welcome my name is that hashish armand and i am your host and my guest today is dr peter l ward dr ward worked twenty seven years with the united states geological survey as research  geophysicist branch chief and program manager he helped develop and manage a major national research program chaired a committee at the white house testified before congress worked on the committee for vice president gore published more than fifty scientific papers and won two national awards for explaining science to the public that he retired in one nine hundred ninety eight working intensely for the past decade trying to resolve several observations related to climate change his analysis and theory are explained in detail on his website and his new book what really causes global warming greenhouse gases or ozone depletion you so that's quite a history you have and you know you were retired and now you devoted tense all of yours to this subject so tell us what compelled you here what were the unanswered questions or the new questions that surfaced for you or me about ten years ago cruising on the internet to sing something totally unrelated to climate i found a to from the greenland ice sheet from a bore ok and i said you know this just doesn't make sense but if i could understand this you could be important so let's turn to looking at the data and much more detail is that these data and i realized back then that though i was on to something there was something going on here that just didn't seem right and if i could figure it out i might make an important contribution i'm going to interrupt you here just just for the laypeople and so typically started with major basalt flows and i know and so we see this relationship throughout you know logic time of major basalt flows covering events took millions of square kilometers or miles that they're associated with stratosphere deplete seals the layer now man that this accidentally back in the sixty's when we started producing c f c gases these were uses refrigerants as spray cans and so on and what happened was beginning in around one nine hundred seventy the ozone layer began to be depleted and the scientists looked at the site realized that the c f c gases when they get high in the stratosphere can be broken apart problem here we've got to do something about this and within two years working with the united nations they passed the montreal protocol on substances that the plate the ozone layer this took effect in one nine hundred eighty nine well sure enough in  volcanism observed seventeen eighty three so it was a very significant event and sure enough two thousand and fourteen fifteen and sixteen have been the hottest years on record two thousand and sixteen by far the electromagnetism maxwell that the electromagnetic radiation travels as ways through the atmosphere prince who space right well it turns out if you calculate in terms of waves you calculate energy of those waves in a certain way no that's not what's happening what's actually happening is letter magnetic radiation which is a whole lot of different frequencies are traveling through space and air as frequencies or radio station transmits a frequency a radio receiver except it's tuned to pick that frequency and that's what's communicated between the two and when you realize that it's three quincey that's being transmitted not waves cockle in energy in a way that makes a whole lot of sense and what you realize then is that the effect of the energy that reaches the earth when you deplete the ozone layer is forty eight times hotter than the energy that reaches the earth when you absorb one greenhouse gases absorb infrared radiation so i'm going to ethopia here because hey we're focusing in one area what happens if we continue focusing there is anybody paying attention and saying wait a minute we need to shift gears here we need to point ourselves and look in a different direction well i'm having a very hard time getting people to take that step they are so convinced based on their consensus that greenhouse  so over a year and a half ago i you shoot a challenge to over two thousand climate scientists all the scientists that are wrong or reviewed the recently p c c technical report on climate change and i said look we've never done an experiment that shows that greenhouse gases actually cause warming of the air that experiment needs to be done and i'm offering ten thousand dollars for my children's inheritance to the first scientists that can do such an experiment successfully because i am convinced from my understanding of the physics and from the data that i'm looking at the greenhouse gases do not cause significant to be injured global warming and did anyone take you up on the challenge no one stick to me up on the challenge i follow that with many other things i have talked to many of the top climatologists in the world i am sick continuing to try to get the word out there because the reality is since the paris accord we're now agreeing to spend more than ten trillion dollars to reduce greenhouse gases if i am correct then that is a total waste of money wow so a bunch of questions surface ok so let's say that we continue on the path we are now and you know the ozone layer continues to be depleted and we have global warming what can be do if the cause of the global warming is a break in the ozone layer due to volcanic activity i mean we can we control that what what are the possibilities no we can't control the panic activity and there are four volcanoes in iceland right now they're looking like they may become much more active and if they do in history they've been significant  uptions but we can what we know is that the world is not likely to get warmer now unless we have more rocky reactivity ok the projections that are made by climate models at the moment that the world is going to get hotter and hotter over the next century just do not stand up at this point and in fact climate models have not predicted the temperature correctly since nine hundred ninety eight so there's no reason to really trust those models what my work shows is that there is very good reason that the mathematics in those models may not be correct that we're not cancelling the unity properly so then again we go back to ok so if you are right what should we be doing if i'm right what we can do is continue to burn fossil fuels provided we control pollution you know currently in southeast asia and china and asia we're killing over three million people a year because of pollution but we know how to control pollution in the western world if we control pollution we can continue to burn fossil fuels in terms of trolling the climate there's not a lot we could do but we should be doing research on what can we do to maybe help the ozone layer not get depleted now the problem is we did the pleat the ozone layer it remains depleted at this time and the c gases are very stable and they last for a very long time so we do not expect the depletion to reduce significantly for several more decades as long as we remained pleated  radiation coming from the sun is reaching earth and warming the ocean and melting ice so much of the effects of warming that we're seeing is going to continue and there's not much we can do about it some won't so a thousand little well not really because the doomsday is this this conjecture by the majority of scientists that we're going to have major warming in the next many decades i mean what we're seeing now  likely to get warmer now unless there's a major volcanic eruption basaltic eruption so that really is good news the fact that we can burn fossil fuel is good news we depend on our lifestyle the pens major amounts of energy and as the rest of the world becomes more highly developed they me that energy to it also means that we don't need to spend trillions of dollars reducing greenhouse gases emissions because that could be i mean we can use that money for a lot of other things yes yeah and again and no they don't stay for me is the whole thing well we can't do anything about the volcano that if they are up they are up to and whatever the consequences of that are just the way it is history we see this we see all kinds of what kind of corruptions there was one two hundred fifty one million years ago where lava came out and covered an area of siberia equal ability eighty seven percent of the united states warm over ninety six percent of all species of the ocean were killed this was the major event we've seen we see several dozen of them it's not quite that big throughout you object time they occur on average about every twenty two million years now the good news is they haven't been around for a while and we don't expect them for a while but if any of the major assault a corrections that have occurred in written history reoccur now if we would see the effect it would change climate we would survive it but the climate will change and we've seen the climate change i mean we can record climate change throughout your logic time and throughout written history wow and can you say a little bit about the relationship between earthquakes and volcanoes well in fact was my specialty with the u s geological survey what the basically when you crack the earth and you let magma come up you get a volcanic eruption and when you crack the earth that's done in earthquakes and what we notice now is that when there's a significant increase in earthquakes say before the and then we get a bigger ocean so you know from the things that i read and i know they are you know developing ways and have developed ways to predict earthquakes is that has that shown up in how people are prepared now garbage how buildings are built and in preparation for let's say if there is an earthquake at preparation for a volcano of volcanic eruptions well a major national program that i was in charge of in the one nine hundred seventy s was the attempt to predict earthquakes and at that time we saw many physical changes but i could occur months before an earthquake and we in the united states soviet union china around the world there was a great deal of interest that are that earthquakes might be predictable it turned out that we just can't get adequate data to really show that and we decided finally it was much more important to improve earthquake engineering to make that the our infrastructure more earthquake resistant than to try to predict earthquakes on the other hand predicting ball chemos we've gotten pretty good at it we actually predicted mo russian and time to get people out of the way millions could have been killed if that certainly tens of thousands could have been killed if we had not predict who to go eruption so in volcanic eruptions we as i say we see this increase in suddenly snaps ok so you can there are many ways of measuring the step from ation now back in the seventy's it was very difficult nowadays with g p s we can measure it in great detail kind of but work a lot better now of the ground prior to the earthquake you can also see changes of that caused by the defamation for example the water table seems to change the chinese actually predicted an earthquake in my change hundred seventy six why the fact that snakes came out of the ground in the middle of the winter and they explained this by the fact that the ground was being to form the water table went up this warm frozen ground to the surface and the snake said oh it must be spring chiefs they actually convince people to stay outside of their buildings on a specific day relationship levies outside now when the earthquake happened many less people were killed wow but we haven't been that successful on all cases there are other evidence of small changes in the mt rate on coming up soon the ground many many differences ical things that we could measure there's been a lot of effort in china trying to correlate in a little activity and sensing with the earthquakes none of that's been particularly convincing but there was a big effort but if this point  say most seismologists are not working on earthquake prediction they're working on trying to understand earthquakes in greater detail as to where they occur and why they occur and when they occur but we're not the kind of given up at the moment at we predicted in one nine hundred ninety that within thirty years there was a sixty seven percent chance of a major earthquake occurring in the east bay going to berkeley richmond hey we're out the east bay a forecast that you know it could happen when not predicting the specific event we're just saying it is going to happen we're certain that event will happen and we're getting the likelihood of that happening it has increased significantly in last twenty seven years planners have taken this into account and the building codes now in the bay area are much more persistent there is an understanding this could happen back in one nine hundred ninety i published a magazine a twenty six page magazine sent to three point three million families of northern california explaining what could happen and what you could do about it how you could prepare for wow that was featured on good morning america fifty thousand requests for that magazine from the around the nation to get that information so i guess just knowing what you know because you know people look to california and they know that these things can happen but they can to figure somebody else's life time so knowing what you know when you live in san francisco at this point well i did live in san francisco for twenty seven years ok or the german cisco region when i moved to jackson hole wyoming and the grand te living i mean i looked out my window so the fact is we live where we live various reasons and no matter where we live there are some hazard it could be tornadoes it could be hurricanes it could be earthquakes that it could be ok knows so what's important is to list to be aware of the hazards where you live and to be prepared for them to think about what you do if they occur for example if we get a bigger earthquake on the tetons fault in january you know in jackson hole wyoming we're in deep trouble because we could lose power we may not be able to get out of any of the passes or changes that connect us to the rest of the world we may be on our own for weeks now and it might be twenty below zero so it's has to be prepared for that possibility yeah and one of the first things i did when i moved to jackson was to write a preparedness brochure pointing out that fact that it's these are the various hazards that we face in this is what the effects of those could be and this is what we ought to do to prepare for them so that we don't have or so we reduce the damage as much as possible and with that well come to that information it is welcome and we now have a  by the local emergency management that can notify any of us on our cell phone immediately if there is any hazard that is showing up and in fact that was the committee at the white house that i chaired many years ago was how to get warning information to people no matter where they are come out or what they're doing and right now fema has a program where it can send a message to your cell phone if you're in the region of high risk without even knowing your cell phone number just by the fact that you are being served by a tower you know rajan and so we have about two minutes left and i want to give you an opportunity to say what ever it is that you think is most important for us to think about eruptions and that explosive volcanoes are the cause of cooling and climate change this makes a big difference compared to what the consensus is at the moment about greenhouse gases we don't need to spend trillions of dollars reducing greenhouse gases that would be a could totally stop money now the problem is right now there is a consensus but science is not done by consensus science is done by data done by analysis and i was my uncle cried who said look if it's consensus it's not science that science is not consensus the most famous scientists in history are famous bush science sleep because they broke with the consensus right now it's peter ward against the war old and i'm working very hard to get the word out that there really is a misunderstanding here about climate change i'm talking to the top scientists in the world i'm trying to get them to understand that one would think that all the people who are profiting from fossil fuel would jump on this bandwagon well it's very interesting i assume the mischler that many of the skeptics that don't believe in climate change would be very interested in what i'm saying right my from talking with them some of them are sort of interested but they all have their arguments you know for two decades at least we've been arguing for russia slightly back and forth between the believers and the skeptics right back and and it's gotten very very bitter it's been a lot of and holland in the tack there's a lot of sore feelings there's a lot of people that are very frustrated and most of the sinuses are frustrated in dealing with people that they don't think are even understand the science i have so i'm walking into a battle peter where at the end of our time thank you so much for doing this interview good luck and again i think people might be interested in maybe even  kind of person doing it with you so i appreciate what you're doing and since we are all at the effect of global warming it impacts all of us thank you it's all discussed on why i climate changes don't come great people get all a detail they want there or in my book what really causes global warming wonderful thank you and that will be up on the screen as well my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining us