On Reality Asserts Itself with Paul Jay, Mr. Robock says his initial work led him to investigate the role of volcanoes in global warming, but years of reports convinced him that CO2 is the most likely cause.
This is an episode of Reality Asserts Itself, produced April 30, 2014.
STORY TRANSCRIPT
PAUL JAY, SENIOR EDITOR, TRNN: Welcome back to The Real News Network. Iâm Paul Jay, and this is Reality Asserts Itself.
Weâre continuing our series of interviews with Alan Robock, who is a climatologist, a climate scientist, a meteorologist. And if you want to know more how we got here, youâve got to watch part one, âcause weâre going to just pick it up from here.
What were doing is weâre going to trace your evolution as a scientist from the beginnings of why you decide to study in climate and where you come to the conclusion that the scientific evidence persuades you that human activity causes global warming and climate change and such. So pick up in college. Why do you decide climateâs going to be your thing?
ALAN ROBOCK, LEAD AUTHOR, INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE: After two years of graduate school, my masters adviser left MIT toâhe retired, and I needed a new adviser. So I went to all the professors and I said, Iâm interested in air pollution, I like computers. And Edward Lorenz, who became my adviser, said climate would be a good field to get into these days, in 1974. And I was lucky enough to take his advice. Heâs the father of chaos theory. Heâs quite well known in our field.
And so I took a climate model, a computer program to calculate how climate changed with time. And at the time, the temperature had been going up till about World War II, and then it had been going down a little bit. And that was what we were trying to explain. And so I looked at all the different things that cause climate to changeâthe carbon dioxide that we put in the atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, which episodically reflect sunlight, dust that we put into the troposphere. Even the heat that humans generate in cities and industries heats the atmosphere. Turns out thatâs much less than the energy trapped by CO2, but that was was one of my conclusions. And so I ran the climate model. Also, natural variability, chaos, how much of it was just random, not caused by these external forces. And thatâs what I did for my PhD dissertation. It was called âInternally and Externally Caused Climate Changeâ.
JAY: So that must have been pretty cutting-edge at the time. When you start to look at it, who else has been looking at it? How marginal, quote-unquote, was this at the time? âCause I kind of remember back in those days when this story kind of started to break there were these environmentalists out there saying weâre doing this, and they were really not believed by anybody.
ROBOCK: As part of my research, I read every paper that had been written on climate change, and I wrote it down on a stack of index cards. And the stack of index cards was very thin, and I put colors on differentâso Iâd read everything. There wasnât that much that had been done at the time. There was a study called Study of Manâs Impact on Climate published in 1970 (of course, we were sexist back then), and it sort of surveyed what we knew.
But computers werenât very big at the time, werenât very powerful, and so we couldnât do these global general circulation models that we do now. I used an energy-balance climate model. It was sort of not veryâsort of on the edge of what people did in the meteorology department. They were looking at the fluid flow, the dynamics of the 500 millibar flow, and a very mathematical-based thing, not looking at physical things like clouds and volcanoes. And so it was sort of a little bit different. But I published the firstâI published my dissertation in 1978, and it was the first paper ever that showed how climate would change in time if you change CO2.
JAY: So when youâre working on your research, do you have this eureka moment where you say, ah! Itâs carbon emissions! Itâs not volcanoes!
ROBOCK: Well, I found that volcanic eruptions were very important in causing climate change, and my conclusion was that the climate change over the last several hundred years, volcanic eruptions were very important. You have to remember, this was in 1970s, and the climate wasnât really warming. It was kind of flat since the end of World War II, and it wasnât till the last several decades when itâs been warming rapidly. So it wasnât clear what the balance was between all these different forces. And so the realization of the importance of CO2 came more gradually.
JAY: So your eureka moment was more that itâs actually random factors.
ROBOCK: Well, my dissertation said that random variations, just the natural variability of weather, could have caused the climate change of the last hundred years. It turned out my model was too sensitive to these random variations and it was wrong. So, over time, I published papers on the impact of volcanic eruptions, which is what I specialize in, and other people worked on the carbon dioxide effect and trying to quantify it. And it wasnât until more recently that it was clear that CO2 was the dominant cause.
But people donât understand thereâs multiple causes of climate change, and theyâre all happening at the same time. And so itâs not just one thing; itâs the battle between these different things that ends up in the net climate change. For example, it hasnât warmed as much for the last 15 years as it did before that. Global warming deniers say, whereâs global warming? Global warming theory is wrong. It turns out thatâs not true. The greenhouse gases have continued to go up, but thereâs been a series of small volcanic eruptions in the last decade. The ocean has gotten cold. Thereâs been an extended La NiĂąa, which has trapped some of the energy in the ocean. China has rapidly industrialized, putting particles in the troposphere, and thatâs reflected some of the sunlight. The sun has gotten a little bit less strong. Thereâs been an extended solar minimum. All those things add up, lots of little things that counteract the effects of greenhouse gases. And so all these things are happening all the time.
Thereâs a big El NiĂąo forecast for later this year, so youâre going to see lots of news about how warm itâs gotten this year, and the global warming skepticsâll say itâs just El NiĂąo. But they started their trend in 1998 when there was the last big El NiĂąo, and they started from the warmest period, not from the year before, where it was colder, when you would have an upward trend.
JAY: Now, Iâve done a few documentary films that required me to interview scientists. I did one on evolution or development of human language, and I would talk to one guy who would tell me itâs all about big brains and itâs big brains are decisive, and somebody else itâs the movement of the larynx, and somebody else itâs bipedalism. And a lot of itâs driven by funding. If your thing was volcanoes, you would have had a kind of an interest, one would think, in that itâs very much about volcanoes. So when does the evidence persuade you?
ROBOCK: No, no, my interest is in quantifying the effects of volcanoes. For example, the Mount Saint Helens volcano erupted in 1980. It was the eruption that got me tenure. I started at Maryland three years earlier. I published two papers in the journal Science, which is a very wellâthe top journal in our country. One of them said the Mount Saint Helens eruption had no effect on climate, and I published a paper about that. Another one was about the effects on weather. It caused the temperatures in Washington State to justâtemperature to be constant for a day because there was so much dust that it was sort of separated from outer space. And that was another paper that we published in Science. So Iâm more interested in quantifying it, getting it right, not proving that one thing is more or less important.
JAY: Well, youâre a scientist.
ROBOCK: Yeah.
JAY: When does the evidenceâthe coin drop for you, you are persuaded that the evidence now is itâs really mostlyânot maybe exclusively, but mostly about carbon emissions? And whatâs the process that gets you to that conclusion?
ROBOCK: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, was established to inform the public and policymakers about what we know and donât know about climate change. The first one said itâll be another decade before we can determine whether climate is even warming.
JAY: What year is this?
ROBOCK: This was about 20 years ago. The second oneâokay, so it was 1995. Yeah. The second one, in 2001, said the balance of evidence suggested discernible human impact on climate, that is, so, at least a 50 percent chance that humans have some impact on climate, not quantifying what it was. Six years later, itâs very likely that most of the warming of the past 50 years has been caused by humans. So during that time period, thereâs more warming going on. We tried to explain the warming with other things, and that was the only thing that made sense. And so Iâm informed by that. Itâs an assessment of the entire scientific community. And I think we wereâit was moreâit was pretty clear 20 years ago how important the effects of greenhouse gases were. But models got better, our computers got bigger, we could include more parts of the climate system, look at it in more detail, and the data get better. And so it was a gradual thing. So I didnât write a paper saying weâve proven that now CO2 is the cause. Itâs sort of a statistical thing. The last one said itâs extremely likely that humans are causing it, greater than a 95 percent chance.
So there is no such thing as a eureka moment, because itâs all statistical. What weâre saying is that thereâs at least a 95 percent chance that humans are causing mostâare the biggest cause of climate change right now and itâsâoverwhelms all these other things which are going on at the same time.
JAY: Like volcanoes [crosstalk]
ROBOCK: Like volcanoes, like pollution in the troposphere. Weâre trapping more energy than is being reflected by the sun from the particles, for example.
But that means thereâs a few percent chance that weâre wrong, thereâs something else causing the warming that nobodyâs figured out yet. So you never sayâ.
JAY: How do you come up with that number, 5 percent where it might be wrong? How does that variationâhow is that determined? How do you get to that?
ROBOCK: Itâs really a subjective judgment by all the scientists who work on it. Thereâs no way you can actually do a statistical test and say weâre sure.
JAY: So, I mean, it could be 5 percent wrong, it could be 10 percent wrong.
ROBOCK: Yeah.
JAY: But what weâre saying is the preponderance of evidence is telling us thatâ.
ROBOCK: Well, itâsâin the last IPCC reports, itâs goneâthe last four, itâs gone from a 50 percent chance to a 67 percent chance, to a 90 percent chance, to a 95 percent chance. And so the more we look at it, the more warming we get, the harder it is to explain any of it, to think of any other reason why itâs warming.
JAY: Okay. So in terms of the year and your evolution as a scientist, when are you convinced that thatâs the evidence?
ROBOCK: Twenty years ago.
But, again, you say âconvincedâ. Itâs not a question of yes or no. Itâs a question of thereâs a much greater chance that weâre doing it. So Iâm neverâ.
JAY: Okay, then convinced that thatâ. I hear you. Youâre still 5, 10, 15 percent open that it could be something else.
ROBOCK: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
JAY: I mean, there is no absolute truth on this stuff, on anything, and particularly on this kind of stuff.
ROBOCK: Well, I think that somebody asked me once to have a debate about global warming, and I said, I donât want to debate that, because I donât want to debate whether itâsâIâm 100 percent convinced that the planetâs warming. One of the questions was: are the data good enough to say that weâre warming? People claim that itâsâthe thermometers are only in cities, and the cities are warmingâyouâre measuring the urban heat island and not global temperature. We know that thatâs not true.
JAY: Yeah, âcause people went back and actually did justâ.
ROBOCK: We adjusted it. But thereâs alsoâ
JAY: And came back with the same results. Yeah.
ROBOCK: âmelting ice sheets where thereâs no people around, sea levels rising. Precipitationâs changing. Thereâs many pieces of evidence that show that the planetâs getting warmer. So Iâm 100 percent convinced on that.
JAY: And there was recently a scientistâI forget his name, but I think he was actually commissioned by the Koch brothers toâ.
ROBOCK: Oh, I met him a couple of weeks ago.
JAY: Oh. Tell that story quickly, âcause thatâs interesting, âcause he was supposed to prove that there is no global warming.
ROBOCK: Heâs a physics professor at Berkeley.
JAY: Whatâs his name?
ROBOCK: Richard Muller, physics professor. And heâsâthinks highly of himself, as many physicists do, and he was convinced that it wasnât warming. So he got funding from various sources, including the Koch brothers, and he got all the data on temperature, every single thermometer in the world, many more than are typically used in an analysis, and he put them all together, and he averaged themâand he didnât do any quality control like we do, but he averaged everything together. And lo and behold, he got exactly the warming that we all knew was there. And so he was open-minded enough to say, I was wrong, it really is warming.
JAY: And his next step, thoughâwhat does he think about the issue of what causes it?
ROBOCK: So his next step was to do a very simple statistical model looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature, correlation between other things. And he said, yes, CO2âs going up, temperatureâs going up. Proven. And I said to himâI was just talking to them a couple of weeks ago, âcause I was in Berkeley for a conference. I said, but, you know, thatâs not really the right way to do it. You really need a model, you need a little bit moreâyou have to take into account the heat in the ocean, you have to wait for the ocean to warm up. It doesnât happen instantaneously. He said, well, it only takes ten years or so for the upper ocean. Itâs good enough. And I said, you know, thereâs a veryâ. You know, I donât have a general circulation model to use. And I said, well, thereâs a pretty simple model called MAGICC you could use. Itâs on the web. Itâs free. You could use that. And that would give youâand people would trust that, because itâs a well-established model. Why donât you do it like that? Oh, okay. Well, Iâll tell my postdoc about that.
But heâs open-minded. He looked at the data and he reported what he found. And even thoughâand I said, that paper you got on the statistical relationships, where is that published? Could you show me the paper? Well, itâs in one of these terrible no-name journals. I couldnât get it published in one of the good journals because they donât like me. And an alternate hypothesis is that the reviews say you could have done it better or it wasnât new. But, anyway, he was open-minded enough to take the Koch brothersâ money and then say that global warming is real.
JAY: And that seems to be now not the debate, whether itâs real or not.
ROBOCK: It used to be.
JAY: It used to be.
ROBOCK: So now theyâve switched to something else.
JAY: Yeah, now itâs switched to something else.
ROBOCK: Yeah.
JAY: Letâs go back to your history. So mid â90s, the evidence persuades you that the likelihood that human endeavor is causing carbon emission, causing climate change, is the most likely theory.
ROBOCK: Now, I wouldnât say it that way. I would say the strength of the warming caused by the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases weâre putting in is enough to cause the warming that weâre seeing, but thereâs other things happening at the same time. So thereâsâyou know, in 1991 there was a big volcanic eruption, Mount Pinatubo, the biggest one of the 20th century, and the next year, 1992, was colder. Some skeptics said, whereâs global warming? And the answer is: our theory tells us that all the sulfuric acid cloud in the stratosphere caused by Pinatubo reflects sunlight and should cause cooling. If there wasnât cooling, that would cause us to question our theory. But those particles fell out after a couple of years of the warming resumed.
JAY: At what point in this evolution of your thinking and the science do you get how serious this is to human society? And how does that affect your decisions and what youâre going to do with your life?
ROBOCK: Iâm interested in climate change, and the topic of the human impacts on climate by nuclear war is what really makes me passionate, not global warming. I think we have to solve the problem of nuclear weapons with the luxury of worrying about global warming. We could talk about that separately.
JAY: Yeah, and we will.
ROBOCK: So itâsârepeat the question.
JAY: Well, since the mid â90s, when the science has become evident, according to most scientists, the predictions on the consequences of global warming and climate change have gotten increasingly apocalyptic, to the point where now the predictions of the effects of climate change, certainly in many parts of Africa and Latin America and Asia, are drastic, and not long afterwards fairly apocalyptic predictions for the whole globe.
ROBOCK: I guess I wouldnât use apocalyptic. Itâs much more subtle than that. There will be winners and losers from global warming. Everybody will not be a loser.
So the most fundamental thing that climate impacts is our food and our water supply. Of course, thereâs also our security, because you get wars as food disappears. But thatâs a secondary effect.
JAY: But do youâ.
ROBOCK: So global warming will cause not necessarily a bad impact on agriculture in the mid-latitudes until 50 years from now. CO2âskeptics are right: CO2 is a fertilizer. Plants grow better with more CO2. But temperature changes and precipitation changes. And can we adapt and use different seeds and deal with the summer drought? So thatâs one of theâitâs not clear. Itâs different in different parts of the world. In the tropics it looks like thereâll be a negative impact on agriculture, with only 1 degree Celsius warming, 2 degrees Fahrenheit warming.
JAY: And now the predictions are itâs by the end of the century if nothing changes, and right now nothing much has changed.
ROBOCK: Yeah, itâll be apocalyptic by the end of the century.
JAY: But thatâs actually what Iâm talking about. Iâm talking about the predictions by, you know, 50 years, the end of the century it will be apocalyptic in much of the world.
ROBOCK: Thereâs still a question of howâ.
JAY: So weâre being told.
ROBOCK: Well, if nothing changes, if technology doesnât change, our farming practices donât change, our ways of storing water donât change, there will be drought in places that are dry now. The dry places will get drier, the wet places will get wetter. But would we be clever enough to adapt and develop new ways of agriculture and new ways of storing water that allow us to adapt to that? I donât know, and thatâs really not my area, but itâs not clear that itâs going to be a horrible thing and everybodyâs going to die. I mean, and if you exaggerate that and people find things wrong with it, then itâs sort ofâeverything else you say is wrong too. So I think itâs a more subtle thing what the impacts will be. And the world agreed that 2 Celsius warming above preindustrial temperatures is dangerous anthropogenic impact.
JAY: And whatâs the prediction now? âCause I thought the predictions now are even past 2 degrees if nothing changes in the next decade.
ROBOCK: Oh. Weâre not there yet. Weâre almost to 1 degree. So depending on what we do about it, it will continue to warm. And weâreâitâll be, you know, another few decades and weâll get to 2 degrees. But thatâsâthereâs geoengineering, which is a way of either taking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or blocking off the sunlight. Those are things that people have proposed to stop us from getting there. And there are a lot of risks involved with that. We need a lot more research about that.
So what I was going to say, though, is that the negative impacts of global warming affect different people at different times. Already there are negative impacts in terms of sea level rise, in terms of violence in the Pacific, in terms of Bangladesh, in terms of Venice becoming flooded more and more often. Even the Thames barrier, which blocks the Thames River, keeps getting lifted more and more often as sea level rises and as flooding threatens people. Some impacts wonât be felt till itâs 3 or 4 degrees. Others are being felt now. So this 2 degree is sort of a arbitrary number, sort of average out all these impacts. And so you have to look at whoâs being affected where and to sort of average out all the impacts.
JAY: But if youâre looking ahead 20, 30, 40, 50 years, are the impacts as apocalyptic as many of theâpeople have said? For example, the Stern report came out in England. The guy that used to be head ofâchief economist at the World Bank, he does a report for Tony Blair. I mean, the predictions in the Stern report looking, you know, decades out was apocalyptic in terms of the tens of thousands of people that would suffer from famine and places that would be underwater and drastic climate change. I remember in one of the things his report, we had just had a summer where, like, 100, 150 people had died in Europe because of heat waves. He was saying this is going to become normal.
ROBOCK: There was a heat wave in 2003 they called the canicule, and many people in France died. Tens of thousands of people died. So it was real tragedy. And thatâs going to be even more frequentâ.
JAY: Tens of thousands?
ROBOCK: Yeah. One thing I know is that severe weather is going to increase. Storms will get stronger. So weâll have more flash flooding and more droughts. But to quantify that and say how much more, where itâs going to affect us, Iâm really not an expert on that, so I donât know how bad itâs going to be.
JAY: Okay. In the next segment of our interview, weâre going to get into some of the areas youâve been focusing on, but also Iâm going to ask you, you know, from the skeptic point of view, which arguments give climate scientists the most challenge.
ROBOCK: Okay.
JAY: Okay. Please join us for the next segment of our interview with Alan Robock on The Real News Network.
