The Biggest Science Story of the Week

good morning John it's been a very busy science week and I feel as if a particular science story has been totally missed but maybe in fact the biggest one of all of them like bigger than maybe room temperature superconductors bigger than maybe a really powerful solid tumor cancer treatment it's hiding and nobody's talking about it and it is that we might Now understand what caused this which is a graph of the temperature of the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean many different years uh and that this year in red which isn't particularly fun to look at like in scary times here on planet Earth but before I jump into all of this Johnny I just want to say thank you for your lovely yesterday video I love you too it's been quite a year though I am happy with the current trajectory at least so geoengineering is this fairly controversial idea that you could intentionally change the climate of the planet now that is different from when you accidentally change the climate of the planet which is just the last hundred years this conversation is going to be a big deal it's going to be a bigger and bigger and bigger deal over the next few decades as we have to make really hard decisions about what to do about the actual impacts we are experiencing from climate change we have very clearly been doing a lot of accidental and Reckless and haphazard geoengineering over the last hundred years the biggest piece of that is dump in a whole lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and thus decreasing the amount of heat that can radiate back out to space that means more heat in the system and a hotter plant but there's also a lot of other pieces of geoengineering that we've been doing for example we release a lot of sulfur dioxide when we burn dirty fuels like coal and fuel oil and sulfur dioxide actually temporarily for a very short period of time much shorter than the impacts of carbon dioxide can decrease the temperature of an area of the planet it does this because it's good at seeding clouds and it does that by combining with moisture in the atmosphere to form droplets of sulfuric acid which you know you don't really want in the air but it does create more and fluffier clouds this is a known effect this is not new information this happens when volcanoes erupt and sulfur dioxide comes out it can cool the planet with the dust and with the silver dioxide now one really big source of sulfur dioxide is those big ships that carry cargo containers from one continent to another they burn the kind of oil that's left over after everybody's done taking the fraction that they want out of it it's like the worst cheapest oil that's what they use it has a lot of sulfur in it they burn it and that sulfur dioxide goes in the atmosphere and it seeds clouds you can actually see them from space they're called ship tracks and they are clouds that are created by sulfur dioxide being spat up from the stacks of these big ships now I don't know if you already see where I'm going with this but this is absolutely wild but because sulfur dioxide is bad for people and animals and the Earth the un's international Maritime organization passed a new rule that said you have to burn low sulfur fuels in these big ships that rule went into effect in 2020 and over the last few years there have been significantly fewer ship tracks scientists have been looking at this really carefully and their mod models are showing that like almost all of the new warming of the North Atlantic surface of the sea can be attributed to just new light hitting it that wouldn't normally be hitting it now that's mostly because of ship tracks and partially because this year there was just less dust from the Sahara for I think unrelated reasons so in one way this is very bad news like it turns out global warming is worse than we thought it was we were just being shielded from some of its effects by other pollution that we were throwing up into the atmosphere but in another way and I think a bigger way in the long term this is good news because the experiment that we just ran here is Priceless and also impossible to pull off like if we had wanted to run this experiment it would have been so expensive that we never could have done it but it also would be politically impossible to pull off because geoengineering is such a hot button issue instead we got a perfect experiment showing us the effects of local geoengineering on this area and the thing is you don't have to use sulfur dioxide to seed Cloud there's other ways to do it that don't involve a bunch of acid rain and giving people asthma one of the ways is to just shoot sea water into the air there's a bunch of seawater around you shoot it up into the air with like misters that make it like super tiny so it can float in the atmosphere just like any other particle most of the water evaporates leaving behind little crystals of salt that then concede clouds and then it falls back down and the ocean's like yeah that was the salt that was here in the first place some people say that we can't discuss geoengineering because people will see it as an excuse to continue just burning fossil fuels I don't think anybody's gonna see it that way in 10 or 20 years it's gonna be very hot it's gonna get hot enough that we're gonna see a lot of marine extinctions it's gonna get hot enough that we're going to see a lot of humans dying those stories are going to be very big in other parts of the world but they're also going to be like local stories in the U.S like people we're gonna have people here dying of heat and we have to do like three things at the same time we have to stop putting new carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we have to start taking old CO2 out of the atmosphere and we have to deal with the impacts of the current warming which exists now and we cannot avoid we are entering into the overlap period the period during which the problem is big enough that we can't ignore it anymore and when we still can do things to solve it and that means all three of those things so to have a natural decades-long experiment like this is priceless and maybe even more than that we can see that we're already doing it instead of saying should humanity take this giant step forward and begin geoengineering the planet what we're saying is should we take a giant step forward and do it instead of accidentally and haphazardly and in the most Reckless manner possible do it intentionally and carefully John I'll see you on Tuesday intentional and careful is also a lot of what the awesome coffee Club is doing so a lot of places and a lot of people just sort of look for the certifications but we've actually gone to talk to and visit with the people who make this coffee because coffee is one of the great joys of life and this coffee is amazing because it's extraordinarily high quality because it is taken care of from the moment the tree is planted in Colombia to the moment that it's shipped out of our warehouse in Missoula Montana there's a link in the description or you can just Google awesome coffee Club you know how the internet works

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 1,066,345

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Id: dk8pwE3IByg

Length: 6min 26sec (386 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 04 2023