This is KABC 719. Unite and Heal America. This is your host Matt Matern today I’ve got on a guest Porter Fox Porter as a writer. Last book he wrote was The Last Winter and glad to have you on the program Porter. Thanks for being on the show.

Thanks for having me.

Porter, why don’t you tell us a little bit about what brought you to the environmental movement and what your journey was to get here.

I was really just a skier at first and as a skier after college, I went out to Jackson Hole to be a ski bum and skied all through the Tetons and CRS and cascades and was pretty obsessed with the sport and I was simultaneously a cub reporter at the Jackson Hole news kind of learning journalism and learning how to write so they kind of just married one another.

And I ended up getting a job at powder magazine about five years later, and worked there for almost 20 years. And my job there was to really go around the world and document winter culture, mountain culture, a lot of backcountry ski mountaineering and kind of Expedition style stuff. So I was on glaciers pretty frequently.

And I guess it was in the late 90s, when myself and a few others started noticing these glaciers retreating, thinning out climbing routes that used to be there were gone ski routes that used to go through the Alps in the Andes, and even the Himalayas were melting out from the bottom up.

And I looked into it a bit and started writing about it for powder. And then ultimately started writing about it. Book form and for larger publications like The New York Times and such. So that’s that’s the abbreviated life story there.

Well, sounds like a fascinating journey. One of my uncle’s was, say, a life while he lived out in Colorado for a long time and was a writer and was big in the nature. And so I think that was kind of a similar path as to what you’re describing and certainly was incredibly disheartened by the course that we’ve been taking in terms of the environment. And what what have you been doing in terms of environmental activism? Since you, you started to see the effects of climate change?

I mean, to be honest, I try to stay away from activism, I try to keep on my reporter hat and just act as the conduit between scientists, ski patrollers, ranchers, farmers, people that are noticing the disappearing snowpack and disappearing water resources along with that, and accelerated climate change that comes with the increase in wildfires that comes with losing snow.

And just just trying to be a conduit between them and my readers. It gets a little tricky when you know, you dip into activism at the same time because it can affect your, your reporting and whatnot. Now, that said I have a long relationship with a group called Protect our winters. It was based in California for a long time. powder magazine, of course is based in San Juan Capistrano in California, and I lived in San Clemente when I was working for them the first three years.

But at any rate, I really tried to take what scientists, researchers, people living in the snow are saying and distill it into story form something that’s a little easier to digest a little more interesting than a peer reviewed academic paper. And really try to tell the story of our planet and what’s happening to it right now, through real people who are living real lives.

And in this particular book, people that are very passionate about winter have lived in the snow in the mountains. Ski, you know manna from squab and Big Bear and, and all the other great spots across you Around the Worlds that are kind of slowly noticing winters shrinking at both ends.

So what is the arc of your Last Winter novel?

Well, it’s not a novel, if it was a novel it would be made up. So this is, this is real life nonfiction unfortunately. But the Ark starts in the Cascades. And it actually starts with a wildfire, which I know folks in California are unfortunately very familiar with. It starts with the Carlton Complex Fire, which at the time was the largest fire in the history of Washington State. And the connection over the course of the first section of the book slowly gets drawn between these firefighters, ranchers, skiers, folks living in the Methow Valley and Washington. It slowly makes the connection between them and this group of scientists that have been drawing a connection between wildfire and spring snowpack.

So one of the the whole book really focuses on the planetary ramifications of disappearing snow and ice, of which there are many, and we’ll touch on all of them. But this first one was surprising to me, because I hadn’t heard about it. But one of the primary reasons for the recent spike in wildfires in the US West is a lack of snow. Snow is a natural water storage system. For the whole us something like I think more than 70% of the precipitation in the US West falls as snow not as rain. And it gets stored in these very deep snow packs up in the mountains, but thinner as you get down to the valley.

And as April, May June, July come along, that snow starts to melt. And it doesn’t rush all at once. It’s this slow distribution of water, through the forests, through the streams through the rivers, down through the valleys and to farmland to water districts all across the West. And so it really is this giant snow is this, they call frozen water tower. And if you look around the world, there’s about 78 frozen water towers on the planet that provide the primary source of fresh water to more than 2 billion people.

As those as that snow pack thins, and eventually will disappear. In most places in most parts of the world. There is no plan to replace it, certainly not completely. So that’s one of the crises that that I write about. And is something that’s incredibly important in California, Arizona, Nevada. You know, especially combine that with the wildfire. You combine that with the wildfires, four and a half a million acres that was you know, that was torched last year. It’s, it’s pretty, pretty shocking. So yeah, that’s kind of a long answer to your question.

Well, in terms of when are we likely to see these frozen water towers, these snow packs disappeared? Just bring it home to California? What’s the time estimate given the current trajectory of global warming?

I mean, you could just look at Lake Tahoe, it’s a pretty popular winter destination there. And since 19, since 1970, I mean, you know, the planets been warming since the early 1800s In the industrial revolution, and this massive release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by by humans. But if you look at just since 1970, at Lake Tahoe, the snow line has moved up hill, almost 1500 feet. So that’s vertical feet. So you can see how Lake Tahoe is pretty high. You know, to start with, you know how tall those mountains are. Eventually we’re going to run out of room there. And the snow line is gonna go right up to the top of the mountains.

So you know, some other popular spots like Park City is estimated to have zero snowpack by the end of the century, possibly by 2080. If you look at, you know, just regions across the country 2100 is really the end of the century is this kind of bookmark because it’s probably easy to remember. But by 2100, you’re looking at all regions in the US losing 20 to 100% of their snowpack 20%, at least 100% for many, many places across the US West. So that’s, you know, that’s kind of a scary number and a scary timeline.

Probably the most surprising thing to me is that it is possible if we were to make a every month goes by as every year goes by the kind of amount of greenhouse gas emission reduction that we need to take on gets greater and greater and greater. That timeline, the timeline of the planet, and melting is on a very solid track right now. And climate change has some momentum.

So there’s a couple of decades of, you know, radical warming, that we probably can’t stop. But with a sudden drawdown, I’m pretty surprised at how much snow we can keep in the mountains. You know, not not as much as we have today, certainly. But definitely not losing all snowpack across the country except for the highest peaks of the Rockies and border and interior ranges.

Let me just jump in there for a second and you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America, my guest Porter Fox, writer of The Last Winter, we’ll be back in just one minute to talk with porter a bit more about the environment you’re out in California.

You’re listening to Unite and Heal America on KABC 790. This is Matt Matern your host, and we’ve got Porter Fox on the show today and porters talking with us about his recent book, and in particular about the greenhouse gas reduction that would probably be necessary to to have us sustain the snowpack across the mountains in the US in particular in California.

I read something recently about the usage of coal actually increasing in the last year or two. And so that’s not a particularly good trendline. I don’t know if you’re following that to or, you know, what your thoughts are and how we’re going to kind of turn this ship around to to make the kind of impacts that would actually save the, these frozen water towers across the US?

Yeah, that’s a really good point. A lot of that coal still comes from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming where near Jackson Hole where I skied all those years is kind of ironic situation. But it’s there are many countries that are trying to they’re trying to draw down. And yet there’s so not they’re so unprepared for greenhouse gas emission reduction that I feel, you know, this is just kind of supposition, but I feel like they’re using coal as sort of this bridge to get to renewable.

In other words, the long term goals are hopefully going to meet the Paris Agreement standards that they agreed to, but they’re using coal in the short term, even places like Germany, who is very much on the cutting edge of climate change, mitigation and adaptation. So it can be a bit deceiving, but it is definitely discouraging to see China building a coal fired power plant every six months or every six weeks or whatever it is. It was equally discouraging to see the you know, not a whole lot happened at COP 26 and Glasgow recently.

Even more discouraging if is looking at politicians across the world who continue to claim that this is not happening. And I don’t take any political bent in my reporting or in the book. But certain things are real and certain things are not real. And when you see winter shrinking by two for six weeks in the fall, and in the spring, you see a very obvious reduction in snow Back across the country, and especially up in the mountains, you know, it’s pretty hard to deny that.

So it’s, you know, there are some discouraging things happening, there’s some unbelievable innovation happening there is solar going in India, on a scale that nobody ever could have predicted their solar happening in Africa on a scale that nobody could have predicted. A lot of people point to even the build ups. You know, during World War Two, in America were folks said, There’s no way you can build this many planes, there’s no way you could build this many ships, and there’s no way that you could take on this awful, you know, attack on Western Europe. And not only did the government turn out that many V 50, twos and guns and ammo, but they doubled it.

So the impossible can happen when your back is to the wall, especially in America, which is just so you know, defined by innovation and by courage, and people like really not backing down from an existential threat like this. So I have this, this glimmer of hope in the back of my mind that when the threat is real enough, then America will really kick into gear and truly lead this fight because it’s it’s not so much about our lives as it is about our kids lives.

Because that is the generation that will really see the crunch. And not just the the warmer temperatures, but the resulting economic instability, political instability, societal instability, that that could be kind of scary. Could be very scary. And so for my own daughter, that’s, that’s kind of my goal is to kind of try to get people to stand up and kick into gear.

We’ll have some absolutely, that’s a worthwhile goal. And it’s something that kind of over the last few years, I’ve landed on as well, that the climate issues are the most important issues facing the planet. And and we all need to kind of focus our attention on this in order to meet this challenge and, and appreciate your optimism, optimism about the American spirit and what we can accomplish.

And I do see a lot of hopeful signs. There are certainly lots of signs that aren’t quite as helpful. Kind of a question that I like to ask, the people who come on the show is like, what are the top five things that you see that we could do, both in the US and around the world that would best address climate change and make the most impact?

Gosh, I would say that, you know, the biggest thing is always to vote, you know, I’m not gonna tell you how to vote. But at this late date, recycling your cans and buying an electric vehicle is not going to do it. We all should do that. We should absolutely all be doing that. But at this late date, it really takes national policy change, it really takes closing coal fired power plants, and creating jobs with renewable energy. That is the switch that needs to happen. If this was 50 years ago, maybe we could have done it on an individual basis.

But we have kicked the can down the road so far, that there has to be sudden, drastic, nationwide change, worldwide change. And so voting still is the best thing you can do. You know, joining and helping advocacy groups that are just really trying to educate people, educate politicians and administrators, groups like protect our winters that I mentioned, just buying a $20 membership and reading their webpage and newsletters and whatnot, just to keep abreast of the situation is super helpful.

Maybe even just educating yourself is the most helpful and not educating yourself on social media. That’s that’s a fool’s errand. As I think we all know by now. You don’t have to read my book, but there are plenty other books that are out there. Very well researched, there’s great information and you know, left leaning publications like The New York Times and right leaning publications like The Wall Street Journal, there’s some excellent fact checked information in both and and you can really decide for yourself if this is a crisis or not.

So educating yourself is probably number one. And then you know, as we go down the list, it does get back to individual commitments to get in more, you know, ride your bike, instead of drive the car, take less flights, if possible, get an electric vehicle, if possible, take public transit, if you can, you know, if we can all do that. Even going around and put the, you know, making sure your home is insulated and is efficient. We just switched over to split units from an oil furnace that was in this house, we were renovating and, and you know, that’s a big change.

Now, that’s a lot of oil that we’re not buying and burning. So those that’s a that’s a quick list of things. But again, number one, is educating yourself avoiding misinformation, avoiding marketing material from fossil fuel companies that have incredible resources, and can get to you in so many different ways. Kind of have to sidestep that and really learn from, you know, really learn from valid sources what’s happening.

And I guess maybe the last thing that that protect our winners suggests, as if you have an opinion, if you have, if you want to make some change on a bigger scale, then find your biggest lever. And by that you find somebody that owns a business, find somebody who is a politician. And so when they can contact and reach out to more people than you can have an earnest discussion with them and just see if you can push that lever a little bit and, and get some more folks on board.

Those are all excellent ideas. I really liked the last one wide to find yourself the biggest lever and and push on that. And I think that’s a an excellent mindset to have is that we all know people that might be able to move the fulcrum a little bit more. And we should reach out to them we should cooperate with them is that what defines us really as a species is our ability to cooperate and read a book about Super cooperators.

And that’s really what has launched the development of our species, but also has probably led to this climate change problem is that we’ve developed capacity to pollute at such a high rate that that’s endangered us, but we can back our way out of it by cooperating to reduce that pollution. So you’re listening to KABC 790. This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America. We’ll be back in just one minute with Porter Fox to talk with him about his most recent book, The Last Winter.

You’re listening KABC 790 This is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America. We got Porter Fox on the show today. And Porter, you’ve done a lot of work in California. What do you see as half what’s happening in California? That’s the problems with climate change, and what can we do kind of have to deal with it?

You know, it’s California is a tricky one are absolutely buried with snow right now. And it’s feast or famine a lot of times and that’s actually what climatologists predicted 1020 years ago, is that in winter, there will be fewer snowstorms in the future, there will be a rising snow line. So the rainfall will kind of move up the mountain. But there will be more severe blizzards. So when there is a storm, when there is a cycle, it will be extremely heavy snowfall.

And when there’s not there will be a lot of high pressure, a lot of winter rain, and a longer time between storms. So that’s generally the future of winter, across the country and especially in in California. You know, the Sierra Nevada, you’re looking at, potentially under the higher emission scenario, which we’re basically on right now. Hopefully that’s going to change. You know, you’re looking at 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming by the end of the century. That’s a tremendous amount, six degrees Celsius. Pretty much a worst case scenario.

And, you know, looking at that potential, you’re probably going to shorten the snow season. by over two months at high elevations, lower elevations that will be completely gone. No snow on the ground. Rain all winter long. Brown peaks in the Sierra, as you know, as opposed to white. It was shocking to me to read that for the first time I skied mammoth, a ton, you know, with powder based in San Juan Capistrano, we ski a lot in Southern California and get up into the Sierras a fair amount.

What was even more shocking, connecting to what I was talking about before I did a piece for The New York Times on this was politicians representing districts that are up in the mountains and, and their, them not standing up for snow, you know, not standing up for conservation, or just trying to, at the very least find a way to get us through this climate crisis. Folks that Kevin McCarthy in the 23rd district, not one time, has voted for a pro environment, excuse me, a climate bill.

Paul Cook in the Eighth District 3% of the time, and his entire career voted for pro environment on a climate dump. Tom McClintock in the fourth district, Doug LaMalfa, in the first district under 5%. You know, these are folks that are representing people living at the foot of those water towers, right at the foot farmers, ranchers, people living in towns where their water district is almost completely coming from glacial melt, glacial or just snowpack melt. It’s completely shocking to me, it continues through Oregon and Washington, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, representatives like Liz Cheney, you know, who’s completely pro oil, pro coal, and does not stand up for the farmers for the folks.

The you know, even the Snake River that straddles the coast, right between Idaho and Wyoming. And it’s so vital to that agricultural business that she just doesn’t stand up for it. That’s that really blows my mind. You know, back to California when you’re getting record, a wildfire year as your record wildfire year, and nearly all of the largest wildfires in the US West are starting in areas that used to be covered by spring snowpack, the snowpack isn’t there anymore, the water isn’t there anymore, the forest becomes a tinderbox because the snow isn’t covering the ground.

A lot more plants new growth pops up, really uses that diminishing water supply like stretches and even further and provides more fuel for the fire. It’s pardon the pun, but it is a snowballing situation that seems to get get worse and worse.

So those are those are, you know, some of the things that could happen in California and the West. In the future, again, hopefully we can kind of get the get the car back on the road and hit the brakes and find a way to create a little bit safer future for all of us. What

What are ways are things that we could do in California, California specific to kind of mitigate these effects and realize that we’re talking about a worldwide problem. So some of it, we can’t just do alone, but maybe there’s some things that we can do.

I’ve I’ve heard of, you know, channeling some of the rainwater knocked down a concrete channelized things like the LA River to something that has a natural soil on the bottom so that it’s actually sucking in some of the rainwater versus currently we’re just having it all shoot out to the sea when it does rain, and it’s not recharging the groundwater. And, and that’s not a good cycle.

Absolutely, engineering like that couldn’t really help. They’re doing incredible things in Europe right now, where they’re replacing Vanishing Glaciers with giant Alpine dams up in the mountain. So instead of the glacier melting away and disappearing, the natural storage the glacier provided is now manmade engineered storage with a dam up on a 10,000 foot peak in this valley holding all the water there. It does work quite the same because of evaporation and a lot of other issues.

But they’re working hard to figure it out. So dealing with those concrete conduits is really important. Probably the biggest thing that Californians can do besides, first of all, look up your representatives and senators and just see how they voted. Make sure that they are voting in your best interest, I would say that’s probably the best thing. But secondly, use your lever to find out where your energy is coming from, to come at from wind, solar, is it coming from hydro and Oh, California is pretty good in that regard. If it’s not what a lot of ski resorts and big corporations in the West have done, has gotten, they’ve gotten together and essentially bullied, the electric companies to buy more renewable energy.

The town that I live in, I’m in upstate New York, I just got a letter from the town that said, we just struck a deal where we are purchasing 100% renewable energy. If anybody does not want to be a part of this deal, then you can sign this letter and send it back. Otherwise, this is going to happen automatically. So the house that I live in now is running completely off of renewable energy that they’re buying for solar and wind and hydro.

So it’s moving the grid and moving the the electric, that’s just such a big greenhouse gas emitter right now would be huge. And secondly, you know, cars, airplanes, trucks, if we can get away from the those internal combustion engines and more towards EVs. That would really help a lot.

Yeah, certainly, that is, hopefully the wave of the future, we’re seeing a number of manufacturers getting more serious about producing EVs, they’ve got a long way to go, I think we’re at 4% of all cars are EVs at this point in time, and we need to get up much higher than that, to really mitigate the effects of climate change.

About the policies here in California, you’ve seen some, some shifts in policy over the last few years in terms of talking about going to net zero sooner? Do you think that’s going to be enough based upon what the climate scientists are telling you?

You know, I just follow what the IPCC says that that’s the United Nations Panel on Climate Change. And you’re talking about hundreds 1000s of scientists sending their data, their studies their research to this panel, it’s it’s really the one cohesive, there’s so many voices involved, I think it would be almost impossible for it to be slanted one way or another. And so what their track is, what they suggest, is really what I go to, it’s also what COP26, you know, the Council of the Parties, when they get together and try to plan a path forward for all nations. That’s typically what they go to for guidelines.

So if we can do that, I have faith that we can avoid the worst consequences of climate change, we can avoid dramatic sea level rise that puts coastlines underwater, we can avoid massive water shortages in the US West, essentially turning everything west of Colorado into a giant desert. If we can avoid, you know, everything from you know, that kind of natural disaster, wildfires and whatnot to again, the economic impact of all of this and keep things close to how they are today.

I would be absolutely thrilled. But the requirements that they’re asking to get on that track to 1.5 degrees warming, and no more are pretty drastic. And companies are saying they’re not going to do it. Some nations are saying they’re not going to do it. To me, I’m kind of like, okay, so you’re thrown in the towel. Because we we know pretty well, what’s going to happen if we don’t do this. You know, I mean, some effects that will happen just from the melting snow and ice is, you know, you’re looking at up to 210 feet of sea level rise if Antarctica and Greenland were to melt just those two places.

Yeah, inundating moving the the coastline, you know, back to I five, you know, moving it back to I 95. And on the East Coast. You’re looking at these billions of tons of greenhouse gases that are frozen into the permafrost of the Arctic, it’s stored there, the greenhouse gases, like methane, co2 are frozen there, that thaws, all of that naturally gets released into the atmosphere warming the planet many more times than humans ever did.

We’re talking about cataclysmic change, and that is something that you would think would wake up humanity. Now you’re listening to KABC 790. And this is Matt Matern, your host of Unite and Heal America and guest Porter Fox, we’ll be back in just one minute to talk with border about these very important issues.
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You’re listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790 This is Matt Matern, your host, and I’ve got Porter Fox on the show. Porter and I were just talking about the potential cataclysmic changes that can occur if we don’t do anything about climate change. And we hope that wakes up people, I am heartened a bit by one of the things that Europe is doing recently, which is to say, anybody who is importing products into Europe would have to meet their environmental standards, lest they be subject to a tariff, which I think the US should do as well, which would also protect US manufacturers from countries that are producing goods where they don’t meet environmental standards.

So it helps our help American workers as well as would help the environment by encouraging countries to meet more stringent environmental standards in order to manually send products to the US or send them to the EU. And I think it’s a it’s kind of a very elegant and beautiful solution to encouraging companies to do the right thing. I don’t know if that’s something you’ve looked into, or it’s something that you think would work Porter, what do you think?

Yeah, I’ve been a little more in the earth science side of this and a little less on the policy making side of it. But I have found that market based solutions like that, like the carbon tax, that seem to be a very elegant solution to the problem. The crazy thing is that in most industries, you know, those changes, save the company money in the long run, becoming more green becoming less of a fossil fuel user, in the long run, is more profitable.

And so that’s why you have seen, you know, a lot of these divestment campaigns, telling colleges to take their money out of this out of the fossil fuel industry, companies, you know, publicly traded companies taking money out of it. Because it’s not responsible to the shareholder to continue to go down the fossil fuel hole, they’re, they’re losing money in the long run. It is more profitable, it’s more equitable, and it’s vastly safer to follow a more green future that is not dependent on fossil fuel. And doesn’t isn’t that what Pete like? What what do they want?

You talking to a corporate person, you’re talking to a politician that gets their money from corporate donations like don’t you aren’t? Don’t you want money? If you don’t, if you don’t care about the environment, and you don’t care about money? What’s your motivation? You know, it’s it. It works on all fronts. It’s a better world in every way.

If we take this on now, use these market based solutions, use national policy change, shut down the coal plants, create jobs to build renewable energy, and get off this medieval, dirty, energy producing process that really was outdated, honored 50 years ago. Yeah, it’s just modernization.

We clearly have the technology to have cleaner energy, it’s within our grasp. We’ve could have had electric cars back 120 years ago, but somehow, the oil companies directed us down a different path. And we ended up with oil and gas cars instead. But you know, we’ve got to play it as wise and deal with the situation as it as it exists.

And we clearly can make these changes and preserve our economy. I mean, quite frankly, as you said it could be would be good for our economy. You just look at California and the examples of trying to reduce the smog here in Southern California. That was said eight Can’t be done. We can’t have cars running on unleaded gas and catalytic converters and all the rest that was pushed back at every stage by the oil companies.

And yet, we did all those things. And they said, we can’t have meet these fuel economy standards. And yet we did. So I just tend not to believe them when they say we can’t, we can’t, we can’t.

Precisely and the oil industry is the richest industry ever in the history of this planet. And in human history. They have so much money, they get so many billions in subsidies from our tax money, that they have power that we can’t imagine. They have bought Congress, they bought the Senate, they bought the presidency, many times they bought, excuse me, and they’ve bought journalists.

They’ve bought, you know, newspapers, you know, the, and it’s, you know, in their defense, they’re just trying to, you know, turn a massive profit. That’s what a lot of people try to do in this world. But now, it’s very much at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and potentially our collective future.

Well, turning back to your book again, what do you see is the change in the in the winter culture over the last 2030 years? And where do you see it headed over the next 20 or 30 years?

Well, one of the coolest things that I have seen is people really communing with nature in winter, more and more the backcountry ski movement, which was pretty small, when I was coming up, and Jackson, were hiking into the Tetons, and skiing down these beautiful powder fields. It’s just booming right now, everybody wants to get away from this resort, away from you know, the base Lodge and the lifts and whatever and just use human power to hike up into the hills and ski down.

That is, that’s been a very cool thing to watch. In Europe, it’s much more common people are doing that all the time anyway, in the States, it’s really taken off, especially since the pandemic and since a lot of the resorts now have limited the limit of you know how many people can be on the resort in a given day, and the lodges are closed and whatnot. So I see that as a great thing.

People that choose to go outside and be active in the winter, are a really special breed. I’ve been writing about them for more than 20 years now. And I just find them to be like the friendliest, most adventurous, physically tough folks around and you know, if anybody is going to kind of take up the torch and try to fight this fight for us, I think they’re probably a great bunch to do it.

Well, that’s, it’s good to hear, I love to hear that there are people out there that are really fighting for this. And I know there are millions of people who do care about this and probably billions of people, it’s really a question of getting their hands on the right levers to make the right moves. And, and that’s, that’s challenging.

Because I think in the US, we’ve kind of been on autopilot for a long time thinking, well, the people in power will take care of it will. We’re just enjoying what we’re doing or we’re busy working busy with our families. We really can’t be bothered with this public policy stuff or learning about the science behind climate change. It’s it’s complex, it’s like you said 1000s of different papers for the AIPCC. It just makes your head spin.

So you know, forget it.

Absolutely. Yeah.

What do we do to and what do we do to engage those folks?
It’s, again, it’s about education, you know, get the politics out of it. I don’t care what your politics are. I mean, I care but it doesn’t affect me, your globe, your worldview. I don’t care. This is about math. It’s literally just about math. I just watched the new movie don’t look up, which is terrific. And it is basically a metaphor for climate change. It’s an actual metaphor, not a fictional one.

Many climate change scientists always said, If a meteorite was speeding towards earth and was going to destroy it, would you just say, Oh, I don’t believe that’s happening and turn your cheek or would you say, Let’s launch some nukes and has tried to divert this thing away from our planet. And in that movie, that’s exactly what happens and led by corrupt politicians, they kind of convinced the world that this is not happening. That there’s, I don’t want to spoiler alert that there’s a valuable minerals to mined from the meteorite, maybe we can, you know, control it and, and, you know, make all that cash off of it.

That is kind of the path we’re on right now. Again, bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry, but I would just say, just find read the science. You know, there, there is no bias for a scientist working on the Juneau icefield, or out on the Antarctic ice core drilling operation. They don’t care, they’re just doing their job. They send the data back there, you know, they’ll write the papers tell you what they found. There’s no bias there.

There’s sure plenty of bias in the Green Movement, plenty of bias in the environmental movement, but not at the scientific level. This is this is just a math problem. And what the math is saying is that we are on track to a very, very dangerous amount of climate change in this century and the next, and that it is also very possible to get off that path and onto a safe one.

So I and my family, choose the safe path. And certainly encourage everybody to look into that science, not on social media, never on social media, but in actual publications and actual books. Learn the real facts.

Well, Porter, it’s been great having you on the show.

You’ve been listening to Unite and Heal America and KABC 790, Porter Fox, the author of The Last Winter, check it out, and we’ll be back next week. Thanks, folks.