What does it mean? Did you see it coming? What are going to be the main consequences for everybody?

Yeah, thanks, Dave.

It's great to be with you.

And there's no question that the revocation by Donald Trump of the endangerment finding via Lee Zeldin was something that was planned well in advance.

It was spelled out quite clearly in Project 2025, which was this blueprint by various organizations, conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation, funded by the Koch brothers and other plutocrats, other fossil fuel plutocrats.

For a long time, they have wanted to eradicate the endangerment finding.

And this was their opportunity to do so.

In terms of the consequences, is it really genuinely just kind of now everybody pollute as much as you want? Is it that simple?

But what's the importance of of maintaining these values, of aspiring to one and a half degrees, certainly keeping below two degrees? What's the harm of going above those numbers?

Yeah, you know, there's sort of a shorthand because it's a simple number to talk about, the average temperature of the planet.

But what it's a shorthand for is all of the impacts that that amount of warming happens, because there's more warming over the continents than the global average.

There's even more warming in the higher latitudes, in the melting Arctic.

There are all of the changes in extreme weather events, the heat domes, the wildfires, the floods.

And so, in essence, this is a thermometer scale.

the global average temperature that is sort of a catchall for the full array of consequences when the planet warms that much.

How inevitable is this? How reversible is this? What can be done at this point if people were to get quite alarmed about this?

Yeah, some common sense measures were kind of put in place.

Absolutely.

These were common sense measures to stem the spread of this deadly virus.

And the problem is for fossil fuel interests, and in particular, the Koch brothers, the largest funders of sort of climate denial, Koch Industries is the largest privately held petrochemical interest.

And Brothers David, who's now deceased, but his brother Charles still remains.

The Koch brothers have funded much of the assault in the public sphere on climate science, on renewable energy.

And They were suffering the consequences economically because those stay-at-home orders, the social distancing, the mask wear.

And it would be, you could do it in a day.

doing.

And they have more than a billion rides on their bullet trains every year.

And those are electrified and increasingly mostly run off of renewable energy.

They're electric vehicles.

Those batteries charge up to, I think, 85% in 10 or 15 minutes now.

So they're just...

They're cleaning our clock when it comes to advancing this technology.

They're just there to destroy the regulators so that they can go back in the private sector when they're done and clean up.

It's better for everybody.

And it was i- that's where the idea came from, um... to do Hughes and then the, and then to do Hughes as the early part of Hughes' life, Hughes as a visionary.

Um, but his, Leo's work is, um, is extraordinary.

He was invested in this character from 1998 when he first walked in my office.

And what he was excited about was the visionary challenged by forces that would destroy him, and how, uh, uh, someone could occupy that position in the vanguard of his own life, just pushing himself and pushing himself to what's new, and at the same time, he's coexisting in a place where imagination and madness are right next to each other, and you could slip and slide from one into the other and not even know it.

And that's what's so dangerous about where he pushed himself to as he moved closer and closer to his sun, if you like.

And, and, uh, and, and Leo was determined to, um, make this the, what I think is the per- he thinks it's the performance of his career.

In all, more than $800 million was spent during the war on planes that never flew, over six billion on other weapons that were never delivered, yet Hughes Aircraft with her 56 million is the only firm under investigation here today.

I think you certainly expect to see more of that, don't you?

Yeah, and I'll actually be talking on cable news about that later on today.

It seems that the only opportunities we have these days when it comes to mainstream media coverage is these extreme weather events.

And it's important for us to take advantage of that and connect the dots for the public so that they understand.

that this isn't just about polar bears off in the Arctic decades from now.

It's about the damage and indeed death that are now occurring because of these catastrophic events that have been increased in frequency and severity by human-caused climate change.

Right now, we're seeing this unusual pattern in the atmosphere, this pattern of the jet stream where you have a big high pressure system out west that's giving them that unprecedented heat so early in the spring.

So how do you explain to people in simple terms that, yes, that's true, but this time it's different?

system, you

know, Weather is something that happens from day to day.

It's just the random, chaotic variability of the atmosphere.

And even if we weren't doing anything to the planet, it would happen because there's just natural variability that happens.

It's chaos.

It's just part of the intrinsic characteristics of the of our atmosphere that you get this sort of three to seven day weather cycle with warm fronts and cold fronts and mid-latitude cyclones.

El Nino, if you like, is sort of the weather of the global climate, which is to say it's also random internal variability, just like weather is, but it has a longer time scale because it doesn't just involve the atmosphere, involves the ocean.

What are your thoughts?

Mm-hmm.

Like, "Oh, yeah, well, you know, uh, uh, the work I'm doing in- investigates the, you know, the uncertainties and, and, and, uh, the effect of clouds on, uh, on, on, uh, on, on, uh, the feedback processes involving climate change." And that's interesting, and it's important, and there's uncertainty there.

But what we lead with is, like, we, what we know for certain.

We know we're warming up the planet, we know it's due to an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel burning and other human activities, and that it's having all these profound consequences.

And yes, there are uncertainties in just how much warming we'll see and what the precise consequences will be, but those uncertainties are not a reason for, you know, complacency.

If anything, they're a reason for even greater concern, because some of the, uh, that uncertainty is not breaking in our favor, it's breaking against us.

Mm-hmm.

Some of these changes are, are taking place even faster than we predicted.

what we are experiencing even with the poor air quality in the united states as a result of wildfires in the us and even those in canada yes it may be because of the fires themselves but the underlying genesis and causes and origins of those fires are directly related to climate change are they not

Yeah, I mean, to your point, it's almost like Donald Trump is stuck in a 1980s comedy film with Pauly Shore, Biodome, if some of your older viewers might remember that.

That's not the way it works.

The atmosphere doesn't have boundaries.

It doesn't have walls between Canada and the United States, though our president might want to build those walls with other countries.

There are no walls in the atmosphere.

And the fossil fuels that we are burning, and we've burned more fossil fuels and put more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country, including China, which so often the Trump administration tries to blame China.

Maybe let us know some resources or some ideas that we can be doing.

I think it's also affirmative harm that is being perpetrated on the American people because it's just lies that are being told about why we're having these wildfires in the U.S. and the poor air quality, you know, as a result of the wildfires in Canada, for example

exampleYeah, I mean, the contrast is just so striking, right? Between European policymakers who recognize that climate change is an existential threat and are taking action to try to, you know, help move us away from our reliance on fossil fuels towards clean energy.

And then you look at what's happening in the United States right now under, uh, Donald Trump in the second administration of Donald Trump.

Um, and with a Republican Congress, um, and a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, you've got all three branches of government working together to deny, um, the science, to defund climate science, to, uh, deflect attention away from the real causality here, um, our reliance on fossil fuels towards...

I mean, it, it, it becomes comical at some point, right? With Donald Trump blaming Canada for the wildfire smoke [chuckles] as if it's their fault, when in fact, they're doing much more right now, um, to move away from fossil fuels.

It's the fault of the major polluters, and nobody has put more carbon pollution into the atmosphere historically than the United States.

And under the current administration, of course, we see an effort to, um, end renewable energy, uh, projects, even though renewable energy is actually cheaper.

Yes

And that is, do the sanctions or the various other criticism that there is at the top diplomatically have an impact sometimes, get in the way, make your job a little more difficult?

Well, yes.

I mean, let's just say, as you said at the beginning of your introduction, there is an awful lot of cooperation between the European Union and its member countries and Israel.

I'm thinking here, you know, in trade, in science, in research and education and so forth.

But obviously, we do not always see completely eye to eye with Israel on issues like the Palestinian, Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And so, you know, there has been a political reaction in Europe, as you've already mentioned, that there are some potential measures on the table and some countries are taking a rather hard line against Israel.

So that clearly makes my life more complicated, but arguably also more fascinating because I have to confront and discuss with my counterparts in the Israeli ministries.

Do you find yourself doing that, whether it be the charges of apartheid or whatever else that are made against Israel? Do you ever feel that? yourself having to defend Israel, if I may ask it that way?

Explain how Europe's abnormally wet winter combined with this record hot summer to make these wildfires worse and more difficult to contain.

Yeah, it's a great question.

And, and, you know, uh, it's often these sorts of interactions, we call these interactions, because we might not have predicted them in advance, but when we see them play out, we realize that there's a whole new way that climate change is playing out here.

And you just alluded to it.

You get w- wet winters that favors the, the growth, so you get lots of vegetation.

Then you get those hot, dry summers.

That vegetation dies.

... considering how unhappy people are with the economy.

He's just spouting talking points there.

Exactly.

These are fossil fuel industry talking points.

And his job is to parrot them.

And, you know, sometimes there's a grain of truth to what he says.

Sometimes there isn't even that.

And in this case, of course, the rate of warming that we've seen over the past half century is, exceeds anything that we can document as far back as we can go.

And it just seems to be just sort of a shameless ploy to rake in as much money and campaign finance donations as possible.

But Michael says on that front, there's reason for cautious optimism, largely because of massive investments by Europe and China in clean energy.

Carbon emissions are probably going to come down for the first time over the next year.

And that's because of the progress we're making.

That's progress.

It's real progress.

It's not enough progress.

But even if we blow past 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming since the pre-industrial age, which is looking all but certain with the trajectory we're on, Michael says all is not lost.

There's this notion that there's some climate cliff.

The events at the MCG are sort of obvious, but what has sparked this out in Bairnsdale?

I think, like everyone else, it's Neil and Beck.

The way they presented themselves and the way they took on the challenge, We just felt like we wanted to be involved.

It's part of a footy environment now.

So we thought we'd try and mimic it, have a bit of fun with it and probably learn.

Like everyone else in the community, we just didn't know much about it until Neil started spreading the word.

What's the schedule look like tomorrow, Michael?

We change the games around a little bit to create a gap in the middle of the day.

The events at the MCG are sort of obvious, but what has sparked this out in Bairnsdale?

I think, like everyone else, it's Neil and Beck.

The way they presented themselves and the way they took on the challenge, We just felt like we wanted to be involved.

It's part of a footy environment now.

So we thought we'd try and mimic it, have a bit of fun with it and probably learn.

Like everyone else in the community, we just didn't know much about it until Neil started spreading the word.

What's the schedule look like tomorrow, Michael?

We change the games around a little bit to create a gap in the middle of the day.

Where are we at?

Yeah, so what I would say is that the warming is proceeding almost exactly as the climate models predicted.

We did see a surge in warming from 2023 to 2024.

That was related to a very large El Nino event.

And so if you actually look at the overall trend in recent decades, yes, there's been an acceleration because we passed the Clean Air Act, So we stopped the production of sulfur pollution that was actually helping offset some of global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space.

We smartly took steps to clean up the atmosphere, but that unleashed some of the warming that had been masked.

So there was sort of an acceleration in warming following the 1970s, 1980s.

Do the climate models account, I'm assuming that they do, account for and to what extent should we be concerned about things like rapid amplification? For example, the melting of the permafrost, releasing massive amounts of methane that might not have been accounted for a couple of decades ago anyway, you know, methane being, what, 27 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, if I'm remembering correctly.

Right.

So we obviously have to preserve our democracy if we are to have any means of implementing policies to deal with this defining crisis of our time.

But there is no question this is the defining crisis of our time, and we've lost valuable time, um, several years.

I mean, we're now just one year into, uh, the Trump administration, but we've already seen decades of significant environmental and climate progress deconstructed in, in a matter of months, and so we're gonna have a lot of, uh, work to do.

We're really gonna have to hit the ground running.

... weather on the 21st of March starts to feel a little existential.

Yeah.

Well, it's sort of a climate change triple whammy, uh, because there are really three factors here, Ali.

Can you talk about what's happening, how this relates to climate change?

Yeah, thanks, Amy.

It's good to be with you.

And here in Philly, we saw a fair amount of that snow as well.

We got more than a foot.

This was a historic bomb cyclone, as we sometimes call them, a nor'easter, which has to do with the fact that these storms are so strong that in one sector of the storm, you actually get winds coming from the east, which is rare for a mid-latitude storm.

Now, These storms, unlike most mid-latitude storms, these coastal storms, these nor'easters, feed on the heat of the oceans.

Can you talk about these extreme measures of the EPA and what that endangerment finding means now?

Can you talk about what's happening? How this relates to climate change?

Yeah.

Thanks, Amy.

It's good to be with you, and here in Philly, we saw a fair amount of that snow as well.

We got more than a foot.

This was a, a historic, a bomb cyclone, as we sometimes call them, uh, a nor'easter, which has to do with the fact that these storms are so strong that in, in, uh, one sector of the storm, you actually get winds coming, uh, from the east, which is rare, uh, for a mid-latitude storm.

Now, these storms, unlike most mid-latitude storms, these coastal storms, these nor'easters, feed on the heat of the oceans.

Can you talk about these extreme measures of the EPA and what that endangerment finding means now?

Can you talk about what's happening, how this relates to climate change?

Yeah, thanks, Amy.

It's good to be with you, and here in Philly, we saw a fair amount of that snow as well.

We got more than a foot.

This was a, a historic, a bomb cyclone, as we sometimes call them, a, a nor'easter, which has to do with the fact that these storms are so strong that in, in, uh, one sector of the storm, you actually get winds coming, uh, from the east, which is rare, uh, for a mid-latitude storm.

Now-...

These storms, unlike most mid-latitude storms, these coastal storms, these nor'easters, feed on the heat of the oceans.

Can you talk about these extreme measures of the EPA and what that endangerment finding means now?

Can you talk about the significance, Michael, Professor Mann, of the closing? Are they closing this facility? What it means? I mean, even right now, as Colorado is under a wildfire alert because there has been so little rain and the winds are so intense.

Yeah, it's good to be with you, Amy.

Unfortunately, this does sort of underscore just how absurd this latest action by the Trump administration is.

We're literally seeing the devastating consequences of climate change play out in this state.

You're not supposed to get wildfires in the middle of the winter in Colorado, but that's the world we live in now because of the warming of the planet and the more extreme weather that we're seeing as a result.

And, you There are a lot of things that Donald Trump could have tried to do to hurt the state of Colorado.

I think the reason that he chose NCAR is that it is the crown jewel of climate science for more than a half century.

And what does it mean to take NCAR basically offline? And what happens to this facility in Boulder right now?

Can you talk about the significance, Michael, Professor Mann, um, of the closing? Are they closing this facility? What it means? I mean, even right now as Colorado is under a wildfire alert because there has been so little rain and the winds are so intense.

Yeah.

It, it's good to be with you, Amy.

Um, uh, unfortunately, uh, this does sort of underscore just how absurd this latest action by the Trump administration is.

We're literally seeing the devastating consequences of climate change play out in this state.

You're not supposed to get wildfires in the middle of the winter, um, in, in Colorado, but that's the world we live in now because of the warming of the planet and the more extreme weather that we're seeing as a result.

And, you know, I, I think there are a lot of things that, uh, Donald Trump could have tried to do to hurt, uh, the state of Colorado.

So talk about overall the Trump administration now when it comes to climate change, and what does it mean to take NCAR, um, basically offline? And what happens to this facility in Boulder right now?

And I wonder if you could just tell me a little bit about when you first recognized that that was coming at you.

Yeah, thanks, William.

It's great to be with you.

And, uh, you know, it goes back, uh, two and a half decades for me.

Back in the late 1990s, my co-authors and I published the, uh, now well-known hockey stick curve that demonstrated how unprecedented the warming of the past century is, and it implicated human-caused climate change, the increase in the concentration of carbon pollution due to fossil fuel burning that was a threat to some powerful vested interests.

And so they focused, uh, a- a whole lot of firepower on me to try to discredit me, to intimidate me, to get me fired from my job.

Um, and I'll tell you, it was sort of like PTSD for me, uh, five years ago when public health scientists like Peter and Tony Fauci found themselves under attack in precisely the same way, the same tactics, um, and even some of the same players.

Collectively though, what do all of those different actors have in common?

Yes.

And there is a document, uh, th- sorry.

There is a line from, uh, the reports that, uh, the tobacco industry was forced to make public as part of a, uh, a- a- a- as part of a settlement with a number of, uh, state's attorneys general back in the 1990s.

They were forced to bride over these internal documents, uh, one of which I believe it was Brown & Williamson, but this applied to all of the tobacco companies, the tobacco industry.

Doubt is our product.

That's a line from the, uh, tobacco industry, and what they meant there was, um, they need to sow doubt and confusion about what their own internal research actually validated.

Their own internal research showed that their product was killing people.

W- what is your message to scientists? And then let's talk about laypeople in terms of, of dealing with this.