Climate change UN-certainty

NICK EICHER, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: debating climate change and what to do about it.

President Biden this week is taking part in the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

The White House says it’s looking to assert a leadership role in the global fight against climate change.

But some say that not all of the climate change science is as settled as many world leaders insist and that some of the proposals for attacking climate change don’t make economic sense.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: One of the scientists questioning those climate conclusions and proposals is Steve Koonin. He’s a physicist who served during the Obama administration at the U.S. Department of Energy. He is now a professor at New York University and author of the book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t and Why it Matters.

Professor, good morning!

STEVE KOONIN, GUEST: Good morning, Mary. Pleasure to be chatting with you.

REICHARD: I want to ask you about this week’s climate conference in a moment, but let’s start with the science.

What we hear from the White House—and many other places, to be fair—is that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is real and that we are on a dire trajectory. Speak to that if you would. Where do we see scientific consensus and where don't we see it?

KOONIN: I think everybody agrees that the globe has warmed about 1.1 degrees Celsius since 1900. And I think everybody agrees that humans are exerting a growing warming influence on it. I think where there is disagreement among the scientists, at least as they talk to the public, is in just how warm it's going to get, and just what the impacts of that warming will be on extreme weather, on society, on ecosystems.

REICHARD: But the point many people make is that even if someone isn’t totally convinced by the evidence for climate change, the consequences of being wrong are too great not to take action. What do you say to that?

KOONIN: Well, this is the insurance argument, right, that we should buy insurance. First of all, you know, the globe has warmed 1.1 degrees, as I mentioned, in the 20th century. And during that time, the population of the globe increased by four times. It went from 2 billion to 8 billion. And we saw the greatest advance in human well being that we've ever seen. And so to think that another one and a half degrees, which is about what the UN says we will see, unless we take drastic action to think that another one and a half degrees is going to really derail things, I think just flies in the face of common sense.

REICHARD: In a nutshell, what is President Biden’s plan for fighting climate change?

KOONIN: Well, the central part of it is to decarbonize the electrical system, the electrical grid, to eliminate all emissions from electrical generation by 2035. And then to electrify vehicles, take all the 280 million road vehicles and turn them into either electric vehicles or run them on biofuels. And then the third, not yet really worked out, is to replace a lot of our heating in homes and buildings with electricity, so that again, we will eliminate carbon emissions for the whole country by 2050.

REICHARD: Moving on now to the climate conference this week in Glasgow. What do you expect to come of that?

KOONIN: Not much, frankly. Look, the tensions and the challenges that climate negotiations face have been there for 20 years, and they have been evident to anybody who's taken the time to understand the situation. What we have is a developing world—most of the globe is developing—they need more energy in order to grow their economic activity, and improve their well being. And right now, fossil fuels are the most convenient and reliable way of getting that energy. We in the developed world—the U.S., the EU, Japan, Australia—have the luxury, if you like, of trying to decarbonize our energy systems, and it's not so easy.

The administration plans that I described would entail enormous transformation and additional cost. The people in the developing world, which account for most of the emissions now, they say, “Well, maybe oh, that's true. But right now, you know, I got this bear chasing after me. And I got to worry about it. I can worry about my cholesterol at some other time.”

REICHARD: Obvious in their absence from the Glasgow conference will be the leaders of Russia and China. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. They are not attending the conference. And that speaks to this question of how much of the burden the United States tries to assume without the full cooperation of the world’s worst polluter, China, as well as Russia and other nations?

KOONIN: You know, even if the United States were to go to zero, tomorrow, it accounts for only 13 percent of global emissions. And its reduction would be negated within five or six years by the growth in the rest of the world. And so, you know, as we go about trying to implement the administration's programs, which will have an impact on ordinary people, people are going to start to ask, tell me again, why we're doing this. And we need to have a good answer. We have not had a good answer, really yet.

REICHARD: Steve, final question and I want to quote from your book: “It starts with the basic research findings, goes through the government reports and their summaries, and ends up in the media. Unfortunately, there are ample opportunities for misinformation, both unintentional and deliberate, as the science is packaged and simplified for non-experts.” Elaborate?

KOONIN: Well, you know, you can ask President Biden, John Kerry, Boris Johnson in the UK, have you really read the scientific reports? And of course, the answer is no, because you need to be a scientist to really read them in detail. And so what they're talking about is not at all the science in the official reports. Let me just give you one simple example. When the UN report came out in August, Secretary General of the UN Guterres said Code Red for humanity. While you can search all 30,949 pages of the report for phrases like “existential threat,” “climate catastrophe,” “climate disaster,” you don't find them at all. You do find the phrase “climate crisis” once in the report and that's not a scientific finding, but a way in which the U.S. media have simplified that coverage.

REICHARD: Professor Steve Koonin has been our guest. Professor, thanks so much!

KOONIN: Great chatting with you, Mary.

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