Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin
Uploaded: 2022-02-11T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-11. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-02-11. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1776 - Steven E. Koonin

Well, thank you for being here thanks
I'm really appreciative of your time and the fact that you are willing to talk
about this
this is a very interesting book and
Extremely controversial and I'm not exactly sure why that is but I think it's a
part of the times we're living in
Yeah, how many cut your book is called unsettled correct?
How many it is? Yes, how many copies of this book so we've sold since it was
published at the end of April
So about ten months ago. We sold more than 120,000 copies
120,000 you know, I don't know anything about publishing but my agent and
publisher are sort of amazed at the numbers
That's a lot and without much fanfare from the media if any
Well, it depends which media you look at where have you gotten so I've gotten
good coverage from the Wall Street Journal
But if you look at the New York Times Washington Post
Not very good coverage at all didn't make the New York Times bestseller. That
seems strange because it's a lot of copies
Yeah, right. Well, you would think right. Yeah, okay CNN nothing
And I think you know people are just ignoring it which really surprises me now
your book is on
The climate it's on climate change and climate science and we should just
establish right away
Just because I know you're gonna experience some criticism right right clearly
First of all your credentials you graduated from high school at 16 you
Went to MIT Caltech for out there's an undergrad at Caltech and then I went to
MIT
I did a PhD there in theoretical physics in three years and then I went back to
Caltech where I was on the faculty for 30 years
And you were on the faculty at 23 years of age. That's correct pretty
extraordinary
Yeah, it's unusual not unprecedented, but really quite unusual now
There's a there's a couple criticisms that people have of you just just to get
these out of the way right away
One of them is that you used to work for BP. Yeah, that is this is a big one
So if you work for some sort of an oil company you were chief scientist
I was chief scientist at BP for five years after Caltech
And you know they didn't bring me there to help them find oil all right they
knew how to do that really well
I was brought in to help figure out what beyond petroleum really meant and that
was renewables and
Alternatives to oil and gas and I helped during my five years to help part a
strategy for that which is today now
15 years later are starting to be realized
But once you say you work for BP there's a certain section of our population
that will immediately dismiss anything you said
Yeah, of course, and you know, it's part of a structural problem that
The advantage of having been in BP is I learned about the energy system and I
teach it at NYU these days
I just did my first lecture yesterday and so I actually know quite a bit about
how the energy system currently works and
a lot of people who
Want to change the energy system have no idea at all of how it works
And so they can do great damage if they do the wrong sort of thing
Well in reading your book one of the things that became very
Clear is there's so much data to sort through it's it's incredibly complex
I actually listened to it on audio and there were sections of it where I had to
go back
Over it again just to try to wrap my head exactly around what was happening
To squash some more of the criticism really clearly up front
You are you're very clear about this you believe the climate is changing
Climate is changing and believe that human beings are having an effect
They are influencing those changes. Yes
Yes, absolutely mostly through greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the
atmosphere
Absolutely your position though is that there's an either an exaggeration or
There's there's a way that people are looking at the data. That's alarmist
That you don't think is reflected by the actual numbers themselves. That's
correct. I think you know to put it in a British sense
They have over egged the custard
Now why do you think this has happened?
You know there's I have in the book one of my favorite quotes from H.L. Mencken
is
The purpose of practical politics is to keep people alarmed by a series of
Mostly imaginary hobgoblins so that they can be clamoring to be led to safety
Now if you think that human beings are affecting the climate and you think the
climate is changing
What what what what percentage of an effect are human influences?
Yeah, so, you know, I think we don't really know that the UN intergovernmental
panel on climate change in its last report in August
said, you know, it's all
Human caused in the last many decades all of it all of it, but you know, they
completely forget that the climate was changing
Comparable ways well before human influences became important and
And and so they they say no no we we're going to ignore that we're going to
suppress it and say it's all human cost
Now one of the things you highlight in your book is that
When you're looking at the way the temperatures have risen on earth over a
period of say like a hundred years
That if you do it in these blocks of time that there's a way to look at it in a
deceptive way
That makes it seem in the alarmist way where it makes it seem that radical
drastic change is happening over a very short period of time
That's all I've ever heard. Yeah, so you know the climate changes a lot on its
own
Maybe we can put up a picture which is one of the ones I wanted to show you can
we put up?
um the second chart in that file called Kunin thumbs and
And what I'm going to show you is a record of the height of the Nile River
Okay, which has been compiled by the Egyptians we go to the net there we go
so this is the height of the Nile River from
640 AD up until
1450 AD so about 800 years of
Data every year about what was the lowest level that the Nile River reached in
that year
The Nile was important to the Egyptians as you might imagine and so they
measured it pretty carefully and
What you see are two things the blue spikes are the annual values
They go up and down a lot one year
It was up at six meters 20 feet and then the next year it was down a one meter
or something like that
So a lot of variability from year to year
But then if you look at the curve
Which is the average?
Trend over 30 years you can see for example in the first hundred years it was
going down and
You can imagine some medieval Egyptian climate panel saying new normal new
normal
We got to do prayers and sacrifices and of course if they just waited another
hundred years it came back up again and this was all before
humans had any influence on the climate are we looking at?
Climate and we were looking at these periods of time
Are we looking at them incorrectly because we have such a short lifespan
ourselves that we tend to think of great change as
Happening in these incremental ups and downs
But realistically we should be looking at it on a broad
Long spectrum of hundreds if not thousands of years
Yes, so so so climate changes on all timescales it changes on
Thousand-year timescales it changes on ten thousand year timescales and it
changes on decades every decade it changes
And you know we also forget a lot in the Midwest there was a drought in 1955
and
And one of the news magazines time magazine said this drought will be long
remembered
Nobody remembers 1955 drought anymore so we forget and we think things are
unprecedented
When in fact they have happened before now you are by training you're a
physicist, correct?
Correct and another criticism would be that you're not a climate scientist
people will say that now my question though and
I think you you'd probably be able to help me on this is like what exactly is a
climate scientist because
Most science you have a hypothesis you run tests you get results and then you
do these experiments
And that's how you get your data with climate science. Is it based off models?
You know it climate science is a very integrative discipline
It involves physics chemistry biology geology
Statistics computer modeling and so on so nobody can be an expert in everything
Many prominent climate scientists are trained as physicists look Jim Hanson
Michael Mann Michael Mann actually once applied to be my graduate student
He decided to go to Yale instead, but that's a different discussion that was
many decades ago
Um and so so some of it is certainly physics
Um I have published in physics and about climate science. I published a paper
in august where we were watching the moon for 20 years to learn how
Shiny the earth was that's very important because if the earth gets shiny it
absorbs more sunlight and so gets warmer and we published a paper and it
attracted some attention
Press releases and so on so I have published in climate science
But more importantly the kind of things I point out in the book
It's obvious to anybody who has any quantitative sense at all
It's like you know if I were ordering
Carpet for a room and the room was eight by ten
I would need 80 square feet of carpet if the carpet guy comes back and says you
need 400 square feet
I'm going to ask him some hard questions right and that's the kind of
Um
Misleading things that i'm pointing out in the book how did you get started on
this journey of being?
I want to say obsessed but if not fascinated with the science of climate change
and the data itself
so I was exposed to climate science in the
uh early
90s when I was working with a group called jason which we can talk about at
some point
for the government and looking at the impact of then
high performance computing and small satellites on
Climate science and the group group jason is top scientists in their field that
are recruited to work for the u.s
Government and it's like what is it 70 percent of it is classified
Something like that we work for all government agencies
But a lot of what we do is is for the national security parts of the government
And it's tackling the most complex difficult technical problems sometimes
You know mysteries that the government
Finds going on in other countries things of that sort what's going on etc. How
do we do x y or z technically?
And so what was the initial study that you had read or what?
So the initial thing that got me interested uh was
The department of energy wanted to deploy a fleet of small satellites
Which remember this was 30 years ago? So that was a pretty big innovative deal
To look at the earth and monitor what was going on for climate purposes for
science
And one of the things that you could do
Was to measure how shiny the earth was the albedo it's called technically
Whiteness of the earth and of course being curious we asked the question well
How was the albedo first measured and the answer was back in the 30s?
Some guy started watching the dark part of the moon
And that brightness of the dark part of the moon is lit by light that is
reflected from the earth
And so was a good measure of how shiny the earth is
It hadn't been done for 30 or 40 years and so we started up a program
That continues to this day to watch the dark part of the moon to monitor how
bright the earth is
And we just published a paper in august
That showed the earth has gotten a little bit dimmer over the last many years
and so not surprising it perhaps gotten warmer
Anyway that sort of got me interested in climate science when I moved into the
private sector
I was more concerned with energy technologies and how we could
develop and deploy or demonstrate and deploy technologies that would reduce
greenhouse gas emissions
And I did that for quite a while in both bp and then in the government
And then in 2014 the american physical society asked me to
Do a review of their statement about climate science
They had put it out a statement in 2007 which was very controversial among the
physicists
Because it used the word incontrovertible and for a physicist that's fighting
words
Okay, so, uh, I they asked me, you know, steve recommend a new statement
And so I said heck we're physicists. We're not going to take anybody's word for
i