC, the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, what a clunky phrase, AMOC.

It's this big circulation in the Atlantic Ocean, and there's been a lot of coverage recently that it's shutting down because of global warming, and the full body of science is much more nuanced, but you don't cover the negatives, you don't cover the nuance.

- Right.

What should they be saying?

What should the public know?

- Well, the one thing I wish, going back in time, would have been in 1988, if the world had formed not an intergovernmental panel on climate change, but an intergovernmental panel on climate risk, and climate change is one driver of risk, meaning the change in the storm, the change in the atmosphere.

The other drivers of risk are exposure and vulnerability.

How many people, how much stuff, and is it durable stuff or not?

If we had had that framing, and if I had thought about this more from the standpoint of risk as a journalist early on, that then illuminates the components of the problem that get away from this whole, is it global warming or not global warming issue, which is a really important question, but it's more scientific than practical, right?

How much of a storm was from CO2, and it's gonna take us a long time to reduce CO2, and the system has some momentum.

How much of that is from global warming is a good technical question that scientists need to work hard on, but what every community on the planet needs to understand is what is putting me at risk, and what that does is it opens up this whole landscape of stories, and they're important ones about, well, why did the Palisades area of Los Angeles not have stricter building codes?

It's because of grandfathering, and that has nothing to do with global warming.

It has everything to do with why 5,000, 7,000 houses burned down.

I actually created this risk formula that's like risk is hazard times exposure, how many people live in Houston, compared to 50 years ago, factoring in vulnerability, who in Houston is not able to withstand a blow from a flood, and then immediately you start to see, oh, well, when Harvey hit, who was most affected?

People who own homes, yeah, but they have insurance, people who rented, people who are immigrants, people who are living in the street during a heat wave.

Those are things we all can work on, but those stories get hidden if it's just the climate crisis.

- You know, I think it's really valuable to just think about the magnitude of changes here.

For example, world weather attribution said that the rainfall from Helene was made 10% more intense due to warming from elevated greenhouse gas concentrations, but the population of North Carolina since that last 1916 flood that was comparable, population has gone up like four times, so that's like a 300% increase, so you're talking about a 10% increase of rainfall, but a 300% increase in exposure, and you go extreme event by extreme event, and you see very similar things.

- Just more of us living in harm's way.

- Right, and there are geographers, Steve Strader and Walker Ashley created this methodology they called expanding bullseye, and it's so vividly clear.

Climate is darts, hazards, you know, storm, hailstorm, tornado.

- Drought, fire.

- Drought, fire, yeah, and so they started with actually tornadoes.

They looked at Moore, Oklahoma, which was hit by two F5 tornadoes in the past century.

They said, "Oh, how many people were living there in 1950?

How many people in 1970?"

And you have a map, so here's the track of the tornado, and the map has, you know, here's the urban area, here's the suburban area, and this bullseye is four times or five times bigger than it was, so you're creating a bigger bullseye.

You're throwing darts.

Some of the darts are getting bigger, maybe because of global warming.

Sometimes the dart frequency is getting down, but the bullseye we have built is hugely expanded.

- So what you're both saying is, yes, damages are increasing.

Yes, more people are, well, they're not more people getting hurt, but they're more than they would have been getting hurt if we hadn't gotten in harm's way.

There are more of us, and so are we conflating that thing with the actual weather event?

- Way too often.

- Yeah.

I mean, I think largely what we're seeing is mostly Earth's pre-existing extreme weather hazards interacting with vastly increased exposure over time and then disseminated to us much more efficiently than ever before through the internet and algorithms, yeah.

- Right.

The question I have, is there a more valuable way or a better way to measure impact?

Is there a better way to do it?

- Yeah, I mean, I just think the increase in exposure, like, has to be a main part of the story since it's numerically the biggest driver of increases in disasters.

- Right.

- And, you know, we should also appreciate that we're seeing increases in absolute value damaged, but not proportional damage.

So just to, like, give you an example, you know, if you have a trailer park that's destroyed by a tornado, that might destroy all of the value.

But if that's replaced by better constructed homes that are much higher value, you could have proportionally less value damaged, but still more absolute value.

- Right.

- So you actually want this, you know, development and these increases in absolute value.

- And if that's in a home, I might live in the $50 home because it's brick, and I might die in the trailer.

- Yes, yeah, and so we've seen this huge decline in lives lost from extreme weather.

- So that's a good thing.

- Yeah.

- Although at the same time, I wrote about that horrible incident where a number of workers died in an Amazon warehouse in the southeast that didn't have a tornado shelter in it.

There was a company in a similar region, small company, not like Amazon, that because the owner had experienced a terrible tornado, he had built a tornado shelter.

- Dig a hole.

- And their place was hit by a terrible tornado, and no one died.

So those are the facts on the ground that we can all work on right now.

Journalists can say, okay, what has Amazon done about its warehouses since that last incident?

Are there now tornado shelters or not?

And you get away from this idea of is it global warming or not global warming, which is so many layers away from people's lives or livelihoods.

- Right, wow.

So what are the factors increasing damages then from weather events?

- Well, there's several ways to go at this.

One is economics, where the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has this metric, billion-dollar disasters.

And often people will say, well, they adjust for inflation.

But that's not taking into account the stuff in harm's way.

More cars, more buildings, more people.

- More humans.

- More humans.

It's so clear-cut that, to me, the solution is in that expanding bullseye type of methodology where you can map it.

You can go to your town council meeting and say, we have five times more homes in the burnable woods in our town than we used to.

How can we avoid what happened in Palisades?

- Sure, sure.

- And there you can end up with possibly changing the trajectories.

- Yeah, you've published and studied quite a bit on fires, the L.A.

fires earlier this year.

Is a decent chunk of that what we're talking about here?

- Yeah, I mean, particularly value.

That was some of the highest-value properties in the world.

But yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting that our group's calculation, as well as World Weather Attribution's calculation, was that the wildfires were basically made six percent more intense by the warming since the Industrial Revolution.

And you get headlines from like, Science News that say, yes, you can blame climate change for the L.A.

wildfires.

And so that just shows their preconceived bias on the issue, right?

Because you could take that same six percent and have a headline that says climate change minor factor in L.A.

wildfires.

And you could even-- - Ninety-four percent not attributed to climate.

- Right.

- And both of those stories are complete distraction.

Both of those stories-- - Right, from the real-- - From what you need to do.

- For the issue.

- That's one thing that put my hair catches on fire every time I see a burning palm tree in California.

All those embers you probably saw on social media, those are not native species.

There's no palm tree, there's one palm tree species I think that's native to California.

But every time you see a palm tree burning, you should be saying, why the hell was that there?

- Yeah, interesting.

- Yeah, and there's no rule that you have to do the attribution on enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations.

You can do the attribution calculation on other things like expanding exposure or on the fuel that's been built up.

- Right, making it a full-- - Due to fire suppression.

- A full spectrum attribution.

- Why don't we do that?

- Well, one thing that's hard, this is where the social sciences come in.

So vulnerability is a big part of that risk formula, right?

Hazard, exposure, vulnerability.

Vulnerability is really hard to measure.

Like, who's vulnerable?

Remember, the storm is not a disaster.

The disaster is what was on the ground.

But when you look at what the drivers of disaster risk are: poverty, racism, redlining.

And so then that gets you to this whole arena of really hard problems that aren't like CO2, where you have this sort of sense, well, if we just turn down that knob, we've solved the problem.

- Right.

One of my big passions and efforts the last many years is on global poverty, energy poverty and global poverty.

What are your thoughts on something like that, Patrick?

You've been studying this a long time.

- Yeah, so when it comes to outcomes from extreme weather, they're dictated much more by societal arrangements and background, just economic development.

So you're 15 times more likely to die in a flood, drought, or storm in a low-income country compared to a high-income country.

You know, the same flood, drought, or storm.

And so that means that just kind of general technological progress and economic development can drastically improve outcomes in the world today without trying to, you know, worry about manipulating extreme weather via energy policy, for example.

And so I think that it is the case that you have to accept the trade-off of additional emissions from low-income countries if they're gonna get the infrastructure needed to be resilient to these extreme weather events.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And that's incorporating energy access into what we call the idea of climate justice.

- Yes.

- Climate justice has become a big frame for all of this.

And it has to include energy justice.

- It does.

- I was so struck visiting those climate meetings.

Glasgow, the meeting a number of years ago, when Johan Rockstrom, he said, "Actually, we have to save space for the poorest of the world."

Half of the world's population can double or triple their emissions.

Ethically, we have to give them that space to do that so that they can become modern and resilient.

- Correct.

- And that just means that the wealthy countries that have used fossil fuels all these decades have to do a lot more work to cut the CO2.

It's not the responsibility of Ghana or Bangladesh to do that work.

But it's a hard thing for that message to be incorporated into the conventional climate crisis message because they're so focused on CO2.

- Look, it's been a fascinating conversation.

Before we go to final thoughts, is there anything we haven't talked about that you wanna make sure to communicate?

- There's this idea that we are kind of sufficiently adapted to the current climate and the primary motivation to increase resilience to the climate is because the climate is changing.

And I think that that's totally false.

I think that we're better adapted to Earth's hostile climate than we ever have been in the past, but we obviously have a very long way to go or there wouldn't be these huge damages from extreme weather.

And so it's almost a distraction to be worried about, was Hurricane Helene's rainfall made 5% or 25% more intense because of climate change?

It's like, we know that intense rainfall and hurricanes are detrimental and there's a lot of things that we can do to increase resilience to them.

And we should just focus on that and look at what are the most damaging things first and try to improve resilience to those things first.

- Interesting.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, I couldn't agree more.

And this has been my prime theme in my reporting and my webcasts and things for a long time.

The other thing that's illuminated so powerfully, when you do the climate risk analysis, the hazard, the exposure and vulnerability, it identifies hotspots of opportunity.

Who are the people who die in heat waves?

Farm workers and people who are unhoused or homeless.

So the solution there isn't technical, it's not fusion, it's not geoengineering, it's not a better climate law, it's better community awareness.

There are local dimensions that can make this complicated.

But that's where every community has to understand that if you define your climate crisis around risk, you have a lot of the work to do right there.

And it's not easy, but decarbonization is not easy either.

And making it, choosing your part of that great prismatic puzzle and digging in with your skill set, you can make big differences.

- That's a good thought.

We got 110 million households out here, Andy.

One or two thoughts from all this, both parts we've done, what do you wanna leave them with?

- We're building a relationship with the climate system that's new.

That through 99.9% of human history, we had a one-way relationship with climate.

It did stuff and you either got out of the way.

- We were victims.

- Or you put on clothing.

Or you invented fire, et cetera.

And now it's a two-way relationship, that we are changing the system even as it's changing us.

And that gives me some comfort level.

This is like a new thing.

We're talking about a big idea here that we're building a two-way relationship with one of the Earth's great systems.

And that's gonna take time.

And the way to avoid feeling paralyzed is to find the dimension that excites you the most and fits your skill set, whether you're a teacher, artist, scientist, economist, broadcaster, and dig in and understand it's the work of a lifetime.

It's a changing relationship.

It's not like a beginning, middle, end story.

We're not gonna be sitting by the shore of a lake someday smoking cigars, not that I smoke cigars, you know, and drinking a drink and saying, "Oh, we solved the climate problem."

We've created a better relationship with climate.

- Right.

That's a really nice thought.

Patrick, final thoughts?

- Yeah, I just think that when thinking about extreme weather and impacts on people, that I just could not endorse this risk framework more, that risk is the hazard, the extreme weather event, times the exposure, times the vulnerability.

And that's very clarifying for what to do about these problems, right, is that we want to mitigate increases in exposure.

So that can be, you know, smarter zoning laws, having people not build in 100-year floodplains, things like that.

It can be allowing insurance premiums to reflect real risk and not subsidizing risk, so people living in the riskiest areas.

And then continuing to facilitate decreases in vulnerability.

And so, you know, something that comes to mind are building codes.

You know, FEMA did a great study post-Ian looking at different houses when they were built and insurance claims.

And it's just dramatic differences.

Buildings, you know, built post-2010, which incorporated more modern building codes.

There's just way less damage, way less claims than buildings, you know, pre-1980.

We see the same thing with wildfires, that, you know, ventilation and gutters and rooftops that are non-flammable.

These make a huge difference.

So we can continue to facilitate decreases in vulnerability.

And I think it helps if we can point the attention to that more to get kind of the public and political capital behind it.

- Well, I just, I really enjoyed this dialogue.

A lot of surprising things to me.

I appreciate, I'm hopeful that there are people like you out here that understand these things and are so courageous and candid about what you do understand.

I think it will help our listeners and everybody out there to just be more aware of what's going on.

So I really wanna thank you, Patrick, for being here with us.

- Thanks a lot.

- Andy, thank you.

- This was great.

- Scott Tinker, "Energy Switch."

Our experts find that media and climate advocates often link extreme weather events to climate change to drive readership or motivate action, but end up misleading the public.

Instead, IPCC data shows that no trends have emerged for floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, or fires.

They may in the future, but today, most extreme weather events are within historic norms.

And we're better prepared today than ever for weather events when they happen.

That said, damages are up because there's now more at risk, more people, property, and wealth on the coasts, in fire areas, and other high-risk environments.

Our experts suggest we not try to mitigate extreme weather through energy policy, an indirect and expensive path.

Instead, we should address extreme weather risks directly through better infrastructure and community support programs, more effective building codes, zoning laws, and insurance regulations.

Here and globally, we can make ourselves safer and more resilient to extreme weather.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [Narrator] Major funding provided by Arizona State University.

Home to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, redefining management education to empower transdisciplinary leaders.

Arizona State, The New American University.