Why the horrific heatwave in China matters to you

thanks to curiositystream and nebula for sponsoring this video so um i got married and it turns out that we went on honeymoon on the train through france and spain at the worst possible time for a climate-based youtuber because i missed all the news thing is perhaps you did too yes biden's climate bill got passed and that's received tons of attention already in particular hank green's done an excellent breakdown here on youtube but two huge other stories also happened in august and received only perfunctory coverage in western media i'm talking about the floods in pakistan which have got a bit more attention and the heatwave and drought in china which you may not be aware of but should be to bring you up to speed starting in late august pakistan experienced its worst flooding this century like at one point a third of the country was under water and this has been a disaster this has displaced something like 33 million people and killed as of the time of recording 1300 people in china however the problem is not too much water but not enough specifically the yangtze which is the third largest river in the world is incredibly low right now now you may have heard that the rhine was so low this summer that scuttled nazi ships became visible well in chongxing the yangtze became so low that buddhist statues were revealed that were 600 years old the river flow is 50 percent lower than the average of the past five years this is a really historic drought in china right now it's a big deal for movement on the river which is crucial to both the chinese and the global economy to the supply of drinking water but also to the ability to generate hydro power sichuan where the yangtze flows gets 80 percent of its electricity from hydro and this summer demand is up by 25 and the available water has gone down by 50 that's not good naturally the question to ask here is why why are these things happening and the answer is as you've probably already pieced together likely climate change but expressed in two very different ways the floods in pakistan were preceded by an extreme heat wave earlier this summer as was reported in nature in april and may temperatures reached above 40 degrees celsius for prolonged periods in many places on one sweltering day in may the city of jacobabad topped 51 degrees celsius for those working in fahrenheit that's a lot the extreme heat resulted in extreme melting of the glaciers that feed into the indus river which of course increased the water level this combined with an unusual low pressure system in the persian gulf and crucially an early onset at the monsoon bringing torrential rain resulted in a perfect storm and far more water than the rivers and lakes could handle at once in china there was also an extreme heat wave earlier this summer but this one was extraordinary noticing a pattern southern china recorded its longest period of continuous high temperatures since records began now admittedly that's only since the 1960s because of china in the 20th century but the numbers stand on their own an all-time temperature record for china excluding the desert-dominated xinjiang region was set of 45 degrees celsius in bay bay for two consecutive days and the city was over 40 degrees celsius for a record 11 days meanwhile a record nighttime temperature of 34.9 degrees celsius was set in nearby chonsing and i just i can't imagine trying to sleep in that in fact that's probably where the extra energy demand came from whether historian maximiliano herrera was quoted in new scientists saying that this might be the most severe heat wave recorded anywhere this combines the most extreme intensity with the most extreme length with an incredibly huge area all at the same time in his opinion there is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in china unlike in pakistan however the extreme heat didn't result in extreme rain in fact the opposite happened and rainfall dried up as did the nation's rivers blaming both of these events which are kind of polar opposites to each other on climate change then sounds a little nonsensical but it is actually what we would expect to happen in a warming world the thing to remember about the climate crisis is that it's not that the earth's temperature is increasing the amount of energy in the earth system is increasing now that largely means that temperatures will increase but they won't increase uniformly the same everywhere because by adding more energy to the system you're changing how that system works and based on our current understanding we think that that means more likely a more intense maxima of temperatures in other words heat waves further for each degree celsius the air warms it can hold about seven percent more moisture as the earth has warmed by about a degree celsius since pre-industrial times we have measured an increase in the amount of water held in the earth's atmosphere that has two important implications firstly because water is a greenhouse gas the increase in humidity amplifies any warming caused by carbon dioxide so it's a positive feedback and secondly more water in the atmosphere means that more precipitation rainfall is possible but because the amount of energy in the system has increased that doesn't mean that precipitation will just increase everywhere changes in precipitation patterns mean that while many areas will get wetter some will get drier and we can expect an increase in extremes on both ends both wet and dry as the planet warms so while these events are shocking they're not unexpected but that's only if you hear about them in the first place in covering the news obviously there's a bias towards stories and topics that affect the viewer or the reader so here in the uk we mostly hear about news in the uk unfortunately and only hear about events in pakistan and china if it's pretty important stuff and i recognize that if we reported on all the bad stuff happening in the world we'd probably all find it hard to get out of bed in the morning because it would be overwhelming but at the same time i'm a little aghast at how little coverage the chinese heatwave and to a lesser extent the pakistani floods have received these are huge climate events and they do affect you they affect you through how interconnected the world economy is and specifically because of how much manufacturing the west has outsourced to china and that is going to be affected by this and it affects you because you're living in the same atmosphere as china and pakistan and in a changing climate that could see similar events happening to you next but perhaps most importantly they affect you because you're a human being too the reason i wanted to make this video is because on twitter in response to news of this heatwave many people reacted with glee saying that it's good that china is suffering under the climate crisis that it has caused that this was some kind of justice firstly this to me is an unfathomably callous attitude i mean if we're talking about chongxing being nearly 35 degrees celsius at night that's a city the size of london you're full of people just like you trying to live their lives like the misery the sheer misery that this heat wave has inflicted on people let alone the excess deaths which obviously we're not close to calculating yet that misery has afflicted 900 million people again people like you this is awful and secondly who is responsible for the climate crisis not china what matters when it comes to trapping more energy in the earth's atmosphere is the total amount of carbon put into it and when looking at the cumulative emissions of co2 to date china is responsible for about 12.7 percent of all the carbon put into the atmosphere to date compare that to europe's 22 and the usa's 25 yes china has the largest emissions of any country right now but each chinese citizen produces half the co2 of an american there just so happens to be over a billion chinese citizens so to wish harm on one of them for causing climate change isn't just morally wrong it's factually wrong i think one of the reasons why people may have this attitude is because quality coverage of the climate crisis can be hard to come by i'm i'm guessing for example that a lot of this video was news to you so if you like me would like to stay up to date on this physical side of the climate crisis then i have some recommendations i've mentioned them before but carbon brief is i think the best website for climate news and you can sign up for their multiple newsletters on different aspects of the crisis i'd also recommend checking out skeptical science which is a website that mostly focuses on debunking myths about climate change but also has a newsletter that summarizes the latest research in climate you can also go a bit closer to the source if you like and sign up for updates from journals like science and nature which summarize the research for you and provide links to the papers themselves for further reading and lastly if you're on twitter there are any number of accounts i could recommend following but two would be scott duncan and catherine heiho ultimately what i'm getting at here is that what is happening in china and in pakistan matters to you it matters economically it matters morally and it matters because the scale of heat of drought and a flood happening on the other side of the world is happening in a changing climate a climate that you share the way that we talk about stories from this changing climate is important in response to a global threat we cannot afford to be tribal we cannot afford to disregard data what is happening to people on the other side of the world is relevant to you and i think you owe it to yourself to learn about their stories of course somewhere else that you can learn about this changing climate is from myself from our changing climates from real engineering from second thought and from many other creators on nebula who have kindly sponsored this video nebula as you've probably heard by now is the streaming service with over half a million users that is owned and operated by a group of educational youtubers including me on nebula you get early access to our content bonus videos and entirely original content such as extremities by wendoverproductions and do so without an ad in sight nebula has no ads instead operating on a subscription model and that subscription also gives you access to curiosity stream the number one source of high quality documentaries on the web they have thousands of titles across every subject you can think of and have plenty about china specifically including the colors of china a series examining how a philosophy of color thousands of years old is still relevant to a billion people today you can get access to the big budget documentaries of curiosity stream and the indie productions of nebula at curiositystream.com simon clark also linked below which gives you a 26 discount on both that's just over a dollar a month for the best bits of youtube without the ads and an endless supply of thought-provoking documentaries for all ages with thanks to curiositystream and nebula for sponsoring this video thank you very much for watching this video half of the sponsorship money from it is going to be donated to relief efforts in pakistan i'll also include a link down there in the description if you would like to donate to try and help people overcome this disaster if you'd like to hear more about what happened with the wedding and just generally how i make these videos then you can watch the behind the scenes vlog available on my patreon patrons get access to a behind the scenes vlog every month as well as getting early access to these videos and now a couple of votes every now and again choosing a topic for a video so if that all sounds good and you'd like to support this channel please do check out my patreon also linked below here's some recommended viewing next and i hope that you enjoyed this video and took something away from it please do pop it a like if you did and that just leads me to say thank you again for watching i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Simon Clark

Views: 205,126

Keywords: drsimonclark, dr simon clark, simonoxfphys, simonoxphys

Id: Rx2yS2iIVSk

Length: 12min 44sec (764 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 13 2022