John Law (9:10)

We'll be right back after this quick break. As many of you can probably tell, our world is changing. AI is coming for our job. We have new tariffs announced every day. Geopolit Political changes are killing historical alliances. The market's bouncing up and down like a yo yo. Many of us are hunkering down, trying to squirrel away some money and protect our futures. But one of the ways you may have forgotten to do that is through a life insurance policy. You've heard of life insurance, I'm sure, but did you know it's cheaper than you think and the younger you are, the cheaper it is. Like double the price if you wait to buy a decade from now. So I'm looking for my life insurance Policy Today with selectquote.com selectquote takes the guesswork out of finding the right life insurance policy for you. You'll be covered faster than you think as they work with providers who offer same day coverage. And you're not out of luck if you have pre existing health conditions because Selectquote partners with companies that offer policies for people with conditions like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today and you can get the right life insurance for you right now for less and save more than 50%@SelectQuote.com tangle save more than 50% on term life insurance@SelectQuote.com tangle today to get started. That's SelectQuote.com tangle.

Ari Weitzman (10:21)

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Kyle Armour (10:57)

Here's how we know it since the 2000s, scientists from different disciplines have worked together to develop integrated models of different Earth systems to accurately simulate how the global climate and carbon cycle operate together. That is, experts in land systems have worked with experts in atmospheric sciences and oceanography to model how energy and greenhouse gases are exchanged between the land, atmosphere and oceans. These models, called coupled models or Earth system models, or ESMs, form the foundation of modern climate science. Two of the researchers I spoke to for this article are responsible for developing these models. Tom Delworth, the GFDL senior scientist, leads the team developing NOAA's Earth system model in New Jersey, and he explained the way these models work in basic terms, we break up the atmosphere or ocean into boxes and within each of these boxes we solve a set of equations for conservation of mass or conservation of energy. Tom Delworth expl the theme of this institute has been building and using a hopefully ever improving set of models to probe deeper and deeper into the climate system and increase our ability to both understand how the system works and to predict its future evolution, dalworth said about the lab. And that prediction may be next week's weather or out to next century's climate. That work started to advance in 2006 when Delworth developed NOAA's first prototype ESM. The team he took over had their own disparate tools that corresponded to the specific expertise of the researcher to develop the coupled model. Dalworth said his team threw those all out to build a centralized model. Dalworth's team is now developing the fourth version of its ESM on the other side of the country. David Lawrence, the NCAR senior scientist, leads the team developing the Community Earth System Model, or cesm, in Boulder, Colorado. He and Delworth are members of a very elite group of scientists responsible for leading the teams that develop these models. There are many climate models that have been built around the world, but only a few of them could reasonably be called Earth System models, which are a lot more complex, bigger and more comprehensive. I'd say on the order of 10, probably a little bit fewer are really independent, lawrence said. These models are enormous undertakings that require the collaboration of hundreds of cross disciplinary scientists. Lawrence's Colorado library employs about 100 people all working on version three of the CESM, he says he routinely involves another 250 or 300 researchers in person and then about the same number of additional researchers online. And that's just one model, Lawrence explained. It's fairly easy to say there are a thousand people involved in the CESM activity. Over the last few years, increasing compute power has allowed researchers to dramatically increase the resolution of ESMs. The leading edge models have a resolution of 3 km on a side, as opposed to 200 km on a side, according to Dalworth, allowing researchers to model extreme weather events like tropical cyclones. We have a technical description of the land component of CESM, Lawrence said. It's 800 pages long and it's got 600 equations in it. So this is not just a little toy. This is an intense amount of interacting information that is giving us the ability to reproduce the entire Earth. The ESM can simulate 15 years of global weather per day, meaning that 250 years of simulation requires about two and a half weeks of constant computation. That is, if nothing goes wrong, Lawrence added. Every five to seven years, ESMs like the ones Lawrence and Delworth are working on will develop new versions to correspond with the Coupled Models Intercomparison Project, or cmip. Participating at CMIP helps researchers collaborate by agreeing on what scenarios to model and how to standardize their data formats, kind of like how carmakers might develop their newest models to comply with the newest safety standards. This allows researchers to operate any of the most advanced models with the least amount of friction. Both GFDL's and NCAR's most recently released models were produced under CMIP6, which provided the conditions the UN used in its sixth IPCC assessment. The models they're currently developing under CMIP7 consider an incredible amount of complexity, from the color and water evaporation rates of regional vegetation to the sootiness of snow on different mountaintops. Climate models were already sophisticated, but they're improving about as fast now as generative artificial intelligence. The recent boom in compute power allows the most advanced models to actually reproduce naturally occurring climate systems like hurricane and typhoon seasons, oceanic currents, and even the El Nino and La Nina cycles. It's what we call an emergent feature of the model, Lawrence explained. The only thing the model knows at the beginning is where the continents are, where the mountains are. We give it that, the ocean bathymetry, and that's it. Everything else, the model is figuring it out. It's able to reproduce what happens on Earth, which is remarkable, honestly. Lawrence said. The latest CESM could start with A model of the Earth from 1850, then accurately reproduce most of the global climate today. Not only that, but it can run simulations with the actual atmospheric conditions of the past 175 years and ones without any excess carbon added to the atmosphere, allowing Lawrence's team to test their model of the Earth to see if it holds up to scrutiny. And in most cases, we're seeing very clearly that the actual world is looking much closer to our simulations with greenhouse gases than it does without. The CMIP7 models are currently being developed to inform the UN's next IPCC report, which is scheduled for 2029. Armour, who was a contributing author on the last IPCC report in 2021, told me that despite all the sophistication of the newest models, the assessment's main findings can actually be derived much more simply. I do this for my classes all the time. You can simulate global warming as well as the fancy models with just a few lines of code on your laptop. I was an author on the most recent IPCC report that came out a couple of years ago, and that's what we ended up using for global temperature predictions. Arm it really is just energy balance, energy in, energy out. As I said, there aren't two equal sides to this story. However, plenty of complicating facts are difficult to reconcile with an understanding of climate change. Difficult, but not impossible. Our new editor at large, Camille Foster, is able to help me with this with something that he invented, which he calls Marley's Razor. After the late, great Bob Marley. It goes like I may have shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy. Camille unpacks it like one thing that your side believes may be true, but that doesn't mean any other thing your side believes is true by association. Here are four examples of Marley's razor at work. When it comes to climate change, things that we know are true. So four sheriffs and the unproven implications that accompany them for deputies. Sheriff 1 Without drastic change, some effects of climate change will be unavoidable. A 2018 report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, found that we had about 12 years to significantly reduce emissions to avoid severe climate impacts. The IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius warned that failing to meet the more ambitious target would bring far higher risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth. The UN said the window to keep Global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius will close in 2030. That's in five years. Note IPCC reports use a baseline of the global average temperature from 1850 to 1900 to measure future warming against so anytime you read about future warming relative to pre industrial levels or anything that doesn't specify a specific baseline, the frame of reference is almost always going to be this 1850-1900 global average. The IPCC did say this and its claim is narrow and well supported. As of 2018, the nations of the world had only 12 years to reduce emissions to avoid a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre industrial levels by 2100. If not, then the additional greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere would generate warming patterns that would require a lot of effort, if not an impossible amount of effort to reverse. Deputy number one, the Earth will be uninhabitable if we don't reduce our emissions by 2030. Remember that claim. We have until 2030 to prevent warming that will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre industrial levels by 2100. Now compare that claim to some of the headlines that ran at the time in 2018 report we have just 12 years to limit Devastating Global Warming Fox said. We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe warns UN the Guardian said terrifying climate change 12 years until we're Doomed the New York Post said catastrophe and doom are a pretty far cry from the IPCC's narrower claim. 1.5 degrees Celsius may be disastrous for low lying island nations, but the range that climate scientists have been warning would be globally catastrophic has been at least 3.5 degrees Celsius before warming. One of the researchers I spoke to, Kyle Armour, Contributed to the 2021 IPCC Report and he stressed to me that doomerism is getting over amplified in the press. Some of the key messages out of the last IPCC report that I think have not been picked up are reasons for optimism, Arm said. And the biggest one is that the most extreme warming scenarios are looking less and less likely. It's looking more and more likely that we're going to be more middle of the road if not on the low end of some of these early forecasts. And 1.5 degrees Celsius is on the low end of the range of warming that the IPCC's 2013 assessment specified and the report said in 2013 it was possible to attain it with moderate mitigation. Right now we're passing 1.5 degrees Celsius, so it's essentially impossible for us to avoid that level of warming now. But to characterize it as Catastrophic is simply not accurate. Sheriff two Scientists were warning about global cooling not too long ago Every once in a while, someone will post a headline from before the 1980s warning about potential global cooling, like Time magazine's 1979 piece the Cooling of America. That piece was mostly a collection of anecdotes about how people prepare for cold winters, and it was long on alarmism and wildly out of bound predictions. For instance, Time published a quote from an anonymous source that claimed New England could look like Lebanon in 50 years due to deforestation. That's in four years from now. Before the 1980s, scientists understood greenhouse gases, but they were uncertain about the magnitude of the effect human emissions would have on the CL. Scientists had observed decadal cooling from 1940 to 1970, and many theorized that increased air pollution and a natural ice age cycle would cause temperatures to continue to drop even today. Scientists like Darrell Kaufman at the University of Arizona contend that the Earth is in a natural multimillennial global cooling cycle. While the Time magazine piece was short on theory about global cooling, other pieces from the time weren't. In 1975, the New York Times published an article covering a debate among climate scientists over whether the Earth would be getting warmer or cooler. The author, Walter Sullivan, mentioned atmospheric carbon dioxide and the theory of global warming, but he was generally more sympathetic to the theory of global cooling. Here's something Sullivan said in that article. Sooner or later, a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable. Hints that it may already have begun are evident. The drop in temperatures since 1950 in the northern hemisphere has been sufficient, for example, to shorten Britain's growing season for crops by two weeks. Deputy 2 Therefore, we can equally dismiss concerns about global warming. Yes, the media has published false and alarming headlines before. Yes, they will continue to do so. Yes, the Earth has had natural warming and cooling periods. And yes, evidence supports the theory that the Earth is actually in a natural cooling period right now. And yet none of that disproves the observational evidence that the Earth has been getting warmer. If anything, the background provides more evidence that the warming the Earth is currently experiencing has been caused by human behavior. If the planet is theoretically supposed to be cooling, then why is it warming? Natural cycles can't explain that change, but scientists can. It's excess greenhouse gas emissions. If you're in a car that's on a hill and it's rolling backwards and then you step on the gas pedal, it's not a mystery why the car starts moving forward. Sheriff 3 Having a kid impacts climate change more than anything else an individual can do Two years ago I wrote an article exploring the question of whether having kids is still ethical due to climate change. A lot of concerns feed into the climate anxiety that motivates people against having kids. But one of them is based on a calculation that of all the choices a person can make, the decision to have a child will impact the environment more than anything else. This is true, and it's also somewhat intuitive. Imagine all the decisions you can make that result in greenhouse gas emitting energy production. Now imagine all of those same decisions, but for two people. In that 2022 article I wrote, I referenced the study that put this into numerical values. Here's what I said at the a 2017 study focused on individual actions a person can take to mitigate climate change concluded with these four recommendations. Having one fewer child, which is an average four developed countries of 58.6 tons of CO2 equivalent carbon emissions reductions per year, living car free 2.4 tons, avoiding airplane travel 1.6 tons and eating a plant based diet 0.8 tons saved per year. That study had to make a few assumptions to arrive at those numbers, but no amount of tinkering with the parameters will get around the fact that that raising a new person will require more emissions than any other life choice an average American can make. Deputy 3 We have to stop having kids to save the planet. So since I wrote an entire article arguing against this, I'll instead pass it over to Kyle Armour, who gives public lectures in the Seattle area to help address climate anxiety. People are still kind of implicitly thinking we're heading toward an uninhabitable earth, armour said. The more scientifically justifiable thing to say would be we're heading towards problems. It may be harder to live in the tropics because of heat, stress and things, and there will be crop failures and all sorts of stuff we have to deal with. But it's not human extinction level. It's maybe not even mass extinction for ecosystems. We're not sure. It's certainly worth worrying about, but it's not nearly as bad as we used to think it was. Sheriff four More people die of cold than of heat. This has been true for a while and it's also trending upward. From 2000 through 2022, cold related deaths in the United States increased from roughly 0.5 per 100,000 to 0.9 per 100,000. At the same time, annual heat related deaths per 100,000 in the US have increased from 0.2 to 0.6. Cold weather in the US is empirically just more lethal than hot weather. Deputy 4 A warming planet won't be bad for humanity of course, these disparities in deaths don't then imply that rising temperatures is not an issue to worry about. First of all, this data does not imply that temperatures have been getting colder. Recall, we know the opposite is true. The researchers behind the Cold Weather Death study proposed two theories for why they think deaths have increased more extreme cold weather events and and increased homelessness. Whether or not they're right is another matter. Second, a closer read of the data shows that both cold weather and hot weather deaths are increasing, but hot weather deaths are increasing faster. The cold weather death rate has about doubled over the past 10 years. The hot weather death rate has more than tripled over the same time span. A paper published in Science predicted this Trend back in 2017. Third, the relatively lesser lethality of extreme heat doesn't obviate the problem. Ecosystems will struggle to adapt to their climate, skinning hotter at a rapid rate, which will strain food systems, erode coastlines, threaten population centers. We can't predict the degree to which those things will happen. And even ascribing primary blame to climate change for any one event is difficult. But we know this will happen.

John Law (28:09)

We'll be right back after this quick break.

Camille Foster (28:15)

As a parent, I obsess over the details. What my baby eats, how they sleep, what touches their skin. But what about the water they bathe in? The truth is, according to ChemTech International, 98% of US household water is treated with chlorine. Data from the US Geological Survey shows that 85% of US households have hard water. Many pediatricians warn of the risks of unfiltered water, especially chlorine, which can decrease hydration in the skin's outermost layer. If your little one is dealing with skin redness, irritation or discomfort, Kanopy's bathtub filter might be the answer. Its Trimedia filter reduces chlorine and irritants for gentler, safer baths. It's made from FDA approved BPA free silicone and fits virtually any spout, so installation is a breeze. But wait, that's not everything. It doubles as a spout cover and temperature indicator, helping protect little ones from accidental burns, bumps and bruises. Like all canopy products, the bathtub filter is hassle free and high impact. It installs in under five minutes. Filter changes are super simple. And yes, you can even toss it in the dishwasher to clean. You heard that right. The dishwasher. Visit GetCanopy Co and save $10 with their hassle free filter subscription. Even better, my listeners can use my code kanopipod at checkout for an extra 10% off your order. Hurry. Better bath time for Baby is just a couple of clicks away.

David Lawrence (29:38)

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Kyle Armour (30:17)

To end this piece, I want to go over the main assertions the leading experts in climate science are making about climate change today. I've broken these down into three buckets the unsurprising, the surprising, and the unknown. At the end, I'll share these experts exact predictions for how much the climate will warm in the years ahead. Let's start with the unsurprising first. Land is getting warmer faster than the oceans. A quick look at any time series of mean temperatures shows an obvious trend. Surface temperatures of land are increasing more quickly than global surface temperatures on average. This is no surprise to scientists and somewhat intuitive to anyone who's stood by a large body of water in the summer. The reason is simple. Over the oceans, much of the energy goes into evaporation, which then keeps the surface relatively cool. Over dry land, energy goes into heating the surface. On land, warming is definitely one and a half to two times greater than it is on the global average, Lawrence said. 2. The northern oceans are warming faster. The whole world has warmed by about 1.4 degrees Celsius since the Industrial Revolution, but the Arctic has warmed by about 3 degrees Celsius in that span. Scientists have predicted that discrepancy for decades. We know quite a bit about where some of the climate change is going to be the most severe. It's in the highest latitudes in both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, lawrence said. It's over land. The land in the Northern Hemisphere is more continuous and farther from the equator, and continents can warm up more rapidly than a solid ocean southern atmosphere, dalworth explained. Models have always shown the Southern Ocean warming much, much more slowly than anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere, the Arctic and the high latitudes. So that actually has been pretty well predicted. Armour mentioned that all of this was first theorized by Arrhenius, the Swedish scientist who first theorized emissions of cause warming in 1896. The Arctic is going to warm faster than the tropics. The land is going to warm faster than the oceans. The nighttime temperatures are going to increase faster than the daytime temperatures, armour said. It's remarkable how much he got right with only really crude estimates and crude reasoning. Number three the oceans are acidifying Multiple readings of the ocean's PH since the early 1980s have confirmed that the ocean has been getting more acidic over time. Europe's Copernicus Marine Service has shown the global ocean surface acidity increasing since 1985, while readings from near Hawaii and the northeast Atlantic are giving us similar data. Observations about lower ocean layers also show the same Results. Since the 2000s, data on the subsurface ocean has gotten much more sophisticated thanks to Argo, an incredibly advanced global system of satellite connected buoys. All the measurement systems, though, are saying the same thing. The global ocean is getting more acidic. However, the process is not quite as terrible as that phrase may imply. As NOAA states, the term ocean acidification is somewhat alarmist. The ocean's PH is getting less basic. The ocean is not turning into an acid, and although a combination of warming and a change of ph can be dangerous to some ocean ecosystems, particularly coral systems, the warming and carbon absorption the ocean provides make it a natural regulator of the global climate. Both have saved us from quite a bit of atmosphere warming because that's heat and carbon that otherwise would have ended up in the atmosphere and heated the whole climate system at the surface, armour explained. Number four Storms are getting stronger. This message is something a lot of people have been repeating recently, especially when storms are in the news. Just like with warming over land. The theory on this is pretty a warmer atmosphere will evaporate more water, and warmer air holds more moisture when it does have a downpour. When you get flooding from a hurricane, that hurricane's holding more water vapor because the atmosphere is warmer and the oceans are warmer, armour explained. And to answer one of the questions that I posed in the introduction, both of these things are true. Drier climates are going to get drier and wetter climates are going to get wetter.

Tom Delworth (34:16)

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer of YouTube and podcast content and co host of the daily podcast. I hope you enjoyed this preview of our Sunday podcast with Ari and Isaac. We are now offering this podcast exclusively to our premium podcast members, along with our ad, free daily podcasts, Friday editions, in depth interviews, upcoming new podcast series, bonus content, and much more. If you want to receive all that and give your support to help grow Tangle Media Please go to readtangle.com where you can sign up for a newsletter membership, a podcast membership, or a discounted bundle membership which gets you both access to the premium newsletter and the premium podcast. If it's not the right time for you to sign up, please don't worry. Our ad supported daily podcast isn't going anywhere, but if it is in your ability to support by signing up for a membership, we would greatly appreciate it and we're really excited to share all the of our premium offerings with you. We'll be right back here tomorrow. For Isaac and the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a great day. Y' all.

Kyle Armour (35:21)

Take care. Bye.

John Law (35:24)

Our podcast is written by me, Isaac Saul and edited and engineered by John Wall. The script is edited by our Managing editor, Ari Weitzman, Will K. Back, Bailey Saul and Sean Brady. The logo for our podcast was designed by Magdalena Bokova who is also our Social Media Manager. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. If you're looking for more from Tangle, Please go to readtangle.com and check out our website.

Isaac Saul (36:04)

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David Lawrence (37:09)

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