until he believes that over the next Century there's 3.5 degrees Centigrade of climate change that intervention actually would be counterproductive it would cost more okay so I don't know the guy he's referring to but 3.5 degrees is colossal what's up guys Rush here and welcome to all about climate So today we're going to be reacting to Ben Shapiro as he talks about climate change now I've heard some of Ben's views before and from what I gather he's kind of a more moderate kind of climate contrarian essentially he is on the political right um and he's broadly skeptical of some of the claims made about climate change and specifically of the need for climate action and a lot of the proposed Solutions so I think he's had a sort of public talk and he's just been asked a question about climate change so let's see what he has to say my question is about climate change so if I remember it correctly I heard you once in a video that you do believe that human activity does have some sort of effect on the climate so one I would just like you to explain a little bit of your understanding about climate change sure and another question is are there any government policies that you would support in terms to mitigate carbon emissions that's a good question yeah okay so uh the so my perspective on climate change is number one I'm not a climatologist but it's a good way to start accepting the ipcc reports you have to take into account the fact that modeling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years modeling has been wrong for 20 to 30 years okay so first claim climate models have been wrong and overestimating warming for 20 to 30 years it's a claim which doesn't have a great deal of basis in actual reality it's a fiction now it's true that climate models are never 100 accurate and they're kind of not designed to be they're designed to follow a range of possibilities so for example we have emission scenarios the big unknown in the climate system is how much CO2 we will produce so what climate models tend to do is they'll run several different scenarios and they just give us an idea of what's likely to happen if we burn x amount of carbon how accurate have they been well have they overestimated warming some of them have there's dozens of models and what the ipcc tends to do is it takes what's called Model ensembles so it takes up all the models and it smashes them all together basically and averages them out and when you plot The Ensemble average against observations it is remarkably accurate in fact I think there's a great website called carbon brief where they go through all the climate models which have been used through the various decades right from I think the 70s right through to the present I'll put some of these up on screen now and and basically you can see that on average they've done a very good job of projecting warming so yes that's not entirely correct but let's see what other quick fire points uh Ben will shoot off but virtually every reputable scientist including folks who are who are called Skeptics believe that the climate is warming there's an argument about as to how much and again I'm gonna have to inject there very quickly there's not really an argument about how much warming there is we have multiple global data sets and they all converge with high agreement that it was approximately 1.2 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average so that's wrong it's false and that over 50 of that warming is probably attributable to human activity it's actually way higher than that by most estimates it's somewhere around the 100 Mark some put it in the high 90s some funnily enough put it in actually that the low hundreds as in more than 100 of the warming has been caused by humans and you might think well how is that possible well the simple answer is that by their calculations if human activity hadn't been a factor the planet would have actually cooled so the factory we've got warming means we've got 100 of the warming plus a little bit extra to compensate for the natural cooling effect now that raises other questions which is okay so let's say the Earth is warming what kind of damage is that actually going to do and this is a serious question right let's say that the Earth is warming and we're causing it does that mean that it's the day after tomorrow and massive floods in New York and Dennis Quaid running around with Jake Gyllenhaal trying to avoid the freeze no it doesn't right it means that over the course of the next hundred years that the water level is going to rise a rather predictable number of inches or feet and then humans will migrate based on those weather patterns as humans have done since human beings became human beings and started walking on two feet okay so um who's right you know we're not going to have the kind of apocalyptic scenarios you see in them what was it the day after tomorrow that is not a particularly scientifically accurate film that said his description of what the actual dangers are I think underplays them slightly so he mentions sea level right that's true obviously as you heat the planet the Seas rise partly because of ice melting but also because of thermal expansion of the ocean so yes the sea levels will rise and the current scientific projection for the amount of sea level rise we'll see again it depends on these emission scenarios but it's likely to be somewhere around three to four feet or roughly a meter by 2100 but by far the bigger threat and I've said this in many videos is to agriculture huh agriculture relies on a stable climate a stable predictable climate a climate where it's unpredictable where you have extreme rat extreme flood and where it's impossible to plan when to sow your seeds plan for how much rainfall you're going to receive it's going to threaten food security and water security which of course Very Much related so that is by far the biggest threat from climate change certainly that in my opinion and it's one which is not going to be easy to adapt to sea level rise in theory you can adapt to you can as Ben says you can just move where you can build sea defenses agriculture is far harder so you know I'm a little more sanguine about the possibility of long-term climate change than a lot of the catastrophists who seem to assume that there's going to be tremendous damage done all the talk for example about the storms are becoming that more severe in there they're doing that much more damage the statistics really don't back that up what they really back up is that we're just building more stuff in the path of hurricanes so we're building more expensive stuff in the path of hurricanes so yeah so storms again it's another thing which climate change will inevitably impact I've spoken about this I think in my Bjorn Lumberg video where he he had brought it up so if you want the actual science there I go into far more detail broadly the consensus on Storms is that uh the frequency of powerful storms we're talking like Cyclones tropical storms the evidence indicates that they're likely to go down so we're going to get fewer in total in number but when they do hit they're going to be more intense this of course is a problem potentially particularly for Coastal communities in the way of storms it's going to cause a bunch of damage but again I would argue it's kind of almost a periphery point to the real threats of climate change which as I said like agriculture so Ben's kind of missing the crucial the main danger here which is agriculture and so when the storms break that stuff then it's more expensive for us to fix that stuff because the number of hurricanes actually hasn't changed markedly over time uh and when folks say the intensity of hurricanes has changed what they really mean is that the amount of cost associated with the hurricane is changing is not entirely right about the intensity thing he's sort of implied that when we were talking about increasing intensity we're talking about increased costs of damage now like in scientific terms when we talk about intensity we are talking about an increase in total energy of the storms and when you think about it it makes sense because tropical storms get their energy from the ocean so as you warm the oceans you give more energy which they can then use for storms so it's it's kind of intuitive as far as what should be done about that well the biggest problem that you have is a serious Collective action problem let's assume that you really think that there's a huge problem you still have to decide whether you believe what let's put it this way what level of climate change requires what level of cutbacks in terms of the global economy so there's a fellow whose Name Escapes Me Right Now who just won the Nobel prize in economics who legitimately made his entire career out of studying the economics of climate change when does he think that intervention economically is called for he says that until he believes that over the next Century there's 3.5 degrees Centigrade of climate change that intervention actually would be counterproductive it would cost more okay so I don't know the guy he's referring to but 3.5 degrees now that might sound small if someone like Ben if you haven't studied climatology but 3.5 degrees in a century is colossal by geologic standards so for those of you who are new to the channel my background's in geology specifically paleoclimate science which is the study of past climate change to put 3.5 degrees into context the difference between the present and the last glacial period was as little as four degrees Celsius four degrees it's about four to six degrees globally but it took thousands of years to warm from one to the other so Ben's talking about a three and a half degree warming in a century which is almost equivalent to the difference between an ice age and the pre-industrial period a period when glaciers covered like half the Northern Hemisphere I'm not an economist but that difference and that speed as well remember it took thousands of years to get from you know the last ice age to today we're talking 10 times faster or more in fact much more three and a half degrees in a century is like 30 times more that level of change I don't know if economists can quite grasp what three and a half degrees actually means but it's scary so I I don't see any reason why I think that I would know better than he does um it's also a basic fact that the only countries that have really been abiding by any of the the attempts to reduce climate change have been extraordinarily developed countries developing countries have no interest in sacrificing their own people at the altar of climate change and the number one reducer in admissions over the past year was actually the United States let's briefly talk about that so first of all developed countries are the biggest emitters so they should be taking the brunt of climate action that just makes sense secondly Ben sort of alluded to the fact that developing countries don't want to sacrifice their people on the altar of current his exact phrasing of climate change I guess implicit in that is this idea that going green is costly and is detrimental to the well-being of people going renewable is actually in many cases a better option for a lot of developing countries for a number of reasons one most developing countries don't have easy access to fossil fuels some have them in their own land but most countries in order to get fossil fuels they have to import them which means they're automatically tying their energy security to the global market and to energy exporters that economically I don't know I think energy self-sufficiency is something to aim for and Renewables give that two most developing countries are sunny right think Africa as a continent gets a lot of sunlight so solar becomes aerial Prospect three a lot of developing countries are very very rural which means that building the kind of complex energy grids that we have in the west doesn't really make sense take a country like the Congo right in central Africa it's huge and its population density is incredibly low so trying to build an energy grid like we have here in the UK where it's kind of the opposite our population density is very high that's just not viable the the logistical challenge the infrastructure you'd have to build would be insane however remote solar Farms make far more sense you can set them up remotely you don't need an energy grid they're self-sufficient and they're a very good option potentially for a lot of the rural poorer contexts in which a lot of people in developing countries live in the United States pulls out of the Paris Accords the Paris Accords by the way did nothing they were completely useless I mean he's got a point there the Paris agreement indeed most of our International climate agreements have I mean they clearly haven't worked emissions year on year are still increasing and we're a long way off getting the kind of collective action we need but I'm optimistic in the long run I think it's going to eventually come from uh technology and basically Renewables getting cheaper it was basically sign a piece of paper saying you you don't like climate change okay fine I signed it yay and we stopped climate change no you didn't um the what does solve climate change is technological progress and technological progress has led to a reduction in carbon emissions in the United States it will not lead to reduction in carbon emissions in developing countries for another 10 to 15 years including places like China so it's it's a complex issue and all the folks who are basically like let's just kill capitalism and good luck with that thank you okay so that that's the video um it's interesting hearing him speak uh clearly I think we would disagree on how we've got to approach climate change we also clearly uh disagree on the severity and the risk that climate change poses but his assessment of international agreements is is quite close to the Bone it doesn't help that at most climate Summits there are more delegates representing fossil fuel interests than there are for whole countries which is true by the way that that it's insane but I think we've got some common ground and he's the kind of guy I'd like to have a chat with and um see if we can convince each other of more than this but anyway that's it for today I hope you've enjoyed it as always please like comment subscribe it really helps the channel grow and until next time goodbye