Busting Climate Change Myths | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org in the 1950s a controversial social experiment took place where a psychologist named mu safar Sharif took a bunch of preteen boys divided them arbitrarily into groups and then got them to fight each other Lord of the Flies style science was a lot more fun back then Sharif and his team took twenty two young boys aged 11 to 12 years old and took them on a camping expedition two robbers cave State Park in Oklahoma they divided the boys into two groups totally at random and gave them a few days to kind of get to know each other and then they brought the two groups together and had them compete for resources almost immediately the two groups turned on each other vandalizing each other's camps destroying their things and even physically assaulting each other science it became known as the robbers cave experiment and it's gone down as one of the best examples of in-group out-group bias humans will get tribal over almost anything from hairstyles to what color shirt you're wearing we seem to have this innate need not only to belong but also to exclude whatever it is you believe say when it comes to climate change you probably share that with a particular political group and you probably see the other guys is wrong or victims of a hoax or disinformation but climate change isn't a political issue there are numbers and measurements that we can see cold hard and partial data I've covered climate change on a few different videos in this channel and I've gotten pretty much every comment in response to it that you can possibly imagine so I thought it might be interesting to take some of these climate change myths and see what the actual science has to say about it fun there are two types of people who are watching this video right now as climate change deniers to prefer the term climate change skeptics in climate change supporters who prefer well any other term because nobody supports climate change and there are people who think that climate change is happening but it's not man-made there are people who think that it is happening and it is man-made but it's not a big deal and there are people who think that the whole thing's a giant hoax so like I said two types of people the myth that I'm addressing here they come from a variety of places there's a lot of confusion and misinformation out there and that's deliberate there are vested interests out there that are trying to muddy the waters to protect their bottom line but that's not something I'm going to talk about here here I'm just gonna focus on the myths that are out there and respond to it with what the science says and I know for some of you that's not gonna hold any water because you don't believe in the scientific establishment you think that they're making it up for various different reasons and this video is not gonna change that so I'm not gonna talk about that here so the first myth is the one about the one about the damn it okay I can't just not address this look anytime there's some kind of technological change there are moneyed interests that have benefited from the status quo and don't want that change to happen they want to slow that change down as much as possible in the case of the fossil fuel industry they stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars at the way we produce energy changes so these moneyed interests have spent tens of millions of dollars bargain really to run disinformation campaigns to sow doubt in people's minds to try to slow down that change and this is nothing new this has happened over and over and over again throughout the 20th century corporations have a legal responsibility to protect the shareholders assets and the more they have to lose the more they're gonna spend on lobbying in PR to try to change the narrative the lead industry did the same thing when the health effects of lead in gasoline became known the tobacco industry did the same thing when cigarettes became tied to lung cancer in fact the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industries both used the exact same PR firm Hill & Knowlton going all the way back to 1956 there's a book called merchants of doubt that's definitely worth reading it talks about all this and there's the film thank you for smoking which is a good send up of the tobacco PR people yeah I'm not gonna I'm not gonna talk about that here okay myth number one there is no scientific consensus on global warming people who clean this often refer to the 2007 petition that was signed by 31,000 scientists asking the United States to pull out of the Kyoto agreement basically arguing that climate change is not real now this is a huge number of people and it definitely makes it sound like there's a lot of debate out there about this and that there's a lot of scientists that disagree with it but the only requirement for signing this petition was you needed a bachelor's degree in a science related field of some sort you didn't even have to actually be working in that field you could have gotten a degree in animal husbandry and sign this petition the fact is only 0.1 percent of the people who signed its petition were actual climate scientist and this sort of expertise equivalency is something you see a lot in these debates for comparison around that same time in 2009 Peter Duran from the University of Illinois ran a survey of 3000 earth scientists specifically earth scientists asking them if they agreed that global warming was happening and that it was caused by humans 90 percent of the respondents in this survey or PhDs and their expertise covered everything from geology to geochemistry geophysics hydrology oceanography and paleontology and five percent of them were actual climate scientists they also collected information on how many of them actually had published works in scientific journals and how many of those published works were about climate change in this survey 90 percent of respondents agreed with the statements and what they found was that the more expertise they have in climate science the more they agreed with the statements for people who had had more than 50% of their papers published on climate science topics ninety 7.4 percent of them agreed that humans are causing climate change in a Princeton study in 2010 took a look at public statements from published climate scientists and found that yes again 97 percent of them agree that humans are causing climate change and in 2013 yet another study was done where they took a look at over 12,000 published articles on climate science between 1991 and 2011 and found that ninety seven point one percent of them again 97 percent supported the idea that the climate is warming and human beings are causing it now I know an argument that gets made here is that of course it looks like a consensus because the only papers that get published are the ones that support the global warming agenda either because the truth is being suppressed or just because scientists live in a state of publish or perish so if they want to get published they have to submit articles that support that agenda but clearly that's not true I mean remember three percent of those twelve thousand articles argued against human caused global warming that's three hundred and sixty papers making that argument so they're getting published and besides if a scientist has ironclad proof that the scientific community is wrong that's a huge story and the scientific journal would jump all over that that scientists name would be in the papers all over the world the next day and besides this is the only research that gets this level of scrutiny if a research paper came out tomorrow saying that 97% of Dermatologists agree that solar radiation causes skin cancer No was argue that nobody would pick that apart nobody would say that dissenting dermatologists are being stifled or questioned their motives or accuse them of some giant conspiracy against the Sun I started this off with the consensus question and I spent as much time on it because this is important this is how science works science works on consensus you know there's there's always gonna be conflicting data there's always gonna be differing opinions it's never a hundred percent but when the vast majority of scientists agree on one thing that's generally what you find the truth and just to put this into perspective 97% is the same consensus amongst scientists that smoking causes cancer co2 is plant food yeah because having more food only makes you healthier no I get the logic plants need co2 to do photosynthesis so more co2 would mean more photosynthesis more energy bigger plants right there's even a term that climate change skeptics have adopted for this it's called global greening but go and figure it's actually a bit more complicated than what you learned in sixth grade science class plants metabolism isn't based on co2 alone it also needs water and nutrients from the soil it's that mix that helps it to grow and if you have higher co2 without a corresponding uptick in water and nutrients it doesn't really make a difference in fact water is gonna be even harder to come by because higher co2 would mean higher temperatures higher temperatures would evaporate more water out of the plant so it's gonna need more water just to maintain the status quo even more water to be able to make any advantage out of the higher co2 concentration and while many have pointed out that more of aberration should lead to more rain climate models actually suggest that that rain comes in the form of high-energy storms which we're already starting to see and that massive burst of water doesn't get a chance to soak into the soil and in fact can remove a layer of topsoil with the runoff without extra fertilizer plants exposed to more co2 might grow a little bit faster at first but they quickly hit a nitrogen plateau and stop growing as the soil gets depleted of nutrients plus extra co2 and some plants can cause chemical imbalances that causes them to lose their natural defenses against insects so if you have plants in a controlled greenhouse environment where you can control the amount of co2 and the amount of water and the amount of nutrients yeah extra co2 could help but in the outside world where you can't control all those variables it would have little and no effect on the plant growth and can actually be harmful Mars is warming to this myth came from an observation by NASA scientist Laurie Fenton that a 1999 composite photo of Mars looked darker than a composite photo taken in 1977 from the Viking mission her theory that this was a sign of global warming on Mars was published in 2007 in the journal Nature but in her paper what she was actually talking about was the albedo on the surface of Mars and how that can affect the global climate the albedo is the amount of light that gets reflected off of the surface so snow and ice is a very high albedo whereas soil and vegetation has very low albedo and Mars famously has planet-wide dust storms that redistribute the dust around and changes the albedo on the surface being that the newer photo of Mars was darker it led her to believe that the planet might be warming she calculated that it might be warming by 0.65 degrees Celsius but there's been no direct evidence of this and this was all just a theory it was based on two photographs and it's completely unique to Mars has nothing to do with what's going on here it's actually cooling yeah that's not true the climate has changed before long before humans existed so has nothing to do with us yes the climate has changed before that is absolutely true even I talked about it in a previous video the earth goes through natural cycles due to it stills it's a regular orbit variations in the sun's energy volcanic activity there's a lot of variables but that doesn't mean that that's what's causing it now this is a logical fallacy it's known as the single cause fallacy it assumes that because the climate changed in the past and it's changing now then it must be for the same reason it's like saying that cigarettes can't cause cancer because people have always gotten cancer it's just not true but beyond that most climate change occurs over geologic timescales over hundreds of thousands even millions of years which gives life plenty of time to adapt but there have been periods of rapid climate change in our past caused by formations known as large igneous provinces which are kind of like super volcanoes that spewed giant amounts of co2 and so2 and methane in the atmosphere and overwhelmed the planet's feedback loops and this didn't go so well for life at the time these kinds of events caused the mass extinctions at the end of the Triassic Permian and mid Cambrian eras which led to oceans rising ocean acidification and the sharp rise in temperatures much like we're seeing today which leads me to a similar myth volcanoes released far more co2 than humans do so for one thing that hasn't been a large igneous province in over 16 million years so there's nothing going on in the earth right now that would equal the kind of rapid co2 rise that we saw in the past depending on how active the volcanism is on any given year the amount of co2 released by volcanoes around the world equals somewhere between 65 million and 319 million metric tons per year and this includes not just volcanic activity but gas is released from geological hot spots like hot springs and hydrothermal vents and stuff like that that sounds like a lot but for comparison according to the US Energy Information Administration worldwide fossil fuel consumption has put 29 billion metric tons per year of co2 into the atmosphere that's what these two numbers look like next to each other another thing is that volcanoes don't just release carbon dioxide in the atmosphere they release a whole medley of gases including sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide and if the uptick in co2 was due to volcanic activity we would also see an uptick in those other gases and we're just not seeing that in fact sulfur dioxide levels have actually gone down 87% in the last 36 years but Al Gore has a big house oh yes back to the old in-group out-group bias Al Gore sits on the other side of the aisle and he's made a whole lot of money on it therefore everything says is wrong the whole thing is a hoax so let me tell you something as somebody who generally considers Al Gore to be part of his own in-group kal Gore I don't care about Al Gore I don't care how much money he's made what kind of car he drives what kind of house he lives in how often he flies in polluting airplanes I couldn't care less what he has to say about this has nothing to do with how real it is look if you don't want to listen to Al Gore can't stand a look at his face you think he's a shill whatever here's somebody else that you could listen to Debbie Dooley Debbie Dooley was one of the founders of the Tea Party movement a right-wing movement but for the past five years she's been advocating solar and sustainable energy technology she doesn't do it cuz she wants to save the polar bear she does it because it's more economically viable in the long run she does it because it increases our national security because we have a safer energy grid less vulnerable to attack and she does it because she has a grandson with asthma and she wants to create a better world for him this earth is not a Republican earth or Democrat earth it's not a conservative or liberal earth so we may disagree on 85% of the issues but we owe it to future generations of the world to our great grandchildren and grandchildren to work together to protect this earth and to lead when it comes to renewables she believes that energy conservation and sustainable technologies are perfectly in line with conservative thinking of course she's had a really hard time getting people on her side to embrace these ideas look al gore was preaching to the choir she walked into a lion's den wearing a lady gaga's steak suit that's one bad grandma by the way you know who else agrees with a scientific consensus on climate change the Pentagon according to an article in the Military Times the Department of Defense created a climate change roadmap in 2014 to prepare the military for climate change over the next 50 years and in that report they said quote a changing climate will have impacts on our military and the way it executes its missions the military should be called upon more often to support civil authorities in the face of more frequent and more intense natural disasters this roadmap was implemented in 2016 with a DoD directive for seven 15.2 one titled climate change adaptability and resilience these plans were of course implemented in the Obama presidency and the Trump administration has told them to stand down on those policies but according to the article in the military Times they have continued on with it anyway because they see that it is an actual threat they need to be prepared for oh and there is one more group that agrees with the climate change data ExxonMobil yeah in 2017 a Harvard study examined 187 scientific papers and internal company memos over the last four decades and found that 83% of peer-reviewed papers written by company scientists and 80 percent of the company's internal communications acknowledged that climate change is real and caused by humans so 83 percent of the findings of scientists working for the fossil fuel industry actually agree with climate change data and this might be why the company publicly embraced the adoption of a carbon tax in 2017 now there are many more climate change myths out there I don't have time to get to all of them but these are some of the most popular ones that I've seen in the comments of my videos if you hear some of your family and friends talking about some of these myths you can use this to respond to them and if you're a skeptic and you want to check these out for yourself i've got links to where I got all this down in the description I promise I didn't just make all this oh by the way a great resource for finding climate change information especially for dispelling climate change myths is a website called skeptical science comm it's run by a guy named John cook and I'm happy to say I had a chance to talk with him and we discussed a lot of the stuff that I've talked about in this video but also a lot of other climate change myths that didn't make it in here it was a great conversation it is on my podcast which you can check out at this link right here and I know there's a lot of you out there I didn't really reference this group at the beginning of the video but there was a lot of people who totally believe in climate change but they just don't think there's anything we can do about it there's a bit of fatalism out there people think we're doomed and I don't agree with that I'm a bit more optimistic than that I think that we as a species have the ability to adapt and to overcome these kinds of challenges that's something that we've always done it's something we're really good at but first we have to get on the same page in the robbers cave experiment that I was talking about at the beginning of this video there was actually a third phase of this experiment that I didn't talk about and it's really the most important part after showing how easy it was to get the two groups to fight each other they wanted to see if they could make them come back together to face a mutual threat so they turned off their water supply out in the middle of nowhere in Oklahoma in the summer seriously I wish I was a scientist in the 50s they got away with everything the kids had to figure out how to get water flowing from a tank up at the top of the hill and it required them to work together they formed a line to move rocks out of the way so they could access the water controls and fix it it took all of them working together to solve the problem but they did it they put their differences aside and they work together and they got the problem fixed and many of them even said that at the end of it all they actually felt closer to their former adversaries and they did to their own end groups this is what we do as a species and we have to do it now we can come together and we can beat this shared threat but first we have to recognize it by the way if you're interested in sustainable energy solutions there's an entire course on solar energy from our friends at brilliant org it walks you through the basics of solar energy both in photovoltaic form and concentrated solar power so you can get a better understanding of how we can harness the energy of the Sun solar energy is one of the fastest growing industries out there right now and it's quickly transforming our energy infrastructure here you can find out how it works from the way PV cells convert photons from the Sun and two electrons to distributing utility-scale electrical grids in case you haven't heard me say this before brilliant org is a really unique learning site because it doesn't just throw facts and figures your way it actually walks you through puzzles and problems and helps you to figure it out on your own which not only gives you a deeper understanding of that subject but gives you skills you can apply to other areas of your life just banging out brilliant org slash answers with Jo and your keyboard and you can get free access to their weekly brain teasers and puzzles in the first 295 people to sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses get 20% off your subscription for life brilliant is awesome I think you'll love it branded org slice answers with Joe links in the description big thanks to brilliant for supporting this channel and a huge thanks to the answer files on patreon that are supporting and keeping the lights on and creating a whole cool community you really want to be a part of it we got some new people on the tribe that just 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Rena Saylor Luke and Kirsten Fane thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get that to behind-the-scenes stuff extras outtakes that kind of cool thing and other perks you can code to patreon.com slash answers with Joe please like and share if you like this and if this is your first time here check out some of my other videos hopefully you like those too and if you do subscribe because I come back with videos like this every Monday all right you guys go out have an eye-opening week and I will catch you next Monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 773,095

Rating: 4.3052511 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, climate change, climate change deniers, climate change myths, climate change skepticism, skepticalscience.com, john cook, debbie dooley, global warming, CO2 emissions, fossil fuel industry, merchants of doubt, robbers cave experiment, climate science

Id: sZB1YtQtHjE

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/usdvdates]

If someone wants to waste 14 minutes of their life, watch this fairytale commercial from the climate industrial complex.

[u/logicalprogressive]

Just another alarmist infomercial, a guy with an Australian accent would have made it sound more authentic.

[u/farfiman]

If you are a skeptic don't waste your time watching this. If you aren't then .... don't waste you time either.