- Some would call it climate change.

Others, call it a crisis and still others call it a hoax.

Today's Gus tells us to take seriously.

The impact climate change will have in all of our lives.

This is Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, this week on "Story of the Public Square."

(hopeful music) Hello and welcome to, "A Story in the Public Square, where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Lewis from the Pell Center at Salvia, Virginia University.

Joining me from his home in Rhode Island is my friend and Cohost G. Wayne Miller of the Providence Journal.

Each week, we talk about big issues with great guests, authors, journalists, scholars, and more to make sense of the big stories that shape public life in the United States today.

This week we're joined by Michael Oppenheimer.

He's a Professor of Geo sciences and International Affairs at Princeton University.

One of the most effective science communicators that I've ever known.

Michael, welcome.

- [Michael] Thank you for having me, Jim.

- We've wanted to have you on the show since we started and we're thrilled that you can join us.

We really can't think of anyone better to talk about climate change today.

You know, but maybe our audience doesn't.

You've been involved in every major global climate initiative for the last 30-plus years.

You've been a Coordinating Lead Author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

You helped frame the amendments to the Clean Air Act that reduced acid rain in the 1990s.

So we're just, again, really grateful for joining us.

Let's start with a really big question.

What is the state of the climate today?

- Well, the climate is in a bit of a mess because of the emissions of the greenhouse gases, primarily carbon dioxide for fossil fuel combustion which have caused the warming of the earth already have about a degree Celsius a little less than two degrees Fahrenheit since pre-industrial times, and a whole slew of changes in the climate.

Some of which we're seeing, if we just look at our computer screens almost every day and check the news.

More wildfires, a shift to stronger hurricanes, more intense heat waves, in some areas more drought, and a rising sea level which is already causing problems along the coast.

Not every bad climate episode that we see for instance, the freeze in Texas is due to climate change.

We're not sure about that one.

On the other hand, all the other ones I just mentioned, like extreme heat, more powerful tropical, more powerful hurricanes, rising sea level.

Those are in all likelihood due to the climate change that emissions of the greenhouse gases are bringing about.

- There was a time when we called climate change global warming.

Why the change in the lexicon?

And is that a more, is it a more accurate way to describe what's happening?

- Well, the word or the term global warming goes back to the period when the one thing we were absolutely sure about is that a buildup of the greenhouse gases would warm the earth and that has in fact happened.

But in addition, a lot of other things have happened that we were unsure about, some of which early science told us would probably happen.

But now have come to pass from the kind of disturbing or exciting, depending on how much of a scientist you are in your head is, that's things that we're speculated about have no come to pass to see them come to pass.

As a scientist, I find that incredibly interesting, as a human being I find it sort of scary because there won't be a good outcome to this unless we start reducing the emissions of these gases as soon as possible.

The reality is we should have started 20 years ago.

But there is a big change in many aspects of the climate.

Some of the things I already mentioned, other areas of climate are also getting more and more difficult for us to deal with and not just us, parts of the system that we're part of, parts of nature.

Like coral reefs, for instance, are suffering due to the changes in the climate.

And so it's very, very different than every place on earth, but not very much of it is good.

Most of it is bad, bad for us, bad for nature.

- So if we do not reduce carbon emissions what are the projections look like in all of these areas, sea level rise, storms, and so forth, 10 and 20, 30 years into the future?

- The most important point is that we are now already moving into a climate, which is totally new.

It's not a climate that human beings and the history of the modern human species goes back around 200, 250,000 years.

It's not like any climate we've ever experienced.

That's why we're seeing more and more phenomena, like more and more periods of extreme heat or extreme precipitation has happened in Hurricane Harvey, that are just undocumented in the historical record.

These are features which are unprecedented.

And so we're in a climate that human beings haven't had to deal with.

Now, we have resources that earlier humans didn't have.

We have a highly industrialized society in many places on earth, which we used believes it's well insulated from extremes of climate.

Oh, air conditioning is probably the best example, protecting a lot of people from extreme heat.

Of course, a lot of humanity can't afford air conditioning.

On the other hand, the big freeze in Texas, which again we have no idea what, whether that had anything to do with the climate change, shows you that human beings are not totally insulated as they build these complicated systems with high technology.

There is a theory that if you build more and more technologically-advanced systems, you kind of walk out on a tree limb and you're trying evermore to do a balancing act because actually you've led the climate change and you become less sensitive to it in some ways, but in other ways you're just out there waiting for something to happen that you hadn't expected and the limb breaks.

And there's a concern that that's the situation we put ourselves in.

So we've used all this technology both to protect ourselves, but also to increase emissions of greenhouse gases.

But it's also sort of built us into a corner.

We have to get ourselves out of that corner very quickly now.

- So can you, can you drill down on sea level rise?

I know speaking personally, Superstorm Sandy which I covered for the Providence Journal along with many other journalists around the country really brought home the danger, the risk there and the reality of sea-level rise.

Can you elaborate on sea-level rise?

I think that is such a critical issue.

- So a Superstorm Sandy wasn't a particularly powerful hurricane and it turned into a tropical storm when it hit the coast.

But the thing about it was that it was gigantic.

So it was had this gigantic circulation around it.

It was something like 1,000 kilometers, six, 700 miles across.

And what it was what the winds were doing was pushing the sea and the water at the sea surface toward the East coast of the United States.

And that piling up of order is called storm surge.

And that storm surge rides on top of whatever sea level was before the storm came along, and sea level along the Northeast coast is about a foot higher than it was a century ago.

So we had the flood due to the storm surge boosted by an extra foot due to sea-level rise.

And that significantly increased damage caused by the storm.

The trouble is that in the future we're just going to raise sea level more and more.

By the end of this century, it could be as much as three feet higher and a little more along the East coast than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

So we're building more and more risk into the system.

And although these a storm like Sandy doesn't come along very often, it's about a once in a 300-year event, as you raise the sea level, that means that the flood level associated with Sandy becomes a more and more common event.

And so the current once 100 years flood level in a place like Miami is going to come along once a year.

Let me repeat that previous, once in a century flood level will appear once a year in a place like Miami by the year 2050.

That's only 30 years from now.

If you were going to think about protecting that city, you would start doing it now.

And in fact, they have started doing it on a small scale, sort of taking the low hanging fruit of how you protect the coastal area.

But that's same once-in-a-century event becoming a once-in-a-year event is going to happen at many other U.S. coastal locations too.

And by 2100, at most us coastal locations.

So we're quickly moving into an era where events and risks, which are very unusual.

You know, once a century are going to become common, garden variety, every year, we got to get our game, we've got to up our game or else by the time it happens, we won't be ready for it.

- So Michael explain to the audience that might not know, why are sea levels rising?

- Sea levels are rising because as water warms and the ocean is warming due to climate change, fluids expand, they take up more volume.

So in the ocean, that means it lifts a little bit and it runs over more onto the coast.

That's one thing, mountain glaciers, like in the Alps, like in Alaska, like in the Andes, like the Himalayas, they melt more, they melt faster where they're warmer.

That means more water is going into the ocean in the first place.

And then at the polls we have two big ice sheets in Greenland and one in Antarctica that cover whole continents essentially, and as they have started to fritter away at their edges.

So the edges of the big ice sheets are starting to deposit more and more water and break off with more and more icebergs going into the ocean.

And that raises sea level rise too.

Those processes are slow and gradual, but once they happen, they were effectively irreversible.

So we are now baking into the system, an amount of sea level rise for the end of this century that we can't just, you know, pull back if we decide to reduce emissions even tomorrow, we're stuck with it for a long time.

- Yeah, the two... That's terrifying.

I don't want to gloss over that.

The, the, the, the two-- - I don't want to scare you here, Jim.

(indistinct) - Too late.

- It is terrifying.

There's no other way to, especially what to hear it from such an eminent scientists as yourself.

- Well, you know, you have to remember there is actually some good news at the end of the story, too, which I hope we'll get to.

- Well, I want to talk about the good news, but I also I want to, I want to dig a little bit further about when we talk about responding, the two principle things that I typically hear described as is a strategy of adaptation and a strategy of mitigation.

So, you know, try to try to make the peaks and valleys a little bit flatter would be mitigation.

Adaptation says, well, it's going to be a hot world in a wet world, and a dry world in some places, we're just gonna have to adapt to it.

When you think about that spectrum of options, how do you think we're doing right now?

And can we actually manage the change that we're as you say, is already baked into the system?

- Well, mitigation in the, in the term of art in the climate business means cutting emissions basically and we're not doing very well on that.

Countries have indicated they want to do it.

That's what the Paris agreement was about, but there are plans to actually of what they're actually going to do are only halfway measures.

And they're not even implementing those plans fully.

Adaptation means learning from experience, planning in advance, and implementing measures that will protect all of us from too much heat, too intense rainfall, too intense hurricanes.

And in some places, extreme drought, and the other effects like sea-level rise.

And we're not doing very well on that either.

It turns out that we haven't got a comprehensive national plan in the United States to implement adaptation.

We have pieces here and there.

If you, you can read in the daily news how bad the situation is along the coast where we don't have a set of incentives to get people to not settle in risky areas.

Instead, the federal government has been selling flood insurance at below-market rates and people are happy in some cases to buy it and stay near the coast because the government is effectively subsidizing them living in areas where they shouldn't be living.

That same story of perverse incentives propagates itself through the whole system through which we should be responding by adapting.

And basically, it originates in the fact that our political leaders don't get any credit for building stuff long in advance.

Taking a forward-looking view of people tend to look at it, as it costs me more taxes I'll let the next generation worry about it.

But the next generation is our children.

And the next generation is also us in some cases, because if you're a little younger than I am you're still going to be alive when this problem gets really bad, unless we start cutting emissions now and developing an adaptation program which gets us protected from the level of warming that is inevitable.

- So do you, do you see any optimism?

Obviously, the Biden presidency is still very early, but do you see any optimistic notes with Joe Biden having become president?

- Well, there's a lot of things that are happening sort of anyway, namely the price of renewable energy, carbon-free energy, solar cells, wind turbines has tumbled, and it's now competitive.

It's better than competitive.

It beats the hell out of coal, for instance in a lot of places, it's cheaper even in some users, the natural gas, which was which is thought of as a cheap fuel.

And so we're moving into a world and that, by the way this didn't happen accidentally.

It happened largely because the federal government has invested subsidize research and development on things like solar cells for generations.

And so a lot of that is coming to fruition now.

So the, the material to cut emissions to get off fossil fuels, to reduce carbon, and eventually have the climate change slow down.

We have most of what we need and we certainly have everything we need to get started.

And the price is becoming very acceptable and there's no excuse for not doing it.

And the Biden Administration seems to be getting together a plan that will provide the regulations and incentives which will get the market spinning and get people buying these technologies and replacing fossil fuels.

So that means eventually driving cars that are electric where the electricity comes from solar energy, for instance instead of from gasoline, and gasoline is basically a carbon fuel.

So there is a lot of positive news on both the technology front and on the political front, but do we have the focus as a society?

Do we have the consciousness as a society to stay focused on the problem long enough, so we can actually implement this stuff, continue the price tumbling of the good energy, while making the bad energy much more expensive.

- Michael, I want to take a step back for a second and talk about how we know what we know about climate.

The folks who are skeptics and that's the term I'll use, about climate change.

Talk about uncertainty and variability.

How do we know what we know about the climate and how confident can we be in those conclusions?

- Certain aspects of the climate have been monitored very well for the oldest records that are direct are temperatures from thermometers.

And they go back now about 150 years.

And then more recently, we have much more reliable ways of measuring many features of the climate system.

For instance, there were measurements of sea level that were just along the coast through devices called tide gauges that go back also more than a hundred years.

But since 1990, we have very precise satellite measurements from laser beams bouncing off the ocean's surface.

We know how much is natural variability, partly by looking at the sources of those of that natural variability.

Some of it comes from the sun flickering occasionally, which it does.

Some of it comes from emissions of dust from volcanoes, which reflect sunlight.

It has a slight cooling effect, but in both those cases we've been looking at both those sources of variability with satellites since about 1979.

And we know how big the sun flicker has been.

We know what its effect on climate should have been.

And we know how big the reflection of sunlight from volcanic dust is.

And we know how big its effect on climate would have been.

And in both cases, the effect is too small by far to account for what we're seeing in terms of the warming that's already occurred.

Plus there's actually an adds together as a slight cooling effect.

And instead, we're getting a big watering effect.

So we have these earth-observing systems all over the place.

We have floats called Argo floats in the ocean which tell us the rate at which the heat is penetrating from the surface deep into the ocean.

We we've, we've done a beautiful job on science but we have to keep that investment up.

If we fall short, then 10, 20, 30 years from now, we'll be blinded.

We won't be seeing what the climate changes are and we will be able to respond effectively.

And one thing that's good news on the adaptation front, is that the death rate in tropical psych loads that is hurricanes, globally, and then in the United States has decreased over the century despite the increase in the intensity of hurricanes we're seeing in the North Atlantic Basin recently and that's probably due to all the investment we've made in improved weather forecasting and early warning systems where we can see what's going to happen.

We get tell people to get out of the way, that's what science is worth.

It saves lives.

- So despite that, and despite, or in addition to the potential resources the United States has, there are large parts of the planet that at least today are not equipped and will not be equipped to manage this.

What, what do you have to say about that?

I mean, it seems like a total looming humanitarian crisis.

- Well, it's, it's sad, but true to that, the to the extent the problem is left running out of control as it has been until maybe very recently the people that have the least ability to cope with it are in general, people who are poor or people living on subsistence farming where they're getting their droughts are getting worse to where it's now too hot, so there, the corn can't tassel, or people who make a living, a subsistence living by fishing in places where the fish depend on coral reefs, but the coral reefs are dying.

So that happening a lot of places in the global South, the so-called developing world.

And a lot of these people just don't have the wherewithal to deal with a problem that they haven't created.

It's been foisted on them by development, industrial development, that's largely occurred until recently in the global North.

Now that's not so true anymore because the biggest emitter these days is actually China, and China isn't really a developing country anymore.

It's an upper-middle income country.

So it's getting close to the kind of status that wealthy countries like the United States have.

And all of those wealthy countries have to own up to not just the historical responsibility for putting the long-lived carbon dioxide into the air.

Once it's there, it lives for centuries, but also the current divisions in the case of China.

And they all have to come to the table, as they did at Paris, and make stronger and stronger agreements for getting rid of the fossil fuel problem basically.

And one of the things they need to stop doing is subsidizing fossil fuels.

That makes no sense in a year, in a world where you're trying to cut the amount of carbon it has.

- Do you, do you, do you have confidence that the political powers that be, whether we're in the United States or internationally are gonna are going to have the courage to do that?

- Oh, eventually, yes, because it's inevitable.

I mean, one of the reasons they have a high consciousness about this now I'm convinced is that people are starting to see changes in the climate which are not only very noticeable but in many cases in tolerable.

And we can't afford year-after-year to have big cities like Houston flooded.

We can't afford year-after-year for a city like Miami to have to put in, you know, not be flooded once every 100 year by a storm, but every year is being flooded by the high tide, for instance 'cause that's riding on top of a higher sea level.

We can't afford to have agriculture in parts of the country gradually be marginalized economically because it's getting too hot and dry.

So these are real economic effects.

There are things that are affecting people's lives.

They're consequences that people know are affecting their lives and that eventually is getting our politicians to act.

And that's why the democratic party, for instance made it a big issue in the past election.

And if the long is that kind of focus continues I'm convinced that our government and other governments will get to solving the problem.

- So, so what can the average citizen of the United States do to, to help in this regard?

I guess maybe a two-part question on the macro level which would be supporting political action or industries and companies that are doing the right thing and then the micro level, you know, right down to your household and what things you buy and how you get rid of them and so forth.

- Well, you know, as you said it yourself, the most effective thing is to make it a political priority.

Let your politicians, your political leaders know what you want.

And when an electric comes, put your support whether it's putting your body on the, in the street I don't mean lying down, but walking around, campaigning for somebody or whether it means campaign contributions, whatever, make it dependent on their program to fix this problem.

And at the smaller level, the micro level, you make decisions every day, which, you know, it may not seem like a lay it up too much, but the more you do it, the more other people will do it.

The more you do it, the more you'll talk about it.

And the more other people do it.

And what's in it is things like when you buy an appliance make sure it's the most energy efficient one you can get.

When you're buying a motor vehicle make sure it has the lowest emissions per mile as that you can get.

If you live in, you know, in the suburbs or whatever, plant trees, they do take some carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

Those little measures may not add up, but they are a an educational opportunity, not just for you, not just for your children, but for your neighbor and your neighbor's kids.

When one person sees somebody doing it it becomes normalized for the next person to do it too.

Whether it's putting solar photovoltaics on your roof or buying an electric car, those are the kinds of measures.

And if we all do both, if we all make ourselves part of the political system, we make it a political priority while you know, walking the walk also personally to the extent we can't, nobody's perfect.

And you don't, shouldn't try to be too perfect because you know, it's probably going to drive you nuts, eventually you'll spin back the other way.

You know, I'm not perfect either by any means, but we should all take those measures which are feasible for us to take.

- Well, it's eminently reasonable.

We've got about a minute left here and I'm wondering we're at the end of this pandemic year, we hope that it's the light that we see at the end of the tunnel, but is there a link between pandemics and climate change?

- There are some links, the pandemic shortcut or emissions, unfortunately, we're probably bounced back, but with the promise of some sort of infrastructure program if we make green infrastructure, infrastructure which has low emissions rather than inducing high emissions infrastructure, for instance, which means improving mass transit rail systems and it systems which take electric, which make it easy to drive an electric car and to power the electric car, rather than making everything friendly for gasoline-powered automobiles, for instance, and building more and more roads to create more and more emissions.

If we do things on the green side, it will make a difference as we recover, it'll make a difference for the long term.

But also, you know, we muddled through bad problems before as a society, COVID was the most recent one.

When I was a kid, we were diving on the desks to keep her being annihilated by the Russians.

We thought, and we found ways if not put the genie back in the bottle, but the court back in cause the threat of nuclear exchanges is still there, but at a much lower level.

We are capable of making messes and then solving them.

And we made a terrible climate mess.

Let's solve it.

I'm convinced that human beings are going to eventually get to solving it.

It's only a question of how much muddle we create before we get the solution in place.

- That's a great place for us to leave it.

Michael Oppenheimer, thank you so much for helping us understand the story.

That's all the time we have this week.

But if you want to know more, you can find us on Facebook and Twitter or visit Pellcenter.org.

He's Wade, I'm Jim asking you to join us again next time for more, "Story in the Public Square.

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