Think Differently. Solve the Impossible.

Show Notes

Guy R. McPherson
Website: https://guymcpherson.com

Transcript

My guest today is Professor Guy McPherson.

McPherson is a professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, and a speaker and scientist on what he calls abrupt climate change leading to near-term human extinction.

He speaks about confronting Earth's cataclysmic changes.

Welcome to my show, Professor.

Thank you, it's a pleasure to talk with you today.

So, there's two points I want to cover.

One is the problem that you see.

Everyone knows global warming, but what do you think the problem is?

Then two, if you can, solutions because I like to talk solutions, but I understand you may think there are not any, and that's fine.

So to start with, what is your belief in this end of the world?

Can I use that term cataclysmic thing that's coming our way?

What's that based on?

Well, you're probably familiar with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Yes.

It was created about 37 years ago during the Ronald Reagan administration.

It replaced the advisory group on greenhouse gases, and as a consequence, it was designed to fail.

The IPCC was designed to fail, and yet...

Why do you say it was designed to fail or not be effective in implementing change?

Right.

Yes.

According to Michael Oppenheimer, writing for the Environmental Defense Fund website on November 1st, 2007, the US government saw the creation of the IPCC as a way to prevent the activism stimulated by my colleagues and me from controlling the policy agenda.

That's from...

And that would be, let's create a superpower scientific organization that makes you guys look small and not significant so that they'll follow them instead of you.

Michael Oppenheimer is the Albert G.

Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and the Department of Geosciences at Princeton University.

So this is not some schmuck, right?

And he concluded that the IPCC was created during the Reagan administration to replace the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases as it designed to fail.

What did it say before and what did the panel say afterwards?

The difference?

As one example, the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases pointed out that when we get to 1 degree C above the 1750 baseline, we will trigger self-reinforcing feedback loops.

The IPCC concluded that, interestingly, drawing upon evidence from an economist, now a Nobel Prize-winning economist, that 2 degrees C was the critical number.

The IPCC still claims that we're not at 2C.

Do you think they're trying to keep people from panicking if the world is coming to an end?

Yes, absolutely.

By the way, that's the stupidest idea ever.

Yeah, what would be the better idea?

If you really want people to panic, you don't tell them anything, and then whatever is going to happen happens, and then people freak out.

Give people some warning.

You know, it wasn't until about 1980 that medical doctors told their patients that they had a terminal condition.

Up until about 1980, medical doctors would sometimes tell family members, sometimes they wouldn't tell anybody.

They know with 99% certainty that you're going to die and they don't tell you.

And okay, I'm starting to understand because some of the listeners had said to have you on, they explained to me that you think there's nothing we can do about it, so let's just be good to each other and have a happy ending.

But the ending is coming, that kind of thing.

Well, the IPCC, which was designed to fail, according to Michael Oppenheimer, the Princeton professor, they concluded on October 8th, 2018, in a report called Global Warming of 1.5 degrees, the IPCC concluded that even abrupt geophysical events do not approach current rates of human-driven change.

The IPCC concluded that we are undergoing, that Earth is amid the most rapid change in planetary history.

Which, by the way, what you're saying is it's not all human-made.

Most of it's not human-made.

It's the Earth, Mother Nature.

No, no, no.

It's human-made.

There's no doubt about that.

It's too much, too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that is causing the rapid warming.

The point is that because of human-driven change, because of all those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this is the fastest event in planetary history.

I saw something on your website that I think it's your website.

The Great Dying wiped out 90 percent of the species on Earth due to a rise in temperature 252 million years ago?

Yes, that's right.

We're proceeding much faster than that.

In fact, there was an asteroid that struck the planet about...

That was natural, though, not man-made.

Right.

That was natural.

And so was the asteroid that struck the Yucatan Peninsula about 66 million years ago.

That was natural.

And yet, the current rate of environmental change is faster than either of those two events.

But are you saying that in this case today, unlike 200 million years ago, more of it's from man, therefore we can't...

And it's too late to reverse it, or most of it's from man, not...

Yes.

Mother Nature.

Okay.

Yes, absolutely.

Huge proportion is from human causes.

And because...

What about...

What would have been your solution if you could have gone backward in time?

There's something called MIR at mir.org, M-E-E-R, MIRs for Earth's Energy Rebalancing.

And MIR was created by...

They're mirrors on your roof, basically, or paint your roof white, you're trying to reflect sunlight back to the...

Yes.

By the way, I grew up, I went to ASU, Arizona State University in Tempe.

So, well familiar with...

I looked it up when I saw it on your site.

Well familiar with that.

Don't know how well it would work in other parts of the world.

How many of these you need.

To me, it seems...

Have you done the math on that?

Like, how many would you have to put these up on everybody's roof all over the globe to mirror, like a giant mirror is what you're trying to do.

Yes.

Yes.

And Dr.

Tao has done the math.

And when he first did the math, he indicated that it would require an area covered with mirrors about the size of the Netherlands.

And I thought, well, that's not horrible.

I mean, that's actually manageable.

If we get governments of the world and a few billionaires on board, we can make that happen.

But the most recent indication from Dr.

Tao is that it will take an area the size of the United States, not an area of the Netherlands.

There's always a, who would have thunk it with any solutions?

What were the potential, even if they could throw money and agree on it, what would be the downside of putting mirrors to reflect back into space potentially?

Well, a couple of things come to mind.

First of all, there's not enough sand in the world to make that many mirrors.

I know there's a lot of cell phones, a lot of glass, a lot of silicon.

Right, think about that, though.

There's not enough sand in the world.

Sand would become limiting to making that many mirrors.

And we don't know the effects of shading that much of the planet with mirrors.

Could affect the weather, do something.

Right.

Exactly.

So maybe that's why they didn't do it.

They weren't just rubbing you off.

It was more complicated than that.

No.

Well, it could be.

But there are some people, including Dr.

Tao, who still think it's a good idea.

They just haven't gained any political or economic traction to make it happen.

Well, in Arizona, we do it because we want the house to stay cool.

It saves on the air conditioning bill, which could be three or four hundred dollars a month.

Even if you set your thermostat at 80 degrees, the air conditioning, you have to do it almost.

I guess that's not adding up to something the size of the Netherlands or the United States.

Right, and I lived in Southern Arizona for 20 years.

Yes, I know, it's brutal.

So moving forward, then, what's your prediction?

Is there anything we can still do?

Or are you saying it's too late, it's on a curve and can't slow it down?

Unless there's something that I don't know about, and that certainly could be, there's a lot of things I don't know, right?

But unless there's something I just don't know about, I don't see a way out of this mess.

I think that we are in the midst of the most abrupt event in planetary history and that it's irreversible, and that comes from the IPCC as well.

So if there is no way out, then it's a legitimate question, how shall we act?

And so I've been trying to focus on that over the course of the last decade or so.

I always think it's good to be kind to each other and be a nice person.

I don't think we have to wait for the end of the world to be nice to each other.

Yes, exactly.

But if, when you understand, can you imagine if everybody you met, everybody who met you knew that you had a terminal condition, right?

Yeah, I get what you're saying is if we truly all thought we were going to die, but on the flip side, I don't know.

People can get crazy, Professor.

They could be looting and shooting.

I mean, you think you understand.

You're a smart guy.

I think I have some intelligence.

You never know.

Well, yes, but is it going to be any better if we wait, if we don't tell people for as long as possible?

Do you think the looting and the raiding and the acting like idiots is going to get better?

If we wait longer?

I don't think so.

So speaking of what do we do in the meantime, it seems to me whether you believe in this or not, the taxes, the carbon trading schemes, the taxes on our food, our fuel, they're hidden taxes.

People don't even know they're being charged the carbon tax, and that's why their food at the grocery store cost more, and they can't do anything about it.

Anyhow, they have to eat.

It seems to me that stuff is, they're capitalizing on our pain, which is not helping anybody in the short term have a better life in the meantime.

I agree, but on the other hand, I don't want to go full Donald Trump administration and cast care to the winds and say that the whole thing is a hoax, and we just need to make sure that the billionaires make more money.

I mean, that seems to be the current.

What would you suggest we do in the short term in terms of all that?

The taxes, are you saying leave some of them in place, even though the world's going to end anyhow?

I don't know and I'm really not concerned about what happens at the governmental level.

That's something that you and I have no control over.

It gets passed down to us, like the taxes on our food, like there's even a cow methane tax, because cows emit methane, so do humans and people's pets.

So therefore, if you eat meat, it's going to be more expensive.

I'm all for vegetarianism.

It just seems like these taxes, where does that money go and does it do anything?

Are there better ways to do things?

And I wondered if you, what's your opinion on stuff like that was, the misguided stuff people think is going to help, it's not.

There's, and there's an enormous number of those things.

From an individual perspective, I recognize that there are things that I have control over and things that I do not.

And this is one of the reasons I'm inspired by modern Stoicism.

Ideas and principles rooted in the, in ancient Athens from a couple thousand years ago.

There are things that I have control over and things that I don't.

And the things that I have control over, I want to work on.

I want to make sure that I do the right thing, the ethical thing.

And when I don't have control over things, and there are many of those, then I just turn away.

And so, what happens with taxes, what happens with almost anything that happens at the level of government, that's beyond my control.

It's a great point.

It's like in that movie, Trading Places, where the millionaire is having to shack up with, with, what's her name, the actress, because he's got kicked out of his house even though he had money.

And she's like, I got, you know, it's not my, I don't worry about other people's problems.

I got my own problems and I can't do anything about it.

Not my problem.

People respect you is why I'm asking you.

People who see this, they know you, or even if they don't, you're a professor, that's why I ask you, because you have some weight and some authority in your, in your opinion.

Okay.

So let's start from the personal level, from the individual level, from you and I, what do we do?

And there are people we can come into contact with almost every day or at least once a week.

Maybe our co-workers, our family, our friends.

And let's treat all of those people as we would treat our ancient dying grandmother.

Right?

We would, first of all, we would never lie to our ancient dying grandmother.

There's no point.

We would treat her with respect.

We would treat her like she matters in the world.

We would do things for her.

Let's do that with everybody.

Not just with the people we interact with on a regular basis, but with everybody.

So, let's tell the truth.

And then at the level of communities, at the level of our community, like the community of Bellows Falls, Vermont, where I live, a small village, let's go to town council meetings and try to remove the terrible things that are found in every civilization, including this one, racism and misogyny come immediately to mind.

Never mind the disparity in wealth from one person to the next.

But we can certainly take aim at misogyny and racism in our communities.

They're rampant.

They're in essentially every community I've ever been in.

And we can do things as communities to try to make those things better.

It would be nice if we were doing that regardless of the state of things again.

Yes, of course.

What if, thought comes to mind, the International Panel on Climate Change, whatever the name of it is, which I don't really trust 100 percent either.

What if there are ideas, what if we're wrong about climate change?

You know, I mean, it's just a model.

It's just math.

It's pretty complex system, the globe, the planets.

What if, what if we are wrong?

I guess no harm, no fault, right?

Because you're still being good to.

Yes.

So, so what if we're wrong and we, we take actions that improve the situation?

Would that be so horrible?

And every, every report, every paragraph that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change turns out is rooted in peer-reviewed literature.

Those peer-reviewed papers in the process of peer-review is the best we had, the best method we know about to generate reliable knowledge.

And so...

And you believe you trust that?

I thought you were saying you had negative things to say about this group.

You believe in their work, their data, what they're saying?

Yes.

Yes, I do.

And they don't go far enough.

Oh, I see.

So I believe the stuff they turn out is based on reliable knowledge.

It's very reliable information, but they don't go far enough.

So for example, they ditched the idea that one degree C mattered and went to two degrees C instead.

And that was a terrible mistake.

And they continue to take a very conservative approach.

Even the conservative peer-reviewed literature.

What would be their more aggressive approach besides naming one or two degrees, which I don't understand the difference, except clearly that's twice as much.

What do we do?

The solutions.

How would things be different in terms of solutions?

The IPCC was created about 37 years ago, plus or minus a few weeks.

And had it started at that time, working on the, based on what the advisory group on greenhouse gases had found, then we would have made tremendous strides already.

This is one of the reasons I think we're too late already.

We're 30 some years.

You know, about 30 years ago is when I wrote my senator in Arizona, John Kyle.

Remember Kyle, senator, and he's actually on the Energy Commission in Washington.

We're in Arizona, and I wrote him, why don't we have more solar panels?

And what are we doing about global warming?

This was when you had to write a letter, handwritten, and mail it.

And you got back in the mail, got a typed letter, or photocopied probably, said, no, global warming is a hoax.

We're actually cooling, and solar can't be done.

And this is, of course, is Arizona the most practical place possible.

But he's a senator in Washington on the Energy Committee, and even though he's from Arizona, probably a little biased, that was about 30 years ago.

Wow.

Well, that's the thing.

Okay.

George Carlin said, I'm going to paraphrase, but he's dead, and so I'm sure he won't get mad at me about it.

He said something like, there are several rules I live by.

The first rule, I never believe anything the government tells me.

Yeah.

Well, at least question it.

It could be true.

You just don't believe it just because they told you so.

Right.

And so John Kyl comes to mind with that response he gave you.

It did make me think though, ever since then, in fact, it's always in my mind like, why would he say that?

And some people said, well, he's in bed with the gas and oil companies, but still, that's pretty strong opposite statement to make, you know, in terms of, show me the data.

And he didn't put the data in his letter, but it all did make me think if he was to defend his statement, what he would bring up.

And you probably know, people manipulate the weather data to make it agree with their theories, right?

Of course, absolutely.

And in fact, I lived off grid for quite a long time, more than a decade, first in southwestern rural New Mexico and then in Belize, Central America.

And I did that because I thought that was a potential solution and by showing the way, I thought other people would join me and would start at least minimizing their enormous consumption footprint that especially most Americans have and Western Europeans as well.

But then later I discovered the aerosol masking effect.

And it turns out that if a relatively large number of people had done the same thing I did, that we'd all be dead by now.

So it was a bad idea.

All dead from wind and solar?

What were you doing in terms of off the grid?

The, at the same time industrial activity produces greenhouse gases which trap some of the radiation that otherwise would escape and therefore heat the planet.

At the same time industrialism does that, it also produces these small particles called aerosols, that go up into the atmosphere and act like mirrors that reflect incoming sunlight.

This is a tremendously important and poorly understood outcome of burning fossil fuels.

James Hansen, the father-

You're saying if everyone had solar panels and wind power, that would produce more particles?

No, would produce less, way less, because we-

Oh, and that would be bad because there wouldn't be particles in there too.

Right, and so the other one would come down and strike the surface of the planet, it would warm up very, very rapidly within a matter of days.

James Hansen, the sort of godfather of climate.

To which I've heard of that model.

I'm trying to get a picture of if you have this shield of particles that's reflecting sunlight back up actually helping keep it cool.

Where in the atmosphere are those particles?

Are they everywhere?

Ubiquitous?

And if that's the case, then some of them would also be bouncing back off each other, back and forth all over the place.

Not just a simple hit the particles go back into space.

Right.

I don't know the answer to that question.

I'm sorry.

I don't know whether they're in the stratosphere.

I don't know what part of the atmosphere they're in.

According to James Hansen, the sort of godfather of climate science, they all fall out of the atmosphere in about five days.

The heavy particles settle, unless the wind, the wind keeps things going, blows them around, stick together, so forth.

It's actually amazing how the Earth clears itself of pollution, and the air we exhale, the carbon dioxide we exhale, and everything else is fascinating.

Right.

How we're not dead already on this ball in space.

Yes, exactly.

And the point is that it doesn't take long for those particles, those aerosols to drop out of the atmosphere.

And when they do, the planet would heat up very, very rapidly to a very high degree.

In fact, by 133 percent over land according to the peer-reviewed evidence.

That's huge.

So we're already at two.

It would heat up to 4.67 degrees.

Well, there's one other variable in that.

Help me with this.

We have these particles.

We're not sure where they are.

But let's pretend we all have solar and wind, so there's no more particles.

Now I think the other part of the theory is that's also the greenhouse gases are trapping heat, right?

Yes.

So where is this trapping dome compared to these particles?

Because if the particles are lower, that means the particles will be bouncing sunlight back into the trapped heat thing anyhow, and it wouldn't make a difference than if the particles were gone or not, really, because up here we still have this bubble of the greenhouse gas keeping the heat in.

But the particles do matter because if they all fall out, then the incoming heat increases dramatically.

And therefore, the heat that gets trapped increases dramatically.

I'm still trying to picture how it works.

The greenhouse gases, in theory, light gets through the greenhouse gases, right?

Yes.

But then light...

And it sweeps up.

And light can get out too.

Light can go both ways through the greenhouse gas.

Yes.

Then how does it trap heat if light can go both ways?

There's nothing stopping the heat from getting in and out.

The incoming radiation, the incoming sunlight, warms up the planet.

And the radiation that is outgoing, the long-wave radiation, is the hot radiation.

And it gets trapped.

But there will still be some radiation of wavelength and infrared energy leaving the Earth, because when the sun goes down, it gets cooler out.

Yes.

So as heat still leaves, all the greenhouse gas can't keep it in forever.

We'd cook in like, in an hour, we'd all be dead if there wasn't some heat being released.

Yes.

Well, I think it'll take longer than an hour.

But imagine that your car isn't really a car, it's a greenhouse on wheels.

And that's what's happening at the level of the planet.

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at though.

It can't quite be the car on wheels though, because then we would all be heated up on a daily basis pretty fast.

Some heat has to go out of the car, the car windows.

Oh, yeah.

Yes, the windows are rolled down on the planet.

Which gets us back to the pollution and more or less the greenhouse gas bubble where I'm still trying to get the model of some heat gets out, then what's the issue?

It's not like it's a sealed dome, nothing's getting out in terms of heat.

Yeah, well, we don't trap at all, just like your car doesn't trap at all, right?

Your car heats up, but it doesn't heat up to 1000 degrees.

Some of the incoming radiation warms up the seats and everything else inside the car and can't escape.

Some of it does escape, and it's the same with the planet.

Some of the incoming radiation does escape, but some of the long wave radiation especially, which is the heat producing radiation, gets trapped.

And it gets trapped by those green house gasses because they block it going out.

Where does it go?

Are you saying the gasses absorb it?

The gasses make sure that it stays within our atmosphere and therefore is able to continue heating the planet.

But it's a wave though, it can't really stay.

It's not a particle now, it's a wave.

So it's got energy.

But it can bounce back.

It doesn't necessarily go out because it's trapped.

So if it's bouncing around, that's what light does.

Light's fascinating to me because the light's over here, but the light's coming from over there and it will be on all the walls, just not a little brighter.

But if I go down the stairs, even though it's dark, it's still light.

It bounces everywhere.

But it also would bounce out to the heat.

I don't know.

I'm not quite understanding how, I'm not exactly understanding the model of, I understand what we're speaking of, but not the doomsday model in terms of, and not also related to the particulates, where the particulates are also as a factor in reflecting heat.

I don't have a clear model on how this works.

I understand the concepts, but not the doomsday effect like this is why we're going to die kind of thing because of it.

I understand the wavelengths and the heat and reflection and everything, but not the dooms and the, we're using the wrong terminology.

The term is trap.

CO2 does not trap heat.

It stores heat.

People say trapped heat.

I get sucked into thinking trapped as if there's some bubble above us.

Doesn't work that way.

Carbon dioxide doesn't stay all up here and trap heat.

There are carbon dioxide and oxygen molecules down here.

As we go up higher in altitude, there's less and less of them, just like there are less oxygen molecules.

It's the same thing with the dust particles.

These dust particles are everywhere.

It's not like there's a layer of pollution all up here.

That would be great and wonderful, then we wouldn't have to worry about breathing stinky air.

As we go higher in altitude, there's less CO2, less oxygen.

If you want to Wikipedia, Google it, whatever, it's about 21 percent oxygen and about 0.03 percent CO2.

I have to wonder, maybe you can tell me, who came up with the term trapped heat?

CO2 traps heat.

It stores it.

Each one of these CO2 molecules, it can absorb heat, but guess what?

So it stores heat, but it also releases heat at night.

It's what maintains the steady state, the livable space.

When it's really cold, then it's going to release heat and help keep things temperature.

Here's a better way to think about it.

If we were to use the idea, you know, in this car, these might be, let's say, bottles of water and you leave them in your car in the middle of the day, they get really hot in the sun.

You need the sun to get things hot.

Now, imagine you're sleeping in your car at night.

And you drive up to the ski area.

It might be nice to cuddle to these warm bottles.

By morning, they're going to be chilled down again.

That's how the CO2 is working.

Ubiquitous, it's not like up here in a superdome someplace.

And same thing with the particles.

The only reason I mention the particles idea that the professor leaves in as well, some other people, that air pollution is actually reflecting sunlight back to the sun, keeping us from getting hotter.

Again, another shield idea.

The red dots here being the particles, the idea would be some sunlight coming in gets reflected back off these particles.

In the way of them, there are going to be some more CO2 particles capturing that heat that's bounced off them.

So it's not like all these particles are again in the sky.

And as sunlight comes in, again, all the pollution is not up all in the sky.

Otherwise, we wouldn't have to worry about air filters and good air quality and checking the smog on our car.

A lot of these dust particles and smog are down where we breathe.

And as light reflects from them off to the CO2, the carbon dioxide molecules are going to absorb some of that sunlight anyhow.

It helps to draw a picture.

Beautifully complex.

How is it possible?

There's a gazillion variables.

This is not just CO2.

This is not just pollution.

It is not just cloud cover.

How we can even wake up in each day and still be able to walk around, take this for granted.

I feel there's so many other problems we could be working on.

Kind of like the professor says, why don't we just be nice to each other and enjoy our life?

I'm really into now seeing who came up with this idea trapped.

Here's what AI says when I Google it.

Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere through the greenhouse effect.

Of course, AI is just repeating what it finds on people's websites.

Here we have one from AI saying, effectively trapping heat.

Let's see who wrote that.

State of the planet, Columbia Climate School.

How does carbon dioxide trap heat?

It's misuse of that term.

There's MIT Climate Portal.

How do greenhouses trap heat?

There's no trapping heat going on.

It is heat storage, and then similarly it's heat releasing.

It's actually misinformation to say exactly how do these molecules warm our planet.

It's not warming our planet.

It's maintaining our planet, hot and cold.

I think I've said enough.

I don't know why it didn't take me this long to think of it myself.

The word trapped.

Draw the picture.

Show me the mousetrap.

Think of the trap.

Show me.

Draw me a picture.

If any of you or the professor would like to add some comments, I'd love to hear them, read them, put them in the comments section for this episode.

Thanks for listening.

On with the show.

You understand, like most people, what the greenhouse effect is.

Actually, you know, when so actually, after I wrote my congressman, like I told you, and he said, it took me a long time.

It took me 10 years to come across something that no one had told me before.

I get these both sides like we're going to die because greenhouse and they know it's a hoax.

No one tells me the middle side.

What is your take on what I found, which is clouds, water vapor.

Some people says a bigger factor and sunspot activity, just more sun activity.

Being a bigger factor in how hot things get in clouds because water holds heat, which would get us on the same discussion in terms of the dome and the greenhouse gas, the clouds hold heat.

What do you think about that?

You're saying clouds are not significant?

No, clouds definitely are significant.

And there's been some recent research indicating, I don't have that at my fingertips right now, but I've been creating two videos a week for the last several years.

And a few of those have focused on the importance of clouds and how the changing clouds are negatively affecting the planet.

That is, the cirrus clouds, ice clouds.

Yes.

And every time, every place I look, the situation is worse than I thought it was.

Yeah, I think the panel speaks about that in their paper.

The cirrus clouds, for those who, I would be one of them way back.

What's cirrus cloud?

It's ice cloud, meaning it traps heat, reflects.

There are those clouds when there's haze, it looks like haze, and it's really bright.

I have to put my sunglasses on, because lights reflecting off the clouds.

I do have good news.

Okay.

The factor which we have least control as individuals, as communities, as a society, is the ice floating on the Arctic Ocean.

That ice serves as a great source of reflectance or what's called albedo.

Helping us out, reflecting sun.

Yes.

Except it can't get through.

We were speaking of the dome, the greenhouse dome.

It can't really get back through there, right?

Oh, yes.

Yes, it can.

That greenhouse effect only traps some of the heat.

When you get into your car in the afternoon, it's been sitting in the sun all day, it isn't 1,000 degrees in there.

It reaches an upper limit and it doesn't get any hotter.

The same for the planet.

It's not going to be 1,000 degrees.

Okay.

So the ice in the Arctic is helping us out because it's reflecting light up and then sometimes it bounces off the ice clouds backwards, back and forth.

Everywhere in between till the sun goes down.

Right.

Yes.

James Anderson, the Harvard atmospheric scientist famous for discovering the link between chlorofluorocarbons and the so-called hole in the ozone layer of the Antarctic, said it was quoted in Forbes on-

And we're speaking of, because that was a while back.

You and I are a little older.

This is back when we worried about the spray can.

Aerosols had freon and people's air conditioning.

So it used to be freon instead of R22.

We switched because that freon would leak out of air conditioning and be like a-

If you go out there and like the greenhouse gas stratosphere, but instead of greenhouse gas, it was blown a hole in the ozone layer a little.

Right.

Yes.

So he said he was quoted in Forbes on January 15th, 2018.

I want to provide the numbers so people can look this up if they want.

January 15th, 2018, James Anderson was quoted in Forbes as saying, quote, the chance there will be permanent ice in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero.

But there's still some there, I think.

There's, in fact, a little bit.

Just yesterday, the US Navy Postgraduate School put out their six-month ensemble forecast.

Just yesterday, the 17th of April, they put out their forecast and indicated that at the end of the melt year, we're going to have about four million square kilometers of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean.

So this is good news.

Well, also, because I like to think of solutions, which took me a while, by the way.

I used to be completely negative all the time.

People like, Dan, if you open your mouth, say something, solution, right?

I don't know how it could be done, but liquid nitrogen, however you make cool stuff.

All we need to do is cool the ocean, make it icy, right?

Make some ice.

Well, in fact, the ocean is a huge sink for greenhouse gases and heat.

The world ocean is now storing an enormous amount of heat.

That makes sense, just like the clouds, and just like water, if you put it outside overnight, it takes a while to warm up in the morning.

Right, and almost three-quarters of the planet is covered with ocean, not with land, and that ocean has a certain specific gravity.

Like a swimming pool, like it takes forever for it to get warm enough to swim, and even when the summer comes and it's 90 degrees the first week, when's it going to be warm enough to get in the water?

It's 90 degrees out, it hasn't heated up yet.

But then in October, it's still warm enough to jump in.

Then it stays hot, right, doesn't cool down as fast, right?

Right.

So how's this work is a solution?

The good news is we're not going to have an ice-free Arctic Ocean this year.

James Anderson, a Harvard atmospheric scientist, the famous atmospheric scientist, said we're going to...

It's like Groundhog Day, where the groundhog comes out and he saw a shadow or didn't see a shadow.

Right.

There will be permanent ice in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero.

It's not going to happen.

And then Jennifer McKinnon at the University of California, San Diego, and also the Scripps Institution, part of the Scripps Institute, said three years and four months later that it's going to be ice free in 2022.

And so we've been very lucky.

They missed that one.

They didn't quite.

Right.

These are very intelligent people.

And this is what makes it sound like it's not as bad as you might think.

Not quite as bad.

That's exactly right.

By a couple of years.

Every year that we have ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, and anything more than a million square kilometers is called ice.

Anything a million square kilometers or less of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean, we say that's zero.

That's the same as zero.

And so I'd say we've been very fortunate so far in that we've had this source of albedo or reflectance from the Arctic.

And what other good things do we have since we're on the good news topics here?

The news train?

Yeah.

Well, we're still alive.

It's great not to be.

I mean, in terms of potential solutions, things helping us out, slowing down the catalysmic end of the world, so to speak, trees, they turn carbon dioxide back into oxygen, that kind of thing.

We weren't chopping them down as fast as we possibly could.

I'd feel a lot better about that.

Right.

I know even in these days, like the neighbors will chop a tree down, or the city will chop a tree down, or the HOA will make you cut your tree down because its roots are going under the sidewalk.

I'm like, seriously?

You can cut a 50-year-old tree down because the roots are going under the sidewalk in my neighborhood, and I'll pay for your concrete to be fixed.

No, we're cutting a tree down.

Yeah.

Right.

We seem to be relatively short-sighted animals.

Yeah.

So on your website, it says there's an ongoing effort to remove you from public service character assassination.

You've been called dangerous.

Dangerous.

Why is that?

Who is that?

You have a big website, so it could be all.

No, I remember.

I can't forget this.

I wish I could.

Who was the science fiction writer?

Heinlein.

Heinlein wrote that being right too soon is socially inconvenient.

I discovered abrupt, irreversible climate change on June 20th, 2012.

And it took a few years for the IPCC to come around to the idea that we were in the midst of abrupt, irreversible climate change.

So maybe I was too soon and people, certain people didn't want everybody to know, just as you were saying earlier.

Maybe if you're ahead of your time on anything, then...

You know, we don't want people to freak out.

You're going to suffer and take the hit for what later becomes common knowledge and yeah, duh.

Right.

And so maybe that was it.

I don't know.

All I know is that the defamation campaign was stunningly efficient and removed me from public service.

Let's get it back to clouds.

Let's talk about clouds again.

I had an attorney who was working pro bono on my behalf, and he was good.

He was suing more than 100 fossil fuel companies in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and he was also working with me, pro bono, and he slipped on a dock in the Bahamas and died on December 4th, 2020.

A couple of years later, I had another attorney come approach me, and within a week, they were so terrified by messages they received on social media, they won't have anything to do with me.

The reason I ask you about the water vapor so persistently is on the flip side of the argument.

There are this idea that clouds and water vapor are, I'm just reading this from one source and rounding off.

They're 10 times more of a warming factor back to your swimming pool holding heat than the greenhouse gases.

Right.

Yeah.

What do you believe on that?

Water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas.

It's actually a greenhouse gas.

It's far more abundant than carbon dioxide, for example.

It's important.

It matters.

It's been well-studied.

We know this.

But it's one of those things that we don't have a lot of control over, water vapor.

Unless we do exceed cloud seeding and change the weather, and airplanes also condensation from airplanes and all that stuff.

Airplane is a big factor, actually.

Yes, absolutely, as we found out on 9-11, when all the planes were grounded.

Clear skies.

Right.

It had a significant impact.

But there's relatively little we can do about water vapor.

The water is going to, I mean, the steam.

What I mean, Professor, is if we're beating ourselves up with taxes and solar panels and all this stuff to get, 10 percent of the problem which is from the CO2, but 90 percent is out of our control from the clouds.

I guess that gets us back to why you're doomsday because you're like, even if we cut our CO2, we can't fix things, is that?

No.

The greenhouse gases that we have control over are causing this problem.

Water vapor has always been a problem.

Oh, okay.

Five thousand years ago, water vapor was a significant greenhouse gas, but it wasn't catastrophically warming the planet.

If it's such, if you, I think you had said clouds, water vapor is a big part of the greenhouse gas.

If the CO2 is such a small part of it, how is the small part making such a big impact?

Green, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, but it's also the one over which we have the least control.

And no matter what happens with water vapor, there's very little we can do about it.

What we can do something about is carbon dioxide.

Oh, I agree with that part.

It's just as if I can't do anything about the big thing that's the bigger part of the problem.

I'm not trying to be negative.

Why am I so hyper-focused on doing the small thing if in the end it doesn't make a difference because it's such a small part of the percentage of the contributing factor?

Because what you're calling the big part of the problem is there are two things, something that we don't have control over.

And it doesn't make the planet heat up.

Oh, so you're saying clouds are greenhouse gases that don't trap heat?

No.

I'm saying that water vapor as a greenhouse gas has always been the most abundant greenhouse gas water vapor has.

It seems that no matter what we do in terms of burning fossil fuels that we have little impact over water vapor and how much heat.

Except for a little, it's not a factor, mind you.

I just like to throw this out because people, they don't know combustion.

You're a professor, you know this stuff.

I'm an aerospace engineer.

I know.

If you burn firewood, you burn gas, whatever you burn, it's always two water molecules for one carbon dioxide molecule that you're going to get if you have 100 percent efficiency on your engine.

You're making twice as much water as your carbon dioxide when you do this stuff.

I was wondering where does all that water go because it hasn't rained in a month.

We're all driving our cars.

Where does it go?

Most of that water vapor is coming from the ocean, as you know.

That's why water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gases because the oceans cover about three-quarters of the planet.

So, is there anything else we haven't talked about that you'd like to add while I'm looking at my list of questions here?

Well, I think most importantly, don't beat yourself up.

I see people all the time who think they are solely responsible for all of the world's problems.

I'm afraid not.

You're just not that important.

That's a great one.

I love that.

That's perfect.

Stressed out, angry, and then they get in an argument with me when I don't take them so seriously.

I'm like, lighten up on that.

How dare you?

You know, it's the end of the world.

You know, you're driving a car instead of riding your bike.

I'm like, sorry.

Can we be friends?

Maybe it's the end of the world that I feel fine.

You know, that's a good song, good theme song.

Yeah.

One last thing.

If you want to, if you don't want to talk about it, it's fine.

The on your website, what's on your website?

Derek Jensen has this book, Bright Green Lies.

And this is, of course, everyone has an opinion on this.

Solar wind, battery technology.

I think he's saying there are salts on the living world and their own right.

You know, it takes industrial mining and manufacturing to make all these things.

And I'm a little seeking clarity here because it seems like you guys used to be friends and now you're not.

Or you had a falling out, but it seems like you're on the same page.

You like nature, he likes nature.

And he's saying some of these things aren't helping.

What is all that about?

He joined the defamation campaign early on.

And in fact, when I'd get invited to interview on corporate media outlets, within 24 hours, the person issuing the invitation would receive an email message from Derek Jensen saying you don't want to interview this guy, he's a sexual predator.

He's a bad guy.

It's back to that.

It's not even about the issue then.

No, no, no.

No, it's not anything except.

But it is because he's trying to smear you because he doesn't want your viewpoint about the change issue.

So let's stick to the change issue.

Why would, why would he, where are you in disagreement with him on his book, The Bright Green Lies?

Why, why do you think he was trying to talk bad about you?

He knows about the aerosol masking effect, but he won't admit it.

He knows that if we reduce industrial activity, those aerosols will fall out of the atmosphere and will superheat the planet, you'll never get him to admit it.

He knows about it.

I know he knows about it because we've had conversations about it.

But do you agree with him when he says these green technologies, are they have an effect, an impact on the climate, the manufacturing like solar panels, for example, people think they're granite.

It's a silicon.

I worked at Motorola.

It's doped and implanted with toxic chemicals.

And people say, oh, solar panels, 90% pure silk.

Yeah, and 10% of it's toxic.

And so you can't pull them apart.

It's like a brick and cement.

So you can't reuse the brick.

Not only that, civilization itself is a heat engine.

This is based on five paper-cued papers by Tim Garrett, the University of Utah.

Well, that's common sense because in Arizona, when you run an air conditioner, here's another thing like you don't really think about until you're a mechanical engineer.

It's getting cold inside.

Where's the heat going?

Your compressor is throwing that heat outside, throwing the heat that's being trapped in every single house in Phoenix.

It's throwing heat back outside.

Right.

So the laws of thermodynamics, you can't-

Thermodynamics.

But like you said, we can't really stop certain things, but I certainly think we could live better.

Maybe we're all a little extreme sometimes, like no solar, no wind, no battery technology.

Maybe there's a middle ground somewhere.

Well, yes, I think that there are things we all can do.

And one of the things we can do is treat everybody around us like they're our ancient dying grandmother.

Treat them with respect.

And then at the level of community, there are things we can do to make the world better, to make our community better.

So yes, there are things we can do.

And if you're interested, if you're adamant about making the world a better place, start in your own backyard.

And then scale up.

Because there are a lot of things any of us can do.

Are we going to save the world?

All species go extinct.

So at some point, we're going to join the other species.

Yeah.

I was thinking about doing some yourself.

Back in 30 years ago, I was driving a four-cylinder into the ground.

Gas is a dollar a gallon, so people are buying the V8s, V6s.

At that time, I'm kind of worried about climate change.

Then the same people go out and buy hybrids, a brand new car.

I'm like, do you know how much energy took to make a new car?

Well, I'm burning less gas.

You didn't have to drive the V8.

You didn't even have to get a hybrid either.

You're not helping by buying something.

William, this is called Jevons Paradox by the way, because William Stanley Jevons wrote a book in 1865.

And he pointed out that as it becomes more efficient, like in your case, we learned how to make cars better.

We learned how to make hybrids and so on.

But when we do that, the human response is always the same.

We make them bigger, faster.

So, and this happened in the 1970s, in the United States when there was the energy crisis in the United States, early 1970s, we reached peak oil in the United States.

And instead of car manufacturers turning everything into a four-cylinder, it'll go for a long time vehicle.

Instead, we got the muscle cars, right?

We got the Novas and the Chevys that had big engines.

A lot of good cars.

I don't drive one, but I get people who are in love with their cars like that.

So that was the human response in that situation.

That was when, but you said that's when we were running out of oil, or that's when we had a lot of oil in the 70s.

But in the United States, oil peaked, reached Hubbard's peak on the curve in 1972, I believe it was, it was in the early 1970s.

So that's why we started having all these political problems with the Middle East and Northern Africa.

But we had plenty of oil, so we're saying, yes, we're using it.

We wanted it anyhow.

We were at the peak of extraction in the United States.

And so we had to go to other countries to get their oil.

Or as the Carter Doctrine says, from Jimmy Carter when he was president, that's our oil over there.

That's basically the Carter Doctrine is, and he was a decent human being, I suspect.

He was the only decent human being to be in the Oval Office in the last 50 years.

And yet, the Carter Doctrine, you can look this up easily, was to get oil everywhere and claim it as our...

You think he was, you know, being, he's a peanut farmer, right?

He was in big business.

The agriculture of peanuts, go figure, was big business.

Right.

You'd maybe think he had some buddies in the automobile business, in the oil business, even though he was in the peanut business or something.

I think he just, he was the Marcus Aurelius of his time.

He could see that the empire was starting to crumble, and he was charged with ensuring that people were comfortable under his watch.

So yes, the empire is crumbling, but I'm going to use the largest military system in the world to make sure that they don't suffer under my watch.

And so if that means I have to go get oil from the Middle East, that's what I'm going to do.

I mean, sort of his responsibility is like you're a parent.

I've never harbored such a notion myself, but if you're a parent and some kid is beating up your kid, even if it's your kid's fault, you got to step in and take your kid's side, right?

Well, I would tell my kid, you are drinking too much diet soda.

I'm not going to go bomb another country to get you more.

It's bad for you.

You don't need as much.

You can drink a half-lead instead of a full-lead every day.

Right.

But in the moment, you got to go in and break up those kids, the fighting kids, right?

If it happened too fast, if the curve built up too fast, the demand too fast, maybe something, because then you had the shortage, I think, and people couldn't get to work because there was no gas, so forth.

I think I remember reading about that or something like that.

Well, you're obviously younger than me in the early 70s.

When these things happen, you might still be alive.

You're just not reading the news.

It doesn't mean anything to you.

Doesn't make any sense because it really doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, there's a lot of things that don't make sense.

When you're young, it's like you were there, but it didn't make any sense, so you can't really remember it in the same context, the same frame of mind as later.

Any last words about the global warming, the doomsday?

I love your take on just be kind and be a good person.

I've been wrong before because James Anderson and Jennifer McKinnon, these famous scientists, I quoted them, and in doing so, I predicted that we'd be gone by now.

We still have ice in the Arctic.

Right.

So that in mind, I encourage people to live every day, to recognize that we don't know how long we have.

It might be another few moments.

It might be another few days.

It might be another few years.

We don't know, but act as if your time is short.

And that often entails acting more kindly to other people than you might otherwise think you would.

Oh, yeah.

Totally agree with that.

What's the saying?

Do be nice to each other.

It's your it's your who were you saying?

The actor that said his don't trust the government.

Who was that?

George Carlin.

Was he in the movie Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure?

I have no idea.

He was the guy from the future.

He was a guy from the future going back to the 80s and his.

And the theme was the tagline that of a be nice to each other.

It's never a bad idea, really.

Yeah.

Thanks so much for being on my show, Professor McPherson.

Thank you.

Professor McPherson's website is Guy McPherson, mcpherson.com.

It'll be in the show notes.

Thank you very much.