What Most People Don't Get About Climate Change | Answers With Joe

there was an experiment done in 1972 it was called universe 25 and they took eight mice and put them in basically the perfect mouse environment they had plenty of things to do as a perfect temperature all the food they could ever ask for it was mouse utopia until things went horribly wrong with no challenges to keep them in check the mice wildly overpopulated fighting broke out social norms broke down and things got bad they got really bad one of the experiment was it apparently without any kind of challenges society will eventually wipe itself out but those are mice they're not an intelligent species that could never happen to us right Shaw MS I'd like to see a video on climate change climate change is sort of a controversial topic with one side saying that we're taking a stable environment and destroying it with all of our pollution and the other side saying that we are way too small and the Earth's way too big for us to ever make a difference but the problem with both of those arguments is that they're predicated on the idea that we live on a planet with a stable climate and we very don't in the 4 billion year history of Earth our climate has fluctuated wildly from everything from a giant snowball to a worldwide sauna and back again it's just constantly flipping back and forth between two extremes it's a chaotic mess of feedback loops and Domino effects of one thing affecting another until it spirals out of control one direction before some other set of influences swings it back the other direction what might be the most scary is how little it can take to cause these extreme flips to happen you know an asteroid impact volcanic activity the the tectonic plates shifting and causing changes in ocean currents and the thawing of giant frozen methane hydrate deposits under the soil even just the wobble of the earth on its tilt in the axis and its orbit around the Sun all of these things have served at one point or another to shift the climate from one extreme to another the one thing you can count on when it comes to the climate is that it's constantly changing but that's a hard thing for most people to grasp because it doesn't feel that way does it feels like it's a pretty stable environment like all things it helps to look at the big picture the average human lifespan right now anyway is about 80 years so let's see how that stacks up against the three billion year history of the Earth's climate well can't even see anything there we're going to go smaller yeah still smaller keep going more more more MORE oh yeah one more there it is ah yeah that's consequential there's a lot we're not seeing in a single human life but what about all of human history that's actually where things get pretty interesting but for that we're gonna have to take a couple steps back because when you look at this time scale what a lot of people don't realize is that for the vast majority of human history we lived in an ice age and by the way just to put the ice age into perspective consider these boulders in Central Park these grooves on the boulders were caused by the grinding motion of glaciers that cover New York and most of North America the glaciers over New York were 3 miles high so if you're ever like in Times Square and catch yourself thinking gee I wonder if woolly mammoths walked through here once upon a time you'll have to imagine them 3 miles above you this was the Pleistocene epoch when woolly mammoths around the north and eight-foot giant ground sloths roamed the south when there was so much water trapped in the poles that the ocean levels dropped creating land bridges which is exactly how the native inhabitants of America got over here so much water trapped in ice meant there was less rain going around the world which meant that edible plants were hard to come by humans were scavenging and getting by just by killing whatever they could find innovation was impossible because every ounce of energy just went into surviving and this went on for well over a hundred thousand years but about ten thousand years ago something changed humans learned how to plant crops and the Agricultural Revolution began which many people consider to be the moment the weak culturally became the humans we are today but why why after hundreds of thousands of years of scraping by did we suddenly start living in abundance take a look at what happens when you drop a chart of global temperatures on top of this time scale after a hundred thousand years of sub-zero chaos the earth entered a rare warm period and temperate period that's continued to this day and it's no accident that that correlated with the beginning of the agricultural revolution warmer weather and more rain made it possible for starchy grains like rice and oats and wheat to flourish and early humans were just clever enough to figure out how to cultivate that but it wasn't just what they were eating they had to keep track of time to know when to plant and when to harvest so calendar systems were created since the food was shared around systems of math and weights and measures had to be developed and and to keep track of inventory they had symbols that represented the different grains those symbols then went on to become the foundations of our first languages monetary systems and currencies formed and then hubs and marketplaces for trading cities sprung up and the civilizations as we know it came to be our entire way of life was made possible because of this random rare and fragile stretch of stable climate over the last ten thousand years so here's an idea what's totally with that about a hundred fifty years ago we started digging carbon-based fossil fuels out of the ground and burning it for energy this kicked off the Industrial Revolution which proved to be even a bigger game-changer than the Agricultural Revolution I mean really 200 years ago people weren't living that much differently than people did 5,000 years ago the pace of change that we have seen in the last 200 years has been unbelievable that's why I'm not really that big of a hater on fossil fuels because I mean when it all comes down to it our lives have been made unmeasurable better because of them but the downside of course is that there's been a worldwide long term concerted effort to dig carbon that's been sequestered under the ground for millions of years and pump it up into the atmosphere which is wound up pushing the greenhouse gases level up over 400 parts per million in 2013 in the last time the world has seen that level of co2 concentration in the atmosphere was 3 million years ago in the mid Pliocene period which pushed sea levels up 80 metres and over half the world's population lives near coastlines so yeah that's a problem the scarier part is the crops that have been stable for thousands of years are going to become a lot less stable water is going to become scarce and next thing you know you're going to be strapped here and nuts to a giant Wallace speakers on wheels playing a flaming guitar and the worst part is it might already be too late remember what I said earlier about feedback loops and Domino effects well as the Arctic warms the ice melts which exposes the darker ground underneath which absorbs more of the Suns radiation making everything warmer spiral and as that ground warms it thaws the permafrost soil it's been frozen for thousands of years and inside of that are organic compounds that break down into carbon dioxide methane putting even more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in fact last year scientists were puzzled by these craters that seemed to just appear out of nowhere in Siberia well now they've determined that they were explosions caused by frozen methane deep in the ground that evaporated spiral and the oceans actually absorb a lot of carbon dioxide from the air but it makes the oceans acidic which kills algae algae that turns carbon dioxide into oxygen which takes that carbon dioxide out of the carbon process leaving it up in the air and making it even more concentrated spiral but that's okay because our natural gas drilling is way safer than it used to be you're looking at a rupture within a massive underground containment system it was first attacked in more than two months ago it's venting gas at a rate of 110 thousand pounds an hour a jar so dr. um what do we like what do we do like what do we do um how'd it how do we how how how how what do we do the situation is so bleak that there's actually been a rash of depression and even suicide the most climate scientists because they're looking at the data and it doesn't look good if we saw a killer asteroid coming towards Earth we'd do something about it because we understand that that's tangible we get hit we go boom but climate change isn't so simple it's not just a single tangible threat and there isn't any one single action that we need to take to stop it the only way to combat this is for us to change our habits and our lifestyles unfortunately human beings are not very good at making drastic change unless there's a huge tragedy to spur that change so the bad news is it's probably going to get a lot worse before it gets better but the good news is we're one of the most adaptable species on the planet we were forged in the ice ages and if there's one thing that's changing faster than our climate right now it's our exponential rate of Technology just last year German physicists announced a successful test of the window Stein 7x nuclear fusion reactor it actually held a fusion reaction for a quarter of a second a nuclear fusion is the holy grail of clean energy it doesn't create any harmful byproducts it would be an ongoing stable continuous source of energy now a quarter of a second isn't very long but it's a start the Wright brothers first flight only lasted 12 seconds Tesla Motors just last week launched the model 3 which is their electric car for the masses which if it's successful could completely change the way we drive over the next 10 years putting millions of completely emission-free cars on the road new battery technologies are making it possible to store more energy and retrieve it faster which could completely overhaul our entire electrical infrastructure solar panels are getting more and more effective and cheaper and easier to install than ever before massive co2 scrubbers could clean the air the carbon dioxide and in fact last year a Chinese artists went around Beijing with a vacuum cleaner and collected air was able to make a brick out of it if one guy could do that imagine what we could do on a big industrial scale hi Agni brick yeah I've got an idea worst-case scenario we could construct massive solar shields that actually orbit between the earth and the Sun that can adjust the amount of light that hits earth a 16 year old kid developed a solar-powered ocean cleanup project that could get all the plastic out of our oceans in a couple of decades and pay for itself in the end it's all about sustainability if you're spending $500 a month more than you're making you're eventually going to run out of money or go into debt it's just not sustainable similarly if you're pumping carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere more than you're taking out eventually there's going to be a reckoning not to mention fossil fuels or a limited resource we're going to run out at some point ultimately it's up to all of us to change our mindsets on this planet and how we use it support politicians that see the value in these kinds of large-scale climate recovery projects and don't let the whole it cost too much argument get in there because you know what it's going to cost a whole lot less to be proactive about it than to move all these cities out of the way they're in danger because of sea-level rise and if you want to make some changes in your own life to help do your part to make the world more sustainable I highly suggest checking out my friend Tom's channel green shorts in it he gives you ideas and tips and tricks to be more sustainable in your own life not just in your little daily activities but also in big green building projects as well the videos are short and fun and hugely informative if you want to make a difference you've got time for this and for one final thought I I kind of hate it when I hear environmentalist talk about save the world or saying that we're destroying the world because it's just not true we're not going to destroy the world the world's going to destroy us very early in Earth's history a mars-sized planet smashed into the Earth which dug a huge chunk of the crust out which wound up forming the moon and you know what happened it just kept going we could launch every nuclear weapon that has ever existed at the same time and the earth would barely flinch okay it was around billions of years before we were here it will be around long after we're gone when we talk about climate change we're not talking about saving the earth we're talking about saving ourselves the fact that the earth has been in this relatively stable climate for the last ten thousand years has been a ridiculous stroke of luck for Humanity and right now we're pushing that luck to the breaking point in our tiny lifespans we've seen enormous progress in technology and culture and we just assume that it's gonna it's a foregone conclusion that's going to keep going that way I mean why wouldn't it it's all we've ever known it is written nowhere that this is going to continue it's up to us to fight for it to wise up to put an end to this thing that Elon Musk called the dumbest experiment in human history because I don't know about you but I like where things are going I want to see them keep going that way what do you think do you think it's too late what big projects would you like to see happen and what changes if you may personally in your own life to make a difference as always thanks for watching if you like this video please share it on your social media channels and spread this message around this is important stuff and if this is your first time here I hope I earned your subscription because I come back with stuff just like this every Monday it's a maybe not quite so depressing all right you guys go out there and you have an eye-opening week and I will see you next time love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 250,482

Rating: 4.7843795 out of 5

Keywords: climate change, climatologists, CO2 levels, CO2 concentration, greenhouse gasses, pleistocene epoch, mid-pliocene warming, early humans, agricultural revolution, fossil fuels, industrial revolution, tesla model 3, elon musk, global warming, universe 25

Id: GYJDAmDX2dM

Length: 12min 36sec (756 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 04 2016