I spent a day with CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENTISTS

climate change the significant changes in global temperature precipitation and wind patterns over long periods of time through the study of ice cores tree rings corals and ocean sediments scientists have been able to extend climate records back millions of years to accurately determine changes in the climate while the earth has naturally cooled and warmed gradually in the past evidence reveals that current warming is occurring 10 times faster than the rate of ice age recovery warning a study published by nasa found that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide the primary heat trapping greenhouse gas have raised by 47 since before the industrial revolution when humanity began burning fossil fuels and destroying forests at unprecedented rates separately the intergovernmental panel on climate change found that human emissions and activities have caused almost 100 of the warming observed since 1950. my name's anthony padilla and today i'm going to be sitting down with climate scientists and scholars to learn more about this phenomenon and how this field of research affects those who have devoted their lives to learning about the seemingly inevitable destruction of their planet are these climate scientists confident that enough progress will be made in time to save our planet or are they convinced that humanity's ignorance and concessive need for economic expansion will ultimately result in an apocalypse do these climate scientists take pride in their work finding it truly fulfilling and satisfying or does the vast amount of data pointing to the extinction of so many species and humanity as we know it fill them with a paralyzing sense of impending doom [Music] hello david hi there good to meet you kevin hi how are you shaz hello thank you so much for coming on here and teaching me about the world of climate change no thank you for having me and thank you for teaching the world about climate change what do you consider yourself a climate scientist someone that learns about terrifying things every single day no i'm a climate scientist i guess i'm a scientist who's worked on climate change forever so i consider myself to be a climate social scientist what are the biggest contributing factors to climate change and the main way humans influence climate change is by interfering with the natural flows of energy through the climate system and the main way we do that is by changing what is called the greenhouse effect in other words we're changing the composition of the atmosphere we're putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere there's now about 45 percent more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there was around the late 1800s that's clearly from human activities you can think about sources of carbon dioxide but also sinks of carbon dioxide and if we keep adding sources which are fossil fuels when we burn carbon into the atmosphere that increases the amount of emissions but we're also removing things from our environment that can suck up that can naturally suck up these emissions like trees the oceans are already starting to get very acidic how long have you been studying climate change and do you remember what it was specifically that made you realize that you needed to go into your specific field i grew up in dubai which is part of the united arab emirates it's not part of illinois is it is there dubai illinois is that a real place yeah i'm like no it's not part of everybody i got to see and experience the country transform over the span of a short decade while i was growing up there and then i came to the us to study physics and math and then engineering trying to put all of these pieces together i said all right i really want to figure out how to solve climate change and within the problem of climate change we have the technology but we didn't have the political will and the public support and so that's what i've been trying to work on for the past decade do you have any examples of things that most people would consider to be marvelous displays of human technological advancements that are actually causing long-term negative effects on the earth you know i saw a cartoon which was quite cute actually i i don't have to worry about global warming i've got air conditioning but what does the air conditioning do it's using electricity in fact you know if you've got your electricity bill that it can use quite a lot of electricity and what's that electricity generation doing it's pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because it's using the electricity and so it's exacerbating the problem as it turns out the combustion engine the combustion engine okay all technologies when they come into play you know they have their benefits and costs right that's why we use these technologies but i would say the combustion engine is both an amazing invention but where we are right now um it's really problematic i feel like it's it's so easy for humanity to see these technological advancements as nothing but positive and that's why they pick up so much steam everyone adopts these things like the combustion engine and it's difficult for them to see the long-term effects yeah and so the thing is every time you turn on the switch there's electricity every time you open the faucet there's water every time you need food it just happens to be there you want something from amazon it's there and a lot of the costs that are associated with this that are not internalized into how we're using these resources are invisible there are laws with like you know cigarettes for example in certain states in the u.s where it'll show like lungs being you know damaged lungs and long-term effects can you imagine if every time we ordered something off amazon there was a label on there that showed all the resources that went into getting that package delivered to you all the fuel that was burned and put into the atmosphere i i can only imagine even seeing that people wouldn't be able to really believe it no and it's not even about believing that we need facts and we need feelings so the facts alone are not enough because you you might know that there is a problem you might know smoking cigarettes is bad for you but you need to be effectively motivated and if you're not motivated the facts alone sort of you know won't be enough and so that our our story should not necessarily be hey tighten your belt and stop you know stop like just you know remove yourself from the economy because that really isolates people it guilt shames people and that's not what our like if that's not what my story is when i try to communicate things about climate change we really need to think about the entire system we are small agents within this entire system but that doesn't mean that we should not do anything what do you think are some of the worst things that will occur if if humanity ignores climate change the most obvious bad thing is actually the simplest it's just high temperatures people don't do well when it's very hot people learn less well they're less productive they live shorter they die in big heat waves and there's a whole lot of evidence now that shows these effects are really strong so i'm involved in a study that's looking at a region by region level in the u.s on really hot years people take home less money and poor people who often are more likely to have outside jobs take home even less money and you bring up a good point the the people who are more financially stable living in more developed countries are able to almost find ways by using their money to act like climate change doesn't exist by you know equipping their houses with filtration systems and turning on their air conditioning when it's hot out and they're almost able to live life as if it doesn't as if it's not occurring at all there's an unbelievable difference in vulnerability before we learn more about the world of climate change i'm just speechless like i just i'm so angry that we've wasted so much time how can you be so sure you're right and remember the way scientists are trained scientists hate to agree with each other the way i win in science is to show the other guy is wrong i wanted to take a moment to talk about the importance of voting the last day to register to vote by mail in the u.s was october 6th but you can still register to vote in person in most states up until the actual election day on november 3rd that's right check your calendar you still got time in 2016 only 58 percent of eligible citizens voted which means that over 100 million eligible voters did not vote in the presidential election it may sometimes feel like our individual existence is meaningless yes i know but i promise in the grand scheme of things your vote does count more than you might know sitting down here and speaking with these scientists and scholars from around the world has reminded me just how urgent we all need to act in ensuring we elect representatives and i don't just mean a president who actually believe in scientific evidence and are willing to make changes to ensure our future isn't as bleak and inevitably apocalyptic as our discussions in this episode might feel i'll include a link in the description so you can check to see if you're already registered and to find your local polling station if you need to go there and vote in person and on a completely separate note i am so happy to announce that this video is sponsored by simply safe as you know sponsors help us continue covering topics like this one and support the crew of wonderful people that help make this series possible simply safe is an incredibly effective reliable home security system that helps ensure your home is safe after you order it online or over the phone you set it up yourself in under an hour and your home will then be professionally monitored 24 7. so if anything happens local authorities will be notified if that makes you feel a bit more at ease they've got sensors to cover every window room and door plus tons of 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immediately associated that with increases in temperature and the part which is most surprising to people is all of the aspects relating to other parts of the weather in particular the rainfall the snowfall the storms the hurricanes and all of those aspects can you explain how climate change and global warming could could cause something like increased snowfall as long as the temperature is higher than it would have been but still below freezing the atmosphere contains more moisture in fact that's one of the key points about global warming is that the atmosphere holds about four percent more moisture for a one degree fahrenheit increase in temperature and so this is what's been happening on the east coast at times uh when you get a storm that has a lot of cold air toes associated with it but then it picks up all of this extra moisture that's residing over the gulf stream and over the atlantic and you can get really big storms the part that's most surprising to me is that we as humans we can see this problem and we see it coming and we're not doing much to stop it and that's like a more of a philosophical ethical moral question as opposed to sort of like all right the science type question but we see this huge problem and it's huge effects on all of us but we are so motivated by our myopic needs and wants and desires that we don't we're not getting ourselves together i feel like so many people are are now finally kind of just in a unanimous agreement in certain in certain areas of culture but yet those same people myself included will be like oh man this is a really horrible problem all right cool well i better order this thing off amazon because it's convenient but what we also need to understand is that i get asked all the time anthony what should i do to help with this problem and the thing is there's nothing specifically that one individual can do to actually truly affect the problem in collective we have so much power as individuals we have less power so we need to figure out how to collectively transform a system i feel like people feel really disenfranchised when they feel like their individual attempts and you know their individual sacrifices from convenience are not making any kind of direct immediate impact and i feel like it's difficult when you realize that everyone has to not only make one change but maybe 10 or more very specific changes that's absolutely right is the push toward consumer level changes like driving electric vehicles and going vegan as helpful as we might believe or do you think changes need to happen on a much bigger scale we need individuals to change but we also need the system to change and they're really integrated they're not like this and it's a false dichotomy to think that they're in you know separated but where the change needs to happen most is the system because without the system you know you and i being vegan or you and i sort of uh using our bicycles rather than driving it's a drop in the bucket and we're sort of we need an ocean right now so it does need to happen on a system scale system-wide level but we all are part of that system and if we demand less of these things that contribute negatively to the environment then less of these things will be made you know thinking through history and how those changes have happened what are the lessons learned that we can apply to climate change and i think that's an open question that's not something i've spent a lot of time thinking about is there anything that keeps you hopeful about the future of climate change most of all it's actually the actions of young people in the last couple years this kind of youth revolution this fridays for the future you know people have heard of greta but there's a whole bunch of different young greta like people all over the world and they've really i think been forcing uh people to confront the hypocrisy so you're telling me that gen z is doing something good seems so it is the young people who are going to be more and more negatively affected by all this in 20 years those young people will have even more of a reason to fight for not just the future of humanity and the planet and the species that exist on it before themselves as well absolutely i mean that's what it really is this inequality of age i mean the big big impacts of climate change mostly come late this century when i'm not here why do you think the discussion of climate change has become so overwhelmingly political well partly it's political because there really are winners and losers so i'm speaking to you from canmore alberta and i've been in albertan for a while though i'm also a professor at harvard and alberta is oil and gas country and the reality is if we act on climate the way i want us to some of my neighbors lose their jobs my brother-in-law gets hurt that is the real world here and and that means there's a natural political combat it's kind of gone beyond the healthy you know there's a trade-off political combat into this unbelievable polarization where a bunch of people in the political right really want to claim that climate change just doesn't exist the climate scientist is just making it up which is utter not and much people on the left want to claim at least some of them that this problem's really easy to solve if we could just sue the oil and gas companies to prevent them blocking solar panels we just clean it all up tomorrow and neither of those extreme views are correct and i think that the the push toward radicalization pushing further and further in opposing directions is really helping no one we need to find what actually helps what is the logical thing to do with scientific evidence for sure how do you feel about the way governments are handling climate change when when trump said that they were going to withdraw from the paris agreement and instead a lot of other countries have not followed through on their own commitments either and so we're on a track which is hitting us towards really substantive climate change that could ultimately be an existential threat i feel like we get a d minus we can give the d d minus to the government we didn't get an f well we'll give him an f actually i didn't realize f was on the table i mean i'm just speechless like i just i'm so angry that we wasted so much time i don't even know where to start like i think it's everything from the paris agreement and trying to leave leave that all the way to sort of the environmental protection agency having less power we have done an enormous job not just in the us but in most the rich world and now in china in cleaning up the air with air pollution laws it's not as good as it should be but it's much better and water pollution and global ozone the first global treaty for the environment to protect the ozone layer it works and in each of these cases there was disputes about science in each of these cases there was industry that said you can't do this or you'll put it out of business and we did it and we have done those past things successfully and that's a reason to believe we can do climbing i really needed to hear that i've been feeling just horrible about the the direction we're heading in so thank you for sprinkling a little positivity in there and i'm sure everyone watching this also needed to hear something like that history matters and there's good history nadia wants to know if there's anything that we're told affects climate change but actually doesn't and vice versa one of the environmental acts that most people do is recycling and the sad truth is that domestic household recycling really doesn't have much benefit there are things that people don't think about much that have huge climate impacts flying really is a big climate impact people who may think they're living really green and take a bunch of long vacation flights those have a big climate impact and while i'm still a meat-eater it is really true that diet when you look at the whole supply chain really has a significant impact in shifting to a less meat diet or no meat diet has a real impact and on a on a national or global scale that could have huge implications yeah it's a sense of it's a it's a sensible action that people can take growing trees is a wonderful thing to do carbon dioxide so trees are one way in which we can actually take some carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere the question then is what happens to the trees the only way to really use trees to take carbon dioxide out of the system is by harvesting the trees and then disposing of those trees in a way where they are never used and come back because if you use them for paper it goes into a landfill it they decay and they generate carbon dioxide and methane and they go back into the atmosphere so even planting trees which seems extremely helpful if those trees die or destroyed or harvested in any way that goes right back into the atmosphere maybe has an adverse effect yes ayla wants to know what the most urgent action to fight climate changes and what we should be putting first i think the first thing would be to vote in november the second thing would be to start getting involved in local politics as well and whatever your skill is and whatever you're passionate about use that to sort of spread the word about climate change talk to people about climate change create climate action the most urgent action in countries like the us is really to get rid of the remaining coal-fired electric power the other thing has to happen is a lot of research on long run things that could really reduce the risks so i think we do need to understand how we could take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in the long run and this particular kind of wacky and controversial thing that i work on which is called solar geoengineering the idea that humans might deliberately alter the earth's temperature it's the idea that humans might deliberately make the earth more reflective by say deliberately putting aerosols fine particles into the upper atmosphere or making some kind of clouds wider a deliberate manipulation of nature to make the earth more reflective so it absorbs a little less heat from the sun which would reduce the amount of climate change that there is for a given amount of co2 in the air so with geoengineering you can actually potentially reduce the heat of the earth within years or what it's technically possible to reduce the the earth's temperature within say a decade in a way that you could not do by cutting emissions even to zero and it'd be very hard to do by pulling co2 out of the air but i think the way to think about this is a combination so we have to cut emissions for sure we do nothing about geo engineering changes that right but we might want to cut emissions and also do this as a way to further reduce the risks would some people consider that just like a band-aid on the problem where you know if that were to happen and if that were to work people would say oh we'll just do geoengineering and we don't need to worry about changing any the way that we're affecting the climate otherwise absolutely and that's the reason why a lot of people who are environmentalists actually don't like the work i'm doing and say we shouldn't talk about it it's not that they necessarily believe it actually would be dangerous but they're terrified that it'll be like this get out of jail free card people will say well we don't need to worry party on burn all the pressure even if we were to use geo engineering and reduce the temperature of the global climate there would still be negative implications of continuing to burn fossil fuels and release those greenhouse gases into the atmosphere regardless right for sure the long-run climate risk is proportional to the total amount of carbon we burn and nothing about geometry changes that how do you feel when you hear people claiming that some people are just completely overreacting about climate change because the climate has always changed as a natural part of the earth's rhythm it's been more than 10 million years since we've had this level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the level we will get to this century so it's true that car that climate has changed and carbon dioxide has changed but the rate we're putting it in will take us back to the co2 level we saw 55 million years ago when there were alligators in the arctic we can go back there in a single human lifetime in co2 concentrations given the rate we're putting it in oh that hit hard i do not want alligators in the arctic kind of weather i don't that doesn't sound yeah i mean to be clear we won't actually have alligators in the arctic in a hundred well they won't go back but yeah they could live there leveling is that high yeah we can demonstrate very clearly now from a number of different ways that yes it's humans that are causing this change one of the ways is by looking at the different kinds of carbon when we burn fossil fuels the age of those that coal and oil is old enough that all of the c14 has decayed and so that's putting c12 the carbon the the regular carbon into the atmosphere and so we can by looking at the the composition of the carbon dioxide we can say ah this is rich in c12 and there's no c14 which means it hasn't come from local trees because that would have the this isotope of carbon in it and so that's one way we can clearly show that we're changing the composition of the atmosphere with with carbon dioxide in my um small experience it's not been very successful and so again it goes into facts and feelings and you have to sort of try to understand what is their worldview how do they arrive to this statement and so when you ask a few questions down that rabbit hole a lot of people actually don't know they've heard it somewhere i mean i think it's akin to cigarette smoking but i don't want to know what this is what's happening and so not knowing relieves a lot of the pressure from me in terms of what i have to do because if i didn't know then there's no then there's nothing that i need to do many people have so many things to worry about already that it's almost easier to be ignorant about these things because then you have another thing that's causing you worry or stress in the back of your mind and it's already so overwhelming and you're absolutely right we have so many things we need to be concerned about but this is a fight this is a long-haul fight and it goes back to what i said earlier is that we see this problem and if we as a species cannot do much in terms of trying to solve the problem that we ourselves created that actually says a lot about our species what's the strangest or worst argument you've heard against climate change science just i don't care like the apathy uh it's both sad and strange because i'm like really you don't care one of the biggest psychological challenges of climate change is you can't see carbon dioxide with your naked eye you can't see what the concentration imagine if we could imagine if we could see the carbon in the atmosphere out of a million roughly a million um molecules roughly 410 of them are carbon dioxide so it just sounds really small and so it sounds like all right i've got all of these other problems all of these other worries why care about this and so i think one of the huge challenges that we have is how do you make the invisible visible if there's anyone watching who is utterly convinced that climate change is a hoax or isn't caused by humans whatsoever they're probably commenting right now in fact is there anything you'd want to say to them how can you be so sure you're right and remember the way scientists are trained scientists hate to agree with each other the way i win in science is to show the other guy is wrong scientists hate consensus the whole way you score points is to show that all the other people were wrong that's how you get ahead right you want to have that label of i discovered it exactly so so the idea that scientists are going to kind of collectively fool themselves for half a century with this extraordinary complicated thing it just doesn't hold up inversely if there's anyone watching who feels an overwhelming sense of dread considering the the bleak future of humanity in our planet is there anything you want to say to them if you feel an overwhelming sense of dread which i do on occasion you need to fill up your bucket again fill up your bucket of self-care and then get ready to mobilize and act right now it's all hands on deck if we take actions now and we decarbonize the economy and so on we can slow down and maybe even stop climate change and so if we can push that out 50 years it enables us to adapt to climate change to build resilience to you know new technology will come along to enable us to deal with it a little better what do you think the biggest misconception is about scientists researching climate change we've been accused of lots of things that uh that we're alarmists of various kinds and yet most of the alarms if you want to refer to them that way that have gone out have actually borne out quite well and so scientists like myself were we're calling the shots 20 years ago on what is happening now and now we're calling the shots to say watch out it can easily get worse yeah you can almost say hey we said all these things were going to happen and now they're happening and now we're saying they're gonna get worse and they're gonna get worse if you don't listen yes all right you got five seconds of shout out to promote anything you want directly in the camera go do what you can to be part of the climate movement we need you vote and tell the politicians that you talk to that climate change in the environment is your top priority climate change is happening and one of the most important things probably that you can do is to vote vote in the coming election and pay attention to the climate related aspects i'm an old guy but anthony padilla's channel seems to really do a good job dealing with real world problems in an honest way old guy approved thank you so much david i feel like i understand the world of climate change just a little bit more thanks a lot thanks for doing it after spending the day with these climate scientists and scholars i've come to understand how acquiring such an extensive amount of knowledge about humanity's effects on the earth is disheartening and these scientists deserve the utmost respect for often putting their emotional well-being on hold for the greater good of our planet see you later bye guys press a like in reality what you're doing is learning all this information that is having heavy effects on your emotional well-being learning about so many devastating things about our future like you don't want to you don't want to feel these negative feelings about the state of the earth yeah every once in a while uh i allow myself to ask i allow myself to ask myself this question which is what could i be studying that does not have that heavy weight yeah yeah i'm only allowed to ask myself that question once in a while

Channel: AnthonyPadilla

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Keywords: anthony padilla, padilla, anthony, i spent a day with, interview, climate change, global warming, scientists

Id: 0vu2Byufofc

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 23 2020