Transcription
Global warming. Will it cook us all, or is it a hoax? I know some pretty smart people in both camps. Some think humanity is doomed, and the others roll their eyes at the whole thing. And both of them think science is on their side. The elephant in the room is that they can't both be right, and a lot may hinge on that debate. I'm Ken Laort.
Now, this is a complicated topic for a few reasons. Part of it is that the underlying science still has a lot of uncertainty in it. But even more difficult is that so much of the science has been weaponized that finding truths underneath it all takes some work. In the next few minutes, we'll cover four major topics. First, how it got political. Then, what we actually know, the science that isn't seriously disputed. Then, what is still disputed, followed by the cost of solutions. So, look, it's not easy to pack an entire field of study along with its politics into a 20-minute video. There's a lot that I can't cover, but I hope you'll find this is a fair overview of the debate. It's the best that I could do.
So, this year marks the 20th anniversary of Al Gore's *An Inconvenient Truth*, and to understand how it got so political, that movie is a pretty good place to start. I mean, the film was a genuine phenomenon. It won two Oscars, a Nobel Peace Prize for Gore, and it won over an entire generation of supporters to the cause. It also permanently fused climate science with democratic politics. For a lot of Americans, a prominent politician leading the charge made climate science something you were either for or against before even looking at the data. Now, it had a lot of science behind it, but many of the claims he offered just kind of blew past what the data could actually support. Gore said that the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro were melting because of global warming and that they'd be gone in about a decade. Polar bears faced imminent wipeout. Graphics showed Florida, the Netherlands, Manhattan submerged following the collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. When you dramatize your cause like that, you get converts, but you also hand your critics a club. Conservative media spent years cataloging every Gore prediction that didn't land on schedule, and the mocking was relentless, and some of it was well-deserved.
The irony is that the Republican party wasn't always hostile to the general message. George Bush Sr. signed a UN climate change framework in 1992. John McCain supported proposals to slow carbon emissions in 2008. These weren't fringe positions.
Then, in late 2009, just weeks before a major UN climate summit, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit were leaked. The university was one of a handful of institutions in the world producing the numbers everyone from the United Nations to national governments relied on. The press called it "Climategate," and the scandal drove a wedge even further into the debate. The emails showed scientists discussing how to keep contrarian papers out of journals, how to resist transparency requests, and how to present data in the most favorable light. Now, I read a lot of them back in the day, and many of them, they felt more like political campaign documents than scientific discussions. Now, it wasn't fraud, but they revealed a scientific community that was defensive, sometimes petty, and more focused on winning the argument than playing it straight.
Beyond that, we also saw some successful framing of some of the language by activists over time. The words "global warming skeptic" disappeared from the media, replaced by "global warming denier." It moved the goalposts of somebody not sold on the science to a denier of something that everyone knows, like a holocaust denier or a moon landing denier. And while the Earth is definitely in a warming phase, it's also gone through some recent multi-year plateaus. And that made it hard to keep warning about global warming. And that's when most of the scientists in the media changed to stress the words "climate change" instead of "warming."
On the political right, a lot of their reaction was pushed by politics and self-identification, not science. For a lot of conservatives, rejecting the entire premise became its own tribal marker. Admit that CO2 traps heat, and you risk getting lumped in with people who want to take your pickup truck and your gas stove. It went well beyond skepticism, and some of that was orchestrated. Internal Exxon documents showed that their scientists understood the basic science decades before, even while the company funded campaigns to muddy it up. Millions of dollars flowed into think tanks and researchers built to manufacture doubt. The Koch Network later did the same, and often on a larger scale. Now, none of that proves that the worst-case predictions were right. But it does mean that some of the skepticism we've heard for 20 years wasn't organic, but it was bought.
And then, to flip it one more time, the renewable energy industry and the environmental NGOs, they've also spent millions and millions of dollars to lobby Congress and to influence the public debate. And from the 2010s, the more alarmist rhetoric started to become the common narrative, often well behind what the scientific literature actually supported. "We have only 12 years to save the planet," or "civilization will end by 2050." "Children, they'll never see snow again." "By rising seas, deadly superstorms, devastating droughts, we are at the verge of the abyss." "You have stolen my dreams." And of course, that played right into how the media works. If five scientists come out with a "how bad it is" study, the most alarming one invariably will get the most attention. And even within a study, the most alarming numbers lead the stories. So when you read that sea levels could rise up to a certain number, you're often reading the most extreme numbers from the most extreme studies. And every overstatement that didn't pan out became ammunition for the other side.
The conservative response was often to wave off the whole thing as a hoax. The polling shows this. Surveys consistently show that roughly three-quarters of Democrats call climate change a serious threat to the planet. Only about a quarter of Republicans say the same thing. Older voters, they tend to be more skeptical. Polls show that about two-thirds of Gen Z Americans say climate is a top priority compared to about half of Baby Boomers. And I'd argue that's not because they distrust science. It's because they've lived through predicted catastrophes that mostly didn't arrive: the 1970s warnings about a coming ice age, Paul Ehrlich's population bomb that predicted mass starvation and societal collapse by the '80s, acid rain, and if the alloxan on apples didn't kill us, the saccharine in our coffee would, cell phone cancer, and more. And each threat came in a package with calls for larger government and more regulations. After a few decades of that pattern, a lot of people just stopped separating the warning from the politics attached to it.
And then came the Green New Deal in 2019. "Climate change is not just a theory." It was a congressional resolution, not a bill, but it explicitly linked climate action to universal health care and job and housing guarantees. Lawmakers threw in language about collective bargaining and family-sustaining wages as well. It gave climate skeptics exactly the evidence they had been arguing for: that climate policy was a pretext for government expansion. By 2020, belief in human-caused climate change had become one of the most reliable predictors of party affiliation in America. More reliable than income, religion, or education. I mean, it's kind of crazy. Carbon dioxide became a partisan identity marker. It's been a remarkable failure of public discourse, and it hit young people hardest. In a 2021 study of 16 to 25-year-olds in 10 countries, they weren't just worried about climate change. Three-quarters said, "The future is frightening," and 56% said humanity is doomed.
Okay, so let's set politics aside and talk about what we actually know, because there is a bedrock here. Start with the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide and methane trap outgoing infrared radiation, making the Earth warmer. That's been understood since the 19th century, and the basic physics hasn't changed. Almost nobody serious disputes that part. Next, humans are putting a massive amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Atmospheric CO2 has gone from roughly 280 parts per million before industrialization to about 420 today. And we know it's us, not volcanoes or the ocean, because fossil fuels carry a distinct chemical signature. They're depleted in certain carbon isotopes in a way natural sources aren't. The level of CO2 and temperature, they've moved in lockstep across eight glacial cycles for nearly a million years. Current CO2 levels are higher than at any point in that record. And we got there in about 150 years. In geological terms, that's basically a split second.
Now, the climate has changed for millions of years before humans were even around. I mean, the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, they were real shifts that happened well before anybody started burning coal. But how much of that warming since 1850 is a planet climbing out of that Little Ice Age versus humans pushing it? That's a fair question, and one that's not entirely settled. But most mainstream scientists say they lean heavily towards human involvement. Another settled data point: the Earth is getting warmer. I mean, the planet has likely warmed about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit since the industrial revolution. Now, to me, I put a little less stock in numbers going back when we were using geographically limited proxies like tree rings or ice cores to measure the past. But since we've had satellite data starting in 1979, the average temperature increase has been 0.23 to 0.38 degrees Fahrenheit per decade. Now, that depends on how the same data is actually analyzed. And yes, that's a 60% difference using the same satellites. From a human standpoint, that's imperceptible, even if your friends say how much hotter it is these days. But ecosystems and agriculture, they can feel it. That rate of change is fast by any geological measure. And fast change is harder to adapt to than gradual change.
Sea levels are rising, too. So far, at a gradual rate. Since 1880, tide gauges show seas up 9.8 inches, roughly an inch every 14 years. And satellites have tracked that change since the 1990s. The current rate is about 0.15 inches per year, so an inch and a half per decade. Now, most scientists predict that rate will continue to accelerate, and the satellite record does show some steepening in recent years. But at the current measured pace, we're still looking at under four to five inches over the next 25 years. Now, that matters for low-lying coastlines, but that's not the flooded skylines you may see in projections. I'll get into the concept of tipping points in just a little bit.
So, here's where the agreement actually is. Some warming is human-caused, and almost no serious skeptic argues that humans contribute nothing. There's a question as to how much comes from us versus natural variability, not whether we're in the mix at all. And this consensus isn't coming from one country or one political party. NASA, NOAA, the UK Met Office, the Japanese Meteorological Agency – they all land on the same basic picture using different instruments and different methods, independent agencies in different countries.
Now, "consensus," though, that's a bit of a loaded word, and it deserves just a little bit of scrutiny on its own. I reread an old speech by Michael Crichton. He was the novelist who wrote *Jurassic Park* and *ER*, and he was also a Harvard-trained doctor, and it's relevant to this debate. He argued in a 2003 lecture at Caltech that consensus is a political term, not a scientific one, because consensus tells you what most people think, not what's right. And among his many examples was a Hungarian doctor named Ignaz Semmelweis, who figured out in the 1840s that merely washing their hands stopped doctors from spreading a deadly fever to new mothers. He was right, but for decades the medical consensus rejected him. He got fired, and they ignored handwashing for years and years while women kept dying. So, having a consensus in the scientific world, that's a data point, but it's not the same thing as saying something's true, especially in a complicated world that still has plenty of forces we don't fully understand.
Okay, so many of the videos here, they deal with how hard it is to get a straight story. That's why this channel exists. And that's why this sponsor exists: Ground News. Every news outlet makes choices. I make choices: what to cover, what to ignore, what angle to lead with. They aren't always conscious decisions to mislead, but byproducts of outlets or people with different journalists and different audiences. But we all have to fight against living in our own bubbled reality. And Ground News, it genuinely helps. They pull coverage from over 50,000 news sources worldwide, and they do their best to give a full picture. You can check out bias ratings, reliability, funding sources, ownership, pretty much everything. Head to groundnews.com/elephants to try it. The blind spot tool shows which stories get heavy coverage on one side of the political spectrum while the other side ignores them. This story on Trump's low approval rating was covered almost entirely by the left and not at all on the right. But this story on a homeless man arrested for a stabbing rampage at Penn Station was covered almost completely on the right with no stories from the left. This is how echo chambers work, and it's up to each of us to make sure our media diet is balanced. I'm on the Vantage plan and I check it every day. Use ground.news/elephants for 40% off or scan the QR code. Supporting sponsors like that keeps the channel running as well. So, thank you.
Okay, so now let's turn to what's still disputed and what's actively being argued by scientists. Start with climate sensitivity. That's the term scientists use for how much the planet warms if you double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. The United Nations puts the likely range at between 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit to 7.2 degrees. Now, that sounds like a narrow band, but in practical terms, it's not. It's the difference between a bad century and a catastrophic one. And after decades of research with billions of dollars spent on climate modeling, we still haven't nailed it down tighter than that. And that says something about the limits of what we actually know.
Then there are tipping points. These are points in the climate system when a change becomes self-reinforcing and potentially irreversible. The ones scientists worry about the most: the collapse of major ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica, the release of methane trapped in permafrost as it thaws, and the dieback of Amazon rainforest as droughts intensify. The concept is that each of these, if they're triggered, they could accelerate warming in a way that humans can't do anything about. Now, scientists genuinely disagree on the timing and the speed of these. Some think certain tipping points could be crossed this century if the warm-up continues. Others think we have more runway.
Another dispute is the social cost of carbon, the estimated dollar value of the impact of each additional ton of CO2 put into the atmosphere. And that's a number that sits underneath virtually every policy calculation about whether a regulation is worth the economic cost. Serious economists using serious methodologies, they've come up with figures ranging from around $50 per ton to more than $400 per ton. Now, that's a huge eight times difference. And which number you use determines whether the accounting for any climate policy pencils out or doesn't make sense.
Then there are ones that people like us argue about. When a hurricane hits or wildfire goes through a state, how much of that is climate change? Now, some climate change estimations have stronger links. Heat waves in particular, they have solid physical backing. A warmer baseline makes extreme heat events more frequent and more intense than ways, and that's well supported by the data. Heavy rainfall events, similar. Warmer air holds more moisture. So when it rains, it tends to rain harder. But hurricanes and wildfires, that's much more complicated. And most scientists are much more cautious on things like hurricane frequency. I mean, there may be a relationship between warming and storm intensity, but the data on frequency, that's far messier. And wildfires, they take in land management, drought cycles, ignition sources that climate alone can't possibly explain. So, when you hear a politician say that a wildfire or hurricane is here because of climate change, they're going further than the science actually supports to make a political point.
Now, I talked to an insurance expert about their calculations because they're actually the ones who make long-term bets on how bad weather losses might be in the future, and they're the ones that pay the cleanup bills. Now, they have real money on the line, but their calculations of how much more they might have to lay out to pay for things related to climate change, it's relatively small at 2% per year worldwide. Still, the honest answer to "how bad does this get?" is, we don't know precisely. And the range of credible answers, it's still very wide.
So, with that, this is probably a perfect time to mention that I'm not a climate scientist. So, if I get any serious facts wrong about it, let me know in the comments and I'll address it in a pinned comment below. My sources, research, they're also linked in the description box.
So, the underlying question of all of this is, are the costs of solutions worth it? And are we even pursuing the right solutions at all? The dominant economic argument for aggressive climate action, it goes back to the Stern Review, a 2006 analysis commissioned by the British government. Its basic conclusion: the cost of inaction substantially exceeds the cost of action. Every dollar spent on trying to slow climate change now saves multiple dollars in avoiding damages later. Now, a lot of people still buy that premise, but they rest on damage projections that have large margins of error built right into them.
The counterargument comes most prominently from Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish researcher who spent 20 years arguing that the climate movement's math doesn't really add up. He's not a climate denier, and he doesn't dispute the science. His argument is that a cost-benefit analysis doesn't make sense. The specific policies being pushed, like aggressive decarbonization, net-zero mandates, trillion-dollar green energy transitions, that he says that they don't survive an honest cost-benefit analysis when you stack them against alternatives. He argues the same money spent on malaria prevention, clean water access, and economic development in poor countries would prevent far more human suffering than halting the use of fossil fuels. It's an allocation of resources argument.
There's also a debate on whether instead of concentrating on reducing CO2, to essentially accept what's already been released and is going to be released, and then spend more on adapting rather than trying to prevent the warming itself. Things like seawalls and drought-resistant crops and early warning systems for extreme weather. It's a notion that used to be considered defeatist, but it's getting more attention now.
Now, some good news is that we're seeing some carbon-reducing energy sources that kind of have their fans on both the left and the right. Renewable electricity is on the rise. In the US, hydropower and solar, that now accounts for about 20% of the electricity generation. Although, when you factor in energy used for cars, planes, and heat, still over 80% of the total energy comes from fossil fuels. Nevertheless, solar and battery costs, they're falling. And renewables, they're becoming competitive.
And here was a surprise for some: fracking has contributed to the largest reduction in US carbon emissions in recent history. Cheap natural gas from fracking made coal uncompetitive. Utilities switched, and CO2 emissions dropped. Even though many of the climate activists had fought against it, nuclear energy, long a boogeyman of the environmental movement, it's another one that's seen more acceptance on both sides of the political aisle. It currently generates almost 20% of US electricity. And there's some real efforts to increase it. France runs the cleanest electrical grid in Europe by a significant margin. The electricity is roughly 70% nuclear, and it has been for decades. On the other hand, Germany shut down its nuclear industry after the Fukushima disaster and promptly burned more coal to fill the gap. Now it's building up its non-carbon sources, but the nuclear abandonment slowed that down.
And the reality is that going down a green path comes with a cost. I live in California, where two-thirds of the electricity comes from zero-carbon sources. But electricity here is about 75% higher than the national average. The UK committed to a net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Big economy, super aggressive. But the results, they haven't been auspicious: surging energy bills, political backlash, and factories closing and moving abroad to find cheaper energy.
On a wider scale, we also need to be aware of some global arithmetic. I mean, the US accounts for about 14% of the global annual CO2 emissions. China, that accounts for roughly 31%. India is rising fast, and it's made clear that it intends to keep developing. I mean, any framework that doesn't seriously grapple with the non-Western emissions, that's not a climate solution, it's a gesture. Because does anyone actually believe China's going to willingly throttle its economy in the name of climate change?
And the issue of these developing countries, it comes with a moral dilemma that really doesn't get discussed on our side too much. Wealthy nations, the US, Europe, Japan, they industrialized freely for 150 years around cheap, plentiful fossil fuels. They built their standard of living, their infrastructure, their middle classes on coal and oil. Now, developing countries, they're being told to grow differently, more expensively, more slowly, with technologies that cost more. I mean, the families in the developing world who want their first air conditioner, they're not the villains of this story. So, telling them they can't have one in the name of climate change, that's a moral argument dressed up as an environmental one.
So, are we winning or losing the war against global warming? Well, if the goal is to stop the planet from getting warmer, we're losing. I mean, and I don't see that substantively changing. The temperatures are still rising, and the greenhouse gas concentrations are still increasing. But if the goal is to avoid the worst-case scenarios that we heard about, you could argue we're doing pretty well, and clean energy is growing faster than most experts predicted. And maybe because of that, or maybe the math is getting corrected. But the worries of warming by 2100, they're generally less than they once were. And perhaps I'm one of those old guys who's heard a lifetime of catastrophes that didn't happen. But I have an enormous amount of faith in human ingenuity. I mean, the more time that I spend away from social media and instead looking into humanity's problems and progress, the more optimistic I get.
And one shift we'll see with green energy is perhaps a little bit different of a relationship with the Middle East. So, in my life, the United States has spent an immense amount of attention over in the Middle East. Although these days, some are saying the current crisis is really a lot more because of Israel. So, let's look into that question. Does Israel really control US foreign policy? Or if not control, how much influence does it actually have? And why does it get so many American tax dollars? I break that down here. And if the link's not there, it's down below.
Hey, I'm Ken Lort. And as always, I hope this was worth your while. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you next time.