Is There Still Time to Mitigate Climate Change?

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Starting today, starting right now, we're going to present a climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show for the next six months. We welcome your suggestions as you follow climate news yourselves. Tweet them @BrianLehrer anytime. We're doing this series because the climate crisis is now, but sometimes it takes a backseat to things that change more quickly in the news, but not here for the next six months. The politics, of course, remain stuck. That's another reason to keep talking about it as little happens sometimes at the policy level.

Washington Post columnist Paul Waldman wrote yesterday a piece called, As Climate Change Worsens, Republicans Insist We Must Do Nothing. It says Republicans have actually grown less concerned about climate change in recent years. A poll in November found just 39% of Republicans think that climate change is a serious problem compared to 95% of Democrats. Can there be political cooperation on climate change today? Well, here's a clip from 2008 that might surprise you if you never heard it. This is from a joint ad between Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich.

Nancy Pelosi: Hi, I'm Nancy Pelosi, lifelong Democrat and Speaker of the House.

Newt Gingrich: I'm Newt Gingrich, lifelong Republican and I used to be Speaker.

Nancy: We don't always see eye to eye, do we, Newt?

Newt: No, but we do agree, our country must take action to address climate change.

Nancy: We need cleaner forms of energy and we need them fast.

Newt: If enough of us demand action from our leaders, we can spark the innovation we need.

Nancy: Go to wecansolveit.org. Together, we can do this.

Brian: Well, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Pelosi in 2008. Can you imagine these 14 years later, Nancy Pelosi and, say, Kevin McCarthy, the current Republican leader in the House, doing a joint ad on climate change in that way? Joining us now to discuss some of the latest climate news and to debut our weekly climate story of the week for the next six months here on The Brian Lehrer Show is Mark Hertsgaard, executive director of Covering Climate Now and a correspondent for The Nation magazine covering the environment. Hey, Mark, welcome back to WNYC.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thanks for having me, Brian. It's always good to be here. Good morning, New York.

Brian: I want to ask you about a release that you have out today that may surprise some people. The headline is, The Best Climate Science You've Never Heard Of. This is a little bit of good news baked into the bad news, right?

Mark: Absolutely. This is good news out of science. Of course, science is always the core of the climate issue. As you mentioned, it's been looking pretty dire. I've been on the climate beat as a reporter for almost 30 years now. It is, generally, a pretty dire picture. At Covering Climate Now, we're actually doing a press briefing later today. You are breaking the news here on WNYC, Brian, about this, which is that a lot of what we've been thinking and assuming for years about climate science and, in particular, how much future temperature rise is locked in already turns out to not be true.

I've been reporting on this for a long time. Like most journalists, I have been saying what the scientists had told us for years, which is that even if hypothetically, even if the entire world were to stop greenhouse gas emissions, which is what we have to do eventually. If we did that tonight, the rule of thumb was always that, "Well, CO2 stays in the atmosphere long time." Even if we stop everything tonight, it's going to be 30 to 40 more years before the temperature rise stops, which is a pretty depressing thought. It turns out that the revised science says, "No, that's not true."

If we stop the emissions, the warming stops almost immediately. It'll stop within as little as 3 years, not 30 years. That has all kinds of implications, I think really paradigm-shifting implications for how people think and feel about the climate issue, especially young people, and also has a lot of implications for how governments and society can respond to the climate crisis. We'll get into those in the coming minutes, but this is a really big deal. This is a paradigm shift. Not so much in the physical science itself, but in how we respond to that science.

Brian: Because I guess it's a matter of hope versus hopelessness to some degree. If you think we can make a difference in just 3 years as opposed to 30 or 40 years to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, it might motivate people to change individual behaviors and change policy more quickly?

Mark: Yes, in fact, I was thinking while I was writing this piece and working on it about the teenage daughter of a dear friend of mine, who is very active in climate work. She's a high school student, but she's out there marching and making signs and protesting. One day, she came back from a march, her dad told me this, came back and said, "Dad, I just don't know, why are we doing this? We're doomed anyway. The temperature is going to keep going up all the rest of my life." That is, I think, a fairly common feeling among a lot of young people.

I have a teenage daughter myself and there's a sense that, "Oh, it's too late." What's great about this updated science is that, no, we're not doomed, not necessarily, but this is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. The only way that this updated science really can save us is if we take it seriously and act now, act strongly. We have got to get off of fossil fuels as soon as possible. We got to cut emissions in half by 2030 in order to really have a good chance of averting the worst.

Brian: Where was the science wrong as far as temperature rises and for how long temperature rise is locked into the Earth's climate already? What should that do to people's trust in the science? People like you always say, "Trust the science, trust the science. Don't trust the politicians." If the science says the temperature rises are baked in for 30 years and then, all of a sudden, "Oh, we read the international panel for climate change report more closely," and say, "Oh, well, no, really, only three years." What does that do to trust in the data we've been told to be concerned about?

Mark: That's such a good question, Brian. Let me try and take it in two bits. First of all, science is an evolutionary process. You get better and better and better. 15 years ago, I interviewed the chief science advisor of the British government, Sir David King. He was the one who laid out to me as many other scientists had said, "Hey, it's a 30-year lag." It turns out that as the scientists have continued to study the problem that their computer models got better. They got a better understanding of how the entire Earth's climate system works.

In particular, Michael Mann, the Penn State University scientist, I imagine he has been on your air before, he explained to me that, basically, back there 15 years ago, the way scientists were calculating this, he says, "It's like we had a knob with CO2 and we would just turn it up or down, depending on how much of CO2 we thought was going to be admitted," because that is the big question here.

CO2 stays in the atmosphere for decades and even centuries after it has been emitted. The assumption was a relatively rudimentary one that, "Oh okay, if it's up there, it's going to last for 30 to 40 years." As they studied it more carefully and their computer models, especially over the last 10 years, have gotten so much more precise, they now understand that, in particular, yes, the CO2 stays up there, but the oceans especially are still drawing down that heat and the forest and the soil to some extent as well.

That's where this new development came from. I should say, this is included in last August's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. You remember, that made big headlines last August. This is in there. this science, but it is buried. Scientists, they sometimes forget that the rest of us don't know everything that they know. Climate scientists have left behind this old idea of 30 to 40 years from what Michael Mann told me.

He says, "We left that behind five, six, eight years ago. They just forgot to tell the rest of us." That's our job as journalists. I'm very happy as a journalist and as the executive director of Covering Climate Now to finally be bringing this out to the world so that we can understand not just what the science says but, as I say, the paradigm-shifting implications for how we respond to that science.

Brian: Listeners, we can take some phone calls, your science questions, policy questions, psychology questions on the new reading of the International Panel on Climate Change report from last August by Mark Hertsgaard from Covering Climate Now, and he's the environment correspondent for The Nation, at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. His new article called, The Best Climate Science You've Never Heard Of. It's no silver bullet, but it offers genuine hope if we act now.

Let me stay on this track of why we didn't hear about this, what you're calling a paradigm shift. When the IPCC report first came out last August, you wrote, "There's plenty of blame to go around." Two of the co-authors of this article are climate scientists, the article that you coauthored. The other is a veteran journalist. We can collectively attest that scientists aren't always the best communicators. Journalists and scientists typically don't speak the same language and much gets lost in translation.

For example, this updated science was not mentioned in the press release sent to journalists prior to the IPCC reports released last August and the concerted headwind of a fossil fuel, industry-funded disinformation campaign. You have the makings of a major breakdown in communication. Can you go a little more into it? What happened last August and how could that be avoided for the future, so the best and most accurate climate stories, even from something like the International Panel on Climate Change from the United Nations, even from sources like that?

Mark: This is one of the reasons that we founded Covering Climate Now, Brian. I'm glad to say that WNYC is one of the founding members of Covering Climate Now is precisely because we as journalists have to do a better job on this. I don't blame the scientists. It's not their job to communicate to the public. That is our job. It's our job to translate what specialists-- Whether they be scientists or policy experts on Ukraine, whatever it is, that's our job to take their scholarly knowledge and put it into vernacular, understandable terms that the average citizen can grasp and take into their lives and say, "Okay, I understand that now," so that they can be informed active citizens in a democracy.

Yes, I did put in that line about how-- Even the press releases didn't include that. That's probably their fault, but it's also our fault. The way I found out about this science was I was doing an interview with Michael Mann for The Guardian newspaper and I was asking him, "Well, but aren't we still locked into 30 to 40 years?" He said, "No, Mark, that's actually old science." You got to be talking to the scientists.

You've got to be interviewing them. You've got to be always checking your assumptions about things and then, above all, you've got to be telling the people. That's our job in the media. As I say, that's part of the reason that we founded Covering Climate Now. We're a global collaboration that tries to-- We're now over 500 news outlets around the world. We're trying to do the best job we can on what we consider the most important story of our time.

Brian: I want to give you some credit for our decision to do a climate story of the week here on The Brian Lehrer Show for the next six months. I was looking at your Covering Climate Now website and we're proud to be a partnering organization, but it doesn't mean I follow every page on your website every day. Something that was on there really gave me an idea and inspired me because you put your finger right on one of the obstacles to journalists and talk shows doing more climate coverage and having more climate conversations than we're having.

That is that climate change happens slowly. It happens almost by definition at a glacial pace, the way people use that term, whereas other things in the news happen much more quickly, and so, "Oh, we have to keep up with this new thing or that new thing," while climate change may be the biggest thing that's happening on Earth over a 100-year period, but it's not over the 24-hour period until there's some big weather event or something like that.

If you look for the stories, they're there. You put out climate stories of the week yourself on Covering Climate Now, but that paradigm shift in thinking that journalists need to engage in, that people in positions like mine need to engage in to detach from the news cycle enough to look for those things that are going to make good talk show segments, good news stories but that don't present themselves right in front of your face every day.

Mark: Well, that's exactly right, Brian, and I really salute you guys for doing this. I promise you now that we will be writing about WNYC and The Brian Lehrer Show's decision to be doing this climate story for the next six months. That's exactly the kind of journalistic leadership that we need and the example that needs to be set. That's all we're trying to do at Covering Climate Now is help all of us as journalists do the best job we can on this.

It really is a cultural shift that we as journalists in our newsrooms have to undertake. What you're talking about there, the problem is what the head of Al Jazeera, who's a man named Giles Trendle, we just did a Q&A with him where he talks about the tyranny of immediacy and how he's always telling his newsroom, "Let's not get caught up in the tyranny of immediacy."

Al Jazeera, they're based in the Middle East. He says to his reporters, "Look, I get it. There's always a bombing or an assassination or a political crisis in one country or another, especially in the Middle East that demands coverage, but we have to keep our eyes on the prize and on the longer-term problems." Climate change is the ultimate long-term problem that because we didn't pay more attention to it these last 30 years, now, it is a short-term emergency as well.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. Wayne in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, you're on WNYC. Hi, Wayne.

Wayne: Hi. Good morning, Brian, and good morning to your guest. I've been following this global heating issue forever and seeing it come and go in waves and how it's been handled by government and things like this. I'm really concerned with your guest's proposed interpretation of this new paradigm of being able to throw the switch and then get an immediate feedback, positive feedback.

I'm afraid that governments and businesses are going to push this interpretation that, "Well, if it's going to happen real quick, let's just get everything out of the ground that we can and burn it until there's nothing left and then, essentially, the switch is thrown for us." How do we now encourage governments to make change in light of this? I can step off the air. Thank you very much.

Brian: Thank you very much. Go ahead, Mark.

Mark: I think I must not have made things clear because the whole point of this is that we have to get to zero emissions. It's not a Get Out of Jail Free card, "Oh, keep going." No, quite the contrary. It does mean that we now have a chance. If we can drive down the emissions quickly, we have a chance of preserving a livable climate on this planet, but we've got to get the emissions down to zero.

That core view of the science remains that we've got to get off of fossil fuels entirely as quickly as possible. We've got to cut global emissions in half by the year 2030. That is an extraordinary rate of decrease. We've got to shift to clean energies and shift to climate-friendly agriculture and climate-friendly forest instead of chopping down the forest and having industrial agriculture all over the world.

It's still a major, major shift and a lot of work, but we can do it. We can do it. We know now from the science that if we do that the temperatures will stop going up. Now, they won't go down. We're stuck with the temperature rise that's already here in the system. There's going to be plenty of difficulties from that, especially with sea-level rise, but we can keep the temperatures from going up if we act fast and strong now.

Brian: Marie in the Bronx, you're on WNYC with Mark Hertsgaard from Covering Climate Now and The Nation. Hi, Marie.

Marie: Hello, thank you for taking my call. My question concerns methane, which is just as bad as the greenhouse gas as reported. The second is, is the new data saying that the oceans with the diminishing albedo effect at the poles getting warmer, acidifying, creating larger and larger storms, more instability at the poles, that would stop with diminished CO2 emission?

Mark: Those are really good questions. Methane, of course, is a very, very potent greenhouse gas. It is far more potent than carbon dioxide, but it stays in the atmosphere a much shorter time. That's why the single most important thing that we can do as a world community is to cut the methane emissions quickly. That was one of the few really good pieces of news that came out of the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow last November.

The last time I was on with you, Brian, was an agreement including with the United States and China, the two climate superpowers on the planet, but many other countries as well saying we're going to slash methane production and emissions rather over the coming years. That would be a huge, huge importance and precisely because methane does not stay in the atmosphere that long. We get an even quicker response of cooling there.

Now, the second question about the oceans, the call is quite right. As I say, this is not a Get Out of Jail Free card. The oceans are going to continue to warm. They're going to continue to rise. There's going to be a lot of sea-level rise on this planet because the emissions are already there. The ocean has been absorbing those emissions for a long time. The acidification, that too. This doesn't fix everything. Really, think of it instead as this is our last shot.

We are down to a pretty narrow road in order to have a survivable planet in the next 40 to 50 years. This new or I should say revised science tells us that if we get our act together and cut the emissions quickly that we can at least avoid further temperature rise and buy some time by which we can then figure out, "Okay, how do we deal with warming oceans? How do we deal with the sea-level rise that is now inevitable? There's a lot of big problems remaining, but this is definitely a ray of hope if we grasp it.

Brian: Marie, thank you. I want to ask you about a couple of other climate stories from this week on Monday. A study in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the mega-drought that the American Southwest has been in since the year 2000 is the driest and most extreme in 1,200 years. That would be since the year 800 AD. Then on Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a report, predicting coastal sea levels will rise by an average of a foot on US coastlines between now and 2050. Do you think that sea-level rise of a foot-- I'm sure a lot of people in the very water-based New York area stood up and took note when I read that stat. Do you think that's already baked in?

Mark: Absolutely. There's no question about that. In fact, and I'm very sorry to say this, but 1 foot of sea-level rise, that's not very much compared to what is on its way. Again, these are long-term. This is geological time scales. We've had an excess of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now for over 100 years and that is having an impact. The poles on this planet are melting. The oceans are expanding because they're hotter. Hot water expands, so we're going to have at least 3 feet of sea-level rise later in this century. Over time, I did a piece not long ago with a scientist out of University of Miami, Harold Wanless, who's one of the world's experts on this.

We could easily have 10 to 20 feet of sea-level rise eventually on this planet. Again, the question is whether that's going to happen in the next 200 years or the next 2,000 years. If it happens in the next 2,000 years, humans can perhaps find a way to deal with that. If it's in the next 200 years and we have 10 feet of sea-level rise, let's say, by the end of this century, that's what James Hansen, a former NASA scientist, is projecting, that would be absolutely cataclysmic.

That would be very, very difficult for human societies to manage. Even the Dutch, who I've done a lot of interviews with this, they're ready for, as they say, 2 meters of sea-level rise. That's about 6 to 7 feet. They say, "That, we can handle." Beyond that, even Dutch engineers get worried. All of this underscores the fact that we have got to act now. We've got to stop the temperatures rising so that this doesn't get worse.

Brian: On the politics, we played that clip earlier for those of you just joining us, an eye-popping or an ear-popping since this is radio clip from 2008 in which Newt Gingrich joined Nancy Pelosi in an ad to say, "I'm a Democrat," "I'm a Republican and we both think climate change is really, really important to the future of this country and this planet. We're going to do things together." Well, Carl in Queens is calling in to react to that ad from 2008. Hi, Carl.

Carl: Hi, Brian. What is your guest's name?

Brian: It's Mark Hertsgaard. He's the environment correspondent for The Nation.

Carl: Oh, hello, Mr. Hertsgaard. More recently, I was either listening to it on the radio or I read about it. They asked Newt Gingrich about his cooperating with Democrats to fight climate change. I'm sure he said, "Oh God, I must have been crazy."

Mark: That's right. He said it was the biggest mistake he ever made.

Carl: Was that more recent than 2008?

Mark: Oh, yes, that was quite recent. That was in the last, I want to say, 12 to 18 months. Newt Gingrich, I don't know, he seems to have gone literally mentally crazy. He's now talking about how Democrats should be imprisoned for investigating the January 6th attack on the US Capitol, so I don't put much importance on what he says anymore. He's out of office and I think he says outrageous things just in a bid to get the limelight frankly.

Brian: I wonder if the current leader of the Republicans in the House would be much different than the way Gingrich is today. Since we played that clip almost a half-hour ago, I'm going to play it again for people who haven't heard it. I'll have a question for you coming out of it. Again, this is Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich in an ad with respect to climate change, really, a public service announcement in 2008.

Nancy: Hi, I'm Nancy Pelosi, lifelong Democrat and Speaker of the House.

Newt: I'm Newt Gingrich, lifelong Republican and I used to be Speaker.

Nancy: We don't always see eye to eye, do we, Newt?

Newt: No, but we do agree, our country must take action to address climate change.

Nancy: We need cleaner forms of energy and we need them fast.

Newt: If enough of us demand action from our leaders, we can spark the innovation we need.

Nancy: Go to wecansolveit.org. Together, we can do this.

Brian: Does that website still exist, wecansolveit.org? Do you know what would've happened there if people had gone to that site in 2008 or if it exists today?

Mark: I don't know if it exists today. I doubt it, but there are plenty of people out here trying to solve it. If any of the listeners want to get involved, it's very easy to find. If you're over 60, you should consider Bill McKibben's new organization called the Third Act. He's trying to organize people over the age of 60 to take climate action. If you're on the younger side, of course, there is Fridays for Future, the Greta Thunberg operation, and 350.org, and the Sunrise Movement, and so forth.

Brian: For what it's worth, I just searched the web address and I got a GoDaddy page that says wecansolveit.org is parked free courtesy of godaddy.com. In other words, it's a website that doesn't exist anymore. Maybe we should take it, Mark.

Mark: Maybe, Brian. Maybe.

Brian: What happened to the Republican Party? That ad got put on our radar screen today because of a Paul Waldman op-ed in The Washington Post that cited it as a starting point for Republican politics of the last 14 years. Obviously, the GOP is not where Newt Gingrich was anymore.

Mark: No, and Newt Gingrich, he was an outlier on that at the time. The Republican Party has never, I repeat, never in this country been in favor of climate action. There was a brief flurry of climate rhetoric when George Bush, the first president, promised and as he ran for president in 1988 that he would combat the greenhouse effect with the White House effect. Never did anything.

In the '90s, the Democrats were just as bad. Even into the Obama years, Barack Obama oversaw the biggest increase in US domestic oil and gas production of any president in history. There's plenty of blame to go around here with both parties. In more recent years, it is quite clear that the Republicans now don't believe in any science. They only believe in what Donald Trump tells them to believe.

The Democrats, to their credit, are realizing that this is a crisis and that we can solve it in a smart way that creates jobs and builds economic growth. I think that's really the question of which vision is going to prevail in American politics. I would just add one more thing. Let's not paint too broad a brush of Republican voters. I remember the stat you gave at the top of the hour, Brian, about how only 39% of Republicans think that climate change is a problem.

If you break that down demographically and you ask Republicans under the age of 35, it is well over 50% of Republicans under the age of 35 are worried about climate change. They want something done about it. I think the reasons for that are obvious. They know that that is their future. They're going to be living with this for the rest of their lives. Some of them are probably having young children of their own now.

They're afraid and they should be, but let's not descend into fear. Let's realize that we can still make a big difference on this problem, but we have got to act now. It requires the government to be involved and to stop subsidizing fossil fuels, which is what we're doing now. Billions of dollars a year. It's like subsidizing our own destruction. That's insane literally. We need to stop that and, instead, subsidize and put people to work building the new green economy of the 21st century.

Brian: All right, that Paul Waldman column in The Washington Post called, As Climate Change Worsens, Republicans Insist We Must Do Nothing. Do nothing. I can see the chance now in the big rallies, "Do nothing. Do nothing. We have to do nothing," so there's that. That ends this segment, which is the first in six months of a weekly climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show.

We're going to do a climate story of the week on The Brian Lehrer Show for the next six months. This was number one with Mark Hertsgaard, who is the executive director of the journalism-based group Covering Climate Now of which WNYC is a member. He's also the environment correspondent for The Nation and is releasing a piece and a data interpretation today called The Best Climate Science You've Never Heard Of. Mark, thanks for launching with us. Thanks for all you do. We'll keep talking.

Mark: Thanks so much, Brian. We are going to come and we're going to write about this, The Brian Lehrer Show doing this in our weekly newsletter, the Climate Beat. I'm going to take you up on and I'm going to interview you. [laughs]

Brian: Great, we'll talk off the air. Thanks, Mark.

Mark: Okay. Thanks, Brian.

 

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