If climate change is an issue that you care about and you want to stave off the worst impact for future generations, then we need to be demanding that policy makers address this problem in a robust way.

You you’re listening to A Climate Change, this is Matt Matern, your host. I’ve got Kristina Dahl on the program. She is vice president of Climate Central, and her prior position was principal climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists. And she got her PhD from MIT Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, a joint program there, and then she focuses there on sea level rise and extreme heat. In 2023 she was named to Time Magazine’s Top 100 list of movers and shakers.

So big congratulations on that. And from where I gather, a lot of the work you’ve done is kind of on climate attribution science, if you will. I don’t know if that’s the right term, but I guess one of the things that I saw you had done was attributing the world’s largest fossil fuel companies and cement makers were responsible for, say, 37% of the North American wildfires in a recent year. So you know, without further ado, welcome to the program, Kristina.

Thanks so much. And over the last couple of months, I’ve actually transitioned to a new role as a Vice President for Science at Climate Central. So my my work has shifted a little bit from the attribution work I was doing there, but there’s a lot of really interesting climate attribution work happening at Climate Central right now.

Okay, well, that’s great. So tell us a little bit about your journey and what brought you to the environmental area to begin with.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think the environmental sciences attracts a really diverse set of people. When I was growing up, I wanted to do something important. I wanted to be a helper in the world. And I think, like a lot of kids, that translated to wanting to be a medical doctor, right? That was sort of the model I had of how you could contribute to society.

So I went into college thinking I would study pre med, and then I randomly signed up for an oceanography class, and totally fell in love with the earth sciences, and this idea that we live in such a complex and beautiful planetary system made me feel like it was something that I could spend my life trying to understand.

You know, I graduated from college in the late 90s when climate change was starting to become apparent, but didn’t attract the level of attention and didn’t have the level of acceptance that it does today. So over time, I just became more and more interested in trying to understand this particular climate moment that we’re in and what it implies for future generations.

So then, where did that lead you next on your journey?

Gosh, a lot of different places. I started off in my first non academic role, I was giving climate change presentations within my community as part of Al Gore’s Climate project, which was really exciting and got me thinking about how we communicate with different audiences about this huge planetary scale problem. I then worked at Rutgers University for a couple of years, coordinating a climate change initiative across this really large university where there was exciting research happening on clean energy and ecosystems and sea level rise, all kinds of climate change topics.

And then I moved to the Union of Concerned Scientists, which is a US based advocacy organization, and there, I was focused on climate impacts and how we quantify and communicate what the impacts of climate change will be like for us communities.

I was there for about 13 years, and then just recently, made this transition to Climate Central, which is another nonprofit organization based in the US working on climate issues that really aims to do rigorous science that’s pushing our understanding of climate change and its impacts forward and making it easier for all sorts of people to communicate about that climate science and connect it to people’s everyday lives

I think what we saw, at least from my perspective, in November was kind of a failure to communicate the importance of the climate issue, and it seemed as though Kamala Harris just didn’t really make that a central theme in her campaign for the last three or four month period that she was out there campaigning. What were your thoughts on that front?

Yeah, I mean, obviously, as a climate scientist, I think this is the problem of our generation, and unfortunately, probably the problem of the next generation, and the generation after that as well. And so, you know, the level of attention that it gets in politics, the level of attention it gets in the general public, is far below what it needs. Could be, you know, the scientific community is very clear about the scale of this problem and what’s needed to address it, and we know that the solutions are there.

And really at this stage, it’s a matter of political will, and that political will needs to come from public demand for it. So, you know, I think we would always love to see climate change be a higher priority for people, so that when they’re making the decisions that they’re making about who to vote for, they are making choices that keep the climate science and where we’re headed if we don’t make any changes in mind.

But the reality is that people have on their minds and a lot on their plates to be considering, and you far be it from me to say that someone should prioritize their feelings about health care below climate change, right? Or their feelings about the cost of gas or eggs over the climate. So it’s really challenging. Yes, would love to see it be part of a bigger part of political discourse, and it’s going to have to be, if we’re going to make the changes we need to make but at the same time, they can appreciate the challenge of being a candidate in this moment.

Yeah, I kind of look at it as a collective failure to communicate. I don’t blame it solely on her campaign, but I feel like she seemed to be reticent to bring it up that the polling doesn’t show that it’s an important issue, and therefore she dodged it as an important issue, just kind of assuming that the polling was correct and that people wouldn’t care.

And I feel like that 20/20 hindsight, that seems like it was a mistake, because it is such an important issue and just needs to be communicated more clearly and forcefully. This is an important issue. We cannot duck this, and my opponent is in stark opposition to doing anything really important about the climate.

Yeah. I mean, what I see in polling is that there’s a very large divide between the political parties in the US and people who identify with the political parties and the general public, such that this is a much bigger issue and a higher priority for people who identify with the Democratic Party than for the Republican Party.

And so if a candidate is trying to speak to his or her party, they’re trying to meet the priorities of the party that they represent. So, you know, I think it’s really difficult, right? It’s difficult to engage both sides of the political spectrum right now on an issue like climate change.

Well, tell us, what are your thoughts on the way forward, to get out the word in an effective way, to change hearts and minds, to say, hey, we need to be more engaged. We need to vote for candidates that are willing to take action to protect the environment.

I think that people are increasingly seeing the effects of climate change in their everyday lives. You hear older people say things like, the pond behind my house used to freeze every winter, and I could skate on it all winter long as a kid, and that doesn’t happen anymore. My parents, who live in Pennsylvania, just told me, you know, we didn’t have to run the air conditioner at all when you were growing up, but now we have to run it like many days weeks.

Sometimes it doesn’t go off all summer long, right? So people are feeling these changes even in their everyday lives, they’re not necessarily connecting that to climate change, where this is all headed and what needs to happen. And so, you know, I see one of the jobs of climate science right now is to connect to the science to what people are already experiencing and noticing in their lives.

And as climate change touches more and more of us in the United States and around the world, hopefully that becomes a case that becomes more obvious to people that we’re headed down a path that we don’t want to be headed down, and we have to change course.

Well, tell us about Climate Central, and what work you all are doing there, and what you in particular are focused on?

So, Climate Central is a fantastic organization. It’s a small organization that does a lot of original science on climate change to try to understand how much climate change is contributing to the weather we’re experiencing in our day to day lives, as well as science that’s looking at things like sea level rise and how it will affect communities, and provides a lot of data to people like meteorologists who are already communicating with the general public about sea level rise, so we try to provide them with the latest science on how climate is changing so that they can incorporate that information into their weather broadcasts that millions of people are tuning into.

So we see ourselves as kind of developers of new scientific information on climate change, but also as people who can package it in such a way that people can understand it and that it makes it easier for other people to carry this message forward to their audiences.

Well, I had a guest on the program a few months ago. Was a meteorologist, I believe it was in Iowa, and he got a lot of pushback from his local audience there who didn’t want to hear this message of climate change that he was delivering on the local weather program. And I think he got some death threats and stuff. It was like crazy. The kind of pushback that he got from the weather got politicized.

It is heartbreaking that people who are just trying to get information across to people that’s straightforward, scientifically accurate and often has implications for people’s health and safety, is something that’s going to be getting pushback.

And you know, I commend meteorologists for getting up there every day and delivering those messages and knowing how much their audiences can take when it comes to climate information and understanding their audiences and the different ways that information can be woven in so that It’s potentially more palatable for their audiences.

I see a little bit less climate denialism out there on the conservative side of the spectrum, I think there’s kind of like reticent acknowledgement that it exists, but we don’t really need to do that much to address it.

So what are you seeing out there, and how best to communicate to folks who’ve kind of acknowledged maybe there’s a problem, but I’m not sure if I’m willing to do much to stop it.

So many thoughts on this. So in a lot of ways, we have seen this shift from outright denial of climate science to what I think of as delay that basically the organizations that would need to undergo massive changes, like fossil fuel companies, for example, are now, rather than publicly denying the science, trying to pivot and saying, Well, we’re going to need fossil fuels for many decades to come, essentially trying to preserve their business model by messaging around the importance of fossil fuels.

So yes, definitely delay. But there’s also still a lot of disinformation and misinformation that gets shared, especially on social media, around climate change. So the greenwashing that the fossil fuel industry has been documented to have done for decades is something that still continues today and percolates through a lot of the social media.

So what do you see as, say, top five, top 10, whatever top three things that you think people should be focusing on for governmental action, as well as maybe a list for individual action?

So in terms of the big, systematic changes we need, because it’s important to recognize climate change is a systemic problem. And so it needs systemic solutions that go beyond any individual’s actions as important as those can be. And so if climate change is an issue that you care about and you want to try to stave off the worst impacts of climate change for future generations, then we need to be looking at the policies we have in place and the policy makers that we have in place, and making decisions about them and demanding that they address this problem in a robust way.

So I would say on that systemic level, pressuring our policymakers to be addressing the problem is probably the number one thing that people can do if you’re looking to personally reduce your carbon footprint and kind of use less fossil fuels in your daily life. The two biggest things most people can do are reduce the amount of flying that you do and reducing the amount of meat that you eat. Both of those things are typically very high carbon intensity activities. And so there are two places that you can consider making some changes and having a relatively big impact.

Well, I saw an article recently by this climate denialist light, I think Yarn Lumbergh, and he was trying to argue that renewable electricity from solar and wind was actually more expensive than advertised because of storage issues, and you needed backup power through whether it was nuclear or natural gas. And I don’t know if you had seen that piece or have a comment regarding costs of power, and whether, truly, solar and wind are cheaper than natural gas and other forms of electrical generation.

That’s a great question. I haven’t seen that particular analysis. I know during lumbar analysis often spark interest, and he’s a very quantitative person, and so can often present numbers in one way or another. But you know, from everything I have seen, I don’t know about the cost in terms of dollars, but this is the direction we need to be heading for the sake of our planet. So rather than focusing on the dollar value cost, I would focus.

The late Maureen Ramo, who is a scientist at Le Mans observatory Columbia University, who was one of my personal heroes when I was an undergraduate, and her work studying paleo climate or understanding the history of Earth’s climate, really helped to define cycles of how carbon dioxide cycles through our earth system, and I think that historical context is incredibly important when we start to consider climate solutions like carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere.

If you’re trying to spark more removal by putting more carbon into geological sources or trying to enhance rock weathering to draw down carbon dioxide so so Marines research in that space is something that I come back to again and again as we start to have to evaluate some of these less than ideal solutions to climate change.

I would put Katharine Hayhoe up there. If you’re familiar with Katharine Hayhoe, I did have a chance to interview her, fantastic scientist and communicator who is passionate about getting people talking about climate change, and she appears completely tireless to me, and really lives what she preaches.

Right?

If she goes to a community to talk about climate change and she has to fly to get there, you can bet she has lined up as many presentations in that location as she can possibly manage to maximize the impact of the emissions that she’s had to generate by flying to that location. Those are just two. And then I’d probably just, you know, get free women up there.

I’d probably put Greta Thunberg, because there are tons and tons and tons of youth climate activists that we could highlight throughout the whole world, but she’s inspired a whole generation and been one of the straightest talkers when it comes to addressing our politicians around the world of anyone you can imagine. So those are three among many, many, many.

Well, those are great choices. I have to ask you about rock weathering, because that that is obscure indeed, and I’ve never heard of it, so you know, you have to tell me and the rest of the audience what we’re talking about here.

Yeah. So the reason this inspired me when I was in college was that Maureen Ramos research from when she was a graduate student showed that millions and millions of years ago, India was on its own tectonic plate, and it was located south of the Asian continent. When India, because of fake tectonics, slammed into the Asian continent, you had the creation of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau. Those are really high up in the atmosphere.

And if anyone has ever heard of sort of rain shadows on mountains where you see weather masses come and they hit a mountain range, and they have to go up and over the mountain range. And in the process of doing so, they drop a lot of rain. So the formation of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau induced whole change in the regional weather patterns, and you suddenly had a lot more rain falling on these these rocks, and that weathered the rocks and actually drew carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

And so one of the solutions that has been proposed to climate change is called Enhanced rock weathering, essentially trying to expedite that process as a means of drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. So I’m years away from remembering the exact chemistry of it, but that’s the general principle that is fascinating.

Well, I guess commenting on that vein, what are your thoughts are on carbon sequestration projects that are being proposed and in some cases, actually rolled out across the world.

The latest Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which is international organization that assesses state of hard climate what they found was that if we want to hold global temperatures to below one and a half degrees Celsius above a pre industrial level, then we’re going to need to implement some kind of carbon dioxide removal.

So removing carbon dioxide from the atmospheres not just ceasing our emissions, but actually taking it out, so that carbon dioxide removal or CDR, and carbon capture and sequestration, which often mentioned in the same breath, are two solutions that are going to be needed, and yet we can’t lose sight of the bigger problem, which is emitting greenhouse gasses in the first place, right? So our primary focus should be on reducing emissions, rather than trying to pull carbon dioxide that we’ve put into the atmosphere out.

Right? The IPCC also found that these technologies are very they’re in their infancy, and they’re very, very expensive. Positive, and so even with a ramp up of carbon dioxide removal or carbon capture and sequestration, that’s a small piece of the pie that’s needed, and we get a much bigger bang for our buck for more traditional emissions reductions through things like renewable energy implementation, electric vehicle implementation, etc.

Well, that is essentially what I heard Al Gore say when I was at the COP 28 in Dubai last year. And he was essentially poo pooing the idea of carbon sequestration and saying, hey, the cost curves haven’t come down in any meaningful way over the last whatever, 20 years, as opposed to solar or wind, where those cost curves have really been amazingly moving down. And so his take on it was that the oil companies are really kind of pushing this, but maybe because they see some benefit in this themselves, rather than that, it’s a societal benefit.

I would agree with that the prospect of being able to capture a lot of the carbon that’s generated through oil and gas production and refining is attractive, and would enable the industry to continue to operate largely as it has, and yet there are a lot of additional costs associated with that industry, things like the health of the surrounding communities and air pollution, and things like the ecosystem impacts of fracking and drilling for oil, etc.

So CCS is a solution to a narrow set of the problems that we have, but it’s an incredibly expensive one, and like I said, it often gets outsized attention for the its potential impact that it could have.

I think that kind of an overall view of what is driving this is our desire to have more and more and more and putting our metric at GNP growth, which is kind of a thing that’s dooming our society towards destroying the environment. So we’re measuring the wrong thing in saying, Hey, we’re successful if we grow the economy. Well, maybe that’s increasing the amount of plastics that we have, increasing the amount of emissions that we have isn’t that the wrong metric to have to determine whether we’re being successful as a society.

We’re buying more plastic stuff and throwing more stuff away and saying, Hey, we’re winning. Maybe that worked in the 19th century, where pollution wasn’t really an issue, but it doesn’t work today. Yet. I’m not hearing anybody really, in a serious political way, propose that a reordering of our priorities really, because this priority structure is dooming us to going off the cliff. Yeah.

I mean, I think that you just described capitalism in a nutshell, right? And there are people who would argue that we can’t address climate change without addressing the fact that we live in a capitalistic society, and I think this is where our individual choices are really important, yes, because of the emissions reductions that could be associated with them, but also because of the social signaling that goes along with it. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it’s near Silicon Valley.

There are a lot of tech entrepreneurs in the area. And the most socially acceptable choice of car here is a Tesla, or at least was for many years. And every Tesla you see on the road is a signal of what this society believes in, and then it induces other people to think about, okay, I see a lot of Teslas on the road. I need a new car. What’s the latest symbol here? And what is it signaling? And do I want to signal the same things? And so, you know, think of the Tesla on one end of it.

You can think of a reusable straw on the other end of it. The reality is that your reusable straw is not reducing carbon emissions all that much, but when someone sees you bring in your own straw and drinking out of it, it’s signal to them that you’re a person who cares about our environment and hopefully induces them to care in some way too. And maybe for them, it won’t be a reusable straw. Maybe it’ll be one less flight per year.

But I think the more that we can be communicating to each other that this is an issue that we care about and we’re going to try to address in whatever ways we can in our own lives, I think the more we’ll be talking about the issue of climate change and hopefully prioritizing it as a community. Well,

I think that maybe little bit of realism here is that instead of wiping away capitalism, which is probably not going to happen anytime soon, is is saying, hey, let’s just account for the externalities. Let’s account for the costs, and do a true accounting of what a product costs. And this thing that. We throw away has a cost to it, and so just have an accurate accounting, not necessarily say capitalism is bad, just that our lack of accounting for certain costs is bad capitalism.

It’s bad accounting. We’re just not accounting for the cost of some of the things that we’re producing and using so maybe that’s what we should be focused on. Hey, there’s a cost to x product versus y product, absolutely. And there have been conversations about whether to do things like put a label on your gas pump, right about the emissions associated with a gallon of gas. Would that change people’s thinking, because right now, we don’t have great ways as consumers of knowing what the impacts of our choices are.

I remember when my kids were born, I was trying to figure out whether to use cloth diapers or disposable diapers. This was my pregnancy obsession, and it’s shockingly difficult to try to get that information about what is better for the environment, and it likely varies. You know, if you’re in a water constrained location, maybe washing cloth diapers is using more water, and that’s has to factor into it, versus the plastic that’s going into landfill. It becomes really difficult, right?

How is the average person, or even a scientist like me supposed to understand everything that’s going into every product you’re buying, and so you having some kind of system that would help people to understand the impacts of their choices, I think would be really fantastic. Would people appreciate it? Would it change behaviors? I don’t know, but an interesting parallel could be things like the labeling that’s taken place in fast food restaurants now have to report the number of calories right in each item on the menu. Has that changed behaviors?

I don’t know, but realistically, not everyone makes decisions based on data. Right? You make a decision based on what food you’re in the mood for, or whether you want to spend your day is scrubbing cloth diapers or not? Well,

I think we’ve got an idea for a new app, maybe one of your tech entrepreneur or neighbors, and create an app that will measure the environmental impact of every product. I just recently got an app that measures kind of the nutritional value or lack thereof of anything that has a QR code.

Interesting. And I know Amazon has done some of this too. Occasionally I surfing on Amazon, you come across a product that says, like, Amazon environmental choice or something, and has a little logo by it. Can they’ve actually put some work into that as a company, to try to understand which of their products are most environmentally friendly. Lots of ways to measure that. I don’t know if it’s perfect, but it’s at least one attempt to get people to be thinking about the impact the choices are making.

Right? I think having the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good, and maybe just taking a step in the direction of consciousness. On this front of saying, okay, sending the signal to consumers, this company is trying to be more conscious, therefore, I’m going to buy that product, because they’ve done things to make it a little bit more environmentally friendly, versus the company that’s making zero effort to make it environmentally friendly, right?

It can be very hard to distinguish those things because there is a lot of greenwashing, a lot of disinformation and misinformation being put out there right now. So it’s always wise to do a little homework, too.

Thank you, Kristina, for being on the program. It’s been great having you and look forward to amazing work that you’re going to be doing over there at Climate Central. Everybody should follow Climate Central, and look at social media and see what Kristina is doing and support it, because we all need to work together in the coming years. Thanks.

It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.