Nobody knows how to make complicated concepts easier to understand than Bill Nye The Science Guy. In this episode, he and Chris break down tough questions about the science of global heating and how to communicate the answers to others.
Show notes from Chris:
We have to believe except work toward the idea that we are going to address climate change in a way big enough to preserve the quality of life for billions of people around the world. If you go into this thinking we're going to get overwhelmed and lose, then we will turn it out.
People.
Ah fucked.
I'm Chris Turney, and this is unfucking the future. The world today is full of some pretty bad news, and it's way too easy to get bogged down by it. But there are some incredible people working on climate solutions, and I want you to join them so that we can fix this crisis together.
We fucking the future.
Bill Nice standing in the science lab, well, actually it's John Olives studio. Looks like a size lab in front of him. He's got a globe, a fire extinguisher, a bucket of sand, and a blanket.
Here.
I've got an experiment for you, safety glasses on. By the end of this century, if O missions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another four to eight degrees.
He brings out a flamethrower and lights for globe on fire.
What I'm saying is the planet's on fucking fire.
There are a lot of things we could do to put it out.
Bill points for a bucket of sand and the fire extinguisher.
Are any of them free? No, of course not. Not thing's free. You idiots. Grow the fuck up. You're not children anymore. I didn't mind explaining.
Photosynthenceus to you when you were twelve, but you're adults now and this is an actual crisis.
Got it. Safety glasses off, motherfucker's.
I don't know who doesn't know Bill Nye, but indulge me while I brag on Bill a bit. He's an award winning entertainer and educator, engineer at Boeing and currently the CEO of a Planetary Society. Bill's TV shows Bill Nye Saves the Earth and Bill ny The Science Guy have collected over fifty prestigious award nominations, including nineteen Emmy Awards. He's written two best selling books on science. Today, he spends a lot of his time educating a public about the climate crisis and arguing for action. His latest show is called The End Is Nigh Now. Something you may not know is that before there was Bill ny the Science Guy, there was Bill Nye the stand up comedian.
Well, I mean I tried, No, I middled. That was as high as do you know what I'm talking about? So comedy clubs typically have three acts in a row, the MC as he or she is called the middle and the headliner. Middling is as far as I got in his day. You know, Jerry signed Field would be the headliner.
Ah see, I ever got to MC. So you're way ahead of me, and you and you actually believe it. I'm not the second comedian climate activists I've actually spoken to for great Adam McKay as well. So I'd love to ask you, why do you What do you think makes comedians such great climate activists?
Oh, because we're so much smarter than regular people. Now, I think what you're the selecting that you're experiencing. There is people who don't mind talking all the time.
And do you think as well, just given the conversation and the seriousness of it, that need for levity as well, to sort of cut from the noise and actually get people to pay attention.
Do you think, well, the word you might throw around is absurd. There's a certain features of the world around us which seems silly or absurd or why does this happen kind of thing? Especially where humans are involved. And a lot of my friends are humans. A lot of people I spent time the individuals that talk to me in English generally.
Are that's reassuring, that's reassuring something. So far you never know. I mean, there's a scientist never say never, right. I'm always fascinated by how people get to this point in time? How do people reach a point where they actually talk about climate change? And let's be honest, it's a subject and topic that most of us would rather really not talk about. What was the point at which you reached where you actually felt I need to talk about climate change?
Oh, nineteen eighty eight, climate scientists named James Hanson Jim Hanson testified in front of the US Congress.
There's good old Jim Hanson again. He's been mentioned by almost every guest on this show. His testimony to Congress in nineteen eighty eight was a seminal moment in climate history. He's still a massive presence in climate science today.
Altogether, this evidence represents a very strong case, in my opinion, and that the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.
And that really raised awareness or motivated me to talk about it all the time.
So I'm so old.
I'm so old that I took one class from this famous, famous astronomer named Carl Sagan, and he talked about what he called comparative climatology all the time. This would be comparing the climates of Earth, Venus, and Mars. And all three of these planets have carbon dioxide, which produces the greenhouse effect. But on Venus the greenhouse effect has, as they say, run away.
Every planet with an atmosphere has some degree of a greenhouse effect.
That's the great Carl Sagan and the greenhouse effect he's talking about is a process where certain gases trapped the heat from the Sun in the fs atmosphere. The greenhouse effect helps warm our planet to a habitable temperature if we didn't have it. For temperature with plummet to about minus fifty degrees. A little bit of greenhouse gas is good, but adding more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere is driving up the temperature, and that's bad. That's a fundamental issue.
The most spectacular case by far is the greenhouse effect of Venus. It's the nearest planet planet about the same mass, radius density as the Earth, but it is spectacularly different in several respects, one of which is that the surface temperature is about four hundred and seventy degrees centigrade nine hundred fahrenheit.
Doctor Jim Hanson and Carl's sake and our trailblazers. Since Bill took Carl's class, he's gone on to teach millions and millions of kids, teens, and adults about the wonders of science and our Earth, Which is why Bill ninety is a perfect person to answer some of the big questions I get as a climate scientists. But to be honest, I want bills help in answering. Okay, I bought in Amber, one of the brilliant producers in last show, to share some of the most frequently asked questions we get Amber, What have you got for us?
Hey, Chris, it's pretty exciting to be on the other side of the mic, I have to say. So. This first one is something we talk a lot about behind the scenes. How do we keep ourselves and other people motivated to keep working on the climate crisis when honestly, the shit is so depressing it feels like it's all gone to hell. How do we keep people hopeful instead of feeling like we should all just run to the hills.
The hills probably is not the place to run to, by the way now. But and the thing is, I say the time, you have to be optimistic. I ain't gonna win anything here in the States. It was the I guess it was. Is that the World Cup or semifinals South Africa versus New Zealand and Rugby was.
On the telly.
I didn't stick around to find out how that game came out. I got distracted by other sporting events here. I'm sure somebody won. Along that line, each of those teams believed strongly that they were going to win. They were optimistic. They did not go into the match thinking that they might lose or that they would lose. Rather, you have to think you're going to win the match, or you're not going to win it for crying a lot. And along that line, we have to make big changes. And don't tell me we can't make big changes. My grandfather was in France in World War One, and by all accounts I wasn't there, But by all accounts he rode a horse. Everybody from his generation knew how to ride a horse well enough. But twenty five years later, when his daughter also known as my mother and her boyfriend, also known as my father.
Were in World War Two.
Nobody who was serious about it was riding a horse, and so everything changed. In twenty five years, everything changed. So we got to change everything.
Let's go.
I really like that. So what I'm hearing is we got to keep obviously basick, but we can actually do this and believe it and actually that sense of we know we can do a massive change. We've done it before, so we just but step all.
We have to accept that it's a massive change. It's not just screwing around.
It's taking that iedgies or anything like that.
Hope is not a so both of those teams pad hopes, but they also had plans about how to win the match.
The other thing for me is to find easy ways to get activated. It's not enough to say something is an issue. We have to be solutions oriented when we talk about climate change. So I'll just give an example right now in Australia, we've got massive flooding going down the East coast. But there's not enough to talk about these things. Try to connect the conversation to what we can do to solve it. We can't immediately stop the flooding, but we can have a conversation about how to make our homes more visilient to flooding. And those kinds of conversations can make our friends and neighbors feel safe and less worried about the future, and that in turn can make people feel motivated to actually do something rather than wallowing in the worry. All right, Amber, what else ficult fuss?
Okay, this wants to settle an argument in my household? Am I supposed to recycle?
I've been told.
By a lot of people that I should just not recycle at all because so much of it doesn't actually get recycled, which is super disappointing as someone who thoroughly washes out all my cans, all my bottles, everything so that it can be recycled.
So is it true?
No, No, recycling is not a bad idea, not another tool, but it's not going to solve everybody's problem.
It's just there's two things you don't want, or three maybe you don't want to waste those resources. I mean, it's so much less energy to make aluminum out from aluminum cans than it does from box site from the stuff you mind I mean, it's what is it ninety percent less energy? Maybe ninety five percent, So let's not be throwing aluminum cans away. And then the other thing, you don't want this material to end up in the ocean. It's a huge problem with plastics it and so there's a few things about the plastic in the ocean that are troubling. First of all, there if you're a sea turtle or somebody eating plastic is not nutritious, then there is struggling things where the plastic kills you as an ocean creature. But the other thing that's not known is all these tiny pieces of people nowadays are called microplastics. Nobody exactly knows what's gonna what effect that's going to have on living things in the ocean. But you got to think it's bad. It's intuitibly it's gotta be bad. So don't throw stuff away. Let's recycle this remarkable material. Yes, but while you're doing all that, you're not cutting greenhouse emissions. I mean, or rather a tiny amount they're cutting greenhouse emissions. The problem is much much bigger than that. It's all the stuff we're in the air.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's ultimately what it is is, I mean one of the things that people can do day to day lives, basically to try and actually cut their emissions.
Well, I want people to talk about climate change, so we do some vot and then.
Vote yeah, oh yes.
Combining your errands in the States, the biggest investment you can make to reduce or to address climate changes whatever car you drive, whatever vehicle you choose.
To drive, which brings us to our holy fuck segment. Every year, Americans drive trillions and millions of miles. That's trillions with a T. In the nineteen eighties, Americans drove a modest one hundred and thirty five billion miles on the interstate. That's just the interstate. But in twenty seventeen they drove two one hundred and fifty billion miles the interstate. I mean, that's a fucking enormous number. And we're not asking you to ditch your car completely, but driving less can make a huge difference. By some estimates, if the average American drove just thirty miles less per week, that's ten percent, it would reduce for US's carbon footprint by about one hundred and ten million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That's like removing twenty eight coal power plants.
This is in the US where we have everybody has bar and roads or everywhere.
So pick an efficient car.
And the reason everybody talks about electric vehicles electric cars is because they are inherently more efficient. Well, if the electricity comes from a dirty coal fired power plant, you got I know, yes, you're right, But the car doesn't know in the anwer from morphic sense where the electricity comes from. So as we make our electrical generation systems renewable from renewable electricity, or if you all want, if you all want efficient nuclear power plants, the car doesn't know it. The car is still more efficient. And even driving around an electric car with electricity made in a coal fired power plant, you still come out ahead in greenhouse gases because of the efficiency of the car, and you're not spreading the pollution all over the place. You can potentially control the pollution at the generation source, you know, a filter, a bag house they call it.
Okay. I love Bill's point here, and I think we should all focus on it. You often hear the argument for the electric cars, it's just shifting which detty carpetsles are power comes from. So what's the point. But Bill's absolutely right because the efficiencies are so much higher on the electric and fossil fuel, everything else being equal, it's still saving on cop in the missions.
We're fucking the future. We're fucking the future.
This is really fun. I feel like I'm letting some good talking points too. What's next?
Amba, Yeah, I mean, I'm having a great time, So bear with me on this one. And I'm just sort of playing Devil's advocate here. One thing I sometimes hear from people, especially here in Florida, is that the science is always changing, that it's not settled, and that we really don't know for sure that climate change is human cause. So how am I supposed to respond to that kind of comment?
Well, it's settled, amazing. I remember being four years old. But one kid says, is so. The other kid says, is not? Is not as too?
Is not? As to you.
Climate deny or sorry, science is so settled, it's settled on top is settled.
Certainly, ninety seven.
Percent of the world scientists agree, if not one hundred percent with or how about ninety nine point nine with a less than point one percent trace percentage of scientists who are not on board it's just weird. I mean, in science, you seldom get ninety percent agreement on anything.
I know, right, gravitational constant.
People don't even probably don't come out with that many significant digits come on you guys. So and it's all, as I say, all this doubt has been introduced by conservative media. And a question I have for conservative me is.
Why are you doing this? Why are you ignoring the facts? What is it?
And just seeing well they're doing it for the money. What money we're all going to if you keep this up. So what I say to Fox News and all the news Maxis and all these other guys is just cut it out, just stop it.
I've seen you talk, we've climate denis as well. Have you ever managed to well, let's call them climate contrarians. You have you ever mentioned actually ten any of them mound the tool have any of a comeback to you and said, oh, I've reflected the way he said, Bill.
It takes you know, I tell everybody, somebody's not going to change his mind her mind.
Just hearing it once.
But it is time I think to get back to we in the States, we have several, of course nutty climate deniers, but I bet each of these two guys ten thousand dollars that the decade twenty ten twenty twenty would be the hottest on record, and they wouldn't take the bet.
And it was wow, and so they wouldn't. They won't take the bet. They know better now.
I think that's the troubling thing. They're just hoping it's not true. But hope's not a plan, people.
No, it is not a plan. I mean, that was the warmest decade on record. Each year is getting harder and harder.
Now.
You often hear this, You hear this fantastic conspiracy fod scientists are in.
Scientists or in the conspiracy? Have you hung out with these guys?
You can't agree with anything.
Honestly, I agree on anything, and I would hope one of them was rich.
If I knew, if I had for proof actually this was not real, I would be singing it from the actual top of the buildings. I would be out there screaming. I'd be getting loads of money, maybe a Nobel, maybe even a Netflix show bill. You never know, right, you never know, but you would be so famous for proving it wrong. And I'd love it to be proved wrong. Honestly, you'd get a Nobel Prize if you proved it it happened. No, it's just sadly it's not.
I think there are fewer of them than the battle bit. Yeah, that's right, there's still too many.
And look, you can't change someone's mind overnight. But that first thing that Bill said is so important. Over ninety nine percent of scientists agree that the climate crisis is human caused, but only twenty five percent of Americans believe that there's a scientific consensus on climate change. The bottom line is, the carbon pollution from fossil fuels that we're putting into the atmosphere is causing the planet to overheat dangerously. That science is ironclad.
Yeah, I feel like it's so important to lay it out there like that. Now, this next question is about how close we are from all of humanity falling apart. I saw a headline that said we only have ten to fifteen years to really stop global warming. But something I hear from my friends is that it feels like we've been seeing these headlines for years. So first, please tell me we have more time, And also, why does it like we've been hearing these headlines for so long?
The latest study that I'm familiar with is Michael Mann. You know Michaelman the hockey Stick graph, The lead author. Well, his latest book is This Fragile Moment, and he, based on his latest modeling, points out there's almost certainly not going to be a tipping point.
Just to pause for a second, the hockey stick curve is a really important piece of climate change science. Basically, the idea is that there was a warm pier during the medieval age, and then the Earth cooled down a little, and now, thanks to all the carbon we're pumping into the atmosphere, we're on the up and up and up. It looks like a hockey stick. The thinking is there's not necessarily a tipping point, but rather the idea is that the Earth will just get hotter and hotter until it's totally out of control. Well Bill says it better. Instead, it's just.
Going to get hotter and hotter and miserable or and miserable for everybody, or and so it's not like there's this moment where it clicks. You can make arguments about one and a half degrees celsius that indeed could be six years, but it's just if you go beyond, when we go beyond one and a half, It'll just lower the quality of life for more and more people. It's not like there's a light switch and everybody dies. It's just going to get worse and worse. Which is let's get to work people, doesn't mean let's relax. It means let's get to work. In a sense, the situation is more desperate than ever. In another sense, we have all the time we'd ever need. It just depends how bad you want things to get for how many people.
To me, this kind of mentality is one of the biggest obstacles standing in that way this whole We've got five years to turn things around. It's honestly, really unhelpful for everyone. There's a risk of making people feel like we don't have to act now, and if we miss that target, is it really all over? It also makes people feel like five years from now there'll be some gigantic tipping point, but as Bill mentioned, it might not play out that way, and when it doesn't, it could erode trust in professionals and experts. All right, next one, Amber.
Okay, we couldn't do this episode without bringing up the cowburps and the cow farts. Are cowburps really that bad. What are the greenhouse gases we need to be worried about? Is it just carbon dioxide? And how about is methane? Can you just kind of walk me through all of the greenhouse gases.
Methane is a much much stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The reason everybody talks about carbonoxide is it's so there's so much of it that overall it is still the most significant one. But and rather, both carbon dioxide and methane methane are carbon. The carbon with two oxygen's carbon with four hydrogen. They're both carbon. That's why people talk about carbon capture, carbonness, carbon net, carbon reduction is because both of those greenhouse gases have carbon at the middle of the molecule.
And I think people realize that methane is eighty times more heat absorbing a carbon dioxide. So for you know, at least for twenty years or so, it's a and it breaks down and then its.
Carbon dioxide with ultrabiolet light from the sun. But it's just these got you, guys. These are huge problems.
Okay, if that sounds a little complicated to you, I'm going to break down bills breakdown of this issue.
What the fuck are you talking about?
Molecule for molecule methane is so much worse for them farm than carbon. Dark side oil gas and coal mining all produce as shitloads of me fane gas and a lot of it comes from leaks. But as we know, those farting belch and cows are also at fault. Farming is thought to be one of the largest sources of me fane gas getting into the atmosphere. The good news is we can get me fane levels down and fast if we stop using fossil fuels, we can turn off a massive tap of mefane. What the fucking talking about?
Okay, Bill and Chris, let's talk about the new technologies. This is everything from the vitamins food composter I keep seeing on my Instagram ads to the giant machines that are supposed to suck CO two out of the air. Are the machines going to save us?
Well?
This would be the idea that we would manage the climate of the planet. Top down technocrats would think deep thoughts and change the atmosphere, change something radically in the top down fashion. And the famous thing that people talk about is putting a compound of sulfur very very high in the atmosphere, stratosphere sulfur which would reflect which is yellow, which would reflect sunlight back into space. And this nominally would work, they say. And furthermore, it would produce diffuse light like a cloudy day, and farm plants, agricultural crops respond better to diffuse light than direct light. Really, okay, anyway, who's going to be in charge of that? Who's going to put these airplanes in the stratosphere spewing sulfur compounds.
Who's going to control that?
We're going to put it up over the UK, over Africa and it's going.
To blend and blow around the world. WHOA Everybody's going to be affected? Is that good or bad?
But with that in mind, I encourage everybody, voters of all ages, to think of things of the world, a humankind's relationship to Earth differently than we have thought about it for centuries. And that is we are in charge. Now, this was not a job that we went applying for. But humans, the human race is so big, there's so many of us breathing and burning this atmosphere so aggressively that we are changing the climate of an entire planet. Nobody you can argue We didn't mean to do that, but we're doing it, so.
We have to.
So when it comes to geo engineering, it is nominally a nutty idea to think that you could spew enough stuff in the atmosphere to control the climate of a planet. And if you reflect all the sunlight back into space, wouldn't that screw things up? Wouldn't that be a bad just inherent there's less heat, less sunlight. Just intuitively, it seems like a bad idea, but it may get people argue, it may get to a situation that's all we got that aside.
Do not count on it.
Now, Look at all that we have done to the climate by accident.
And then who you're going to put in charge Vladimir.
Putin, Like, who's going to be in charge of doing sulfur into the atmosphere?
Anyway, you guys, geoengineering is not going to solve a problem.
On the other hand, this idea that nature is separate from us is that's an old idea.
We can't do it.
When we go camping in the wilderness, we're going just to a different part of the planet that we control.
I totally agree with Bill that these big pie in the sky geoengineering ideas are kind of scary and likely to introduce all sorts of problems we can't predict, not to mention, they raise a lot of forny political questions. That said, I do want to touch on what Amber said about the giant machines that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These machines, along with other natural methods of capturing carbon, like in coastal restoration projects, might actually save us at this point. We need to slash our emissions while also removing a carbon we've already pumped into the atmosphere, and there are a lot of cool innovators working on projects that do just this. That's what we mean when we say carbon capture.
We're fucking the future. We're a fucking the future.
Bill sees this has all hands on deck situation. He says we need to prioritize free things.
Three big ideas clean water, renewably produce electricity, and access to the internet for everybody in the world.
When you have.
Access to the internet, you can have education. When you have education, you can raise the standard of living of women and girls. When we raise the stand of living of women and girls, everybody is better off easy to say, hard to do.
You might wonder what the hell has to do with the climate crisis, but it actually has everything to do with it. We talked about this in the Sabrina Elber episode, but for gist of it is, prioritizing women and girls has an outsize impact on our world and for the better.
I would invest in electricity transmission. Someone got to do.
When I say invest, I'm not just talking about the engineering and the towers and the lines and stuff, but the legal right of ways and the deals made and the financing has all got to be figured out. And then I am very interested. Yes, let's continue to have some people messing around with making nuclear fission less scary where the public will accept it in a way they won't accept it right now. But also I want people us it to invest. I'm not joking you guys to invest in nuclear fusion. There's so many organizations universities working on this right now.
This isn't an episode of Bill n I, the Science Guy. But you watched it in middle school when you had a substitute teacher in for the day, So we're not going to get too vol into a nucleifusion. But what you should know about nucleiffusion is that if we can do it, we would create unlimited energy without fossil fuels.
I think the next less than twenty years somebody's going to figure this out, because we can now control magnetic fields with much faster computers than we ever had in previous decades. And controlling a magnetic field would enable, hypothetically, theoretically enable you to control the.
Plasma. This is a gas where all.
The electrons are off on their own, they're not associated with any atoms. So anyway that's in the background. But clean water, noble electra and so let's get swind and solar electrical storage, less efficient, heavier, cheaper batteries in the basements of big buildings that don't rely on lithium and.
Get or done.
Then also world peace would be good because all the wars that are going on, you're just inefficient people just through in the States, just around the expression supply chains, your supply chain, and you disrupt everything and you it has knock on effects worldwide.
And so this is all stuff we got to get done.
Let's go, let's get her done.
And so that leads to very much to the last bit about what can people do meaningfully to make action themselves.
Become politically active in your community and advocate for climate change. Vote for people who are going to address climate change. And here in the US, if you're a third party candidate, don't do it.
You know.
I used to say the most important election in my lifetime was the year two thousand when in the US George Bush became president, even though al Gore had more.
Votes popular votes.
This is an old system, very well intending founding fathers that things out. It's outlived its usefulness, the system. Anyway, It's important election ever in history is twenty twenty four.
That's it.
Whether or not you live in the US. Yes, this is the most important election. You can hate the US whatever it is, but the US is so influential globally, It's most influential culture. And so this is it, people, twenty twenty four?
Is it? Do you want to talk about turning points? This is the point of turning.
Bill Nye, the science guy, the man is a legend for a reason. I mean, he told so many of us about science, but he's now teaching us about how to teach others about the science of climate change. I wanted to bring back Maggie Beds discuss how we can take action on Bill Nye's three Big Ideas?
What fuck can I do?
Hey, Maggie, Hey Chris Well, I don't.
Know if I could follow Bill, but I will do my best.
I'm surely he'll be pretty What of your golfers is wee? Maggie, Chris?
I was thinking about how Bill so effectively breaks down complicated ideas into something easy and fun. So in that spirit, our action this week is to lead with joy. Yes, the climate crisis is extremely serious, and so bringing in a little humor to the conversation helps us reach people and make complicated topics more easily digestible. So if you would like to try to bring more humor and more effective communication techniques into conversations about climate, there is a great article that we will put in the show notes. Check it out. But it all leads up to the big takeaway here. Instead of focusing on the doom we might experience, let's try to envision the better world we could have. Let's all try to be.
More like Bill Gosh. I love that, Maggie, thanks so much on the stay. And that's what the fuck you can do for this week?
What fuck? Can I do.
Oh fuck, that's all for this episode. Next time, on Fucking the Future, we talked to Glennis Humphrey, a fire a cologist who wants us to use fire to prevent wildfires.
What we're seeing is different from the past.
We've seen basically.
A change in the intensities of fires, the frequencies of fire that we haven't actually seen before.
When you see a change where.
Fires occurring where it didn't occur before, or it's occurring at a much bigger scale than it did occur before, I think that's what's alerting us that something is off. That's a warning to say things are changing because it's different from.
The past until then. I'm Chris Turney signing off from Sydney, Australia. Thanks for joining me and I'm Fucking the Future.
Fucking the Future.
I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Imagine Audio and Awfully Nice for iHeart Podcasts and hosted by me Chris Turney. The show is written by Meredith Brian. I'm Fucking the Future is produced by Amber von Shassen and Rene Colvert. Ron Howard Brian Grazer, Carral Welker and Nathan Chloke are the executive producers from Imagine Audio. Jesse Burton and Katie Hodges are the executive producers from Awfully Nice. Sound design and mixing by Evan Arnette, original music by Lilly Hayden, and producing services by Peter McGuigan. Sam Swinnerton wrote our theme and all those fun jingles. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to rate and review Unfucking the Future on Apple Podcasts or whether you get your podcasts