Latest / Saving the World From Bad Ideas / Bad Idea #14 "increasing disaster costs show extreme weather is getting worse" with Roger Pielke Jr

Transcript

Bad Idea #14 "increasing disaster costs show extreme weather is getting worse" with Roger Pielke Jr · Saving the World From Bad Ideas

0:00
I got an e-mail from a very prominent leading climate
0:03
scientist and this was one of the things that's kind of one of
0:05
those career defining moments said you do really good
0:08
research. You know, I agree with it.
0:09
It's accurate related to societal effects of extreme
0:12
weather. But you have to be careful going
0:13
into a political setting that your research might be misused
0:18
by the people who are opposed to climate action.
0:19
And so maybe you should downplay or not even share your
0:24
conclusions and emphasize the importance of of mitigating
0:27
greenhouse gases. And for me, I got the sense that
0:30
I was being asked to misrepresent my research for
0:32
political purposes and I decided not to do that.
0:35
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCCI, often
0:39
said if it didn't exist, we'd have to invent it.
0:41
There are hundreds of thousands, literally millions of peer
0:44
reviewed papers published on aspects of climate every year.
0:47
And so I often just simply point to the IPCC as the best
0:52
available snapshot of where the science is I.
0:54
Don't think there's anything wrong with having conservatives
0:56
doing climate science. Like I would actually prefer to
0:59
have a world where science was more politically diverse because
1:02
I think that would help help us not to get into the situation
1:05
where you've got this incredible partisanship now in culture wars
1:09
in science. Welcome to saving the world from
1:13
bad ideas. I'm Mark Linus, and I've had a
1:15
few bad ideas in my time. I used to go out in the night
1:19
time to destroy GMO crops, and I also opposed nuclear power.
1:22
But then when I looked at the science, I found I got it wrong.
1:25
Oops. I've learned the hard way that
1:27
none of us are right all the time.
1:28
So now I'm here to challenge the assumptions that we all too
1:31
often take for granted because the future depends on us getting
1:34
it right. Welcome to saving the world from
1:37
bad ideas. I'm here with Roger Pilker
1:39
Junior, a old friend of mine who's published papers on
1:43
climate change for two decades. 3 decades, Roger. 3 decades. 3
1:48
decades. Wow.
1:49
Until recently, I think you were a professor at the University of
1:52
Colorado in Boulder until, well, until 2024.
1:55
And I think you described yourself on your Substack as a
1:58
recovering academic. And you're now a fellow at the
2:01
conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
2:04
And you write a lot on Substack under the on this broker brand,
2:09
which I'm a big fan of. I think I may even be a paying
2:12
subscriber. So I'm glad to contribute to
2:14
your upkeep. Anyway, welcome to welcome to
2:16
saving the world from bad ideas. Thanks, Mark.
2:18
Great to be with you. So we have to have a bad idea
2:21
for each episode to kick us off and to get into a conversation.
2:24
And you've, you know, stuck a toe into some pretty
2:29
controversial waters over the last, well, 30 years, as we just
2:33
discussed. So we, we've kicked around what
2:35
could be the bad idea that you're tackling.
2:37
And I think we landed on the bad idea is increasing disaster
2:42
costs show extreme weather is getting worse.
2:44
So to try and get into some of, you know, the real nub of your,
2:47
your climate work, which has been looking at how people tend
2:51
to get it wrong when they talk about extreme weather and
2:53
linking it to climate change. So can you kind of just give us
2:56
a bit of a summary on that issue?
2:58
Yeah. First, great to be with you.
3:01
Great to see you. A long time ago, in the mid
3:04
1990s, I had the chance to start a postdoc postdoctoral
3:10
assignment at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
3:13
And the project I was put on was extreme weather and its impacts.
3:17
And this was before climate change was really a thing and
3:21
and a big deal. I had a friend, Chris Lancey,
3:25
who was doing a postdoc up the road at Colorado State
3:29
University. We just played basketball
3:30
together and. He was a Hurricanes guy, wasn't.
3:32
He, he's a hurricane guy. Yeah.
3:35
I, I expect pretty soon he'll be the head of the National
3:37
Hurricane Center. But at the time, he had just
3:40
published a paper that showed that the, the, the period 1991
3:44
to 1994 was the, was the least active four year period for
3:48
North Atlantic hurricane since 1950.
3:51
And I was doing research on the economic impacts of hurricanes.
3:55
And that exact same period was the most expensive period.
3:58
And, and we talked about, you know, it's the least active, but
4:02
the most expensive. And so that led us to doing some
4:05
research to look at what the costs of historical hurricanes
4:09
would be with, with contemporary levels of property development
4:13
population. And, and what we found and
4:16
really have worked on since is that the, the overwhelmingly
4:22
most important factor in the costs of disasters, which are
4:26
significant and increasing, is what we build, where we build
4:29
it. And how many of us there are
4:32
the, the, the changes in extreme weather, the variability, that's
4:36
important, but it's a much smaller influence.
4:41
And so over the years, as climate change has become really
4:44
a public topic, and it's an important topic because climate
4:48
change is real and it's having impacts, people have come to use
4:53
impacts, laudably economic impacts of disasters, as a proxy
4:58
for for identifying changes in climate.
5:02
And that's a problem because it #1 it distracts from the real
5:05
reasons behind why we see economic impacts, but it also
5:10
distracts from the fact if you want to identify signals of
5:13
climate change, look at climate data, not economic data.
5:16
And so this, this is a confounding issue.
5:19
And then I guess I'll put a third layer on there.
5:22
If you say this sort of thing as I have, and you know, I've been
5:25
saying it since before climate change was a thing, people think
5:29
you're minimizing climate change because you're identifying
5:32
economic factors as the, as the real key behind increasing
5:36
disaster losses. So it's, it's a really
5:39
confounding issue, but it's one where I think, you know, we
5:42
should get the science right regardless.
5:46
Yeah. So, so let's get the science
5:48
right in. In a sort of general sense at
5:49
the moment, are hurricanes getting, are hurricanes affected
5:54
by climate change in any identifiable way, never mind the
5:57
economic stuff. But I mean, do you do you see
5:58
climate data which convinces you that hurricanes are getting, you
6:01
know, stronger or more frequent or anything like that?
6:03
Yeah. So, I mean, and that's the right
6:05
way to approach this is by specific phenomena that the,
6:09
the, the general big bucket, extreme weather isn't
6:12
particularly useful. Climate change is real and it
6:16
affects all weather. There there's I mean, there's,
6:18
there's no way around it that humans have affected the climate
6:21
system. If you take a look at how the
6:23
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change looks to identify
6:26
signals of climate change, the first thing they do is they they
6:29
engage in what's called detection.
6:32
And they say, have we seen a trend in the climate Gradle
6:35
could be number of hurricanes, could be the intensity of
6:38
hurricanes, how much rain falls from hurricanes, where they make
6:40
landfall. You, you can pick your favorite
6:43
variable. And they say, have we seen a
6:45
trend in that variable over climate time scales?
6:50
And, and the the canonical climate time scale is 30 years,
6:54
but it's a long time. So climate, climate time scales
6:57
you should think of as kind of like a human lifespan.
7:00
It's not what happens this week to next week or this year to
7:03
next year. And the IPCC has been very
7:06
consistent since 1989, when it was formed that the signal of
7:12
changes in what are called tropical cyclones, hurricanes,
7:15
are a subset of that has not been detected with high
7:18
confidence anywhere on the planet.
7:21
There are some hypotheses that perhaps we will have fewer
7:26
hurricanes in the future and a larger proportion of them will
7:29
be intense hurricanes. There's also hypothesis that
7:32
that hurricanes are getting wetter, meaning that there's
7:35
more rainfall falling from them. But if you look at the
7:40
projections of the IPCC, they don't expect to detect those
7:44
changes with high confidence before 2100.
7:47
So for me, it's a people can believe whatever they want to
7:50
believe about hurricanes, understand what the IPCC says,
7:55
but also understand that if you want to mitigate the impacts of
7:59
hurricanes, we don't need to know what precision what climate
8:03
is doing. We need to know that the largest
8:06
factor behind damage and human impact, other human impacts, is
8:12
what we build, where we build, how we build it, and the
8:14
policies and and procedures we put in place for dealing with
8:17
these extreme events, which existed long before people did
8:21
and will continue to have a significant impact.
8:25
Yeah, I mean, I think probably too many people think that
8:28
hurricanes are somehow a creation of, of global warming
8:31
and, you know, they've become the kind of canonical symbol of
8:34
it. Remember the Inconvenient Truth
8:36
movie had that the tropical cyclone sort of coming out of
8:40
the spiralling out of the top of this smokestack chimney, even
8:43
though it was spinning the wrong way, certainly for a Northern
8:45
Hemisphere cyclone, which bugged me because, you know, I went I
8:48
went storm chasing in 2002 off the Outer Banks of North
8:53
Carolina, Hurricane Gustav as it was.
8:55
And I was doing that for my book High Tide, looking at the
8:58
impacts of climate change. And I remember speaking to
9:02
scientists at the National Hurricane Center in Florida and
9:04
elsewhere, and they all said, you know, there's no clear
9:07
signal in the data yet. And this was in 2002 that
9:12
climate change has impacted hurricanes in any measurable
9:16
way. I think I would have been
9:17
surprised back then to he still sat here in what, 2025 and still
9:22
no signals been detected in the data.
9:24
So let's just really, really, really emphasize that.
9:27
Are you just quoting the IPCC? Is that your opinion or what?
9:29
What's what's the the the most kind of the scientific consensus
9:33
on this? Yeah.
9:35
So, so that is the scientific consensus still, and the reason
9:39
for that, it's not, it's, it's not unexpected.
9:44
If you want to look for signals of changes in climate, extreme
9:47
weather is probably one of the worst places to look.
9:52
So from 2002 until today, the most notable feature of the
9:59
climate record for hurricanes in the continent of the United
10:02
States was the period 2006 to 2017, when there was not a
10:07
single major hurricane. A major hurricane is a category
10:10
3-4 or five hurricane that hit the US.
10:13
It's almost like Al Gore's movie caused hurricanes to be scared
10:16
away from from the coast for a while.
10:19
But it also, I mean, if if you think about it, if if you are
10:23
interested in climate change, you're you're a scholar or
10:26
you're an activist and you're in your 30s, forties, 50s and
10:32
defining feature of your lived experience.
10:34
Is this this decade plus long stretch with no extreme
10:38
hurricanes hitting the US, which is, which is unprecedented in
10:41
the historical record. And so it's quite accurate to
10:45
say, well, when I think back 20 years, we didn't used to have
10:49
extreme hurricanes and today we do.
10:52
And that would be an accurate statement.
10:53
And which is why, why it's important to understand that,
10:56
that it's very difficult for you or I with our short life spans
11:01
and our ability to be in one place at at one time to actually
11:05
experience climate change. It's, it's, it's, it's very easy
11:11
to say, well, we didn't have hurricanes and now we do and
11:15
say, well, that must be due to climate change.
11:16
That, that's, that's, that's why we do science.
11:18
It's, it's, it's really important.
11:22
But at the same time, if you go back to 1900 and you say how
11:26
many hurricanes have made landfall in the continental
11:28
United States, it's 200 and some hurricanes.
11:31
It's not a large number. If I were just to take a deck of
11:35
cards and, and insert 2 aces, I'm stacking the deck.
11:39
So there's been deck change and then we were going to play
11:43
blackjack or poker or something. You would have to play a lot of
11:45
hands before you could detect that there was a change because
11:49
even though you're adding two aces to the deck, it's a subtle
11:52
change. So, so think about changes in
11:56
climate. Similarly, it, it, the, the
11:58
changes are not expected to be really large in comparison to
12:04
natural variability, which is why the IPCC doesn't expect
12:08
detection of hurricane, for example, changes to occur this
12:12
century. It's not because there's not
12:14
changes, it's because the changes that they do expect are
12:18
small in comparison to variability.
12:21
And a lot of the discussion, we can talk about this, the media
12:24
hype gets people to think, well, the changes must be massive,
12:28
right? I, I, I, I'll be able to see
12:30
them next year, over the next decade.
12:33
And that's just not where the science is right now.
12:36
And and that's a good thing because if if, if there were
12:40
changes detectable in that time frame, it would be far outside
12:44
with the scientific community scientific consensus expects
12:47
right now. Is there even a consensus about
12:49
what what the dimensions of change would be expected for to
12:54
be for tropical cyclones? I mean, let's say for a really
12:58
extreme climate scenario where we get like, I don't know, 3 or
13:00
4 plus degrees of warming, what would happen to tropical
13:04
cyclones in that in that world? Yeah, so there's literally
13:07
hundreds of modeling studies. And I tell people, you know, you
13:10
tell me what outcome you want in the future, I'll find you a
13:12
study to support that. But the general consensus, and
13:16
this is where it gets a little tricky because, you know,
13:19
science is not a democracy. You don't vote with studies.
13:23
But there was a, a review paper that Tom Knutson LED for the
13:28
World Meteorological Organization where they
13:31
summarized the literature available at that time.
13:35
And, and the, the, the kind of the fat part of the bell curve
13:38
is an expectation that the strongest tropical cyclones
13:42
might get a little bit stronger, single digit percentage
13:46
stronger, there might be fewer overall tropical cyclones.
13:50
So for fewer storms of hurricane strength, of those fewer storms,
13:55
a greater proportion might be extreme storms.
13:59
That gets confused in public discourse when people say a
14:02
greater proportion, people think that means more storms.
14:05
And that's not necessarily the case.
14:06
If you have fewer hurricanes and a greater proportion, it might
14:09
just be the same number. All of this is highly, highly
14:13
uncertain. So, So that's the fat part of
14:16
the bell curve, but the bell curve has some pretty long tails
14:18
on either side. It, it is an area where there is
14:23
a lot of uncertainty. If you go from scientists like
14:27
Kerry Emanuel, who was very bullish on climates effect on
14:30
hurricanes, to Tom Knutson to Chris Lancy, to others, you can
14:35
get a lot of different opinions. And, and this is one of those
14:38
areas where if you say scientific consensus, the
14:41
scientific consensus in this particular area is, is wide and
14:44
flat. It's, it's not like temperature
14:46
change with temperature change, it's narrow and, and tall.
14:49
There's a pretty strong consensus on, on the effects of,
14:52
of greenhouse gases on, on temperatures for hurricanes.
14:57
There's there's much more diversity of opinion and that's
14:59
OK. That doesn't limit us from from
15:03
responding to climate change, either energy policy or
15:05
adaptation. What it does though, is it sets
15:07
up a situation where it's very easy for people to make claims
15:11
that are very strong and but very much out of step with this,
15:16
this broad perspective of of the expert.
15:19
Community. But if the expert community
15:21
believes, as you're asserting, that hurricanes are not
15:25
identifiably getting impacted by climate change, how come you
15:29
pointing this out gets you cancelled?
15:31
Yeah, Well, first thing is it, it I can't be cancelled.
15:35
That's one thing I've learned. It's so so I mean, it really
15:40
goes back to, you know, you mentioned it, Al Gore's movie
15:43
with a hurricane coming out of the smokestack.
15:46
At that time, Hurricane Katrina had just had, you know,
15:49
devastating impacts to New Orleans.
15:51
More than 1000 people died. It was a, you know, it was a
15:56
horrific event compounded by horrific policy failures by the
16:00
Bush administration. For better or worse, hurricanes
16:06
have become kind of the poster child, literally of, of the
16:09
climate movement. They're very photogenic.
16:12
They come around every year. They're reliable and they, they
16:16
make for a talking point at some point.
16:20
And I, you know, I lived through this in the 2000's, the climate
16:25
activist community decided it's, it's not enough to tell people
16:29
that temperatures are going to increase by single digit degrees
16:32
by 2100. You know, people have to take
16:34
the kids to school. They got to pay the bills.
16:36
You know, that's, that's not going to move the dial for
16:38
climate activism. And in the United States in
16:41
particular, there was this idea that we bring climate home to
16:44
people through the lens of extreme events, through extreme
16:48
weather. And we convince people that the
16:51
extreme weather that they see on TV, that maybe they've
16:53
experienced in the community, that was caused by the
16:56
proverbial smokestack. For me at the time, I, I, I tell
17:03
a story that in 2006, I won an award from the National Academy
17:06
of Sciences, the Roger Ravelle Award for my work on extreme
17:10
weather and the role of, of population change.
17:13
That was two months before Al Gore's movie came out.
17:15
For me, everything changed at that moment because doing
17:22
research that showed that the impacts of extreme weather are
17:25
due to us making decisions about where we live and how much
17:30
wealth we put in harm's way. If you live, you know, by the
17:34
ocean or in the floodplain, you're going to experience
17:37
disasters. It's if that's the way it is.
17:40
But that, that was a very inconvenient message for those
17:44
who are saying extreme weather is the result of climate change
17:49
and the impacts that you see on your TV and now your social
17:53
media feed are due to greenhouse gases.
17:56
So, so it, it was a very weird experience for me finding my, my
18:00
research go from being celebrated to being criticized
18:05
for being inconvenient. And, and I mean, to be honest,
18:09
in, in the academic community, in, if you look at, you know,
18:12
Google Scholar and so on, my research does this just just
18:16
fine. You, you, you would not be able
18:18
to say, oh, this guy's, you know, the subject of a, of a tax
18:21
from environmentalists by looking at my academic record,
18:25
it, it is more a social media phenomenon and you know, more a
18:28
political phenomenon that I've, I've, you know, took a while to,
18:34
to understand and, and come to grips with.
18:36
But there is a broad understanding in the research
18:41
community of what drives the costs and impacts of disasters.
18:46
Even if it's not popular and not too many people stick their
18:48
necks out. It's not particularly
18:50
controversial. And part of the reason it's not
18:53
rocket science either. It's, it's pretty obvious.
18:55
If you have two big hotels on the beach and they get
18:58
flattened, you have twice as much damage as if you have one
19:01
hotel. I mean, it's.
19:02
It's that simple. Well, zero hotels if you're if
19:05
the same storm was heading in 19 O1, I mean these these places
19:08
were undeveloped. So and that's even taking a
19:12
counter inflation. So you've done this work which
19:13
is normalizing. Is that what it's called where
19:15
you? So we so Chris Lanton, after we
19:18
were on the basketball court, we decided to write a paper where
19:21
we we wanted to adjust the historical costs of hurricanes
19:26
hitting the continental United States for more property, more
19:29
people. And we called that normalizing.
19:32
We invented a word and actually it's, it kind of took off.
19:37
There's, there's probably 70 or 80 studies now normalizing the
19:42
impacts of extreme weather events all around the world,
19:45
floods in China, landslides in Switzerland.
19:49
I mean, there's, there's a lot and the idea there is simply to,
19:55
to come up with a methodology to adjust and there's, there's many
19:58
different approaches to normalizing.
20:01
These studies are very popular in insurance and reinsurance
20:04
because they use models to assess what.
20:08
What risk is this? And this is a independent
20:11
methodology to kind of verify or evaluate their models.
20:16
And I mean, for example, we we find in our research, and I can,
20:20
you know, this is some breaking news where Jessica Winkle,
20:23
former student of mine and who I've collaborated with for a
20:26
long time, we are updating the normalized US hurricane record.
20:31
And the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane is in 2025 terms
20:37
approaching $400 billion of losses that that is maybe four
20:43
times the cost of Katrina. So, so things could be much,
20:48
much worse. And it's really hard for us to
20:50
get our mind around the fact that not only does climate
20:53
change, but society changes and society changes in a much faster
20:58
rate than the climate does. Swiss Reinsurance estimates that
21:03
overall over the planet ensured losses from extreme weather
21:09
events are increasing at 7% per year.
21:12
That's not because extreme weather is getting 7% worse per
21:15
year. They identify the largest signal
21:19
to be exposure. So that's, that's, you know,
21:21
again, what we build and where we build it and how we protect
21:24
it. So, so trying to put that in
21:27
context is really important. It's just that the climate
21:30
debate kind of kind of kind of stuck its nose into this issue
21:34
and became very political. Yeah, I mean you, yeah, you'd
21:39
expect the insurance industry to take an interest.
21:41
And I remember there was a time when all the climate works I was
21:45
working with were, you know, hoping that the insurance
21:47
industry would be the ones to tell the fossil fuel industry to
21:49
stop because it was going to cost them and they were going
21:51
out of business. But that seems not to have
21:53
happened, at least to anything like the extent that was that
21:55
was expected. But all right, so hurricanes are
21:58
out. What?
21:59
What are the what? What?
22:01
What about the other so-called climate disasters?
22:03
What other extreme weather phenomenon are or are not
22:06
related to to climate? Climate impacts.
22:09
Yeah. So, so one thing to understand
22:12
and it's really important is that for any phenomena, I can
22:16
find an expert or a even a, a research paper to, to support a
22:21
claim that this this particular event is getting worse.
22:24
So more intense. What?
22:26
What's the what we need to do collectively is not to cherry
22:31
pick this or that expert or this or that study, but we need to
22:34
assess the science broadly. And then the Intergovernmental
22:41
Panel on Climate Change, IPCCI often say if it didn't exist,
22:46
we'd have to invent it. There are hundreds of thousands,
22:49
literally millions of peer reviewed papers published on
22:52
aspects of climate every year. And understanding what that
22:56
sprawling literature says is a huge task.
23:00
And so for extreme events, the IPC CS Working Group 1, which
23:04
focuses on physical sciences has over over its 30 years of
23:11
existence summarize the literature on extreme events.
23:14
And I often point to that. My research is cited in there,
23:17
others is cited in there and and from my perspective, their
23:22
research is consistent with the consensus again, which could be
23:26
wide or could be narrow in the community.
23:29
And so I often just simply point to the IPCC as the best
23:33
available snapshot of where the science is.
23:36
So with that long introduction window, phenomena by phenomena
23:41
where there's the most certainty among the expert community in
23:46
changes in climate that are the result of greenhouse gases is a
23:49
heat. So extreme temperatures, heat
23:53
waves have increased not everywhere, but in many places
23:56
around the world. And the IPCC has identified
24:00
those increases as being due to accumulating greenhouse gases in
24:03
the atmosphere. The next most certain conclusion
24:07
of the IPCC is that extreme precipitation has increased.
24:11
Here. We have to be careful because
24:13
extreme precipitation is is kind of like an inkblot.
24:17
If I say it to a normal person, they'll think heavy downpours,
24:21
they'll think floods. The scientific community is very
24:24
precise when they talk about extreme precipitation.
24:26
Sometimes they mean it's precipitation at 95% threshold
24:33
for a particular location. Here in in Colorado, that's not
24:39
a particularly high threshold. We don't get a lot of rain here.
24:42
Extreme precipitation is not the same as flooding, and the IPCC
24:46
in their last report was was very good about making that
24:49
clear. But the the IPCC is is fairly
24:53
strong that extreme precipitation has increased in
24:56
in some locations around the world.
24:59
After that, things get pretty uncertain whether it's floods,
25:06
tropical cyclones, tornadoes, drought and drought is another
25:11
concept of where the IPCC uses 4 definitions of drought.
25:15
And the IPCC says, well, soil moisture deficits, if we use
25:19
that as a measure of drought, they have increased and they
25:22
hypothesize that they are due to the increasing heat.
25:29
But if you look at hydrological drought, so which is let's say
25:32
stream flow or meteorological drought, which is rainfall,
25:36
there's much less certainty worldwide.
25:38
Once you start going down the list of different extreme
25:41
events, you find that a lot of the headlines, the things that
25:44
we see on TV, the big flooding in Germany, the tornado that
25:48
goes through the US Midwest, the, you know, the, the typhoon
25:53
that that makes landfall in Bangladesh.
25:56
There's not much certainty at all that there have been
26:01
detectable changes in those phenomena, much less attributing
26:05
any changes to human caused climate change.
26:08
Again, the reason for this is if you want to look for the signal
26:10
of climate change, it helps to have a lot of data.
26:13
And This is why temperature, which is measured everywhere on
26:17
the planet every moment for a long time, and precipitation,
26:21
which happens or doesn't happen everywhere on the planet every
26:25
moment, are the best places to look for signals of climate
26:27
change. You have dozens of extreme
26:30
events, maybe hundreds depending on how you define them every
26:34
year. It's not like the millions and
26:36
millions of data points we have for temperature and
26:38
precipitation. The IPCC has been very
26:40
consistent over time. And, and one of the, the, the
26:44
notable things I've observed is that in the media, in particular
26:49
the, the mainstream media, there's much less referencing of
26:53
the IPCC on extreme events. They they tend to go to it's.
26:58
Something interesting, that's why I.
27:00
Mean they tend to go to people who make stronger claims.
27:02
And so I mean it, it, it is, you know, I, I give full props to
27:08
the IPCC for playing things straight for 30 years on this
27:11
topic, even though it's not particularly popular and not not
27:16
widely appreciated. The IPCC doesn't trumpet these
27:19
conclusions for sure, but they're there.
27:22
And if anyone wants to, you know, look, go to Chapter 12,
27:26
Working Group 1, Table 12.12, and it's summarized pretty well
27:30
there. You've obviously started this
27:32
before the, I mean, I've lost count of the number of headlines
27:38
I've seen saying, you know, ex floods in Pakistan 50 times more
27:42
likely or five times more likely or whatever it was.
27:45
And that's then referenced back to an attribution study.
27:48
So the way that they get over the lack of data, as you just
27:51
said, there's lots of data for precipitation and temperature,
27:54
but not much on extreme events because by definition, they're
27:56
infrequent. So your signal to noise ratio
27:58
isn't there is to run it through a climate model and then run it
28:01
run the climate model 100,000 times.
28:03
And there's your, there's your lots of data.
28:04
And that's how attribution studies work, right?
28:06
Yeah, I'm just going to say there, there, there has been
28:08
this, you know, we, we live in an era of alternative facts and
28:13
there has been this development of a, I guess a counter
28:18
narrative to the IPCC. And it's it's, it's one group in
28:23
particular world weather attribution.
28:26
They say that, you know, their goal is to get in the media and
28:29
in the days after an event and support lawsuits against fossil
28:32
fuel companies and they bypass the peer review process.
28:37
They put out press releases. And what they do is, you know,
28:41
I've, I've critiqued their methodology, but they, they come
28:44
up with a, a, a pretty straightforward, simple method
28:47
to identify the, the asserted influence of human caused
28:53
climate change on extreme weather.
28:55
And as you say, they say, well, this event was, you know, 40
28:58
times more likely, 7 times more likely because of climate change
29:03
that they're in a difficult spot.
29:05
Because if something is 40 times more likely than over the last
29:09
50 years, there should be a trend there.
29:13
And if you don't see a trend at the IPCC concludes, then
29:17
somebody is is is not correct. So but it has been very
29:23
influential in in the media in particular.
29:27
I don't think it's been particularly influential in the
29:29
scientific community our for that matter, in in broad based
29:33
public opinion, but it does occupy a lot of attention.
29:37
I. Mean they wouldn't I don't think
29:39
they'd be characterized. They characterized themselves as
29:41
a counter narrative to the IPCCI think they see themselves.
29:45
I mean, I'd have to get someone on to talk about it, but you
29:48
know, it's, it's it's amazing really how sort of politicized
29:52
this issue has become. I mean, you've been, I said you
29:54
were cancelled. I mean, you, you think you even
29:56
refer to yourself as he who must not be named in climate science.
29:59
There's a big picture of Voldemort on your on your page.
30:02
You know, you're even on this, this smog's climate
30:04
disinformation database. You know, what have you done to
30:09
get to get this kind of a name for yourself?
30:11
Surely not just pointing out accuracies in science.
30:13
Maybe you're just, maybe you're too 1 sided or something.
30:15
Yeah, you know, you know, others can decide what that is.
30:18
I've been doing this for a long time.
30:19
I was, I was an early and probably one of the more
30:23
successful bloggers if people know what a blog is from 20
30:27
years ago in, in the climate space, you know, I got, I, I got
30:32
in trouble for a lot of reasons. I don't think it's just the
30:34
extreme weather stuff. I mean, early on when there was
30:37
the controversy over Michael Mann's hockey stick, I tried to
30:41
broker at the taunt between Steve McIntyre, man's arch
30:46
enemy, and Michael Mann and, you know, offered to help them write
30:49
a paper together to, to identify areas of agreement and
30:53
disagreement and, and, you know, the no.
30:59
So McIntyre said he would be happy to participate.
31:01
Michael Mann said he would never work with the devil.
31:04
The, the, the climate debate from very on evolved in a way
31:09
that was very morality and Manichaean base that there's
31:13
there's good people and there's bad people.
31:15
Pick a side and if you're not on the good people.
31:17
And the and the bad people are all funded by the oil industry,
31:20
right? You yourself included.
31:22
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's another story too, just to be
31:25
sure, I mean. We'll get into that because I
31:27
think you were, you were hounded by politicians, weren't you?
31:29
To? Yeah.
31:29
Yeah, I was investigating by Congress, accused of taking
31:32
money from Exxon Mobil. But yeah, I mean, you know this
31:35
as well, too. I mean, it really leapt, you
31:39
know, into the stratosphere with Bjorn Lombard's book.
31:43
In 2001, Skeptical Environmentalist and the Climate
31:46
Community organized Steve Schneider.
31:50
The late Steve Schneider, who I knew fairly well from from my
31:53
time at ENCAR National Center for Atmosphere Research,
31:55
organized a campaign to get Cambridge University Press to
31:59
cancel his book. Unfortunately, Cambridge didn't
32:01
do that, and the world survived Lombard's book.
32:04
But there was this. I played my pie.
32:06
I threw a pie in his face. I know, I know.
32:09
Yeah. So I mean, you know this very
32:11
well that that there was this idea that that, you know, you're
32:15
on the side of virtue or, or you're on the side of evil.
32:18
And that came to define the climate issue and, and issues of
32:23
nuance. And unfortunately, what I would
32:26
call scientific integrity, just calling things as they are and
32:29
letting the chips fall where they may rather than creating
32:34
messages to support narratives. And it's kind of taken root.
32:38
I mean, I can tell you. And after George Bush was
32:41
elected, the National Academy of Sciences organized a one day
32:47
workshop. It had like 5 or 7 experts.
32:51
I was one of them that was invited.
32:54
I before I went and it was with the Secretary of Treasury.
32:56
It was with a couple senators, Democrats and Republicans.
33:00
And the idea was to help the Bush administration to
33:03
appreciate and understand where climate science was at the time,
33:06
which is very similar to where it is today.
33:10
And, and I was invited and before I went, I got an e-mail
33:13
from a very prominent leading climate scientist.
33:18
This was one of the things that's kind of one of those
33:20
career defining moments. He said to me, and I'm just I'll
33:23
just paraphrase. He said, said, you do really
33:25
good research. It's it's you know, I agree with
33:28
it. It's accurate related to
33:29
societal effects of extreme weather, But you have to be
33:32
careful going into a political setting that your research might
33:36
be misused by the people who are opposed to climate action.
33:41
And so maybe you should downplay or not even share your
33:46
conclusions and emphasize the importance of, of mitigating
33:49
greenhouse gases. And for me, I got the sense, I
33:53
don't know if this was the intent, but the, the, the, the
33:56
sense that I was being asked to misrepresent my research for
33:59
political purposes. And I decided not to do that.
34:03
And so, you know, really, since, you know, for the last 20 years,
34:07
I, I've lived my professional life out in public.
34:10
I, I all my research and you know, my, my approach to
34:14
research and my, my, my good ideas, my bad ideas I put out in
34:18
public. And some of them aren't popular.
34:21
And it's fine. It's, it's, you know, I'm, I'm
34:23
not in a popularity contest. I can tell you I also do
34:26
research on transgender. Athletes, I was going to say
34:29
you're not not not happy enough being cancelled by the climate
34:31
community. You you go and study like trans
34:33
issue in sports. I mean, come on.
34:35
Right, right. But you know, the interesting
34:36
thing is that the, the people who criticize me for my climate
34:40
research love my work on trans athletes because I'm a I'm an
34:45
advocate for regulated inclusion and vice versa.
34:49
And so and, and that's OK. I mean, researchers shouldn't
34:56
evaluate their success by who's politics are are are benefiting
35:01
from your research. That's that's not how it works.
35:05
So it's, you know, so so I've been in the climate space and,
35:08
you know, at some point maybe, you know, if I had a time
35:11
machine, I'd revisit this decision.
35:13
But at some point I decided, you know, I'm going to focus my
35:15
career on controversial science and how they politicize context.
35:21
And you know, it's important. Yeah, so tell us the story about
35:25
how you got holed up in front of Congress.
35:27
So yeah. Yeah.
35:31
So in 2013, and I occasionally give testimony before the US
35:37
Congress. Originally, I was always invited
35:40
by Democrats, and then eventually I got invited by
35:42
Republicans. Interestingly, I say pretty much
35:44
the same thing. Yeah.
35:47
But in 2013 I testified, I don't remember what it was the House
35:51
Science Committee and then the Senate Energy and Commerce
35:53
Committee, Same testimony before the House and Senate.
35:56
And I think it's my Senate testimony.
35:58
So I, when you give testimony before the US Congress, you
36:01
start with a 5 minute, basically a 5 minute presentation and
36:05
you're limited. There's a little little buzzer
36:08
that that goes off. So my 5 minutes, it went viral
36:12
on YouTube. I don't know why it had four
36:15
400,000 views in, in the, in the, the weeks after my
36:20
testimony brought a lot of attention.
36:22
What did I testify about? I, I summarized the conclusions
36:26
of the IPCC special report on extreme events.
36:30
This was a report that came out in in 2012 and said basically
36:34
what what we've been talking about, that societal factors are
36:37
the most important damages. We don't detect changes in most
36:42
metrics of extreme weather events.
36:44
So I summarized it, it went viral, brought a lot of
36:49
attention to me in my work. Just a couple months later,
36:53
President Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, testified
36:57
before the same Senate committee.
37:00
And he got, as we say in Colorado, he got a little
37:01
forward on his skis in some of the claims he made.
37:05
And one of the senators called him out on it.
37:08
And unfortunately, that senator name checked me.
37:12
And so while we had Professor Pelkey here a couple months ago
37:15
summarizing the IPCC and he said things that were contrary to to
37:19
what you're telling us, it was embarrassing for Holdren.
37:22
I get it. He went back to the White House
37:25
and he he published on the White House website a six page, I'm
37:31
going to call it a screed. It's kind of the sort of thing
37:33
your crazy uncle might put on Facebook, just basically
37:36
ranching and raving about me. And I realized, you know, the
37:39
White House is truly a bully pulpit.
37:43
Emphasis on bully. That brought a lot of attention
37:46
to me and, and and soon after a member of Congress, Wall
37:50
Grijalva from New Mexico, who recently passed away, he wrote a
37:55
letter to to the president of my university and also several
37:58
other academics. And he said we have reason to
38:01
believe that Professor Pelkey may be taking money from Exxon
38:05
Mobil in exchange for his testimony to Congress because
38:10
his views are contrary to President Obama's science
38:13
advisor. That that letter and the
38:16
subsequent investigation by my university really turned my life
38:20
upside down and changed the course of my career.
38:23
It was, it was, you know, I've, I've had oral surgery and I'd
38:27
much prefer oral surgery to, to that sort of thing.
38:30
But, but there's a few, I mean, there's a few details that meant
38:35
like a few university presidents refused to investigate their
38:39
faculty. They said no, they they have
38:41
academic freedom. My university.
38:43
This happened to several academics.
38:44
It wasn't just you. Right.
38:46
And it was, I think it was 7 in total.
38:48
Judy Curry was another one like Steve Hayward was another one.
38:51
I don't know all the don't remember all the people I do
38:54
know. I think Michael Crowe, the
38:57
president of Arizona State, said no up the road from, from
39:01
Grijalva's district said no, we're not going to investigate.
39:04
My, my university investigated. It was fine.
39:06
You know, show all your financial records, show all your
39:09
emails, show all the drafts of your testimony.
39:11
This was, you see, Boulder, was it?
39:13
Yeah, University, Colorado Boulder.
39:15
I, you know, I have never taken money from Exxon Mobil or, or,
39:19
or energy interests. And, you know, I said it so
39:22
publicly at the time. And, you know, I being a very
39:25
public figure, I, you know, was very public about how, how, how
39:29
absurd this was. I called it a witch hunt.
39:32
There was some support from the scientific community.
39:35
You know, the American Neurological Society, to their
39:37
credit, said you, you know, Congress shouldn't be
39:39
investigating. They shouldn't be investigating
39:41
Michael Mann. They shouldn't be investigating
39:42
Rodger Pelkey. I was a defender of Michael Mann
39:45
when he was being investigated by Congress, you know, a decade
39:48
before. And, and so, but, but that
39:53
basically and, and I, I, I think it's fair to say for a year or
39:56
two, I was pretty much cancelled.
39:58
Like all my speaking invitations were, were rescinded.
40:02
I, you know, was not asked to co-author papers with colleagues
40:07
and and that's what led me to working on sports for.
40:11
About about four or five years, which I continued to do, which
40:13
was a, that's how I got into working on transgender athletes,
40:17
because there's plenty of controversies involving science
40:20
in a lot of areas. But, but that was one where I, I
40:24
realized that, you know, the, the climate issue had gotten to
40:29
the point where and, and I was less concerned about a
40:34
politician politicizing climate issues than I was with my
40:39
colleagues there. There were there and there
40:42
continue to be. And I think they're much, much
40:44
less impactful in the community than they were.
40:47
But there were what, what the journalist Keith Klore called
40:50
the science police. There were people who really
40:53
wanted to police discourse in support of a preferred narrative
40:57
that was in support of preferred politics.
41:00
There's less of that now. And it's, it's, it's still
41:03
prevalent in, in, in many areas. And think of the origins of
41:06
COVID, for example, which is another highly politicized
41:09
issue. But for me, that was, you know,
41:13
that that was that was one of the points in my career that
41:16
definitely marked a significant term.
41:19
But haven't you just confirmed how evil you are though by going
41:21
off to work for the American Enterprise Institute?
41:23
I mean, that's a right wing think tank.
41:25
Presumably they take money from the fossil fuels industry, so
41:27
maybe these Democrat witch hunters were right all along.
41:29
Yeah. So the American Enterprise
41:31
Institute, which I affiliated with in 2024, and then after I
41:35
announced I was retiring from the University of Colorado, they
41:37
asked me to join the staff there.
41:39
It's a fantastic place to work. the US has a very strong think
41:43
tank culture and, and to understand think tanks, some of
41:49
them are advocacy think tanks. Like they take a position and
41:52
everyone that signs on kind of supports that position.
41:58
American Enterprise Industry, AEI historically is center
42:00
right. They sit and, you know, in
42:03
Dupont Circle and watch it right next to the Brookings Institute,
42:05
which is center left right. Now the US pretty much has four
42:10
distinct political polls. You've got the MAGA Republicans,
42:16
you got centre right, you get centre LATCH and you get the
42:18
progressive Democrats. AEI has historically been centre
42:22
right and, and they are extremely strong in stating that
42:29
even though historically they're identified as being on the
42:32
centre right, their scholars have complete academic freedom.
42:37
And so there are people at AEI who are, I would say quite
42:43
liberal in the American sense, kind of on the left.
42:45
There are people who there's a few people who are mega, a lot
42:48
of people in the center right, a lot of people in the center
42:50
left. It's a very diverse place.
42:53
No one at AEI in the time that I've been affiliated with them
42:57
asked me who I vote for, asked me what my party registration
43:00
is, asked me what my politics are.
43:02
The president of AEI, Robert Doerr, who I think is a a great
43:06
leader, he tells me all the time he says keep doing what you're
43:10
doing. There's whatever it is, whatever
43:12
you're doing, keep doing it. So the other thing I've come to
43:16
appreciate AE is funding. And I think this is just about
43:21
right. 70% comes from individual donors and a much smaller
43:25
proportion comes from corporations and foundations.
43:29
AEI has not historically been funded by the energy or fossil
43:33
fuel industry because they haven't had expertise in climate
43:39
or energy in there was a time, and I think it's like 10 or 15
43:43
years ago, they kind of flirted with some folks who were more in
43:45
the, what we call the climate denial camp.
43:48
There's none of that now. And they'd have a nice firewall
43:53
between the scholars and the fundraising.
43:56
So I, you know, I, I, I'd be hard pressed to name, you know,
44:01
where their funding comes from. And I don't, I don't care if
44:04
they support me to do my work and tell me to do what I do.
44:08
I think that's great. I'm, I'm having a debate with,
44:11
with Ben Ziker, another AEI scholar in September on the EPA
44:15
endangerment fighting. He thinks it should, it should
44:18
go away and I think it should stay.
44:21
And we're both AEI scholars and the, the institution is, is, is
44:25
organizing a debate around that topic.
44:28
I the last thing I'll say is I have experienced a more
44:33
confidence in academic freedom in the year plus I've been
44:37
affiliated with AEI than I felt at my university for the, you
44:41
know, 10 or 15 years prior. So the, the last thing that
44:46
anyone should do is evaluate anyone's arguments based on who
44:50
they're affiliated with. It matters, of course, if I was
44:53
taking money into the table from Exxon Mobil, that would be
44:56
important to disclose. I'm not.
44:59
But at the same time, if you're in the business of ideas and
45:03
argument, at some level we should engage ideas and argument
45:07
on their own merits, recognizing that you know, there will be
45:11
affiliations and there is money in politics, but reality also
45:16
matters. And it's it can't be just boiled
45:17
down to interest. Yeah.
45:19
And I'm playing devil's advocate to an extent here because
45:22
actually I don't think there's anything wrong with having
45:24
conservatives doing climate science.
45:26
Like I would actually prefer to have a world where science was
45:29
more politically diverse because I think that would help help us
45:33
not have get into this situation where you've got this incredible
45:36
partisanship now in culture wars, in science.
45:40
And as you say, not just climate science, but COVID and other
45:43
issues too. So something has happened,
45:45
though, hasn't it? Because the surveys of, of
45:47
academia show that there's been this trend towards like
45:50
incredible levels of liberalism and progressivism in the last
45:55
what, few decades, I think. I mean, so it's now vanishingly
45:57
unlikely to find a Republican doing, I don't know, even even
46:01
climate research. And I, I think that's a problem.
46:03
I mean, do you? Oh, yeah, absolutely.
46:05
I think, and I've, you know, I've written on this for for a
46:07
long time and it's, it's been a long time coming.
46:12
I am, you know, on record being strongly opposed to what the
46:16
Trump administration is doing to institutions of science and
46:19
academia. But I think we have to
46:21
understand that this this is not an overnight issue and and both
46:26
sides of the political spectrum played a role.
46:29
If you look back, I mean, we mentioned the the debate over
46:31
Bjorn Lomborg in the early 2000s, but it wasn't long after
46:35
that, that with the the re election of George W Bush, the
46:41
scientific community in the United States organized itself
46:45
to be in opposition to at the time, Republicans.
46:48
There was a quite a prominent book at the time called the
46:51
Republican War on Science. And Democrats and Republicans
46:55
both liked that framing. They in the United States and
47:00
you know, it happens everywhere, but we have what we call wedge
47:03
issues. These are issues that you can
47:05
politicians can bring to the public to divide them.
47:08
Transgender athletes is an is another one.
47:11
They're they're very simple. They're very black and white,
47:15
good and bad. And science was readily
47:17
available, partly because the the Academy and scientific
47:20
institutions had leaned more to the left that had also become
47:24
more overtly political in, in their work.
47:30
And I, you know, I remember before the 2004 election, I
47:35
think it was the first time ever something like 47 Nobel Prize
47:38
winners signed on a a letter and endorsing John Kerry.
47:43
And, you know, it's, it's very easy for people on the left to
47:47
rally around that. And it's also very easy for
47:50
people on the right say, oh, look, there are a bunch of
47:52
liberals in the scientific establishment.
47:55
When Barack Obama ran, one of his tag lines was we're going to
47:59
restore science to its proper place.
48:02
And it's, you know, proper place was the bosom of the Democratic
48:04
Party when when the the Trump administration first came in in
48:09
2016, they identified science scientists as people who were
48:16
opposed to mega. And that was not wrong.
48:21
JD Vance, the current US vice president, gave a speech couple
48:24
years ago where he said the universities are the enemy.
48:28
And so this has been a long time coming.
48:33
Climate science has been kind of the the tip of the spear.
48:36
It's been very politicized for very long.
48:39
A leading spokesperson as a celebrated spokesperson for the
48:43
climate movement is is Michael Mann, University of
48:45
Pennsylvania. Just a few weeks ago he put out
48:48
on I think it was on blue sky or, or or or X or Twitter A, a
48:53
statement that it's time to invoke the Second Amendment
48:57
against Donald Trump. Second Amendment is in the
48:59
United States the right to bear arms.
49:02
And you know that that was not a very subtle threat against the
49:07
president of the United States. Whatever you think about Donald
49:11
Trump or Joe Biden or whatever, the more political, overtly
49:16
political, the scientific community is in One Direction,
49:21
the more it puts a target on itself for for being subject to
49:25
political attack. I tell people in the United
49:27
States, there's something like 5 million PhDs total in a, in a
49:32
voting population of like 180 million.
49:37
There are something like 70 million people who have terminal
49:41
high school degrees. So no college.
49:45
If, if we in the PhD class think we're going to be a political
49:48
movement or that people are going to care that we're
49:52
credentialed, we're going to get destroyed in democratic populist
49:56
politics. And so, you know, set aside
50:00
who's right, who's wrong about the merits of the issue.
50:03
As a matter of just pure power, politics experts need a broad
50:07
base of political support. And that means Republicans, and
50:11
that means Democrats, and that means progressives, and that
50:13
means mega. And we we we ignore that reality
50:17
at our own peril, because if we go pick a fight, we're going to
50:22
probably lose. Well, you have picked a fight
50:24
and you are losing. I mean, every single institution
50:27
of American scientific probity is being defunded aggressively
50:32
by the Trump administration from the National Science Foundation
50:34
to NOAA to I mean, well, obviously what's going on with
50:38
Harvard is, is, is another issue as well.
50:40
I mean, so it seems to what you know, what, what can we do and
50:44
what, what sort of sides do you do you take on, on, on what's
50:47
currently happening. Yeah, I think, I mean, I think
50:49
it's, it's, it's horrific. I think the, the mega Trump
50:53
folks are taking a Wrecking Ball to institutions of expertise and
50:58
institutions of science and academia.
51:00
I do think Harvard is, is part of all of this.
51:04
I, you know, the, the mega movement is, is right now
51:11
focused on quote, UN quote, owning the libs, which, you
51:14
know, in the US fake means they just want to cause destruction
51:17
and harm to their political enemies.
51:21
We in the expert community need to begin this, this and it's
51:27
going to be difficult this long process of rebuilding broad
51:31
based public support for what we do.
51:35
I don't, I don't know what can be done, you know, in the, in
51:38
the days and weeks ahead, you know, go, go to the courts,
51:41
fight the Trump administration. But if we take the bait and we
51:46
say, well, we're the party of the extreme left and we're going
51:49
to fight the party of the extreme right, I think that's a
51:51
mistake. One thing to recognize in the
51:54
United States is, you know, if you just pay attention to the
51:56
media, there's a lot of focus on Donald Trump and opposition to
52:00
Donald Trump. Most normal Americans are, are,
52:03
are not in either of those camps.
52:06
They're they're living their lives, they're working, they're
52:08
paying the bills. So I do think that that we
52:14
experts need to re establish kind of the fact that we're in a
52:19
social contract. The public provides support for
52:23
the work that we do, whether it's academic freedom, whether
52:25
it's federal financing of grants and contracts to do research.
52:29
And the expectation is that everybody benefits from the, the
52:32
work that that that scientists and and universities do.
52:37
That social contract has has truly broken down.
52:41
And if you look at public opinion, confidence in science
52:45
and confidence in the medical establishment, confidence in
52:48
university has taken a dip. And it it's pronounced among
52:52
mega Republicans, but it's also across the board, it's among
52:56
Democrats. It's among the only group that
53:00
has not seen a a such a dip in confidence in expertise are
53:06
liberal, wealthy, well educated Democrats, people who are just
53:12
like the scientific community. Pretty much everyone else,
53:15
whether they're Hispanics or blacks or high school graduates,
53:18
has seen a loss of confidence. And we need to work to restore
53:22
that confidence. And we're not going to restore
53:24
it by by being the resistance. MMM.
53:27
I, I mean, I'm, I'm trying to figure out why this happened.
53:30
Obviously it's a multi decadal trend, this sort of
53:33
polarization, political polarization within science.
53:36
Was it, I mean, was it COVID? Did something big happen or
53:39
because of the COVID pandemic which somehow really spiraled
53:42
this? And and if So, what was it?
53:44
Yeah, so I mean, the, the, I guess the, the fuel, the, the,
53:47
the gasoline was, was available when the fire was already
53:50
burning and COVID kind of combined the 2 the COVID
53:55
mandates. You know, again, the the United
53:57
States stands apart from most countries around the world in
54:02
that there was no centralized expert advisory body on COVID.
54:08
You know, in the UK you had the sage and you know, most, most
54:11
countries had some high level body.
54:13
And we can critique, you know, what they did, how they did it,
54:17
but they existed and they provided a kind of a, a point of
54:21
departure for discussion and, and debate of, of COVID science
54:25
in the US. The Trump administration had
54:27
what was called the, the, the COVID task force.
54:31
And it was it was a group of, as the Trump administration does, a
54:35
group of political appointees. So in the US system of
54:38
government, you have what are called career officials.
54:41
These are government officials in the bureaucracy that, you
54:43
know, are there from president to president.
54:45
And they often have very specialized expertise, whether
54:48
it's intelligence or help or whatever.
54:50
And then above them, you have what are political appointees.
54:53
Each president can appoint their people to lead the bureaucracy.
54:58
The Trump administration's quote, UN quote, expert body for
55:03
COVID was political appointees. They were his people and it
55:09
became very political very quickly.
55:11
And in the US you had what are called red states, Republican
55:15
LED States and blue states, Democrat LED states that
55:20
implemented very different sorts of policies for masking,
55:23
distancing, school closures and COVID.
55:26
It was interesting because if you if you look prior to COVID,
55:31
the the side of the political spectrum that was the most
55:33
skeptical about vaccination were Democrats.
55:37
Yeah. And the more, the more, yeah,
55:40
the more left you were, the more skeptical you were of of
55:42
vaccination, while COVID flipped that on its head.
55:44
And now? Now Democrats seem to love
55:46
vaccination and Republicans don't.
55:48
See this in the in the career of RFK junior, can't you?
55:50
I mean, he's was a icon of the left and now he's now he's MAGA
55:54
through and through leading. Exactly that's.
55:56
Destroying vaccines in the US. Yeah, that's the personification
56:00
of, of, of that trend. But I do think, and if you look
56:03
at the public opinion polls, COVID, COVID was a, a big
56:06
factor. But, but it's important to
56:08
understand that, that the dynamics at play were decades in
56:14
the making. There was, and I, you know, I
56:15
lived through it. There was this idea that in the
56:20
Uki think it was Mark Henderson wrote a book called the, the,
56:23
the the geek Manifesto and which was basically the idea, the idea
56:29
that that we in the expert class should create our own political
56:32
party. We should, we should, or, you
56:34
know, lead a political party because we, we know more than
56:37
other people. And I, I do think my community
56:41
got a little bit heady in the political space thinking that,
56:45
you know, we're the experts. We know how to respond to
56:48
climate change. We know what to do on different
56:51
topics and people should respect our expertise and the people
56:55
that are opposed to us. Well, you know, they're no rough
56:57
things. They're anti science.
56:59
And again, it, it, it people can point fingers, but we have to
57:03
reckon what I tell people is I, you know, I can't control what
57:06
mega Republicans do. But but what we in the expert
57:11
academic community can do is control our own institutions
57:15
nature, which is, you know, bridge based.
57:17
One of the leading science magazine endorsed Joe Biden and
57:21
then Kamala Harris in the last two presidential elections.
57:26
Nature published a paper that showed in 2022 that showed that
57:31
the effect of their endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 was to not
57:36
change the mind of any people on the left.
57:39
They were already going to do what they were going to do, but
57:41
it made people on the right much more skeptical and opposed to
57:44
science. That's that's what we would call
57:48
an own goal. After that was published, Nature
57:52
wrote an editorial and said, yes, we understand that
57:54
research, but it's too important not to speak out.
57:58
And so, I mean, these are these are self-inflicted harms to our
58:03
community. I mean, no one, no one cares
58:07
what Nature thinks about the US presidential election.
58:10
No one cares what I think. No one cares what the PhD class
58:13
thinks. And so it's really important, I
58:17
think, for for the expert community to take a step back
58:20
and understand we exist to support all of society.
58:24
And, you know, childhood vaccination is important for,
58:28
you know, Donald Trump's grandchildren as well as Joe
58:31
Biden's grandchildren. Doesn't matter.
58:33
And if if we insist on taking sides in political debates,
58:38
whatever side that happens to be, the other side is not going
58:41
to appreciate us. And it's, it's, it's really a
58:44
simple political calculus. And so I'm, I really think we
58:49
need to do a better job. And I do think there are some
58:51
university presidents in the US that kind of get this now in the
58:55
ways they didn't before. We're speaking out and saying,
58:58
yeah, we, we serve everyone and we welcome everyone on our
59:01
campus, no matter who they vote for.
59:04
But it's going to take a while to restore trust in in the
59:07
institutions of expertise and. What what about that trans
59:11
issue? I mean, I tend not to go there
59:13
because, you know, for well, for obvious reasons, you, you have
59:18
gone there. It's just can science help on
59:20
this? I mean, because there are
59:23
arguments that this won Trump the election.
59:26
I mean, the perhaps more than anything else, this idea that
59:29
what was it? Kamala's for day them and Trump
59:32
is for you. You know, I think that was very
59:34
potent. And so like, yeah.
59:35
So is science being abused in this area and has has your work
59:39
helped? You know, does it can it help?
59:41
Tell me what to think Because as I say, I'm I'm confused.
59:43
I don't know what to say. Well, I, I tell my students I
59:46
don't care what what they think. I care how they think.
59:48
Here's how I think about the, the issue and my, my focus.
59:51
And then just to be perfectly clear, my focus is on the
59:55
regulation of transgender athletes in elite sport
59:59
competition. We've written a paper I with
1:00:01
Spencer Harrison, several others on on high school kind of
1:00:07
younger athletes, but my main focus is on elite athletes like
1:00:11
the Olympics and, you know, college sports in the US.
1:00:14
And the important thing to understand is that that sports
1:00:18
organizations have no authority, no legitimacy to to define
1:00:25
anyone in terms of their sex or gender.
1:00:28
That's, that's not their role in society.
1:00:30
Sports organizations are actually pretty simple.
1:00:31
They organize competitions. And it's perfectly legitimate
1:00:35
for sports organizations to decide who gets to compete in
1:00:41
different competition classes, including men's and women's.
1:00:43
That's, that's their job, but the criteria.
1:00:46
So when they encounter people in society, they already have a
1:00:52
legal sex and a legal gender. And depending on your
1:00:55
jurisdiction, it could be one, could be the other, it could be
1:00:57
under different words. What sports organizations do is,
1:01:01
is they, they create competition categories to regulate fairness.
1:01:06
So, so let's step outside gender and sex, which makes people go
1:01:10
crazy. And let's talk about athletes
1:01:13
who are amputees. So think Oscar Pistorius, who
1:01:18
who ran on the cheetah blades and that there's a competition
1:01:23
called the Paralympics. You're in that because you
1:01:28
participate in the Paralympics does not make you ineligible to
1:01:31
compete in the Olympics. And so athletes who run on
1:01:34
cheetah blades, and there's a number of them have sought to
1:01:37
have inclusion in the Olympics. And the, the jurisprudence
1:01:42
around sport is that you can't just exclude someone because
1:01:44
they're an amputee. That's, that's, that's, that's
1:01:47
not, that's not about, you know, that's, that's not legal in, in,
1:01:52
in most settings. And it's not what sports about
1:01:54
inclusion. So what the sports organization
1:01:56
say is, well, if your cheetah blades allow you to compete
1:02:01
fairly, then you can be included.
1:02:04
And so then that gets, well, who decides what's fair?
1:02:09
And, and the, the, the, the sports courts have decided that,
1:02:14
well, the, the organizations that overseas sport have to
1:02:18
prove that cheetah blades are unfair.
1:02:21
How do you prove that they're unfair?
1:02:22
Well, this is where science and evidence comes in.
1:02:25
So Oscar Pistorius, he was evaluated, scientists argued on
1:02:29
both sides. And the, the courts decided,
1:02:32
well, we can't, we can't, you know, determine that he has an
1:02:36
unfair advantage. And if we can't determine it,
1:02:38
then he's going to run. So he participated before Tokyo,
1:02:42
which was 2021, the Olympics, an athlete from Los Angeles named
1:02:47
Blake Leeper, who also runs on cheetah blades, wanted to run.
1:02:52
And he is fast on those cheetah blades, faster than he runs,
1:02:57
faster than the existing world records for the distances he was
1:03:00
running. And they evaluated him, the
1:03:02
scientists argued and the courts decided, yeah, he has an unfair
1:03:06
advantage. And so he can't participate.
1:03:09
So you have a case of inclusion, a case of exclusion.
1:03:13
Both are determined by scientific arguments.
1:03:15
So I bring this up for a transgender athlete who appears
1:03:20
the the task of a sports organization isn't to determine
1:03:23
are you really a man? Are you really a woman?
1:03:27
That's that's that's not their their role.
1:03:29
This is a not. I mean, what's curious about
1:03:31
this is it's become identity politics.
1:03:33
It's not about your identity. It's about do you have an unfair
1:03:36
advantage? And so if, if the issue is
1:03:40
boxing, let's say, or a judo or a combat sport, the criteria for
1:03:47
unfair advantage are going to be very different than if it's
1:03:49
archery or swimming or women's gymnastics.
1:03:55
You know, there, there there is no trans athlete, trans woman
1:04:01
who is ever going to be competitive in women's
1:04:03
gymnastics. Why?
1:04:05
Because women's gymnastics has developed over the years and has
1:04:08
scoring rules that favor women's athleticism.
1:04:13
And so it's so much so. And actually young girls that
1:04:17
had to put age limits there that the, the rules favor younger and
1:04:21
younger girls who can do things that older women can't do.
1:04:24
So the, the, what I have proposed is there's 22 important
1:04:29
rules. 1 is I call it a cap tie rule for people who follow
1:04:33
football, they'll know that if you're, if you're an
1:04:36
international footballer and you play for a particular country at
1:04:40
the elite level, you're tied to that country.
1:04:44
So if Qatar wants to buy up all the Brazilian soccer players,
1:04:50
it's really, really hard to do that, to change nationality.
1:04:53
They're tied. You get a cap when you play an
1:04:55
international match. So you're cap tied if you were
1:04:58
an elite athlete and you're, you know, you compete as a man or
1:05:02
you compete as a woman, you're tied to that.
1:05:05
You can't change to, to the other gender.
1:05:10
People don't understand that it's really hard to be an elite
1:05:12
athlete whether you're a man or a woman.
1:05:14
And all of the cases I am aware of of controversies involving
1:05:19
trans athletes involve athletes who are already elite wanting to
1:05:24
change gender categories. It's very, you know, you or I
1:05:29
are not going to get up off the couch and say we're women and
1:05:32
all of a sudden show up in the Olympics.
1:05:34
It's just it's not going to happen.
1:05:36
Definitely not, no. So, so, so that's one rule that
1:05:38
that takes care of pretty much 99% of the issues.
1:05:43
Then when it comes to individuals who have
1:05:46
transitioned and want to compete, the Australian system
1:05:51
of sport does this very well. You evaluate the athlete on a
1:05:55
case by case basis, just like you do with athletes who run on
1:05:58
prostheses. And you asked, well, what does
1:06:03
it mean to have an unfair advantage?
1:06:05
If you're, if you're a rugby player, you could say, well, 100
1:06:09
kilos is that's, that's unsafe, that's unfair.
1:06:13
Well, guess what? You have to apply that to
1:06:15
athletes across the board, not just, you know, based on their
1:06:18
chromosomes. So, so I do think there are very
1:06:22
straightforward ways and it's, it's messy because you will have
1:06:25
some athletes who will be included like Oscar Pistorius
1:06:29
and some athletes who are not like Blake Leaper.
1:06:32
And there will be judgement calls along the way.
1:06:36
But it will be based on evidence of unfairness, not arguments
1:06:41
about identity. The last thing I'll say on this
1:06:44
is sport has been hijacked by campaigners and it's
1:06:47
particularly true in the, in the UK, in the US also, but to a
1:06:52
lesser degree, not in Australia for, for some reason or much
1:06:57
anyplace else as part of this broader culture war against
1:07:00
trans individuals. Because sport is popular and
1:07:05
people see it. But it's it, it shouldn't be it,
1:07:09
it doesn't have to be the controversy that it has been
1:07:13
because it's, you know, sport is about, it's about inclusion and
1:07:16
it's about fairness. And we have good, good
1:07:19
procedures in place to figure those things out.
1:07:21
So, you know, I, I will say that that trans advocates don't like
1:07:25
the cap tie rule and people who are, you know, part of the, the,
1:07:30
the gender warriors don't like any possibility of inclusion.
1:07:34
So, you know, this is like the climate issue that there is a,
1:07:38
you know, forgive the phrase, but there is a third way here
1:07:41
that's that's not as black and white as the political debate
1:07:45
debate would have it. Well, evidence based furnace.
1:07:47
I mean, you're speaking my language here and it's been a
1:07:51
fascinating conversation. There's a lot.
1:07:52
I've got all these notes about other things I wanted to talk
1:07:54
about. We're going to have to have you
1:07:55
back on because we haven't done planetary boundaries.
1:07:58
We haven't done pillpers, iron law.
1:07:59
We haven't done a number of things so that, you know, I'd
1:08:02
love it if you could, but tell us before before we wrap up,
1:08:05
what are you going to do next? Because you're always picking
1:08:07
these amazing, amazingly interesting things.
1:08:09
So like what What's, what's your next controversy?
1:08:13
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, I, I, I think I'm
1:08:17
going to be focused a lot on restoring integrity to
1:08:22
institutions of science. And you know, the, the Trump
1:08:26
moment, hopefully it's just a moment.
1:08:29
The Trump moment will pass and there will be a lot of wreckage
1:08:33
to rebuild. And, you know, I want to focus a
1:08:37
lot of attention on how the institutions of expertise can,
1:08:42
can reclaim public support, public trust.
1:08:47
And just, you know, there is a crisis in certain areas of
1:08:50
science where honestly, bad science has taken root.
1:08:55
AI makes this worse. And how do we make sure our own
1:08:58
house is in order? I, you know, I, I can't change
1:09:02
big picture politics. No, no expert can, but we really
1:09:06
can make sure that our own house is in order.
1:09:08
And I'd like to focus more conversations on that.
1:09:11
I don't think any one of us has the answers, but we do need to
1:09:15
open up our communities for broader discussion of how we
1:09:18
move forward. Well, I look forward to hearing
1:09:22
more about that and wish you all the best.
1:09:24
And in the meantime, would just like to say thank you, Roger
1:09:27
Pilkajuni, for helping to save the world from bad ideas.
1:09:31
Mark, great to see you. I look forward to seeing you
1:09:32
soon. Thanks so much for listening to
1:09:37
Saving the World from Bad Ideas, a Weplanet podcast.
1:09:40
Weplanet's a movement of citizens and scientists
1:09:42
dedicated to defending the science and solutions we need to
1:09:45
save the world. Please do subscribe and share a
1:09:47
nice review. It helps us spread the message.
1:09:49
We'd also love to hear your feedback and suggestions of our
1:09:52
e-mail podcast at weplanet.org. Please also join our podcast
1:09:56
mailing list and we'll let you know when a new episode drops.
1:09:59
Just go to Saving the World from badideas.org or
1:10:02
weplanet.org/podcast right now. See you next time, yeah?