Everything You Need To Know About The MONSTER El Niño.

If you think this year has been hot, well, next year could be much, much hotter. That's the message from my guest on this special edition of Novara Live. Zeke Hausfather, very distinguished climate scientist. He's a researcher at Berkeley Earth. He's a lead author for the IPCC and the climate lead at Stripe, which we talk about financial technology company and also a writer for Carbon Brief. I've been following Zeke for a long time on X. He does brilliant data visualizations when it comes to the climate. I've shown them on Novara Live a few times. So, it's great to get him on to talk about what El Nino could have in store next year and the second half of of this year. And many people calling this a Godzilla El Nino, a super El Nino. Lots of very worrying words and to be frank, the next 12 months could be a rather worrying time. In the interview, we also discuss possible solutions to climate change, which are those approaches which might work, which aren't, who should we trust, who shouldn't we trust. Really, really interesting conversation. As you'll notice, this is not a normal episode of Novara Live. We've given the team the day off for the bank holiday, but I think this is a really, really fantastic conversation actually. I'm really glad we got Zeke Hausfather on to talk about the work he does. Thank you so much for joining us on Novara Media. >> Thanks. It's a great to be here. >> You've got many strings to your climate bow. So, you're a scientist at Berkeley Earth, you're a lead author at the IPCC, you're the climate lead at Stripe, and that's a financial technology company, and you're a writer for Carbon Brief. What's the common thread running through sort of all these hats you're wearing? >> You know, I'm someone who likes to be involved in a bunch of different areas of a problem because climate. And so, you know, part of it is the mitigation side, you know, figure out how to reduce emissions. Part of it is which is largely what I work with Stripe. Part of it is the physical climate side, you know, understanding how the system works uh and what we have in store for us in the future. Uh and part of it is communicating that, you know, explaining to the broader public like how this all works, um why it's important, uh what we can do about it. And so I think that, you know, you can do the best science in the world, but if you can't talk about it, uh it's it only goes so far. >> And on this sort of purely scientific basis, what is your specialism? I know you sort of seem to publish a lot about surface area or or surface temperatures. Is that sort of your your real niche? >> Yeah, so I did my dissertation on improving observational temperature records. So like all of our data from ships and buoys and weather stations and fitting it all together to create long-term records. Um but I've also done a fair bit of work on sort of evaluating the performance of climate models against observations uh as well as like scenarios around, you know, future emissions, future warming, that sort of thing. >> I've been following you a long time. Lots of great sort of data visualizations on your X account. Everyone should follow you. Um this one in particular got a lot of people's attention. So it went quite viral. Definitely got my attention. I think we've shown it already on on the show this summer. So you say, "I'm not sure folks have realized just how crazy the second half of 2026 and 2027 will be for global temperatures on the back of a record-smashing El Niño event. Here is my latest estimate of where both years will end up compared to global temperatures since 1850." Uh this is back at the beginning of August. I'm not sure if your sort of modeling has changed since then. Um but you've got 2026 sort of very close to being a record-breaking year, sort of 50/50 as to whether or not it will be higher than 2024. But then you've got 2027 absolutely smashing that record. So I think about sort of 1.7° higher than pre-industrial temperatures. Um talk to me about that. Why is the second half of 2026 and um then 2027 going to be um in your words crazy? >> So what's really happening here is El Niño, which is a mode of natural variability in the climate system and happening on top of, you know, accelerating human-driven warming. So, the world has warmed by about 1.4° since pre-industrial already, driven by human activity. And then, [snorts] on top of that, there's these sort of wiggles every few years. El Niño years tend to be hotter than normal, La Niña years, which is its sort of colder twin, tend to be colder than normal. Um, and this year we seem to be on track for the biggest El Niño event in recorded history, or at least in since we've had records. Um, you know, most of the models that we have today, and there's about 14 different groups around the world that provide dynamical models of El Niño, expect this event to peak close to 4° C above normal in the tropical Pacific. Um, and to put that in perspective, the strongest El Niño events on record, which are one in 18 uh 87 uh and one in 2015-2016 were about a little below 3° above normal in that region of the tropical Pacific. So, this could smash any previous El Niño we've seen, and as a result, it's going to contribute pretty significantly to temperatures both for the remainder of this year and particularly for next year. You know, one thing that we tend to see over and over again in the temperature record is that when an El Niño is developing, it boosts that year's temperatures, but more modestly. But, it's the year after El Niño peaks, cuz El Niños almost always peak, you know, around November-December, that we really see the big boost. So, you know, 1997 was a particularly warm year, but 1998 smashed the record. 2015 was a particularly warm year, but 2016 smashed the record. 2023 and 2024 followed the pattern, and so we expect something similar to happen with 2026 and 2027. And that's why, given how strong this El Niño seems to be shaping up or shaping up to be, you know, that's why we expect such a record-shattering temperatures globally in 2027. >> People are calling this a super El Niño, a Godzilla El Nino, a monster El Nino, Uh all sorts of names flying around for it. Um is it just bad luck that we're getting this super El Nino when we've already got accelerating temperatures? So, I mean, if you you know, the the last few years have been the hottest years on record, and then sort of on top of that do we just have this terrible luck that we have the strongest El Nino ever, or are the two things related? >> So, certainly a big part of it is bad luck. Um you know, there is an active debate in the scientific community about the extent to which climate change is affecting El Nino. You know, there's some indication in the record that we might have been seeing more intense El Ninos in recent decades than we have historically. Um but, you know, models are pretty mixed in terms of how well we can attribute that to to human influence or not, or whether we expect that to to change sort of outside of the the noise in the system and going forward. So, we can't rule it out, but I I think it's it's one of these areas where, you know, the science isn't particularly settled yet. Um so, I want to avoid, you know, overstating our confidence that there's a link there. But, there certainly could be, and there's some physical mechanisms that scientists might identify where, you know, a warmer world could see more intense El Nino events going forward. >> Yeah, I mean, in in any case, obviously, the underlying global warming means that a big El Nino leads to hotter um sort of temperatures. So, in in that sense, we did it to ourselves. >> Yeah, and and everything's happening on top of a a hotter baseline, right? You know, a big El Nino event creates a big boost in global temperatures for a year or so. Um but, you know, the size of a strong El Nino event might boost global temperatures by 0.2°C or something. You know, we're adding 0.2°C to the climate system every 8 years through our emissions. So, we're we're adding a a permanent super El Nino worth of heat every 8 years by emitting, you know, 40 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, um to put it in perspective. >> And so, I've also seen you sort of write somewhere that next year's super El Nino will show us what the norm will look like in 8 years' time, potentially, sort of by the logic you've just explained there. Um, talk to me about what we could see. So, what could we see next year? The temperatures might be 0.2 um, above what they would have otherwise been. So, maybe we're talking sort of 1.7° above pre-industrial levels. Um, I know an El Niño doesn't affect the world universally. So, in very simple terms, and you're going to be able to sort of explain this in much better detail than myself. My understanding is you get severe droughts in some parts of the world. So, Australia, Southern Africa, and Indonesia for example. You then also get heavy floods in other parts of the world. Um, so Peru and Southern USA I've seen mentioned. Um, and then as we've discussed already, you get higher average temperatures across the globe. So, what are the kind of, I suppose, scenes that we could be seeing directly ourselves or sort of in in news footage over the next 12 months if this El Niño um, is as as big as it looks like it's going to be? >> Yeah, so so the biggest impacts of El Niño in terms of harms to people are really on the rainfall side, not the temperature side. Um, you know, El Niño's associated, as you mentioned, with stronger rainfall in the tropical Pacific. So, in that sort of El Niño tongue of elevated temperatures over the ocean, there's a big increase in rainfall. But, around that region, in sort of the the extratropics and to the east and the west of it, you see much drier conditions. So, over India tends to be drier, over Southern Africa tends to be drier, Indonesia tends to be drier, Australia tends to be drier. Um, and these have historically been associated with some pretty severe crop failures. Um, you know, [snorts] in the 1997-1998 El Niño event and the 2015-2016 event, uh, there were crop failures in in Africa, um, that led to emergencies being declared and, you know, big mobilizations to make sure that there weren't famines. Um, you know, there were tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars in damages in those regions. Uh, it's also associated with significant wildfire risks. Uh, so, in the '97-'98 event, there were record-setting wildfires in Indonesia uh that themselves emitted something like 15% of all CO2 emissions emitted that year from burning peat uh or globally uh just from burning peat in Indonesia and you know covered large areas of Southeast Asia with smoke that contributed to premature mortality. Um we could expect to see something like that again this year. You know, similarly the Amazon had its worst fire season ever in 2024 on the back of that much more modest El Niño event hasn't really recovered from that fully and so adding this strong El Niño event on top of that could really, you know, pose some catastrophic fire risks in the Amazon. There's a a piece in nature just a couple weeks back on this that suggested that, you know, this added to that stress could help push the the overall Amazon system toward a a tipping point uh which would be pretty terrible. Uh another big impact we see from El Niño events is these global coral bleaching events. So, prior to 1998, there hadn't really been a 97-98, there hadn't really been a global coral bleaching event. There's been individual reefs that experienced particularly hot conditions and and might bleach, but it was a very rare occurrence. Um but ever since that El Niño event, every time we have a strong El Niño event, we see this widespread coral bleaching. Now, the corals can recover from that given enough time, but if we start seeing these coral bleaching events, you know, going from once every 50 years to once every 10 years to once every 5 years to once every other year, uh we expect to see much more significant uh degradation of coral reefs um particularly in the tropics. And those are, [clears throat] you know, key critically important for fisheries and coastal protection and a whole bunch of other services. >> Just to clarify on the on the on the the coral bleaching. So, is that related to tipping points? Cuz my understanding with the Amazon, there's this worry that [clears throat] there'd be these incredibly these positive feedbacks which would be very damaging because you get global warming and therefore the Amazon collapses and if the Amazon collapses, that's less carbon being sucked out of the air and also if it burns, that's obviously carbon being put into the air. So, you can sort of see this vicious cycle. Is it a similar situation with the the coral bleaching, or is that more of a sort of biodiversity issue? So, coral reef bleaching by itself doesn't contribute to additional climate change. Um it's it's not a a carbon cycle feedback like you have in the Amazon. But, not all of what we call tipping points in the climate system are necessarily drivers of additional warming, right? Like ice sheet loss is a big impact for all of us who live near the coast, uh but it's if anything is probably going to slightly cool the planet rather than warm it cuz you're just putting an immense amount of ice melt into the ocean uh over time, you know, trillions and trillions of tons. So, you know, not every tipping point has to itself, you know, result in additional warming. Though, some of them certainly do. Permafrost thawing, you know, Amazon dieback are are two good examples of of ones and and uh sea ice loss as well because then you're exposing darker ocean water under the sea ice, which absorbs more heat. Those are all self-perpetuating feed or not in climate self-perpetuating, but they're they're positive feedbacks that contribute to additional warming in the climate system. Coral reefs are generally considered to be a tipping point in that at least individual reef systems are highly sensitive to a particular temperature threshold, which when you go beyond, you know, the coral expels the symbiotic algae, the zooxanthellae that lives inside them, and then bleaches and dies. Um but they don't themselves contribute to additional climate change. >> Yeah, that's the sea ice. That's if the ice is on land, then that would have an a cooling effect temporarily if it goes in the sea because that's lots of ice in the sea. But, if it's on the sea and it melts, that has a warming effect because there's less sort of sunlight being reflected back into the air or back into the atmosphere, sorry. >> term you'll Yeah, very very long term you'll have a warming effect from from melting land ice because you still expose darker surfaces. Like, ice is pretty reflective. But, the ice sheets we're talking about here, Greenland, Antarctica, they're just very very thick. And so, the time frame over which enough melt would have to happen to expose significant amounts of land is just thousands of years. Um you you'd have much bigger impacts of many, many meters of sea level rise long before you have the sort of temperature feedback effects of of that ice melt. Whereas sea ice is very thin. So, you don't need to lose much sea ice to expose a much darker surface across wide areas underneath. And so, it's for that, it's really the albedo, the reflectivity impact that's the the major one. >> 1877, just sticking with El Niño, because so lots of lots of people might think we've only been talking about El Niño since our climate change began. Um I certainly hadn't heard of it since the last until the last 10 years, I think. 1877, we had an El Niño which caused potentially 50 million deaths. Um 2 to 3% of the world population. And that was because, as you said, the droughts, which caused crop failure, which caused famine. Now, obviously, sort of technology has advanced a lot since then. I assume we're not looking at sort of 50 million deaths um next year, thanks to this super El Niño. But, sort of how how serious could this be in human terms, sort of compared to sort of historical El Niños that we've seen before? >> 1877, as I think I mentioned earlier, is is roughly tied with 2015-2016 as the strongest El Niño in history. Um obviously, we we have less good data back in 1877. You know, the amount of ships that were going through the the El Niño region taking temperatures uh during the winter were were relatively small compared to the buoys and satellites and everything else we have today measuring these regions. Um so, the error bars are bigger in that. But, we do know it was probably, you know, around 2.7, 2.8° above normal in the tropical Pacific based on the measurements we do have uh during the 1877 event. Um but, 1877 was also a world that was much more isolated, uh much less interconnected, with much lower adaptive capacity. Like, we didn't have the ability to mobilize, you know, the World Bank and other international institutions to provide, you know, food support, to provide direct payments to farmers who might have their livelihood wiped out with a drought. You know, governments in the region these regions were were much less capable of that back then. So, you know, I don't think we're going to see a famine where millions of people die. Hopefully not. If if we do, that'll be a bigger failure on the part of humanity than on the natural [clears throat] world. Um but I do think we might see some pretty persistent economic losses for these regions. There was a a paper that came out in science about a decade ago where they looked at the impacts of El Nino on economies of these parts of the world that are strongly affected by El Nino events. Uh and the the numbers they found were pretty staggering. So, in this paper they tried to model not just the direct damages like during the El Nino year, which are in the hundreds of billions globally, but but also the effect on long-term growth in these regions. So, how much slower economic growth was following El Nino than it normally would be in these regions. And they found that if you account for the loss of growth, the damages associated with very strong El Nino events run into the trillions of dollars. You know, I think it was like 3 to 5 trillion dollars of losses from the 1997-98 El Nino event. Um and so certainly it's not just what happens during that year. It's it's the long-term effects on these economies that are important. >> And so stepping away from El Nino for a moment looking at I suppose longer-term climate trends, um all of this associated with sort of human-caused climate change not these natural cyclical phenomenons. This is a graph from the New York Times and you've got the 1880 to 1970 trend which looks fairly, you know, it's going up but fairly flat. Gets much more steep from 1970, um but then from 2010 to present I mean the the temperature rises just seem to be massively accelerating. So, the the details I've got here, the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35° per decade over the past 10 years compared with just under 0.2° C per decade from 1970 to 2015. Um I mean, that's almost a doubling of warming, isn't it? So, that sounds very scary, right? If if climate change is is not only sort of happening, but accelerating, we could be getting to a very difficult position quite soon. Um talk me through that. How worried should we be about this acceleration and why is it happening? >> Yeah, so I think there is increased evidence that climate change is in fact accelerating. Um I wrote a piece for the New York Times back in 2023 when this was more emerging as as an issue and there was much more disagreement in the scientific community sort of putting a stake out there saying like, yes, we do actually expect to see some acceleration and it is in fact happening and and I think the last 3 years have have started to prove that out. There is still a debate of how much it's accelerating. You know, the the graph you just showed draws that last line through a pretty short period of time. So, whether you have a big El Niño event near the end like what happened in '23, '24 can affect the slope there. Um there's a a more recent paper uh that uh a number of us IPCC authors published where we argue that the the current rate of human-induced warming is probably close to closer to 0.3 or a little below 0.3 rather than 0.37. But either way, it's it's notably higher, about 40% higher we estimate than the the long-term warming that we've experienced since the 1970s. So, why then is warming accelerating? What what's going on here? Um well, for one thing, you know, we're still emitting more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Uh our emissions have not peaked even though they've slowed down a bit. Um and every ton of CO2 we add to the atmosphere adds to the warming of the planet. And so, the only way to for global warming to slow down is for our emissions to decrease. The only way for it to stop is our emissions to get to to net zero, which is why that's the global target. But But top of our emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, there's also something else important happening. Which is that we're cleaning up the air. Now, that's a good thing. You know, outdoor air pollution from primarily from burning fossil fuels and and also like burning trash, burning crops, things like that, kill on the order of 5 to 8 million people a year. From things like particulate matter, PM2.5. And one of the main precursors of that particulate matter is sulfur dioxide. That sulfur dioxide comes primarily from burning coal. And also diesel fuels cuz there's a lot of sulfur in fossil fuels that we dig up from the ground. And that sulfur then goes up to the atmosphere, forms these little particulates, makes the air very hazy. And so if you look at a picture of, you know, Beijing from 10 years ago and the sky looks like pea soup, you know, that's coming from these coal emissions, diesel emissions, things like that. So, that's been a giant health crisis for decades now. The world has taken important action on cleaning that up. You know, China's emissions of sulfur have fallen by 75% since the the Beijing Olympics, which was a which was a real wake-up moment for them. Global emissions have fallen by about 40% of sulfur since then. So, that's good news. We should celebrate that. At the same time, it turns out that our emissions of sulfur in particular from burning fossil fuels were serving to mask some of the warming from our greenhouse gases. So, sulfur is very reflective. It scatters light back to space, which is why it's so dim outside when it's very polluted, which is why we talk about global dimming. It also serves as what we call cloud condensation nuclei. So, if there's a lot of sulfur particles in the lower atmosphere, it's easier for low-lying clouds to form around them, which themselves are reflective and bounce light back to space. And so, if you look at, you know, our best estimate of what is driving warming over time, about a third of the warming the world would have otherwise experienced has been masked by our emissions of air pollution. So, to put it another way, we're at, you know, 1.4 or centigrade warming today, we'd be closer to 2° if we hadn't been uh masking some of that warming through air pollution accidentally. And so now that we're cleaning up that air pollution, we're sort of unmasking past climate change. Uh and that's, you know, at least in my modeling, uh is what the is the primary driver of this acceleration we're seeing. >> I mean, that's that's terrible. >> [laughter] >> I mean, I suppose because this is is it is a real sort of um irony, I suppose, because the the decision to try and clean up our air was a really important one to make. Um millions of as you say, I mean, I'm just repeating what you said really, but millions of people die from these particulates. Um so regulating them was absolutely the correct thing to do. Um especially, you know, if you lived in Beijing, there was huge sort of public um a a sort of a public upswell of protest to say, "You need to clean up our air." My understanding is also that the the shipping industry sort of new regulations that meant that the shipping industry um releases less sulfur dioxide. That has also had um a a a big impact on accelerating climate change. Um although, you know, it's good for people who live in port cities, for example, because they have have less pollution. So, I mean, how do we solve this? Because, you know, I I I I assume the people who care about sort of the health of people's lungs, um they want us to get to almost zero sulfur dioxide, but you're saying if we get all of this out of the air, then we're going to go up to 2°, which would be a disaster, presumably. So, how do we you know, how do we fix this puzzle? >> It's it's a tough one. I mean, uh >> [sighs] >> we're probably going to get close to 2° this century, no matter what we do at this point, unfortunately, just cuz the world isn't getting its act together to reduce emissions quickly enough. I mean, the the one thing that is worth noting is that these reductions in sulfur emissions and the associated unmasking of of greenhouse gas warming are built into all of our future climate modeling scenarios. You know, it was as far back as 2008 or so, I think, when the models switched over from assuming that we'd keep polluting the air, you know, through the end of the century to, you know, actually no, we're going to clean up the air. Um, it also turns out that any model you have where you reduce fossil fuels and replace them with clean energy, you get rid of most of that sulfur sort of by design, right? Cuz it's it's co-emitted with fossil fuels. Um, so we [clears throat] we sort of have that baked into our projections. It's not a surprise. Um, and there are other countervailing factors that can help prevent that additional warming. So, greenhouse gases are a pretty big category. The main one is CO2 that we we spend a lot of time talking about, but the second biggest one is methane. And CO2 the warming from CO2 is more or less forever. We can we can talk about the reasons for that later, which are are in- interesting and complicated, but methane is very short-lived in the atmosphere. Um, methane sort of decomposes or oxidizes into uh water vapor and carbon dioxide, you know, after about 10 years in the atmosphere. And so, if you can cut methane emissions, you get pretty quick cooling of the planet, um, because the methane you emitted previously goes away quickly. Um, and so, if you take a climate model and you get rid of all the sulfur, but you also get rid of, you know, most human methane emissions, the two kind of counterbalance each other. The problem right now, of course, is that methane emissions are increasing at the same time that sulfur is rapidly decreasing. So, it's sort of the the worst of both worlds. But, if we can get to a trajectory where we're reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and in particular reducing our methane emissions quickly, we can help avoid, you know, the the termination shock uh of sorts that we're seeing from from cutting air pollution. >> Well, so, why have we you know, cuz what can we learn from how it seems like it was very easy to reduce sulfur emissions? Why have we managed to reduce the emissions of sulfur, but not methane? Is it because sulfur sort of humans can sort of see and smell it and therefore there is a democratic demand, or in China, I suppose, a popular demand to regulate it, whereas with methane it's all a bit more abstract? >> I think that's part of it, right? Air pollution is a a pressing, visible concern that's killing many, many people today. Climate is also killing people, but it's more indirect. It's less visible. It's less, you know, short-term than air pollution. And so, for better or worse, there's been more of a push, particularly in in places like China, to clean it up. But there's also, from a technological standpoint, it's in some ways easier, right? You can put a scrubber on a coal-fired power plant. You can, you know, mandate transition away from diesel lorries to electric ones as China has done. Um, for something like cleaning up methane, you know, you need to track down diffuse leaks across a large system of of natural gas, or you have to deal with agriculture. You know, uh it's it's really hard to stop cows from burping methane. Uh, you know, barring eating less beef, which, you know, has been a hard sell for for the public in general. Um, so there's just sort of easier techno-fixes in some ways for the sulfur side than there is for the greenhouse gas side, which is why I think we've seen much more rapid reductions there than we've seen for greenhouse gases. >> Okay, techno-fixes, you've used the word. Um, and this conversation about how we cleaned up sulfur from the air, and that has increased the heating of of the earth, has led many people to suggest that we put some of it back in, um, but higher up. So, sulfur when it's close, um, to the earth's surface, um, we breathe it in, causes lung conditions, kills lots of people, um, but it all does also reflect a bit of sun. Um, and and the argument that people put forward, and I think you've sort of suggested it to some degree in the New York Times, um, a year or two ago, is to say, "What if we put some of this sulfur back in the atmosphere, but we do it much higher up, so it doesn't have any effect on people's lungs, but it also has the same effect of reflecting some of the sunlight back?" So, it gives us the same global cooling effect without the problematic health impacts. Um, this is sort of part of solar radiation management, um, in sort of the the official terminology. Um, talk to me about that. Is that an option? Should we do it? >> It's a big question. Um, you know it, I personally am in favor of having it as a sort of break glass in case of emergency measure. Like things get bad enough with climate change that we need to respond quickly. Um, what I'm concerned about is, you know, it it I In fact, in that New York Times piece, we we had a good line on this, which we said the, you know, the the biggest risk of geoengineering isn't some Hollywood catastrophe, it's complacency. Uh, and what we're trying to get at is that if the underlying problem is the warming of the planet from CO2 primarily, you don't actually solve that by putting sulfur in the upper atmosphere. So, if I emit a ton of CO2 today from burning coal, it's going to keep warming the planet at pretty steady levels for about a thousand years or more until eventually you get, you know, some earth system responses that that start cooling things down. But, and that's a pretty robust finding from climate science, you know, it goes back to Susan Solomon's work in like 2009 and and it's been, you know, pretty much all climate models today give similar results. Um, whereas if you're putting sulfur in the upper atmosphere, it lasts for a year year and a half until it falls out. And so, the only way to solve the problem of climate change is to stop emitting CO2. Like you can put a band-aid on it with putting sulfur in the stratosphere, but as long as we keep emitting more CO2 per year, you're just having to put more and more and more and more sulfur in the stratosphere to counterbalance it. Um, there's a great Futurama skit of the classic, uh, you know, macro running show. >> How do we get rid of the greenhouse gases? >> Fortunately, our handsomest politicians came up with a cheap, last-minute way to combat global warming. Ever since 2063, we simply drop a giant ice cube into the ocean every now and then. >> Just like Daddy puts in his drink every morning, and then he gets mad. >> Of course, since the greenhouse [music] gases are still building up, it takes more and more ice each time. Thus, solving the problem once and for all. >> BUT >> ONCE AND FOR ALL! >> And this is more or less a version of that, right? It It doesn't solve the underlying problem. And so, there is a worry that if we start doing it, you know, people say, "Oh, well, we can just kick the can down the road. Future generations can deal with like solving the mess that we've created, and and we can, you know, mask it in the meantime." Um That's not to say that there's not there's not a world where we should be masking it. Like, if the impacts get bad enough, we we shouldn't be arguing that people should suffer in order to solve the problem. Um but I we want to make sure that if we do go down that path, we don't sort of use it as a short-term solution while ignoring the big problem of CO2 that we ultimately have to deal with. >> And when you say, cuz I hear lots of people say this, it's sort of something to have in your back pocket in case of an emergency event. What counts as an emergency event? What is a What is an emergency event look like where we might take such an extreme response? >> Uh to be clear, it's not something that we can like deploy instantaneously in response to a particular event. Like, we can't say, "Oh my god, the El Niño is going to be really big this year. Let's put a bunch of sulfur in the atmosphere." Like, the it it takes more time for those processes to kick off than, you know, the the time scale of like a single year event. I think it's more like if the impacts of climate change get so bad that they're causing widespread human suffering at a scale that we can't or societies can't respond to, if, you know, some of these potential tipping points in the climate system end up being more severe or more sensitive, you know, I think those are the types of cases where we'd say, "Okay, stuff is getting really bad. You know, we need to do something about this in the short term, even while we keep, you know, working to solve the underlying problem. Um and it's important to emphasize that with solar geoengineering or solar radiation management, the more you put up into the upper atmosphere, the worse the unintended side effects could potentially become. You know, for one thing, you're still putting sulfur or some other particle up there that is ultimately going to fall down and people are ultimately going to breathe it. It still has health effects even if it's, you know, much less severe than what we're doing to the lower atmosphere today. But also, it changes a bunch of other things. It's not like putting a ton of sulfur in the upper atmosphere perfectly undoes putting CO2 into the atmosphere. They have different climate effects in different regions of the planet. So, some will continue to warm, some will cool. If you put a bunch of sulfur up there, it also has big effects on precipitation patterns. So, some regions of the world would get wetter, some would get drier if you put a bunch of sulfur into the upper atmosphere. Um that itself could create a lot of problems, um particularly because it's not always that predictable. You know, if you put a bunch of sulfur in the upper atmosphere and suddenly the Indian monsoon doesn't come the next year, it could have just been a freak one in 500-year event, but there's no way to prove it wasn't caused by that geoengineering. And so, the politics of it sort of become that you own the weather once you start doing it. Um and if you really put a lot up there, you know, particularly in a scenario where you where not reducing emissions very quickly and we just keep masking more and more and more of it, you know, you start affecting crop growth by reflecting more light back to space, less light reaching the surface. Um you can turn the sky white instead of blue, >> [laughter] >> which, you know, would not be ideal uh from a, you know, world we want to live in perspective. Um and you can hurt the ozone layer. Um you know, we already see after big volcanic eruptions uh reductions in stratospheric ozone and so, the more you're putting up there, particularly pounded over time, uh the big bigger impacts you might have on the ozone layer. So, it's not a great solution. Um if it the best case, it's a, you know, stopgap measure for us to buy ourselves time to get our act together and solve the problem. >> And getting our act together, I mean, basically involves electrification and then moving to renewables. I want to get up a couple of graphs, um, a couple more graphs. These ones you did make, you you put them on your your X very recently. So, you got coal going from somewhere near 40% down to sort of 31-ish percent. Um, nuclear going This is since 1985, by the way. So, nuclear going down. We all know the reasons why, although it seems a bit of a shame in retrospect that nuclear has gone down in that time. Um, and then gas, um, sort of leveling out. Wind, solar, and other renewables going up to 21.8% so, overtaking gas. Um, that in a way looks quite positive because you're seeing, you know, most of the fossil fuels going down and the renewables going up. If you look at it in terms of the absolute amount of emissions as opposed to the proportions, um, it looks, I suppose, more worrying. Um, so, we can get up the next graphic, which is showing that while coal has become a sort of smaller proportion of the energy mix, I mean, it's still increasing. I mean, maybe it flatlined in the past year because China is moving moving to renewables, but it's still going up and up and up. You know, you've been working in this space for a long time. How would you kind of assess the transition up to this point? Are we doing better or worse than you would have imagined 10 years ago? >> To be honest, I think we're doing better. You know, I I wasn't particularly optimistic 10 years ago, and I think what we've seen in terms of cost declines from batteries, from wind, and particularly from solar is is a goddamn miracle. Like, if you told me that we'd be seeing solar prices as low as we are right now in, you know, 2010, I I would have said you're crazy. Um, and so, you know, I I do think of all the things happening the world, you know, solar in particular and its cost declines is the single best thing we have going for us. And at the same time, you know, even with solar being ridiculously cheap, it's still an uphill battle to replace fossil fuels. You know, all all the graphs you were showing are for the electricity sector, which is an important part of our energy mix. It still only represents about a quarter of global CO2 emissions, right? The other three quarters come from industry, from transportation, from buildings, and all the infra agriculture. Those all need to be addressed as well. And even in the electricity sector, the wind and solar that we're adding is mostly going to meet new demand, which is still important, right? In a world where we didn't have that clean energy revolution, you know, we our emissions would be much much higher from coal, oil, and gas because that would be going to meet this new demand instead. But we we're still not quite at the point where we're seeing large-scale declines in fossil fuel use globally, even if there are some countries like, you know, the US, the UK, the EU where we have seen coal more or less collapse and largely been replaced by clean energy and and natural gas. Um so we got a long way to go. There are certainly some good signs. Um we've also seen a lot of progress with uh light vehicle electrification. So this year about one out of three cars sold globally is going to be electric. Uh and that's up from, you know, almost nothing 15 years ago. Uh the US is very much the laggard there. It's only about one out of 20 cars sold in the US is electric. But if you go to somewhere like China, it's every other car. Um and so what we hope is that we can see similar progress to what we've seen with clean energy technologies and with vehicle electrification for things like heat pumps to decarbonize buildings, um for, you know, medium-duty transport, for trucking, for electrification. You know, there there are a lot of other sectors where we have technologies that are reasonably mature today that are falling in cost that could be effective solutions. And then there's some parts of the economy that are just going to be really hard, like agriculture. >> [laughter] >> We don't have that much that can decarbonize it easily. Um Um, you know, producing less more food on less land can open up more areas to to plant more trees and and you know, reduce impacts in that way. Um, you know, there are certainly some options for changing agricultural practices in a way to minimize emissions, but as long as we have large amounts of ruminants, cows, sheep, goats that are producing large chunk of our food, we're going to have huge methane emissions from that. As long as we're adding tons of nitrogen as fertilizer to our fields, we're going to have large nitrous oxide emissions. Um, industrial heat is another really tough one. So, if you want to heat something up to 1,000° C or 2,000° C, uh, you're going to need a huge amount of energy. And at least right now, electricity is not a cost-effective way to do that. You know, maybe we'll invent small modular nuclear reactors that you can attach to a steel mill to provide high-temperature heat, but we're well away from that today. Um, aviation and long-distance shipping are both tough ones. So, there there's a lot of areas where we still need to develop the technologies to be able to effectively decarbonize. But, the fact that we have done so for wind and solar and that we have this success story and that so many people around the world, so many smart people are now working on these problems, does give me some hope. >> I mean, you're a climate scientist and a technologist really, right? So, you you look at the Earth's temperatures, you look at climate models, and then at Stripe especially, you're looking at sort of the technologies which might help us solve this problem. We'll talk a bit more in specifically about Stripe in a moment. First of all though, there'll be lots of people watching this thinking, "Actually, the problem isn't technology. The problem isn't understanding the science. The problem is politics." Right? The problem is that we need politicians who are brave enough to tell people to eat less meat or fly less. Um, we need politicians who are brave enough to stand up to the fossil fuel companies or brave enough to stand up to industry and say, "Yes, it might be cheaper to use um, fossil fuels for your production processes, but we're not going to tolerate that." Or tell people, "You need to consume less." Right? So, industrial processes are often fueling consumer products. And no politician at the moment really wants to stand up and say, "Consume less." But, there'll be um, lots of people who we've spoken to on this show and people who who watch this show will say, "That's the missing link." Um what's your approach to that? Do you think of that as something that other people think about or do you think that actually that's wrong-headed? How do you approach the question of of climate politics, I suppose? >> So, I think the climate politics are an essential part of the story. Um but I think where they're a lot more successful is where they are synergistic with technology rather than you know, trying to convince people to make sacrifices or change behaviors. Like for for better or worse, most of our or many of our societies are democracies. They are responding to the will of the voters and the politics of asking people to make large sacrifices in their personal life are tough. You know, everyone remembers in the US at least Jimmy Carter, you know, asking everyone to to turn down the thermostat and wear a sweater and that did not end well for him. Um that's not to say that we shouldn't do that and promote that. Like people should eat less meat. People should fly less. And you're not going to convince people to skip seeing their grandparents on the other side of the country, right? Like we have become used to a certain amount of comfort in our modern lives and I think any attempt to get to get the public to give that up is going to be a political dead end and the type of political system that would be required to enforce that is not one we necessarily want to live in. So, I think what we're left with is where policy makers can really push the needle in terms of decarbonization doesn't necessarily involve huge changes in our lifestyles. And I think for that it is ultimately a story about technology. It's like how can policy makers identify the technologies that replace current fossil fuel uses at a comparable cost or, you know, figure out ways to push those technologies down the cost curve so they achieve a comparable cost or to subsidize them with taxpayer money. So, from a consumer perspective, they're a comparable cost. Like all of those achieve the same outcome of getting those technologies out there, of replacing fossil fuels in the real world. And that's how we saw this explosion in wind and solar. It you know, the too cheap to meter solar panels didn't descend from the heavens on tablets. You know, they came from 50, 70 years of intensive R&D efforts at US national labs and you know, very expensive public policy efforts in places like Germany subsidizing these technologies that were 10 times more expensive than every other energy generation in the early 2000s. And more recently huge industrial policy from places like China to create the economies of scale necessary to drive those costs down. Which you know, wasn't a clear winner initially. You know, China made a strategic bet here that we're going to drive the cost down of these technologies become a huge for it to become a huge export industry for us. Um so I think you know, in many ways technology drives policy and we shouldn't treat them as independent. But in another way technology can drive policy. You know, if you look back to the Obama years in the US. Um we thought that decarbonization be hugely expensive and that hurt the ambitions in some ways. You know, the the main policy uh climate policy law that was debated during the Obama administration that never passed was the Waxman-Markey bill. And that set a target to reduce US emissions I think 15% by the year 2020. In reality the US reduced its emissions 18% by the year 2020. We actually beat the targets of the policy that was never enacted in the during the Obama administration. Um and part of that was the fact that these technologies got cheap. But nowadays we're in a very different world from policy. Like it would be so much cheaper now to drive a 20% reduction in US emissions than it was in 2006 because the technologies needed to drive a 20% reduction in US emissions are so much cheaper. And so that's why we we see much more ambitious policies worldwide. That's why China and India have net zero targets because they see a way that they can meet these targets without compromising on their development priorities. And the reason they see that is because the technologies needed to meet these targets have become so much cheaper. And so I think there is a real way that we under appreciate where technology enables policy ambition by reducing the cost, reducing the sacrifice needed to have ambitious policy. >> Talk to me about what you do at Stripe. So Stripe, if people don't know, it's a financial payments company. If people donate to Novara Media, they do it via Stripe. Um I suppose a bit like Visa, but I suppose I don't know. I'm going to I'm going to screw this up explaining what Stripe does. You maybe can even explain what Stripe does. But you don't work on the payment system, you work on the climate side. So I sort of talk to me Give give me the context of Stripe and the work you do for >> Yes, so Stripe is in many ways the financial infrastructure of the internet. You know, they provide the the digital plumbing for financial transactions that happen online. And back in 2019, Stripe set up a program called Stripe Climate. As a background there, the the CEO of Stripe, Patrick Collison, had read the IPCC report on 1.5 degrees that came out in 2018. And that report, you know, laid out the ways that would be needed to meet our most ambitious climate targets, which, you know, obviously, clean energy was a big part of that, all these other things that we we talked about. But another part of it that that report really highlighted was the need to not just get emissions close to zero, but also remove a lot of carbon from the atmosphere, both to deal with the part of our emissions that we can't fully mitigate, like agriculture or aviation, and to potentially deal with what we call overshoot. You know, the world is on track to pass, you know, 1.5 degrees and probably pass 2 degrees this century. And if we do that, the only way to get temperatures back down in the future permanently is to remove carbon that we previously added to the atmosphere back out of it. And so this IPCC report in 2018 had a huge focus on carbon removal, and that was a technology that largely didn't exist in the real world. There was like a shipping container prototype in in Zurich >> [laughter] >> from a direct air capture company, and and that was about it. Um and so it was an area where Patrick said, "Oh, you know, maybe a a relatively small investment of resources, in the grand scheme of things could make a big difference here because this is such a nascent part of the solution space, but one that's going to be super important later this century. Uh, and so they initially set up a way where people who signed up uh, to use Stripe could opt into donating some money to, you know, support the development of these technologies. You know, it raised about $25 million in the first few years. Um, but $25 million only goes so far, particularly if you're trying to create an industry that doesn't exist today. And so, um, around 2022 they had the idea of like, can we take what has been successful at a small scale and and make it big enough to actually drive change meaningfully in the real world? Uh, and that's where Frontier came out of, um, which is the the effort I primarily work on. And so Frontier is a coalition of buyers of carbon removal, including Stripe, but also folks like Google, McKinsey, JP Morgan, Shopify, Salesforce, um, Anthropic now, and a number of other, you know, large companies that collectively have put together enough money to actually create a market. So, so we call it an advanced market commitment, which is actually an idea that came out of public health initially. So, in public health there's a problem where, you know, you want to create diseases for tropical, or sorry, you want to create vaccines for tropical diseases, but there's not a clear market to pay for those vaccines, and therefore in many cases it doesn't happen. And so, big players in the in the health philanthropy world like the Gates Foundation put together a big pool of money and said, if you create a vaccine, we will guarantee we're going to buy a certain amount of it. And that led to some really big successes in vaccines for tropical diseases. And so we said, well, can we apply a similar model to the carbon removal space? Can we put together a big pool of money and say, if you build carbon removal that works, we will buy it. And that then lets companies, you know, get started, attract investment, raise capital, build facilities because they can point to this market and say, hey, look, there's someone who's actually willing to pay for this climate benefit versus a world where there was really no one a able or willing to pay for that. And so we've raised about $2 billion from Frontier Buyers to spend on carbon removal. Other players like Microsoft have themselves committed many billions of dollars. And so we've really started to seeing a pretty robust ecosystem for these carbon removal approaches emerge in the last few years. Now, it's still a small part of the solution, right? A couple billion dollars a year is not much in the grand scheme of things. The world spent about $2 trillion last year on clean energy and climate mitigation writ large, you know, electric vehicles, renewables, all the really important stuff. Um but, you know, we have to start somewhere. And if this is going to be 10%, 20% of the solution later in the century, it's worth spending 1% or 2% of our money today on it. And so that's, you know, primarily what I've been working on on with the teams at Stripe and Frontier. >> And I want to put the skeptic's case to you. So, I suppose what, you know, a lot of people we've interviewed over the summer, Naomi Klein, George Monbiot, probably are in this camp. George Monbiot maybe slightly less. But if they're coming from a climate justice background, and they would say, the fact that the IPCC ever made this target which involved carbon removal was itself a disgrace and a sop to sort of corporate interests who didn't want to take more dramatic action. Carbon removal is an unproven technology and therefore even talking about it is a distraction which creates a moral hazard. And the fact that now, you know, companies owned by billionaires, Google, Alphabet, Microsoft, they're all piling in to give this legitimacy shows that this is, I suppose, a corporate stitch-up which is distracting real meaningful climate actions in search of a as yet elusive techno-fix. How would you respond? >> Yeah, it's a reasonable criticism. I think there Let me address it in a couple parts. First, the [clears throat] physics of the climate system are clear, right? We The only way to stop the world from warming is to get to zero emissions globally. The only way to cool the planet back down durably is to remove more carbon than we're emitting. And there are certain parts of the economy that we're not going to be able to fully decarbonize, full stop. There's going to be at least 2 billion tons a year of residual emissions, if nothing else from nitrous oxide in agricultural systems. You know, most models have us closer to 4 or 5 billion tons a year uh of residual emissions at the point of net zero that we're going to have to solve somehow. Um And so, you know, at a minimum, you're going to need some carbon removal to do that. And unfortunately, because we seem to be on track to overshoot our climate goals, you know, if we ever want to cool things back down, we're going to need carbon removal for that. So, I just don't think there's a way to put together a system that stops the world from warming without at least some carbon removal. It's It's again, as I mentioned earlier, going to be 10% of the solution, but 10% of a problem as big as climate change is is one that merits, you know, a lot of people working on. On the corporate side, so it's a complicated question. I I would note that many of the same companies that are spending money on carbon removal, the Googles of the world, are also the biggest buyers of clean energy out there, and they're spending a lot more money uh buying renewables projects than they are doing carbon removal. It's It's a pretty small part of their portfolio of of climate action. Um And as I mentioned earlier, the world is spending about $2 trillion a year on mitigation at large and only about 2 3 billion dollars a year on carbon removal. So, I think, you know, in terms of a pure like how much effort we're spending on mitigation versus removals, it's not that disproportionate. It's maybe 0.1% 0.2% of the money going to mitigation is going to removals globally today. Um which I think is fine. You know, maybe we should even increase that to closer to 1%, you know, uh in the next decade or two. Um On the question of whether these technologies are unproven, of course they're unproven. We haven't done them. It's almost definitely unproven because we are trying to prove that they work. Like that the whole goal of of frontier and the efforts we're doing is to use this decade to figure out what works and what can scale. And if none of them work and none of them can scale, that itself is an important lesson and means we're probably going to have to figure out somewhere some other way to to solve this problem um because we don't have the solutions we need. But at the end of the day, we know that some will work. We know that, you know, you can uh capture carbon in alkaline rocks. Nature does it uh at a scale of billion tons a year naturally and it's the biggest driver of the the long-term carbon cycle. And so technologies like enhanced rock weathering or ocean alkalinity enhancement or surficial mineralization can bind atmospheric carbon into mineral form and and take it out of of the air. You know, we know that biomass, the photosynthesis, sequesters billions of tons of carbon naturally each year and much of that then gets re-released when that biomass decays. If you can interrupt that cycle, take some of the biomass that otherwise would have decayed and pump it down into geologic storage either in the form of gaseous CO2 or just the biomass directly like what companies like Charm Industrial are doing. You know, that's going to prevent those that carbon from getting back to the atmosphere and and ultimately reduce uh the amount in the atmosphere. So, you know, the technology is there's not physics-based reasons to assume they don't work, right? I think the question is can they work at a reasonable price point where it makes sense um which, you know, we've roughly targeted toward $100 a ton. Um most of these technologies are closer to two, three, $400 a ton today. And so there is a lot of work needed to to drive the cost down. I think the other big concern that critics raise is this idea of moral hazard. You know, are people just going to, similar to our discussion of SRM, punt the can of solving the problem down the road assuming we can just clean it up after the fact with carbon removal. Um and I think that's an area of reasonable criticism. Like I myself have criticized uh some of the models that, you know, have been used by the IPCC in the past for being a little too bullish on just how much we could scale these technologies in the future. You know, some of them have these crazy worlds where we're removing half of all of what we're emitting today by the end of the century, and I think that's just absolutely insane. Um and I think it's also just going to be so much more expensive to clean up our mess after the fact than mitigate our emissions in the first place. You know, carbon removal today is $300 a ton. If we're wildly successful, we can get it down to $100 a ton. Most emissions reductions today are less than $20 a ton. And so, if a company is deciding to get to net zero by, you know, spending an enormous amount of money on direct air capture or backs or enhanced weathering instead of reducing its own emissions, it's effectively setting money on fire. There's much, much cheaper ways to do that. >> But again, it's worth it's worth having the technology in our back pocket if we need it, and it looks like we're going to need it. Um Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, all these companies you say, you know, they're putting money towards this this project to try and stimulate um a market and innovation towards um carbon removal. You're saying they also buy quite a lot of clean energy. Um they're also building a lot of data centers. So, there is currently um you know, a lot of concern about the data center build-out. This again was something that sort of Naomi Klein really emphasized when I spoke to her. Um the water use, the energy use. I know you've worked on this. Um you've sort of done some research into how carbon-intensive data centers are. Um I want to get your your perspective. What did you find? >> Yeah, so data centers are are using a huge amount of energy. Um obviously using energy by itself does not drive climate impacts. It depends where that energy comes from. Uh but at least today most of that is coming from natural gas, uh which is not where we want to go. Um it's also not necessarily where the data center providers want to use ultimately. Like, if they could get cost-effective clean energy, they would. Um but the permitting restrictions, transmission unavailability, you know, delays in grid connection, there's a lot of things that are forcing folks toward gas today that I think are are deeply problematic. Um In terms of the overall impact of data center buildout, it's both big and probably not going to move the needle on our emission trajectory all that much. So, look let's look at the US for example. The US, you know, has been building a huge amount of data centers. Some of the estimates suggest that up to 12% or even 15% of US electricity will go to data centers by 2030 um or 2035. But, that's only about 4% of US emissions overall cuz again only about 25% of US emissions are in the electricity sector. If you were to to increase electricity use by 15%, um and that ends up being something like 0.2% of global emissions. And the vast majority of data centers being built today are being built in the US. So, it's not great. It's not going to make our job any easier to meet our climate goals, but it's not like we're going to end up at, you know, 4 or 5 degrees warming instead of 3 by the end of the century because of data center buildout, right? From a like global emissions perspective, it's making it harder to cut emissions, but not substantially increasing the trajectory of of future emissions even if at a regional level or country level can have a much bigger impact. >> This is the kind of thing I've been seeing a lot sort of coming up on my timeline recently. So, this is uh someone who is, I think, an exec at a company called Rainmaker. Rainmaker just produced 19 million gallons of water in Alaska via next-generation cloud seeding over 3 hours of operations. We're the first company to provably produce precipitation in Alaska as promised. We've linked our white paper and relevant data. In the future, Rainmaker will protect and restore glaciers with man-made snowfall. Immediately, this demonstration shows how Rainmaker will add new water to the Colorado River and Great Salt Lake in the coming months. And this had, you know, I'm not going to ask you actually specifically about this company, although if you have information, I'd be, you know, you're you're very welcome to share it. But, I see this every so often, um you know, once a month or so. This I think this got 4 million views, this tweet, where there is a company coming out and saying, "We have come out We have come up with this fantastic technology, which we just tested, which could be an absolute game-changer in terms of of climate change." And everyone gets very excited. And I'm always very curious. I don't sort of dismiss these things out of hand. But, I suppose from your perspective, how should we interpret these? Do you Do you think that there are a lot of people at the moment who are bullshitting when it comes to climate? Maybe they're in sort of seeking venture capital? Or do you think that there is genuinely a lot of very interesting innovation going on, um you know, in and around the tech center tech sector, sorry, um by, you know, innovators, often in the United States or or the West Coast of of America? >> I mean, I think it's both, right? There's There's no lack of companies or or startup founders that are faking it till they make it and, you know, bullshitting to to get attention or investment. And there's a lot of legitimate, awesome innovations happening out there. You know, I don't know that much about the cloud seeding space, which is this particular startup is playing in, to be able to judge, you know, is this vaporware or or is this real? Um Certainly, if cloud seeding were to work, it could help at the margins, but only so much, right? You're not going to create moisture in the air when it's not there in the first place. And if you create make rainfall in one place, it often comes at the expense of rain falling in another. You know, the atmosphere is is ultimately somewhat zero-sum when it comes to the amount of rain potential. Um there has been a long history of attempts to do cloud seeding. You know, China's done it at very large scales, you know, parts of the US West have been trying experiments on it for many decades. Historically, it's been very hard to actually pick up a meaningful full signal from the noise, like to say, if it actually did rain after you did it, is that because of it or is that because every now and then it just rains in general? You know, there hasn't been a particularly strong signal, and a lot of folks in the climate world are are pretty skeptical about the overall effectiveness, particularly compared to the cost. But, you know, technology on this front is always advancing. There might be some real breakthroughs here. I don't know. I think the jury is still out until the the climate and meteorological community really reviews the the data coming from these efforts. Um but I think at the end of the day, like stuff like this isn't going to solve the bigger problems we have. The we're not going to get the Colorado back to its full flow long-term by doing cloud seeding. Um ultimately, if the snowpack is disappearing from higher temperatures and higher evaporation, you know, this is only going to be tinkering around the margins. >> Uh one last technology I'm going to put to you. Um this is something that's been suggested not by a sort of entrepreneur on the West Coast of the United States, but Sir David King, the former chief scientific adviser in this country. Um I interviewed him, I think, last year. Um and and their big project, I think at the Climate Repair Centre, I might have got his name slightly wrong, is is they want to protect and repair the Arctic, potentially by uh the method of marine cloud brightening over the Arctic to specifically in that part of the world, so not sort of reduce overall global temperatures, which is the um sort of the stratospheric aerosol injection method that we talked about earlier, but just by um brightening clouds in those areas where the Arctic is most at risk of of sea ice melt. Um what do you think of that? >> I mean, I think in some ways it's a less risky geoengineering technology than stratospheric aerosol injection. You know, it's it's much more short-lived. It's much more regional in its effects. You can easily stop it. Um I still think, you know, there are some questions about its impacts on things like precipitation patterns that need to be addressed. Um and similar to our discussion of of stratospheric aerosol injection and solar radiation management, it doesn't actually solve the underlying problem. So, you could potentially you know, temporarily keep the Arctic from melting as quickly or or the Antarctic um through deploying this, but you'd have to keep doing it constantly forever or until we, you know, get our emissions to zero and ultimately remove enough carbon from the atmosphere to get temperatures back down to a point at which, you know, the the problem isn't going to persist. So, as far as stopgap solutions or stopgap measures, you know, it's it's worth exploring. Um but I think we should make sure it doesn't detract from the need to to actually solve the problem here, which is greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. >> Zeke Hausfather, thank you so much for speaking to us. Really, really appreciate it. Um you know, I mean, you're the expert on El Niño, so I imagine we'll try and get you on uh later this year or in early 2027 if the really hits the fan, which seems like it it might do. Uh but, you know, we we >> Hopefully not, but >> Yeah, hopefully it won't. We talked about the potential solutions as well, so I appreciate that. Uh yeah, thank you for joining us on the Var Media. >> No risk. Great to be on.