Climate Uncertainty: The Coolest Year for the Rest of Our Lives? with Zeke Hausfather

Zeke Hausfather (0:00)

There's really three big uncertainties that future warming comes down to. The first is what we do as humans. There's how does the Earth's biogeochemistry respond to our warming? And then the final piece is this question of climate sensitivity. And if we put all of them together, we get a pretty wide range of future warming possibilities. But in an El Nino year like what we're experiencing right now, is in some ways a sneak peek of what the new normal will be a decade from now. We add about 0.2 degrees from human emissions every eight years. And so we're essentially adding a permanent super El Nino worth of heat every eight years just by burning coal, oil, and gas.

Nate Hagens (0:40)

You're listening to The Great Simplification. I'm Nate Hagens. On this show, we describe how energy, the economy, the environment, and human behavior all fit together, and what it might mean for our future. By sharing insights from global thinkers, we hope to inform and inspire more humans to play emergent roles in the coming Great Simplification.

Today, I'm joined by Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and systems analyst, for a deep dive into what the various numbers, and models, and acronyms in climate science are actually telling us about our rapidly changing biosphere. Zeke is a lead author of the IPCC Seventh Assessment Report. He also has authored the Climate Trends Chapter of the Fifth US. National Climate Assessment, and has testified as an expert witness before the US. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. At Berkeley Earth, Zeke helps produce one of the world's primary global surface temperature records. He is also a climate science contributor at Carbon Brief, as well as the lead climate researcher at Frontier. In this conversation, Zeke shares where we're currently at compared to the prior IPCC models, what that actually means, and how the IPCC is updating its models for the upcoming Seventh Report in order to understand the biggest climate questions of recent years, including is global heating accelerating? Beyond that, we also discuss what the current Super El Nino means for warming in 2027 and beyond, as well as Zeke's recent analysis on the surprising energy requirements of using AI and large language models for environmental research. If you enjoy digging into the weeds of climate science and getting a better understanding of what climate research is based on and how reliable it is, this one is for you. With that, please welcome Zeke Hausfather.

Zeke Hausfather, welcome.

Zeke Hausfather (2:57)

Thanks, Nate. Great to be on.

Nate Hagens (2:59)

So you have had a unique path for a climate scientist.

You founded a clean tech company when you were in grad school and ran it for about a decade before going back to get a PhD in energy and resources, which rhymes with my past a bit. But now, you're wearing several hats at the same time, scientist at Berkeley Earth, climate research that you do at companies Stripe and Frontier, climate reporter for the Climate Brink and Carbon Brief, and this one I imagine takes up a lot of your time, lead author of Chapter 2 of the IPCC's 7th Assessment. That is a pretty unique mix of expertise. So, let's start by me asking, how might your perspective differ from a typical climate scientist, if there's such a thing, who has stayed in academia, and what do you think is the biggest insight that you've gained from your background?

Zeke Hausfather (4:02)

So, I think working in both the startup world and now in Silicon Valley with Stripe and Frontier, I've come to realize that there's a lot of things that we discuss in the academic literature that are often abstract or not necessarily that practical and that when it comes to building things in the real world, there's a lot of challenges that aren't necessarily reflected in peer-reviewed papers. This is probably a bit more on the solution side than the climate science side itself.

But just getting a recognition of how messy the real world is, how frictionful it is, and how our simple models often fail once they meet the reality of the real world. So I think of all the things, it's understanding and recognizing that complexity.

Nate Hagens (4:50)

Well, I think there's climate science and then there's technology and innovation, but then that all sits within the broader backdrop of human macroecology, and so there's different lenses with which to view this whole situation. I do think the climate science and tech lens is interesting and nestled in there.

Zeke Hausfather (5:20)

So my first company was helping utilities reduce their customers' energy use, and so a lot of it was focused on helping people change their behaviors.