Gennaro criticizes inconsistent sea-level rise projections

And you're going to go off on a tangent for a minute.

And therein lies, you know, some of the people who criticize climate change and don't believe in it, don't, you know, they don't know, you know, they don't have confidence in it.

Back when I was working for the state as the...

DEP, as the DE, the state DEC deputy commissioner, we were, for our purposes in DEC, using

numbers for sea level projections that were projected by Columbia.

And the governor's office of storm recovery were using numbers that were generated by my alma mater,

Stony Brook University, their department of marine, oh God, senior moment, department of

SOMAS, School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences.

And, you know, they're high-end estimates for sea level rise by X date, whatever it was, or half of what the Columbia projections were.

And so I raised the point.

With the commission of DEC and state government at large, people see state government as kind of like one entity, and we have two sets of books for sea level rise.

So if you're at the governor's office of storm recovery, you're seeing the high-end estimate of like X, and if you look at Columbia's number, the high-end estimate was 2X.

And so...

We shouldn't have two sets of books, and this is why people lose confidence in climate forecasting and sea level rise projections.

Because they're like personalities of...

You know, the one who was doing it at Stony Brook was a, he was a Nobel laureate.

And he's very strict in terms of we don't know something until we know it.

And so if we don't know it, it's not going in the calculus for the projections.

We could be wrong.

We can end up, there could be things that we don't know, factors that we don't really, that we think are out there, but we haven't really studied them enough that, like, they're not going in the projection.

So we're going to be conservative.

And whereas some other entities are like, well, you have to build in a little bit of a fudge factor because nature always has something out there that we don't yet know.

So let's use the Ouija board and try to...

Fit it in somehow to account in our current projections that which we don't fully know yet.

And so as a scientist, it's always like kind of annoyed me.

And so that's two minutes of your life you can't get back.

Sorry, but hopefully it was enriching about climate science and why people sometimes poke at it, because that's exactly the thing people would say.

New York State's got two sets of books on like what climate, on what sea level rise projections are.

You know, one of them has got to be wrong, probably both of them.

And so that doesn't mean we shouldn't endeavor to figure it out.

It doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prepare for it.

But these are some of the frustrations when you're dealing with people who don't want to even recognize climate change and sea level rise as a thing.

This is fodder for them to throw in our face, and I don't like to serve up things that people are going to throw in our face.

That's three minutes you can't get back.

And so...

Where were we?