Does NASA have any climate change skeptics? | Michelle Thaller | Big Think

Does NASA have any climate change skeptics?
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Couldn't we just put up a giant disk to block out the sun's rays and cool Earth? Michelle Thaller from NASA answers if that's possible. She also wonders if any such solution is really looking at the underlying causes of climate change.
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MICHELLE THALLER:

Dr. Michelle Thaller is an astronomer who studies binary stars and the life cycles of stars. She is Assistant Director of Science Communication at NASA. She went to college at Harvard University, completed a post-doctoral research fellowship at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, Calif. then started working for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) Spitzer Space Telescope. After a hugely successful mission, she moved on to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), in the Washington D.C. area. In her off-hours often puts on about 30lbs of Elizabethan garb and performs intricate Renaissance dances. For more information, visit
NASA.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Lisa, I share your concern about climate change. This is something that’s one of the biggest challenges that humanity has ever faced, and it’s something that in the next couple of decades and centuries we’re going to have to really band together and work together to solve.

And when you ask a question like you did, about “how might you solve climate change,” it actually gives me a lot of hope because it means that young people like you are really starting to think about ideas about how we could address climate change.

You said, “could you build a giant disk and put it between the earth and the sun and have it act as a kind of sunshade actually cooling down the earth?” That’s a wonderful idea. There are some things about that that would be quite difficult and one thing is that the sun is actually very large, it’s much larger than the earth, so it actually projects light around anything that you put up there.

You’d have to put a very, very large disk up there. It might have to be something roughly the size of the planet in order to shade the planet effectively against the sun. So that’s something that might be possible, but it would be very expensive and difficult to construct. But I love the fact that you’re thinking about it.

It does however to me sort of not address the underlying problems with climate change. A lot of people have ideas similar to yours that, what if we could just block out some of the sun’s light, would that actually make climate change go away? And one of the ideas people have is possibly launching lots and lots of particles of dust up into the atmosphere.

We observed that when there’s a volcanic explosion and the earth naturally puts lots and lots of dust up into the atmosphere, the earth’s climate cools. We observed this in the ‘90s when Mount Pinatubo erupted and we actually had a decline, a little bit of a notch on the global warming, just due to this volcano putting lots and lots of stuff up into the atmosphere.

So could we do that artificially could we just darken our atmosphere to actually have less sunlight get through? The answer is yes, we probably could, but it would be a huge effort.

A single volcano puts up many, many thousands of tons of dust up there, so this would have to be something continuous: lots and lots of rockets or aircraft distributing dust across the atmosphere. And the thing that kind of frightens me is that we really don't understand our atmosphere enough to know what that sort of cooling would do. The atmosphere stores heat, it creates winds and of course the air moves around, there are storms; scientists spend a lot of time studying how the atmosphere stores heat, how the weather forms, and when you darken the atmosphere I’m not sure what it would do to our weather. It would be a very dangerous experiment to do if you couldn’t control it.

And the same thing with building a disk: I’m not sure that darkening the earth is a very good idea; it may change things like weather patterns or even ocean currents, the winds, all of that. It also doesn’t get at the problem of carbon dioxide.

Now the reason our atmosphere is getting warmer and warmer and warmer is because we humans are putting lots of carbon dioxide up into the atmosphere and this acts as what we call a greenhouse gas. Sunlight can get through the atmosphere but the carbon dioxide traps it and it can’t release itself back into space so it gets warmer and warmer over time. Carbon dio...

[lakejindsay]

100 Scientists wrote and published a paper citing how Einstein's Theory of Relativity was wrong. Pretty sure they did so because there was "no disagreement" in their scientific community.
When you say there is no disagreement or the science is settled and start throwing around the word consensus, you start to sound more like an activist than a scientist.

[writerconsidered]

Politicians are paid to ignore their own agencies findings.

[ElRey_Congo]

Full disclosure: I am a man made CO2 emissions being the driving force behind climate change denier, however, it is obtuse to think that I am not environmentally conscious or that I have political agenda. If critical analysis is done there can be a more than plausible conclusion reached as to what are the most important factors to climate change. My biggest criticism of man made CO2 emissions as the driving force behind climate change are the policies being proposed to combat it and the means by which the “consensus” is being made. Many liberties have been taken at the expense of science to promote a narrative and along with narrative promoting comes corruption. Much like green peace, climate change activism has been hijacked and politicized. If you’re not a believer you are anti-earth. This is dangerous as the intentions may be good, the policies formed through misinterpretation could have severe negative consequences. The true problems facing the environment are lost in the process, like abject poverty in the under developed nations. Pollution is the number one environmental concern, not man made CO2 emissions. I have questions about the consensus and motives behind it:

How is NASA funded? Is there group bias amongst scientists at NASA? Is there a narrative being propagated as the result of NASA data? Are all esteemed scientists that deny the claim that CO2 is the driving force of global warming/cooling considered climate change deniers/skeptics and also considered to have political agendas? Have scientists with opposing popular opinions on causes of global warming been ostracized and lost funding for presenting alternative quantitative analysis using the same data available to the “consensus”? If logarithmic relationship is an axiom among the climate scientists for the relationship between CO2 ppm and temperature, why is the emphasis of global warming/cooling put on CO2 ppm? Is there a revenue stream for man made CO2 being the cause of global warming? What is the percentage of man made CO2 being added to the atmosphere and what is the effect it has on climate change? If 1000 ppm CO2 is used as the ideal concentration for industrial plant growing operations, how is the current 400 ppm in the atmosphere considered approaching a catastrophic concentration (keeping in mind the logarithmic relationship to temperature)? Are the proposed “we must do something about climate change” solutions going to have a desired effect if the “consensus” about CO2 concentration being the driving force of global warming turns out to be misinterpreted and misunderstood data? Could there be negative effects to putting into place policies based on the man made CO2 emissions consensus?

[saulorocha]

Nasa not political? Seriously? Must I remember Richard Feynman during the Challenger disaster?

[MisterKauffman]

"Skeptic" really isn't the word to use anymore.

To call them "skeptics" at this point is to give them the benefit of the doubt, to assume these are sincere inquiries for evidence based on good-faith arguments. Yes, we should be able to question and discuss everything, even the things that seem so obvious that we take them for granted. Skepticism is the most important or one of the most important processes for evidence-based thinking. Skepticism is invaluable and should form the basis for most of our individual and collective decisions.

Paranoiac tinfoilist conspiracy "theories" (which are always incoherent on the face of them, as they require our entire mechanical understanding of how greenhouse gases work - dating back to at least the 1850's - to be the product of a conspiracy; *and* whose basic cui bono motivations never make any sense), pedantic word games, willful misunderstanding of the difference between weather and climate, "LOL AL GORE", willful resurrection of arguments that were buried thirteen years ago, manufactroversies like "Climategate" (see the previous category), anecdotal objections, whataboutisms ("But it's cyclical and it's been warm before so who cares? There's no definitely no reason to investigate the specific causal links of the current situation") and appeals to economic consequences ("But any mitigation action will kill jobs!", as if that's a fault of environmentalism and not the structure of late capital) =/= "skepticism".

Much like the theory of evolution by natural selection: now as when it was first proposed, there's nothing wrong with asking for evidence because there's a wealth of it to choose from. When those demands refuse to engage with evidence and fall back on tired, bad-faith arguments, it's increasingly no longer skepticism but denialism.

[tonyd]

NASA scientists who are skeptics may not admit to it due to possible negative repercussions to their careers. Just a thought...

[adashastew]

I can't understand why climate change is up for debate in 2018

[GMGMGMGMGMGMGMGMGMGM]

"We're not political, policymakers are political. Policymakers aren't involved in NASA's science; they just pay all our salaries & tell us what we're allowed to research by deciding what gets funding & what doesn't. See? No Politics involved at any stage whatsoever!".

[danielprivate]

So what percentage of observable climate change can be directly attributed to human activity? Because climate is not static, it has always been changing. Is there a model which definitively shows how much of the change we see is due to human causation? Or conversely, a model which shows what the change would be without human causation? Anybody? Anyone at all?
I only ask because climate change is now labeled "the climate crisis" and people who call it that should be able to answer those questions before calling it a "crisis".

[Micscience]

I did think about it as she said and I wonder how is it she knew the stance of hundreds of fellow NASA colleagues?

That would mean she had to ask all those hindreds of people what side of climate change they believed in and I find that highly improbable. I don't think shes being honest if she was she would mentioned how it was impossible to remember everyones answer on the subject let a lone the crazy task of asking all of them that question. I wouldn't trust her answer it seems bias.

[erichawman]

There is no controversy, no debate, among those who are intellectually capable and honest. The real question among them is: How bad will it get? What will the Earth be like when all is said and done a few centuries from now?

[kpkgdlh]

I wish we had more departments or agencies like NASA, where politics are kept at a distance

[FranBunnyFFXII]

For all the people claiming that Animal Agriculture is the biggest contributor to Climate change:

It's actually not.
A lot of people exaggerate this claim a lot lately because they don't understand the actual ramifications of it.
If you look at the actual data concerning agriculture emissions, its around 16~18% total greenhouse emissions globally. That's CO2 AND Methane combined, not just CO2.
And of the top 100 most polluting companies in the world, not a single one is involved with food production or animal agriculture.
Energy production for human consumption is some 50% or more of the climate altering carbon dioxide emissions.

Many people cite Methane as a major problem for climate change but they dont realize that the methane cycle is only 10 years, instead of the 100+ for Carbon Dioxide.
Many people are unaware that much of the areas of the planet being used for meat and dairy production is largely post Pleistocene grasslands, that we've replaced with more grasslands and feed lots. Corn is a Grass, and it's used extensively, not just in animal agriculture as well.
Also many of these farms are in Australia, a largely desert region in which many ancient forests are unaffected.
This makes Palm oil, which is used in many non animal products more destructive than Dairy. Because Palm oil plantations are largely affecting 100million+ year old Rain Forests in Borneo. Pleistocene era grasslands can be rebuilt and recouped to their ancient ways fairly easily, but you can't replace 120million year old forest.
Many people forget also that a lot of non animal agriculture contributes as well, including things like Tea, Coffee, Chocolate, and other crops that are absolutely unnecessary and out right non-natural to the human diet. Unlike meat. Remember, humans evolved to eat meat, not enormous amounts of sugar, and caffeinated drinks.

The rally against animal agriculture, while admirable isn't as important as people make it out to be. Some 65% of all Climate Change emissions are related to Energy production and Industrial processing.
And Aggriculture and land usage as a whole is largely only 1/6th of the actual concerns, and much of the concern for Animal Agriculture is Methane, not CO2. And again the methane cycle is just 10 years, and it's no longer a problem.
The carbon Emissions are largely more dangerous because they acidify the ocean and stay in the atmosphere for 10x longer.

Energy Production is one of the most dangerous and largest problematic sectors of climate change.

[jirikivaari]

This video is missing much more biggest question: what are causes of climate change for humans exactly. Not whether its happening.

[NoChannelChannel]

If all scientists agreed the earth was flat, that's not science

[Umbra_TuSlayer]

Given how useless politicians are at dealing with real issues like this, maybe its time you stepped up...

[johnplus]

Saying that all scientists believe that climate change is caused by man is like saying water is wet. Saying that climate change is going very very fast is misleading. The temperature has been going up by 0.16 degrees per decade since the 1970's which followed decades of cooling. Most most people refer to 1880 as the start of the temperature records, and since then the temperature on average has gone up less than .01 degree per year while the average CO2 increase has been less than 1 part per million per year. The rate of change has been a little less than double since 1970, but we are still talking about a slow change.

[williamsutherland]

A real scientist understands there are no absolutes and has a healthy level of skepticism with all theories and patterns observed

[ChessMasteryOfficial]

*I'm not afraid of death; I just don't want to be there when it happens.*

[Foxtrop]

all scientist with the same point of view, what could go wrong?