transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] Now, here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2:
[00:05] And welcome back to Coast to Coast, George Noory with you, Peter Ward back with us, paleontologist, ecologist, and astronomer at the University of Washington. He's the author of a number of books, at least 20 about science for the public, including books on estimations of frequency of extraterrestrial life, vast extinctions of the past, climate and climate change, and past and future evolution. Peter Ward, back on Coast to Coast. Hello, Peter.
Speaker 3:
[00:32] Hey, George, thank you again for having me. And aren't we a couple of long-lived humans now?
Speaker 2:
[00:38] Absolutely. Let's just keep doing it, huh?
Speaker 3:
[00:41] Yeah, a happy Earth Day too. I'm trying to figure out if I could remember when the first Earth Day was. It seemed to be kind of a hippie-dippie, long-haired, bead-rattling first occurrence of it. I don't really understand what it's evolved into, but I'm really glad we still celebrate this planet.
Speaker 2:
[01:01] What does Earth Day mean to you, Peter?
Speaker 3:
[01:04] Well, I'm just, I'm really glad that we're still on it, you and I and all the people that we care about. It certainly is a changing place, isn't it? Since I've talked to you last, I've been to Papua New Guinea again. I did a long trip there. I've just wrapped a new TV series that I think you guys are gonna want to hear about. Future Evolution. It's a co-production of France and Australia. And we worked in Europe. We worked in Papua New Guinea. We're trying to do a really cool series about what future animals we can predict to be present on the planet. So it's nice to have an Earth Day. And we're thinking, at least in the TV series, about future Earth Days, if you will.
Speaker 2:
[01:48] If I had found a barontosaurus bone in my backyard, what's it worth, Peter?
Speaker 3:
[01:54] You know, George, it all depends how it looks and what it looked like. Interestingly enough, I live just south of Canada, by Vancouver Island. You've been up here a number of times. This week, it was announced that a brand new type of dinosaur was just discovered on Vancouver Island. That's the second in two years. We had another in the American San Juan Islands. So, you never know what's going to pop up. And a lot of these new bones are being discovered around here by amateurs. A lot of people go out, they have taught, but they're well educated. They know what they're looking for. They have a bunch of experts to help them out. So it's really fun that we keep making these discoveries. If that brought us our bone in your own backyard, if it looks like a nice dinosaur bone, it's probably worth something.
Speaker 2:
[02:43] Peter, why don't bones deteriorate or decompose?
Speaker 3:
[02:47] Well, they really do. And unless every one of those dinosaur bones that we think about and look at in museums are no longer bones, they're rock. So what happens? The bone falls down into the ground, it gets covered over, and then groundwater percolates through, carrying with it iron or silica or another mineral, and just replaces it. And you know well, petrified wood, the same thing happens to bones. All the organics disappears, replaced by hard minerals. So you get a facsimile of what was there.
Speaker 2:
[03:19] Let's take a few moments to talk about climate change, and regardless of how it changes or why it changes, can you say that beyond a shadow of a doubt, climates change?
Speaker 3:
[03:32] Yeah, well, it certainly has. It's funny that just as I was preparing for the show, I was looking and was surprised to see a week ago, it was announced that the El Nino event, which we in Western Washington keep an eye on, is expected to be what they're calling a super El Nino. El Nino is a cycle back and forth, and it's entirely related to the warming of water or the cooling of water off the Western Coast of South America. If it warms too much, it causes the jet stream to move in different directions. George, I don't know about where you've been this past six months, but we out in the West have just gone through the driest, warmest winter that I can ever remember. I'm a snow skier. I've gotten up once this year and was skiing on rocks. The cascades and all the way down to the Sierras, you know, the snowpack is about 10 to 30 percent of normal. So that's all good and fine till we get to July and August and September. And then we will have had so little snow and so little runoff from the snow that we're expecting a monstrous forest fire year in the entire Northwest this year, that will probably extend down to California. And that has me really unhappy. I mean, I hate those years when the smoke is so devastating. It's hard on all our health. But it's a consequence. It turns out that 2024 was the warmest year on record. 2026 already has a 30 percent chance of surpassing it and being the warmest year in history of the planet that we've been keeping records.
Speaker 4:
[05:17] And I know you're going to want some after hearing this. This is an amazing story.
Speaker 5:
[05:19] We've got Stephen and Malachi Gregory in Nelson, New Zealand.
Speaker 4:
[05:24] I understand that Malachi, who is eight, almost nine years old now, was suffering with not just one or two warts, but I mean a significant outbreak of warts all over his body, so significant it impacted his ability to really function.
Speaker 6:
[05:37] Yeah, he was having trouble even holding a pencil to write. That was Ty's book, actually, that got me thinking about it.
Speaker 5:
[05:44] I'm not surprised. It is an amazing immunomodulator. And so I can see that it would work.
Speaker 4:
[05:49] And so at what point did you see that there was actually improvement is really going to work?
Speaker 6:
[05:54] Well, look, we really started to notice it around 12 weeks. You can see these things actually getting smaller and smaller and then going down to where they're just little red marks, the whole things are gone. We're talking about once, you know, one the size of a warner. I thought, no way that's going to...
Speaker 4:
[06:10] Wow.
Speaker 6:
[06:10] It's just been miraculous to see him get into a pair of shoes.
Speaker 4:
[06:14] Yes. How wonderful.
Speaker 6:
[06:16] It's great to see him so happy and confident.
Speaker 4:
[06:19] Absolutely wonderful.
Speaker 6:
[06:20] Our friends that have seen it, they're just blown away.
Speaker 4:
[06:22] Ty, this is awesome.
Speaker 6:
[06:23] Yeah, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:
[06:24] Another amazing story. Why? We're talking about Carnivora. Call them to awaken your immune system and protect yourself now. Call 1-866-836-8735. That's 1-866-836-8735. Or visit carnavora.com. C-A-R-N-I-V-O-R-A, carnavora.com. In terms of El Nino's, as you just mentioned, what causes them?
Speaker 3:
[06:52] Well, it's all really complicated ocean currents, but it's pretty simple in this particular case. Off the west coast of South America, if the water warms a couple of extra degrees, it causes the climate above it and the air above it to change directions. The El Nino becomes, as we're thinking about, at least for this year, super El Nino. It will cause drought in some areas and extra rain in other areas. But for our own area, the worry about El Nino is it could cause drought in the agricultural areas. Look, we do not want, with this many billion people on the planet, to have drought. We need to keep growing as much food as we possibly can. And again, this is where various news organizations, The Guardian, NBC, there's just been a whole series of articles. Somebody is worried about this year's El Nino. And so there are a lot of people really anxiously looking at surface water temperatures of the oceans.
Speaker 2:
[07:57] Peter, the late Art Bell used to talk about the planet, and he was concerned that it got too cold instead of warm.
Speaker 3:
[08:03] Yeah, I saw that movie. You saw that movie. That was a very interesting point of view. Where we're worried, George, about things getting too cold, it's not the whole planet, but really the other interesting climate news that came out in the last month is that the Gulf Stream, which after it goes by the western or eastern North America and moves across the Atlantic, it's still carrying warm water. And this warm water heats Europe. I mean, if you think about the latitude of where the great wine is grown in France, and if you go to Spain, these are pretty high latitude areas equivalent to parts of Canada. And yet you've got all these fabulous hot weather crops. All the grapes are really warm weather type of crop. The current that warms them has been slowing down. And so all the way back to about 20 years ago, there's been a worry about this interesting gulf stream slowing down and perhaps stopping. And if that happens, then we really are going to have some climate change.
Speaker 2:
[09:13] What amazes me about this planet, Peter, regardless of droughts and seasons like that, is the planet takes care of itself. We need rain for crops, it rains. We need to do certain things, it happens. Who would design something like that? What a great god, huh?
Speaker 3:
[09:32] Yeah, it just shows the whole natural world is pretty complex. I mean, the beautiful thing is we keep making these great discoveries. You just heard it in your news report. All lots of lots of extra water down deep underneath. The problem with that ocean down there so deep is we can't access it. And as you well know, the Colorado itself and many of those areas in the west, everybody's now fighting for water. It's going to be something far more valuable than gold or diamonds or silver or anything else. Fresh water is going to be the greatest treasure on this planet.
Speaker 2:
[10:07] How in the world could water get so deep down into the planet?
Speaker 3:
[10:11] I think it was there personally, I think one of the coolest stories at all about the origin of the earth. It's something that really you show how to think about, how did we get our moon? So at 4.5 billion years ago, the earth, the early earth, was hit by a planet the size of Mars, smacked into the earth, transferred an awful lot of its volatiles, its light elements. Personally, I think all that water was transferred from that planetary collision. Now, much of that planet was absorbed by the earth, but part of it wasn't, and the part that wasn't got thrown out into orbit. And that's how we got this gigantic moon. I mean, if you look at the rest of the solar system, there's no other planetary body that has such a large moon relative to the size of the planet. We're unique in that regard. And we now know it was from a one-in-a-million collision of another planet in the early solar system. I think that's where all that water came from.
Speaker 2:
[11:11] Peter, if you were on the planet at the time of the collision, and you were able to witness it, what would you see?
Speaker 3:
[11:19] You wouldn't be seeing anything for very long. I mean, both planets completely disintegrated. There's a beautiful video showing how the disintegration of both planets happened, the orbit around each other. Much of the smaller the planets, the Mars-sized planet, again, gets absorbed into the Earth. The Earth gets much bigger, and the last piece is the moon. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons that we have life at all, that the habitability of this planet, much of it is related to the fact that we have a process called plate tectonics, continental drift. When did that start? And that started at all probability because of the collision of this smaller Mars-sized planet. It thinned across, it brought all this water to us. It created the chance for the Earth to become a life-giving and life-diverse planet. So if you're really looking for how many other planets in the Cosmos, if we could track down other such collisions, we might get some sort of estimate. But it sounds to me that life may not be quite as common in the Cosmos as much of us hope it will be.
Speaker 1:
[12:32] Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at 1 a.m. Eastern. And go to coasttocoastam.com for more.