Are weather disasters getting worse? Check the dashboard yourself

0:00The Mainstream media has betrayed our trust. Rather than tell us the whole story about the important issues of the day, they tell us only what they want us to hear. Your hosts, Tom Harris and Todd Royale will bring you the other side of the story. We constantly hear climate alarmists blame human activity for causing increasing extreme weather events. But these events have always been with us. And although many reputable and independent scientists have studied these phenomena, we still have to take their word for it when they tell us that extreme weather is or isn't increasing. What would be ideal is if there was a publicly available database that anyone could search to study extreme weather, one that's not clouded in scientific jargon, but clear enough for an intelligent adult to understand. It just so happens that such a database is now available.

1:03Dr. Roger Pellke Jr., senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writer of the Honest Broker Substack has recently released an extraordinary database of extreme weather records. It's called the Global Extreme Weather and Climate Change Dashboard, abbreviated GWX. It's a compilation of extreme weather records from around the world. It covers eight extreme weather phenomena, heat waves, cold extremes, tornadoes, flooding, drought, winter storms, wildfires and hurricanes. And get this, the dashboard follows the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes framework for detecting changes in the climate. So even the UN and governments should be taking this very seriously. It also shows whether the extreme weather trends that it describes are consistent with those coming from the IPCC documents. The website is easy to navigate, giving us a detailed look into extreme weather with adjustable timeframes and locations. In today's episode, Dr. Pellke will be explaining what his dashboard, the GWX, shows us about

2:09today's extreme weather trends. Dr. Pellke has a PhD in political science, a Master's of Arts in Public Policy and a BA in mathematics from the University of Colorado Boulder. He's his work at the American Enterprise Institute where he focuses on science and technology policy. The politicization of science, government science, advice and energy and climate, he's also a professor emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. He was a professor there in the Department of Environmental Studies at UC Boulder. He currently also works with leading institutions in Japan, Australia and England. Dr. Pellke has frequently testified before the U.S. Congress at the invitation of both Democrats and Republicans. Additionally, he's written and edited a number of books that we'll link to under the podcast when it goes online on Monday. So welcome to the show, Roger. Roger, thanks so much for being on the show. We have been big fans of yours.

3:10Recently, Tom and I were talking about your global extreme weather and climate change dashboard. When you tell our listening audience, you know, some more about what we call kind of the GWX. Yeah, first, Tom, it's great to be with you. Appreciate the opportunity to talk about all this nerdy stuff. You know, I started working on extreme weather in the 1990s. I did a postdoc on Hurricane Andrew in the Midwest floods. And it was about 1999, along with no scientist and Ken Kunkel, an old school climatologist, Stan Shagnan, who's unfortunately no longer with us. We wrote a paper in the Bolton and the American Meteorological Society in which we assessed all of the data as much as we could get on extreme events in the United States. And honestly, that paper took us maybe two years to put together. And it was a great paper and it got a lot of sites. Ever since that I've been thinking, you wouldn't it be great if there was a way to more readily,

4:12more quickly present to the public, to policymakers, just what the data says on extreme weather events. And now with AI technology, AI tools, I was able to put together, it's not just this dashboard, but several dashboards, to be able to have one stop shopping. So people can, they can get off the internet where they're arguing over things and actually just looking what the data says. I mean, my goodness, that means people can't argue on Twitter. So I mean, our ex, whatever we want to call it. Oh, they still can argue. I got plenty of data sets. You tell me what answer you're one. I'll probably find the time to move on. As I say, on a funny note here, I mean, how much, because you are using data sets and the spreadsheets, all that, how much are people arguing with you though about this? Because obviously, there's a whole world that believes in extreme weather and events and you've got this incredible background and all this, but I would imagine I'm just kind of funny, funnily thinking, how much are people arguing with you about this?

5:14Yeah, it's interesting. So the dashboard has 388 indicators across eight or nine different phenomena now. I'm building it out. And first thing I want to say is shout out to the US government, the European Union for providing open access to this data, which is just remarkable. There's a few other organizations around the world in Asia, Japan, and elsewhere. And data transparency is really important. And as you say, people like to argue about extreme weather. If you had told me 30 years ago that extreme weather would become deeply politicized, I would have laughed. But it is. And I mean, the reality is some of the indicators show sharp increases, some show decreases. Most of them don't show an increase or a decrease. And one of the things I did with the dashboard is aligned it with the work of the intergovernmental panel and climate change. People may have heard of it. The IPCC that summarizes climate science.

6:15And if people want to argue, you know, it's not me they should argue with. I'm a conduit. I'm bringing the data to them. And everything I've done is consistent with the IPCC. And if people don't want to believe it, there's people who don't want to believe things on climate change is the end of the world. And then some other people say that it's a hoax. And the data says what the data says. Yeah, that's actually interesting because one of my later questions was that you actually use IPCC aligned trend detection didn't you? Can you explain a little bit more on that as to what the audience saw so they can understand what that means? Yeah, this gets, I mean, this gets a little bit down in the weeds, but it's also the source of a lot of confusion out there when people talk about climate change. The climate community for decades from forever has defined climate change as a change in the statistics of particular weather variable. So it could be the global average surface temperature of the earth.

7:16It could be the number of hurricanes, could be a rainfall metric. And a change has to be, and this is again, the IPCC, it has to be a statistical, detectable change, usually a trend in that variable over a period of climate time scales, which is decades of the world meteorological organization. They use a round number 30 years or longer. But there's nothing magical about 30 years. It has to be a long term change. Climate change is not a cause of anything. And climate change is a statistic. And so once you detect a change in the climate variable, the next step in the IPCC framework is, all right, why did that happen? Can we attribute it? So they use the word attribution. So can we understand why that occurred? Was it due to internal variability of the climate system? Was it greenhouse gases we've added? Was it the reduction of aerosols? So some combination of those factors, the detection step, which is the only thing I do in

8:16my dashboard, is hard enough. It's difficult. To do attribution requires running, you're pretty sophisticated earth system models. And it requires a lot of judgment. And so there's a lot of judgment involved in how we collect and present data. But the data I'm presenting is the official data that you would find if you go to meteorological organizations around the world. Yeah. Hey, I want to get into weeds with you a little bit more to give some context. Because in my previous careers, I've done regressions and data sets and all that. And when you talk about 388 data sets, can you just give a context? Because when you just said that, I was like, oh dear God, this man just put together all of the data sets. I just want for our audience. And we really do have a, what I like to think is a pretty walkie audience. They enjoy it. I like to know this, but I would love for you to even just give the context. And when you're talking about that many data sets, just how much data you've put together, which I would actually probably argue we can give it more boring and get into confidence

9:21intervals, but that you've really put together something that's going to be pretty hard to argue with. Can you put some of that into context just the amount of data sets, please? Yeah. And I can tell you, I can give you a really good practical example of where people still have arguments about them. It's an enormous amount of data. I mean, I can't even, I would hesitate to quantify it, but I am using Anthropics Cloud Code and I spend a lot of money on Cloud Code. AI is, at this point for me, much better than H.I. for programming, for doing the quantitative work. And I honestly, I've been telling people this, if you gave me four super smart postdoctoral research assistants, you gave me a couple million dollar grant, I might be able to do this project in a couple years. And with the AI Cloud Code, it is remarkable how much data you can collect in process.

10:27And this took me months to put together, but it took one due months to put together. It's just remarkable. And so it is an enormous amount of data. And it's updated twice a week with the latest data. And so it's, and again, all credit to the taxpayers and places around the world who have enabled the collection of this data and put it out there for anyone to use. So it must be millions of data points for at least. Oh, yeah. I mean, I, more than that, it's, it's, I mean, when we start talking about things like temperature and precipitation, I mean, honestly, temperature and precipitation are measured literally everywhere on the planet every second of every day. I don't have that, that fine of resolution. But you can imagine that if we're looking at data sets that span many, many decades, it's an enormous amount of data. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting when you talk about how long it spans. We've had politicians in Canada say, well, look outside, it's, it's setting records today

11:30to which the answer, I guess, is, well, so what? If it was doing that year after year after year for decades, then it would be a trend, right? I mean, the, the occasional record doesn't really mean anything in a trend sense. Yeah, this is, I mean, again, this is where, you know, climate change has kind of morphed into an all-purpose kind of zeitgeist sort of thing. And I get it, you know, it's hot. It's hot today, climate change, ha ha. You get more serious when people wouldn't book it like in the Nepal floods and so on. But, but the reality is the detection of a change in climate requires very good data kept over a very long time. And the reality is that extreme events are not the best place to look for changes in climate. And that's just a statistical point. I mean, it mad that the analogy I use with my students, if you have a deck of cards and I stack the deck, I put a couple more aces in it. And then I say, all right, how many hands of Blackjack, or 21, how many hands do you have to play before you have some confidence that the deck is stacked?

12:32That's an answerable question. And if you understand probability and statistics, you can figure that out. The answer is a really long time, many, many, many, many hands. And that's because even though adding two aces to a deck is, you know, 50% increase in aces, the variability in the hands you get playing cards is so great. It just takes a very long time. I mean, there is a reason why the scientific community has detected and attributed changes in climate for temperature and precipitation, but really not most other extremes. That's because we have so much data on temperature and precipitation. It's a lot easier to tease out a statistical signal than in other areas. Yeah, so you mean in a time duration, we have like over a century of both of them. Yeah, it depends on your measurement. So the example I was going to raise. So in the United States, there are measurements of temperature, extreme temperatures. And in this case, with my dashboard, they go back to something like 1894.

13:34And there's an argument that, you know, I'm not, I'm not in a position to resolve within the scientific community over whether that data from the past needs to be adjusted. They use different types of thermometers, different screens to collect the temperature. It was located in different places. There was a lot more measurements in the Midwest than elsewhere. And so there are some people who say, well, if you go back before the 1930s, there's no trend in extreme temperatures in the United States because the 1930s were so extreme. You have other scientists who say, well, no, no, those data aren't any good. We have to start in 1950, which drops the 1930s out of there. And so that's not an argument about temperatures. That's an argument about data and data quality. And so obviously people have their positions and they're entrenched. But, you know, what I did on the dashboard is I just presented both data sets. You know, pick the one you like. Can I, can I show you, let's talk about your, let's say I'm going on your dashboard.

14:37So I'm in the Dallas area. And, you know, Tom's talking to me talk about this. It's been a, it's been a very mild summer for us. And then all of a sudden towards July, it just got incredibly hot. And then August, it's just 100 plus degree temperatures all the time. If I'm, let's say I'm a person who goes, Hey, Roger, hey, Tom, I think, I think climate change is causing all of this. I, it's never been this hot. We've never had these 100, you know, 100 degree plus temperatures 45 days in a row. How could I use the dashboard if I'm listening to go in there and go, Dallas, Texas, how hot has it been? How can I look at this to see if what I think or what I've seen on the local news is correct or not? Yeah. So I'm, there's a few things there. I mean, the first thing and people get tired of me saying this is, is we have to get, get, move away from saying, did climate change cause. Exactly. So I would point, so my, my datasets are at the continental level.

15:39So I have one for the United States, continental United States and then one for the globe and I break it down into continents. My colleague, Ryan Maui, somebody you guys should have on your radar screen. Yeah. He has a substat called Weather Trader. He has an impressive array of dashboards and websites that actually allow you to go to locations, say Dallas, Texas and ask this sort of question. And the first question, I would encourage people to ask is, is the weather that I'm experiencing looking at my windows, is this part of a longer term trend in this location? And if it's extreme temperatures in most places, the answer is probably going to be yes. Now, does that explain the weather of the day? Absolutely not. The weather of the day is a result of the dynamics of the atmosphere and high pressure, low pressure. What El Nino is doing out in the central Pacific. So climate, climate patterns, climate trends can never explain weather.

16:42But you might say, well, you know, it's a hot year this year. You could say, well, that's consistent with what's been going on over the last 30, 40, 50 years. That's about as far as you can go with that, that analysis. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it doesn't attribute cause at all. In fact, you don't even look at cause in your database. No, I do not go to the attribution step. It's an important one. I do summarize what the IPCC concluded. And it does, you know, my reading of the data. So the IPCC reported its six assessment report 2021, 2022, 2023. So we're a few years on. So I have more data available to me and you in the dashboard. And I assign people can look, you know, what does the data say with respect to consistency with the IPCC? And, you know, there's no inconsistencies. I look at some things the IPCC doesn't. But one of the things about long-term trends is that you add one to three more years to the data set.

17:42It's not going to alter the conclusions we had before. And that's one reason why the IPCC has been so consistent for so long on extreme weather. And they don't actually attribute it to greenhouse gases directly, do they? They give a probability. Yeah, so the IPCC has a strong attribution for changes in extreme temperatures. And so the hotters, temperatures have become more hot. The colder temperatures have been less cold. And they also have, they have made an attribution statement not as strong, but for what's called intense precipitation. Which is, again, another statistical measure or an index. It's not flooding. But when you get to the headline phenomena like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought, the IPCC does not make any strong claims of attribution. And yet the media suggests that they do. Yeah, I mean, don't get me started. The media is a mess. Every event can be explained by climate change.

18:45And I have some fun with that online. But just this week in the Grand Canyon, there's a horrific flash flood that washed away some hikers. And the first things I see are that this was caused by climate change. And it's frustrating, but it's also, there's a climate beat now and they need to generate stories every day. So extreme weather is on the list. Would you explain attribution? Because I know you and Tom have been banning that back and forth. But I left for the audience to really understand because you just, you talked about your side and, obviously, all the data sets, but you're like, I'm not doing attribution though. I am talking about or maybe given some inclusion on the IPCC. But would you talk about what you actually mean by what that means, what that term attribution actually means? Yeah, attribution in simple terms means why did this happen? It's basically an explanation. And in the case of the IPCC, attribution is, why do we observe this trend over many decades?

19:51And so to take the top line conclusion of the IPCC, the earth system has warmed over many decades. And that includes the atmosphere, but the most robust measurements, and I credit my dad for teaching me this, are in the ocean. That's where most of the accumulated heat goes. And the IPCC has concluded that that warming is due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, notably carbon dioxide, but also other greenhouse gases. And that adds energy to the system, which has a general warming effect. Now I wrote a piece earlier this summer about warming in Europe. And there's some really interesting research that's been done that suggests, yes, greenhouse gas warming contributes to warming in Europe. But another big factor is that air pollution has been reduced in Europe. There used to be a lot more coal and dirty coal. And when you clean up the air, more sunlight reaches the ground.

20:52And really, that heats the ground and it dries the soils, and it amplifies the heating. And so there, I can't reconcile it, but there are papers that say that the reduction of smog has been more important than the increase of greenhouse gases in heat waves at Europe is experiencing. Oh wow. So when you get to the regional level, things get even more complicated. I will tell you that there is an area of science that's called event attribution. So we had a hurricane, had a flood. Can we explain why it happened? And there are some people who want to say, well, that event would happen on March 15th in Alberta was caused by greenhouse gases. I understand enough of atmospheric science to know that as a chaotic system, it just doesn't work that way. It doesn't. The long term accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warms the planet. It leads to changes in the climate, but it doesn't cause weather.

21:55And that distinction is really important. I don't have a lot of hope that we could say, well, we emitted some carbon dioxide in the last 100 years and that caused the storm that came through last night here in college. Yeah. So I find it amazing, Roger, is that they're now having court cases in which they're trying to attribute extreme weather events to the emissions of a specific company. So what do you think about that? Yeah. I've written a lot about the attribution side. I'm not certainly not an expert in the legal side of things, but the notion that you can assign responsibility for a harm to an individual due to a weather event based on some companies emissions in the 1930s. And you look at my substack to see what I think about that, but that's a causal chain that just doesn't work. And I try to characterize it as you can build a ladder. You can say we're putting greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

22:57That accumulates. It leads to more energy going into the earth system. That leads to a general warming of the oceans in particular in the atmosphere. That's a very solid chain supported by physics and evidence. But you can't say as well because the earth is warmer, that led to this weather event on this day that calls this harm to this person or this company. It doesn't go the other way. And so I actually think that my sense is that most of these cases, and there was one just a judgment in New York over the last couple of days, are probably going to fail because of legal reasons, which is outside my expertise. And not, you know, the science is not going to go on trial because as I understand it, a lot of these cases involve trying to influence global climate policy or national climate policy. And what the courts have repeatedly said is, well, this is a question for legislatures.

24:01This is not something that in Montana, the courts can decide national climate policy or international climate policy. So I do think there are some legal challenges there. But you know, more generally, to me, it reflects a frustration among climate advocates that efforts to come up with smart, effective climate policies at the legislative level. They haven't succeeded. And so they're trying to do an end run around the democratic process. And I don't think that's going to succeed either. No, I don't. OK, I got to pull on this thread a little bit when you're talking about. I've never heard this before to make so much sense when you just talked about smoke. As you clean up the dirtiest of coal plants, which I would wonder now, maybe walk me through this. So I'm a big advocate for nuclear power. I work in the nuclear power industry. Tom has heard me say many times and I've written much about this. If it were me, the whole earth would, would use nuclear power. And that's where you get all your electricity.

25:02And then I would work with advanced, you know, advanced reactors and get processed heat, steam, et cetera. If we clean it, if I take on that thread, if we cleaned up the earth, does that mean we would be warmer just because, like you said, you don't have that small cover? Is I'm not trying to be funny here or? No, you're not. And this is actually a real thing. OK. I mean, as you know, I mean, I'm a, you know, cards on the table. I'm a huge nuclear advocate myself. And, you know, if we were serious about reducing emissions, the world would commit to shutting down all the coal plants as soon as possible and replace them with nuclear, even natural gas cuts the emissions in half. Tom has heard me talk about this about a million times. So thank you. Yeah. It's important. Important point. Yeah. I mean, so this is, this is one of those things that, you know, the climate advocacy community doesn't really have a good answer for. Air pollution is a big killer of people around the world. It's shortened life spans. And there's plenty of studies on the negative consequences of air pollution.

26:02Anyone who's been to Southeast Asia in February, March, and April during the burning season, you know, that's probably, you know, just like smoking cigarettes for five years. Yeah. So, so cleaning up the air, which has a lot of public health benefits leads to a warming of the earth. But in that case, people say, well, that's worth it because we're saving a whole bunch of lives. Yeah. And so, you know, the response, and I've heard this response is, well, if it's worth it there, why isn't warming worth it by extending natural gas plants to, you know, sub-Saharan Africa or South, you know, and so that invokes the idea that there are trade on. And of course, there's trade-offs. But there are some technologies and nuclear, I put, you know, at the head of the list, because the energy punches so big that can provide copious amounts of electricity, process, heat, and so on, with absolutely none of the air pollution effects.

27:04So, and you know, the last thing I'll say about that comment is the idea of no human influence on the climate system is a fantasy. We influence the climate system in profound ways. And it's not just greenhouse gases or smog and aerosols. You know, if you're in an airplane, look down. We've changed the earth's surface, mainly through agriculture, but urbanization, and that changes the flow of air around the world. Irrigation has a big effect on regional climate systems. So the human impact on the climate system is pretty profound. And the reason why I tell people that greenhouse gases are so important is that it alters the energy balance. And it's not because we can predict the future or we know that it's apocalyptic or that it's going to be benign, but it's going to be somewhere in between. And so all else equal. I mean, and this is kind of the logic that I wish we had more of.

28:05Nuclear power reduces greenhouse gas emissions. It reduces air pollution. It provides a lot of electricity. All those things in the end are pretty good. So why wouldn't we take the low-hanging fruit when it's offered? Yeah, exactly. We have to go for a break now. But to start the second half, I'm hoping you can guide listeners as to how they can actually use the database, whether or not they have to pay for it and that sort of thing. So we'll be right back after the break. You wouldn't go a day without brushing your teeth or washing your hands. What about washing your nose? I mean, your nose does filter the air you breathe. Air loaded with bacteria, viruses and irritants. Make nasal hygiene part of your routine with clear. No messy bottles to fill, no drowning sensation. Clear is a natural drug-free sailing with the added benefit of xylitol, which blocks bacterial and viral adhesion. Available in stores and online at clear.com. That is x-al-e-a-r.com. Are you struggling with thinning hair or excessive shedding? I know I am.

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31:10Well, the American people have seen Google's track record prompt in the question, is Google and untrustworthy player in the AI race? Now is our time, my fellow Americans, America out loud.News, Liberty and Justice for all. We are back with our guest, Dr. Roger Pilke, Senior Fellow of the American Enterprise Inspecies, and also the writer of the Honest Program on Substack, a highly recommended and highly recommended you follow Dr. Pilke's work. He's done amazing work for decades. We want to get in with you, talk to us about how to use the dashboard. Do we, is there a price for it? Is it no cost? If our audience wants to, frankly, I think myself and Tom will be using it as well, how can we use your dashboard? Yeah, so the easiest thing to do is to go to thehonestbroker.org.

32:14That's the new landing page. At this moment, I have five dashboards that cover tropical cyclones, decarbonization of the global economy, the extreme weather, dashboards, and they're all free to use. They're all open access. This is all data that the public has paid for. I do run a substack called the Honestbroker, where I comment on all sorts of the manner of things. I invite people to subscribe. There's a free subscription, and there's also a paid subscription, which is voluntary. 95% of my stuff is out in the world. I do have a few perks for paid subscribers, but really the paid subscribers to my site underwrite all of this work. I worked as a professor at the University of Colorado for 24 years. I had millions of dollars of funding from the US federal government almost exclusively. An important respect you sing for your supper to get those grants.

33:17I've been doing the same thing now. I sing for my supper, and I invite people to support my work. I've been extremely fortunate that a sufficient number of people support my work. Number one, I left academia. Number two, honestly, all of these dashboards and the development costs, which are not trivial. I'm already underwritten by the subscribers. If people go, and I encourage them, explore the dashboards, let me know what makes sense with dozen. What else do you want? I had a comment. It was a critical comment on Twitter from somebody who was complaining about me. He said, I wanted to see this variable. I added it. I'll take positive suggestions, negative suggestions, and it's work in progress, and I want to make it better and useful. If people let me know, that's great. If they want to support it, so much the better, because there's a lot more coming. They go to the HonestBroker.org, and it's obvious like they can just click on this particular

34:21database. Yeah, at the top, there's on the menu, dashboards, and then you have a drop-down menu that goes to all my dashboards. You can get to my sub-stick also. That's the general idea there. In other words, if somebody is in a presentation from a politician, and he says, floods are increasing across North America, they can quickly on their cell phone. Is that true? Exactly. No, it's not. I just checked it out. You could go to the microphone and then contest it. One feature I built into the site was that every single graph that a user makes or altars or as it's presented, you can click a button and download an image. You can go on Twitter or X or Facebook or your LinkedIn or your favorite social media outlet. There it is. You have the data and you can share it. I have started seeing it unprompted by me on social media that people are using it for exactly that purpose to say, usually in response to some blame in the media.

35:24Here's the actual data on drought in Europe, because when I saw recently, which, most metrics does not have a trend, even though it was a bad drought this year. That's the idea is that it elevates the quality of our discussion of these topics. It's not, I don't expect people to agree, but at least using the latest and best data they can have a higher level conversation. If they take a screen capture, for example, of one of the graphs that's produced or an image, it's not copyright. They can just use it anywhere. That's right. Completely. It's got the honest broker logo on it because I want people to go to the site. This is all public data. I list the sources. People have a methodology document. If people really want to drill down and see where did this come from, how do I access the original data, all that's possible. You can download a spreadsheet associated with every graph if you want to play around with the data. The idea is to make it user friendly. My ambition is that it just improves incrementally over time.

36:29Wow. Our audience should know, Tom, that this level is something that is simply not out there. You're having to go to big consulting firms, McKinsey and others. A lot of these guys will not... You look at a JP Morgan. They're not listing sources like this. They're not listing their methodology. I would imagine I could even get access to his data sets, meaning just realms of spreadsheets. If I wanted to drill down, if I'm doing masters or post-doctoral work, post-doc, I can run on regressions. This is unheard of. Our audience should know what Dr. Pilke has done here. You're not going to find this anywhere else. One of my ambitions in creating this was I wanted it to be the best one-stop shopping for this information. I've been doing this. I got my PhD in the 90s. Where's this bin? I said a gripe and about it. I decided to build it. I'm pretty pleased with where we're at now with it.

37:30Did you find it? When you're putting all this together, were there any interesting trends or things that you went in thinking one way and made you think another way? I'm just curious if you found any trends that surprised you? Yeah, it's a good question. I guess the most significant insight that came from building it out. I've been working on extreme weather for more than 30 years. I know inside my brain, I have a map of what the literature looks like, what the data looks like. I realized there's a lot of terror in cognita inside my own brain. When you start talking about trends in the African continent or parts of Asia, there's a lot of information that's out there that I really had an access or thought about. The other thing, and you really see it in the database, when you talk about trends at the global level, everything is synthesized together.

38:33The variability in data isn't as large as when you go to a regional level. If you go to the globe, let's say you look at tropical cyclones, hurricanes, across most metrics, there's absolutely no long-term trends. That's what the IPCC says. If you go to the Atlantic Basin and you use your slider on my graph and you start in 1970, there's uptrend since 1970 in the Atlantic Basin for a lot of variables. That might prompt people to ask the attribution question, why? If you go into the literature, you'll find that there's good research that says, well, the 1970s, one of the least active periods in the Atlantic for hurricanes of the last 300 years. Wow. If you play around on the site and you use the sliders on the graphs to look at shorter periods, longer periods, you can get a pretty good sense for how variability itself, without

39:34any invocation of anything except statistics, can present trends, but then a longer perspective, they go away. I really encourage people, when they hear a study, floods are more common, ask the question, when does the data set start? How does that compare with starting that data 10 years earlier, 20 years earlier? We are limited by the availability of data. Again, I point to my colleague Ryan Maui, who's built a site on climate through the centuries, and he goes back more than 1,000 years and talks about the climate system. One of the more interesting things, there's not too many data sets that go this far back, but the 1870s were an incredibly extreme decade. There's a massive El Nino, there's a lot of discussion now, El Nino that's unfolding right now might be comparable to that one, but estimates are something like 4% of global population perished in the 1870s due to extreme weather events mainly drought around the

40:39world. I don't know, if you're nerdy and you like to explore data, this could be a rabbit hole to go down, because then it leads to all sorts of questions. What happened then? What was going on then and why did this happen? For me, it's just opened up a view of the world that's much more expansive than what I had. You just gave me a question then, because it seems like Tom, I could see someone asking us this. You just talked about the Atlantic basin, tropical cyclones being higher, then the obvious question, of course, would be all be Twitter or the media or just your average person would go, Dr. Pilke isn't that because we burned fossil fuels. We're releasing all this stuff into the air and so it's warming it. Dr. doesn't that mean that we shouldn't have fossil fuels that's causing all of this? Yeah. What does the data show? Let's say, yeah, that's the attribution question. What I tell people to do is, well, don't start your data in 1970.

41:44We're lucky that in the Atlantic basin, we can go back a lot longer. You know, you can go back. There's aircraft for connoisseurs, the satellite era, the 1960s. One thing that I was able to do on the site is the global time series for tropical cyclones is viewed to be solid from about 1980 when we had global coverage. That the Western North Pacific, which has most of the tropical cyclones on the planet, it's going nuts this year because of El Nino, and the North Atlantic allow us to go back to 1945. Together, those two basins are about 80% of all global activity. You don't have everything, but you can say, what's happening in that 80%? When you do that and you look at trends from 1945, all of the trends from starting in 1970, they go away. The answer to that question to people is, well, if greenhouse gases cause an increase from

42:491970 to today, how come there's no detectable trend from 1945 to today? And then it gets even more complicated with the attribution. There are some scientists like Kary and Manuel at MIT, who is hypothesized, again, going back to reducing pollution. That reducing pollution from the United States, which blew out over the Atlantic, allowed more sun to hit the open ocean, warm the ocean, leading to more hurricanes. Wow. One reason I did not get into the attribution questions is it involves all of these complexities and leave it to the IPCC to summarize that literature and come up with their judgments on that because it's always going to be a judgment call. Yeah, I just wanted to emphasize at one point, and that is where you start your analysis. In Canada, they say, oh, since 1948, we've had three times the warming of the rest of the world. Well, of course, the question then is, well, what about the 1930s? I mean, you just go back another 20 years, and suddenly you're right, the trends just

43:52disappear. You know, so I mean, this is an extremely important point. You have to, they're cherry picking a lot of times, aren't they? I think in a lot of instances, I testified for the US Senate, I don't know, two years ago, maybe the Senate Banking Committee, and I, it was on drought, and I presented time series of extreme wet, extreme dry in the US for different periods, all of them climate timescales, one should an increase in drought, one should a decrease in drought, and one should no change. And I said, you know, tell me which answer you want. I will emphasize, though, you know, at the global scale, the accumulation of heat in the oceans, it's probably the most solid, most striking evidence of the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate system. Yeah. Drawing a line from that to weather and weather patterns, again, is is probably beyond the ability of the scientific community, which is why the IPCC has not had strong claims

44:52for most types of stream events. So what is your dashboard currently show about drought in the United States or continental level? So for the United States, and again, this is the continental level, there is not strong evidence for an overall increase in drought, and people will say quite accurately that the Southwest has seen a dry engtrend, and that's absolutely true, but at the continental level, it gets washed out in the larger level. Again, the problem with attribution is that the smaller the spatial scale and the shorter the time, the more variability there is in the time series, the more difficult it is to have strong attribution. The IPCC, and it's last assessment report, people can look it up, chapter 12, they have a table, a table 12.12, when they talk about, when do we think we'll be able to detect changes in all sorts of extreme event variables based on climate model projections?

45:55And people thinking we're going to have strong attribution claims in the near term should take a look at that, because the IPCC does not expect confidence and attribution for much of this century. Oh, wow. Is that right? So for decades, we're talking about it. Yeah, so don't hold your breath if you're looking for that. Again, this is why I would say extreme events as photogenic as they are and impactful as they are, they're not the best type of climate science to lead with for climate advocates. Because very quickly you go beyond what consensus leading science can support. And it gives people who are opposed to action on climate are easy target, because if you're out on a thin limb on science, then people are going to call you on it. Yeah. So is extreme weather of any kind increasing on continents at that level over long time frames across the world? Yeah, so the strongest evidence and this is global is extreme heat.

46:55So heat waves are IPCC expresses high confidence in increasing heat waves. They don't have data everywhere, but everywhere they do, they have high confidence. Again, at the global scale, and this holds pretty much in most comments. And then what's called extreme precipitation, there's not quite a strong claims by the IPCC, but there is an expectation in this alliance with theory that will have more heavy downpours. That said, the IPCC is, I mean, to its credit is very clear that more extreme precipitation does not mean more flooding. And there has not been detected changes in flooding. And there are reasons for that because flooding integrates a lot of things beyond just extreme rainfall. And as you probably know, extreme rainfall here in Colorado, a wet day might be an extreme rainfall day in some parts of the year, and it's not going to cause a flood. So jumping from one to the other, the IPCC says, don't do that.

47:58Yeah, yeah. When I look at the actual graphs that you have, you have a P variable. What does that mean? Because for example, for heat waves, it has a P of 0.00, while for tropical cyclones, it has 0.5. So what does that actually mean, the P variable? So there's two criteria that I use in the dashboard to determine if there's been detected change. And I use the phrase detected change to align with the IPCC. The first one is that there has to be a trend. And the P value refers to the confidence that we have that there is in fact a trend in that variable. And then the second criteria that I apply on the dashboard is it's not enough just to have a trend. You know, if you do a trend from right now where I'm sitting here in Colorado to midnight tonight, there's going to be a sharp drop in the temperature. That's not a climate change or a change in climate.

48:59It has to be a significant proportion of observed variability in the record. And so it has to cross those two thresholds. And so the P value refers only to the trend part. If you look at the graphs, people can see there's a dark gray shaded part. And that's if you take the 66% of the variability. So you get all the variability in the variable. This is two thirds of the data falls in that dark gray band. And then I have a lighter gray band on there. And that's the 90th percentile. And so you will see that there are some trends that you can see in the data, but they don't ever escape those gray bands. And so if you don't escape that gray band, it's very difficult to say, oh, there's been a change in climate. Yeah. And so it's indistinguishable from a low period of variability to a higher period of variability. Yeah.

49:59So there are other criteria people could apply to the detection of trends. I made these clear here. And so detection of change equals detection of trends plus exceeding historical variability. So a P value that's high would be no detected change, is that right? That's right. Okay. And zero in the case of heat waves means that there is a. There's a strong indication of change. And you know, the conventional threshold of statistical significance is five percent and zero five. But you know, that's there's nothing magical about that. It's the smaller the people should understand the smaller the P value, the stronger the trend confidence that we have in the trend. In the case of wildfires globally, you say the time series is too short. So what did you need at minimum of 30 years? Yeah. I used the WMO world meteorological organization standard of 30 years. And if it's less than 30 years, I do not.

50:59I don't attempt to detect a change. I should say, and this is important, I include wildfires, area burned, a number of fires in the dashboard. The IPCC does not. The IPCC includes a metric that's called fire weather, which is basically hot and dry. The reason they do that is that wildfires, both the area burned and the number of fires, is not a climate variable. It involves things like land management, human starts of fires, all sorts of things that go well beyond just the climate. And so I included it because everybody is interested and they've not had a lot of demands for it. The IPCC wisely does not use it as a climate indicator. Mm-hmm. Now, if you were to guide society as to what sort of efforts should be made to actually make our societies more resilient to extreme weather and to help in relief efforts through

52:02parts of the world that are affected, what would be the kinds of steps that you'd recommend? Yeah, there's a couple of things. One is that the first thing is to understand the long history of climate variability. There was, Todd, you may have experienced this, a winner, ice storm in Texas in five years ago. 21, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 20, 100 year ice storm, probably. 100 year ice storm. And so the body that oversees the grid in Texas and it's planning for how resilient do we have to be? You would be shocked to learn that they use 10 years of data to assess their resilience. Yeah. And in 1989, there was a similar large outbreak, cold outbreak that led to freezing. That was very similar if AirCOT had said, all right, we're going to design to the 1989 standard

53:05than 2021 would not have been as impactful. So understanding the long history and the long history is more than 10 years, 20 years, 30 years. Let's understand what's possible out there. And the questions I ask, are we prepared for the past? And there's a lot of effort into predicting the climate future. A lot of that has more of an advocacy orientation. Once we're prepared for the past, that would go a long way to making us more resilient for the future. We can't prepare for everything. There are events in the record that are well beyond anything, the paleo record, in the long-term record, anything that's been observed. We should have some awareness of that for stress testing. The other thing is we need to have very effective tools of monitoring and warning. So if we jump over to the Nepal tragedy, which is a horrific tragedy,

54:05one question that we should be asking in the aftermath is, do we have the technologies, satellite remote sensing that might have given some advanced warning that the bedrock was slipping? Take a look at the awful videos of there. It's pretty clear that people who were an hour downstream of that event had no warning. Absolutely no warning. Can we put into place efforts to monitor and warn when an event happens? One of the great success stories of the last, really of the last century of science and technology and policy mixed together is cyclones in the Indian Ocean Basin. I have a paper, a science paper from Bolton and the American Meteological Society in the 1960s. And it has a table of the number of people killed in India, Bangladesh, Myanmar, with tens of thousands of people pretty much every year in the 1960s.

55:09And now people are warned. And people die, but it's measured in the dozens instead of the tens of thousands. So we know how to successfully warn people. The last example I'll use, hurricane. It goes over hispanola. You have Dominican Republic on one side, which is fairly wealthy, and Haiti, which is destitute and poor, inevitably when the exact same hurricane hits that island, the two sides of the island have very different outcomes. Haiti has an enormous loss of life. Can Republic does very well. And so that's a natural experiment that tells us that we need to better adapt to our local context where we know extremes occur. So there's a lot that can be done. In the large scale, the drop in the loss of life and the overall mortality associated with extreme weather is an enormous success story that we don't tell you. And we should plan for the past. Actually look at what really happened and say, okay, how would we handle that if it happened today?

56:14So yeah, that's a good final message, that's for sure. So our guest today is being Dr. Roger Polky. He's with the honest broker and people can check out his website, checking it out at thehonestbroker.org and click on this database, the global extreme weather and climate change dashboard. So thanks so much for being our guest today. It was a very interesting interview. Thanks for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to get down into the weeds. Yeah, for sure. It was really fun. Okay, so this is Tom Harris and my co-host Todd Royale with our guest, Dr. Roger Polky, signing out from the other side of this slide.