For 40 years, Stephen Schneider has talked to anyone who will listen about climate
change, and the Stanford climate scientist says he's finally seeing results.
Scientists who take climate change seriously are ascendant; John Holdren,
Schneider's long-time friend and associate, is President Barack
Obama's chief science adviser; and Nobel laureate, former Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory director, and fellow Bay Area resident, Steven Chu is Energy
Secretary. Not only is climate change accepted within the new administration, but Obama
is attempting to restructure the entire U.S. economy around renewable and carbon-neutral
initiatives. As if this wasn't enough, Obama will have an opportunity to jump
into the global fray as early as December, when negotiations are held in Copenhagen on a
successor treaty to the Kyoto Protocol, to stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions.
It wasn't always thus. Schneider started his career in the early 1970s, when
the powers that be were far from in agreement on the seriousness of climate change. With
a PhD in mechanical engineering and plasma physics from Columbia University, he
dedicated himself to climate science after attending the first Earth Day celebration in
1971. Since then, he's contributed to all four U.N. Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) reports; won a MacArthur Fellowship; and shared the 2007 Nobel
Peace Prize with the IPCC's other lead authors. His fifth book,
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save the Earth's
Climate will be out in October. But it's his willingness to
enter the public brawl that is the mainstream media to communicate on these issues that
has truly been his passion.
BAS: What's the secret to communicating effectively with the
public?
SCHNEIDER: The first thing you have to do is talk in metaphors that can be
understood. So many of my colleagues are miseducated to lead with their caveats, what
journalists call “burying the lead.” Lead with your story.
Somebody asked me once over dinner, “You mean there's only a
25-percent chance of truly catastrophic outcomes?” And I said,
“There's only a 25-percent chance that there's
salmonella in the salmon we're eating and, of course, you're going
to eat it. And you have fire insurance, right? The probability that your house will burn
down is 1-2 percent.” We hedge all the time. What scientists need to do is
make people realize that they're not disempowered to make judgments about
important issues such as climate policy because they don't understand all of
the details. They don't need to understand all of the details; they need to
understand the basic overview and the relative likelihood of various outcomes that they
then can weigh the importance of.
BAS: In a recent Gallup Poll a majority of the U.S. public said they would
be willing to take some amount of environmental degradation if it improved the faltering
economy. How do you communicate the importance of climate change in the midst of a
recession?
SCHNEIDER: When you actually take a look at the amount of money that would
be needed to deal with climate change, it's small potatoes relative to the
Iraq War, the bailouts for broken banks, or the growth rate of the planetary economy. I
try to frame it that way, because otherwise you get the Carl Sagan problem, when he
talked about the billions upon trillions of stars in the universe. People
don't know billions from trillions from hundreds of millions, of dollars in
our case. It all sounds big and bad. What we really have to talk about is pretty basic:
How much longer will it take the world to be five times richer with a low level of
climate impact versus a high impact? The answer is just about one extra year over a
century. That's not much. It's a cheap insurance policy to protect
the planetary life support system. So I always try to frame these things that way, and I
ask my friends in the media, why don't you ever cover it that way? And they
say, nearly uniformly, “it's too many numbers.”
BAS: If the mass media isn't doing its job, how do you get that
message out?
SCHNEIDER: You just say it and say it and say it and say it and form
coalition after coalition after coalition. Then you hope some of your other colleagues
say it and form coalitions and that other people do, too. Margaret Mead said
it's a small group of people that generally change the world. It just takes
time. In fact, she told me in 1974, when John Holdren, George Woodwell [Woods Hole
Research Center founder], and I were just a few lone guys fighting the environmental
battles. “Come on, you're going to burn up, kiddo,” she
pointed out. “You've got to have a generational perspective.
You're worried about winning battles; you've got to think about
the war.” That's easy to accept now that I'm 64. When I
look at the changes, the things we're talking about now relative to 25 years
ago, when we said the same things but with less confidence, we've made
progress. It just takes a generation or two like Margaret said. So you keep at it.
BAS: Can you only blame institutions, leaders, and the media? Or is there
some responsibility on the part of the public for historically being disinterested in
climate change?
SCHNEIDER: Don't leave scientists out of this. We have our part.
We make things obscure. There's another factor in this, too: Climate change
is a systems science issue, and it's bewilderingly complex. Most people have
been trained in school that the truth comes from the front of the room, that
I'm just little old me, and I'm not empowered to make big
decisions. This also happens to be convenient if you want to go right on the merry old
path that you're on. We need to do more fundamental training in what I call
the “doubt-test paradigm,” which is that everything in life should
be doubted without evidence. This is a serious and deep division, not just in the United
States. It's worse in other parts of the world; try Islamic fundamentalism.
That's what I call the “faith-trust value system,”
which is that it's somehow blasphemous to revise doctrine based upon
evidence.
BAS: Can researchers change people's minds?
SCHNEIDER: There have been a few reports that really changed the world. When
an ozone hole opened up above Antarctica, world leaders took the last report written by
the World Meteorological Organization on ozone off the shelf and that became the basis
for the Montreal Protocol, which phased out the international production of
ozone-depleting chemicals. The same thing happened with climate change after the massive
heat waves in 1988; world leaders took out a National Academy of Sciences report on
climate. So we scientists, we do our due diligence and we keep doing it. You never know
if the report that you pour your guts into will be the one that makes the difference.
And they build on each other as the credibility of the evidence grows over time.
That's why we have to be honest brokers on these issues.
BAS: Are there similarities between the successful effort to ban
ozone-depleting chemicals and the effort to reverse climate change?
SCHNEIDER: Paul Crutzen [co-winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in chemistry for
his work revealing the human role in ozone depletion] sent me an e-mail not long ago
asking me, “What's climate change's ozone
hole?” But the trouble with climate is it's so variable that you
can never honestly pin any one thing on global warming–unlike the chemicals
we could prove were causing atmospheric ozone depletion. How much of the Katrina storm
surge can you blame on climate change? My answer is somewhere from three inches to three
feet. Three inches is trivial; if we're responsible for three-foot storm
surges then we did it. But we don't know, and we'll never know.
All we can do is statistically look at it over a fairly long period of time and try to
figure it out. So there is only a weak analogy to ozone. And climate change is a much
greater long-term threat, because of its irreversibility unlike with ozone depletion.
BAS: James Hansen, the director of NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, has said we have passed a point of no return, that we're
actually watching climate change occur around us.
SCHNEIDER: Actually, what he said was we have 1 degree to go before
Greenland irreversibly melts. I agree with his point that we are courting dangerous
outcomes, but I disagree with his framing on Greenland because the way you quote him is
better. We have passed the point for some damage.
The IPCC has said it's more likely than not that human-caused warming of the
oceans is responsible for some of the observed increases in hurricane
intensities–and that they will intensify as the oceans warm even more. The
IPCC also has said that it's very likely that the observed five-factor
increase in wildfire area in the U.S. West is related to the 1-degree temperature
increase in the western states, itself likely related to global warming caused by human
activities. Increases in droughts and floods are exactly what was predicted decades ago
and are now being observed as emerging from the background level of natural variability.
Because if you make the world warmer, you increase evaporation, meaning that if the
atmosphere is configured to be dry, it has bigger droughts; if it's
configured to be wet, it has bigger floods. It's almost a no-brainer. The
cats are out of the bag. The Arctic sea ice is melting, and Greenland now is melting
faster than any theories predicted. So you could say it's too late. But it
isn't too late to prevent 40 percent of the species in the world from being
wiped out. We haven't killed them yet. We haven't driven food
production in the hot countries down by 20-30 percent, which we could do if we warm up
3-4 degrees. What I keep arguing is that we need to stop asking when it will get
dangerous, because that's a value judgment and it's already
dangerous for some places, so let's not let it get even more dangerous.
I would assign a 1-5 percent chance that it's already too late for Greenland,
even before the one degree of warming happens. The unprecedented melt rates are much
faster than anybody's glacial model. And the melting ice could already be
lubricating the bottom of the ice sheet and transporting heat down there at a rate that
already has created a slippage we won't be able to stop. The trouble is it
might take 100 years to rev up and 300-500 years for sea level to rise many meters.
Still, that's not a nice legacy for this generation to leave, having to move
the majority of people away from low-lying cities where they've built their
infrastructure. Therefore, I'm completely in agreement with Hansen that
we've got to slow it down. But, at the same time, we also have to tell the
truth as we currently understand it, and the truth for me is it's a
risk-management problem, a value judgment about the acceptability or unacceptability of
risks, not a precise level of warming known to cause some specified impact.
That's what makes a lot of my scientific colleagues uncomfortable; they
don't like risk management. They want science to stay in the objective realm
and not in the subjective realm.
BAS: Are you encouraged that President Obama appointed so many scientists to
his administration?
SCHNEIDER: I thought the triumvirate of Steven Chu, John Holdren, and
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Director Jane Lubchenco, added
world-class scientists instead of mediocre bureaucrats or, worse, ideologues to the
White House. There are some people who say, “But Steve Chu isn't
aggressive, he's not a fighter.” That's not really
true. He definitely has an understated sarcastic sense of humor that you have to be
sharp to get; however, I don't think Steve will have any trouble.
Don't underestimate the power of a Nobel Prize in physics to intimidate the
blowhards in the room. His learning curve is going to have more to do with the fact that
knowledge that might be powerful in the academic world has no power in the political
word until it's connected to the politics. He's probably learning
that as we speak. He also has a president who knows that and Obama's chief of
staff, Rahm Emanuel, knows that in spades. So I'm guessing it will be a very
good match. You couldn't ask for the whole cabinet to be filled with
intellectuals such as Steve Chu and John Holdren, but to have none would have been a
disaster–as it was in the previous administration.
BAS: What should be the priorities right now to halt climate change?
SCHNEIDER: I believe there are five things that need to be done in a
sequence. Step one, out of decency, we have to help people adapt to the changes that are
already in the pipeline, which are unavoidable no matter what we do. I don't
know what you're going to do for In-uit-type hunting cultures; I
don't think they can adapt. But you can adapt some cities that are prone to
flooding by building seawalls. And for a while, you can develop alternative crop strains
that have higher yields under the new climate conditions. Other options, such as crop
insurance and training poor farmers in modern farming techniques makes sense with or
without climate change, but climate change adds another reason to do so.
The second step is to enact performance standards for automobiles, air conditioners,
refrigerators, airplanes, buildings, and electronics. Naturally, you don't
snap your fingers and enact them all tomorrow. You slowly ramp them up. But they have to
be inexorable. The environmentalists want instant super-targets that nobody is going to
reach and will only make powerful political enemies. What I want is instant financing
for increased efficiency. Then the targets will fall where they may, and
we'll start adjusting the knobs as we find out how much more we need to do.
Number three is to invest in clean technologies. We have all of these brilliant
alternative energy ideas and startups, but are they large scale? No, they're
at the scale of a few megawatts. We've got to do it at the scale of 500
megawatts and build demonstration plants. Then we have to figure out how to scale those
that are technically and financially attractive from demonstration plants up to terawatt
scale–and we need to do that soon. The single most important word in the
energy-environment debate is scalability. You want to replace 50
percent of coal? Well, you're not going to do that when you've got
3 percent of the country on renewables. It's got to be 33 percent, and then
you scale that up to 50 percent. Without the impact of these technologies at such large
scales we'll more than double carbon dioxide emissions by mid to late
century. And scale is a cost problem; it's a materials problem; and
it's a social acceptability problem. For instance, some think wind mills kill
birds or look ugly. Others disagree. These are mainly siting issues that will be
negotiated, but we need to get on with it. This process is what I call the
“learning by doing feeding frenzy.” We've got to get
out there and do it and see what is promising and what is not feasible.
The fourth step is what we're fighting about right
now–cap-and-trade. I'm not against cap-and-trade; although I
actually prefer a carbon tax and recycling the revenue to the poor and to targeted
investments in clean technologies and increased efficiency. But you can't
utter the T-word politically anywhere on the planet, so you do cap-and-trade instead.
Environmental groups often prefer cap-and-trade since it is quantity based and they
think they know what the cuts should be, but whether they can be achieved without
specific policies and measures defined up front is an open question. Carbon-emitting
industries and most economists prefer a tax since the costs are known ahead of time and
it is administratively easier to tax at the mines, at the oil and natural gas well
heads, etc., than to monitor carbon emissions.
The fifth step is geoengineering. And if I can inject my values, there's good
geoengineering and bad geoengineering. Everybody agrees that if we can figure out how to
take carbon out of the atmosphere relatively benignly, we should do so–cement
that takes carbon dioxide out with different chemical processes, carbon capture and
sequestration, etc. Then there's the other kind–dispersing dust by
plane or cannon into the stratosphere or spraying ocean water one-half kilometer up to
make sea salt aerosols that form white clouds that block the sun. Indeed, these might
offset the greenhouse gas increases–but with big uncertainties. (And none of
this does anything to prevent oceanic acidification, however, which increases
proportional to carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.) Furthermore, increased
carbon dioxide concentrations last 1,000 years in the atmosphere; therefore, we would
have to have control over Earth's climate for that enormous amount of time.
Do you think rational and internationally sanctioned control is going to continuously
survive wars, chicanery, and strife over 1,000 years? The social limits on
geoengineering are much more daunting than the engineering uncertainties, which we will
figure out in a few decades, I think. But we can't take
geoengineering–even dispersing dust in the atmosphere–off the
table since the threats are potentially so serious, everything must be explored.
Every single one of these sequential steps is necessary, but none is sufficient. So while
we're arguing for the next five years over the rules of cap-and-trade, why
can't we move on adaptation, performance standards, and technology
investment?
BAS: Speaking of cap-and-trade, what should we expect from the December U.N.
Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen?
SCHNEIDER: Let's start from the top rather than the bottom, the
bigticket item, which will get positive attention from environmentalists and negative
attention from industry–cap-and-trade with large targets and short
timetables. That scenario won't happen at Copenhagen.
What will happen is some agreement in principle. Then it will take time to negotiate the
rules: Do you charge China for its carbon emissions on coal it burns manufacturing all
those electronics and furniture that Americans buy? Or, should those carbon emissions be
charged to the United States? That's got to be worked out and it will take
time, because its going to determine massive cash-flow transfers. So yes, we must have a
price on carbon, absolutely. Without it, we can't solve the problem. On the
other hand, don't expect a high price on carbon to emerge at Copenhagen.
I'm hoping other steps are enacted in the meantime, however. Such as
performance standards and real money transfers to help developing countries invent their
way out of the problem. If we're going to have any credibility in getting
them to abandon industrial-era dirty technologies, we're going to have to
help them through the transition. I believe that performance standards and incentives
for investment can take place without having a final deal on a shadow price.
BAS: What is a shadow price?
SCHNEIDER: Cap-and-trade is a shadow price, because you're not
putting a direct tax on carbon emissions. Instead, you have an indirect tax on carbon
emissions; you cap it at a certain level and the market determines the price based on
what clever people can deploy to cut emissions. The environmentalists love it because
they know what the level of cuts are. Well, they think they know. But how do you know if
you don't have specific policies and measures? Anybody can say
they're going to cut 15 percent by 2020. What happens when they
don't? The successor to the Kyoto Protocol will have to deal with mandatory
requirements and the penalties of noncompliance.
BAS: Will that be the difference from Kyoto?
SCHNEIDER: Kyoto had no consequences. There were some countries that met
their Kyoto carbon emission reduction targets, mostly because it was domestically and
politically acceptable, but not many. That's why my preference is not for
cap-and-trade; my preference is for specific policies and measures. I would rather have
countries announce precise amounts of cash they will spend on investments in alternative
technologies, improved building codes and efficiency standards, and helping developing
countries leapfrog over the industrial revolution. Tell me how many tens of billions of
dollars you're going to spend and on what. Now you're talking real
policy. If you just tell me aspirational targets, how do I know you're going
to meet them? And what are the consequences if you don't? Kyoto is an
unfortunate case in point.
BAS: Are you optimistic that Copenhagen will be more successful than Kyoto?
SCHNEIDER: Yes, it will be much better because the United States will be one
of the good guys for a change. I'm worried, however, that progress will be
halting, and it will be too much numerology, focused on over-precise emission targets,
and not enough show me the money, based on real policies and measures. Aspirational
targets are fine–you need them in order to know what you're
shooting for–but they need teeth and policies that explicitly spell out what
you can do, what the trading entities are, what counts as legitimate tons, all of that
stuff. And it's not going to get negotiated in one meeting. That's
going to take years, and I don't want us to waste five more years working out
the details of the transactions when there are two or three things such as adaptation
funding, performance standards, and incentives for clean technology that should happen
now.
BAS: Do you think we will be successful at making the necessary sacrifices
to reverse climate change?
SCHNEIDER: Haltingly yes; perfectly no. I can't tell you how many
times I've told my environmental friends, “Guys, would you stop
having the perfect be the enemy of the good?” Let's just get the
camel's nose under the tent. You know it will have its butt in there pretty
soon. Why do you think the Republicans and the fossil industries are so opposed to this?
Because they know that. People won't mind it once they see it works. Just
like the Clean Air Act, it worked. Now, of course, it's going to be harder,
and this will have more fits and starts. But you've got to get started.
