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.

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.

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, 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.

So, I'd love you to talk about that climate piece of it.

Yeah.

Uh, thanks, Molly.

First of all, it's great to, to finally meet, uh, and to be with you here, and of course to be with my good friend, Peter.

And as he mentioned, you know, this sort of came together because we both found ourselves under attack.

Me, some, some time ago really.

The, the climate wars began decades ago, and so as I watched similar, uh, attacks that had very much, uh, you know, the- the- the- the same feel.

if you could talk us through this sort of parallel there.

Can you talk about what rescinding, uh, this so-called endangerment finding will mean globally?

Yeah.

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

Um, and let me first actually add a data point to the- that timeline that, uh, David very nicely provided us.

Um, it's worth noting at the- at the very beginning of George W. Bush's first term, 2000, his own EPA administrator, Republican EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, declared that CO2 is a pollutant that should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

And it was only later when they got rid of Christine Todd Whitman that they went down this road that takes us to where we are now.

And so, this wasn't always such a partisan, uh, political issue.

Can you talk more about the EPA announcing, um, Michael Mann, that it'll eliminate its scientific research arm and begin firing hundreds of chemists, biologists, toxicologists, and other scientists? What this means?

Uh, Professor Michael Mann, can you respond? He says, uh, talking about this cooling period.

Yeah.

You know, they say a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

And here, you know, he probably read a headline, this Washington Post headline, and didn't even understand the headline, uh, you know, let alone actually read the article.

Um, it was about a, a, a, a research article that had been published, uh, I believe in the journal Nature, um, which I reviewed at the time and wrote about it.

Um, and he got it 180 degrees wrong.

What that article actually showed was when you look back, uh, over tens of millions of years, um...

Uh, what this means for the future and development of sci-... of the scientific community in this country?

President Trump, uh, has started the process of withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, which set this 1.5 degree threshold. Uh, also easing restrictions on oil and gas production. How does that, uh, impact efforts to, uh, avoid further exceeding this threshold? And what about the general, uh, political climate elsewhere in the world?

The real problem here is that this sort of sends a signal to the rest of the world that, uh, the United States isn't willing to honor its commitments. We're the world's largest legacy carbon polluter. We've put more carbon pollution into the atmosphere than any other country. And that's all that climate cares about. It cares about the cumulative carbon emissions over time. We've contributed more to the warming of the planet than any other country. Fortunately, we have seen some degree of resolve. Uh, the EU remains committed. China seems to be stepping up. I, I think they see an opportunity for actually taking leadership in the vacuum left by US, uh, disengagement under the, uh, new Trump administration. So, it's a global problem. It requires global cooperation. Um, and so we will have to see what other countries do.

And in terms of that global participation, there's long been a debate about the responsibility of developing countries, um, and what they have to do versus developed first world countries like the United States. How does the reaching and exceeding of this 1.5 degree threshold move the needle on that debate?

You know, uh, the combination of the fact that we're getting perilously close to this, you know, new dangerous milestone, uh, and the fact that, uh, this is happening in an era of US disengagement, and it does provide an excuse to developing countries who can rightly say, "Look, you had access to two centuries of cheap, dirty fossil fuel energy to grow your economy, and if you're not willing to do something to help, uh, the world deal with this problem, then why shouldn't we get our own opportunity to grow our economies?" Many of these developing countries have contributed the least to the problem, and they're already bearing the brunt of the problem. They're seeing some of the worst consequences. They have the least wealth and resilience to deal with the consequences that are already, uh, happening. We have to provide some degree of assistance to developing countries to help them deal with the catastrophic consequences they're already dealing with, and to help them sort of leapfrog past the dirty fossil fuel stage of economic development. We wanna see them bypass that. We can't afford them to make the same mistakes that we made, and we have to make it worth their while to move directly to clean, renewable energy sources.