SciShow Tangents - SciShow Tangents Classics - Weather

Episode Date: March 21, 2023

Original Airdate: January 26, 2021SciShow Tangents will be back next week with a new season and very special guest! Until then, please enjoy this beloved classic episode about Weather! Because it's spring and the weather is changing, you see!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley, Mike A, and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!

Hey there, everybody. It's Sam. In case you haven't heard, Season 4 of SciShow Tangents ended last week, and we're taking this week off. Next week, you can look forward to our Season 5 premiere featuring special guest Maddie Sophia, but for now, please enjoy this beloved classic episode about weather. See you next week. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Or just some regular folk who are friends with each other. This week, as always, as sometimes, I am joined by Sam Schultz. Hello.

What's the most satisfying size of battery? Oh, you know what? can't stand triple a batteries i hate yeah those anything bigger than a triple a and actually watch batteries too i i like them all except a triple a that's such a bad size for some reason it's weird i think about that all the time Finally found something that you're actually passionate about with my question. I figure if I get weirder and weirder, I will locate more things that Sam cares a lot about. Have you licked a D battery? That's why that one's my favorite. The nine volts, not the D battery. Nine volt. Yeah, you're right. The square ones.

I want to really bad, but I'm scared. Oh, it's just like, no. I've done it. My guitar uses them. And so like during shows, you have to make sure the battery is charged and you can tell by looking at. Is that why you guys are so smart? Because we charge our brains with batteries. Yeah, we're battery lickers over here.

What's your tagline? Exploring the idea of podcasting from bed. I do sometimes podcast from bed for my podcast I have with my wife. And it is not unpleasant. I will say that. Sari Riley is also my other co-host for the day. Hello, Sari. Hello.

Do you have any idea why there is a large taxidermied squirrel in the parking lot of our office building? I have not been to our office building in months. How large? I would say that if it were a live squirrel, it would weigh four times more than a fox squirrel. And it's mounted to a piece of driftwood. Could be a trap.

It's probably like a giant ruse set out to catch you specifically one of the scientists we invited for an interview like left out a squirrel as a social psychology experiment how long will it take for these nerds to bring in a taxidermied squirrel into their office yeah it's a trojan squirrel yeah what's your tagline conspiracy of snakes and i'm hank green and my tagline is printers be damned take off the off the hats! Every week here on Tangents, we are trying to one-up amaze and delight each other with science facts. And we're also trying to stay on topic, but we're not going to, even though we're trying. We're also going to play for glory, but we are also awarding chin coins from week to week because we need to keep track of who is

winning and who is not so that we can feel bad or good about ourselves. Just as last week, we're bringing in the new season by trying out some new games. So each week in January, one of us is bringing a new game for the show. If we like it enough, might put it into our regular rotation. And I can't wait to see what Sari's mystery game is. But first, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. All I'm going to say is shanties are in right now. There once was a forest of old birch trees struck by lightning for all to see.

The rain welled up, the leaves swirled round, oh blow my bully boys blow. Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region. One day when the thunder is done, we'll take our leave and go. She had not been two weeks in spring when down on her the clouds did bring the hail and ice and wind did sting her face with all that snow. Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region. One when the blizzard is done we'll take our leave and go and then the summer days get hotter the sun beats down and we're chugging water turn up the fan i'm glad we bought her before the sky did glow soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region one day day when the heat is done, we'll take our leave and go. Thank you.

Holy crap. You need more than one point. We have established that parody songs get more than one point. Oh, we also established that the poems don't get points anymore. Yeah. Oh, fuck. I went all out for just to scare myself. You know, you got to feel alive during a pandemic sometimes. Yeah. Oh, fuck. I went all out for just to scare myself. You know, you got to feel alive during a pandemic sometimes.

Yeah. I hope by the time this episode comes out, sea shanties are still a thing. But I also hope by the time this episode has been out for four years that sea shanties are still a big part of popular culture because it is the main thing that I have just had so much joy brought into my life by. So thank you for doing a sea shanty cover. And the topic for our day is not just weathermen, but also just the weather in general. So, Sari, what is weather? Well, weather is all kinds of events that happen in the Earth's atmosphere, all kinds of events that happen in the Earth's atmosphere, usually in the troposphere,

which is the part of the Earth's atmosphere that is closest to the surface and under the most air pressure, just from other atmospheres squishing down on it and being pulled down because of gravity. And it can be temperature and wind and humidity and storms and all that stuff. If you point outside and are like, look at that, that's the weather. How does wind work? That's air pressure. You can think of high pressure as when molecules are crammed close together, so like a crowded room. And you can think of low pressure as when things are more far apart. So like everyone is an arm's distance, is six feet away from everyone else, hypothetically.

And naturally, to balance out, to reach an equilibrium, things move from high pressure zones to low pressure zones. So they move from the more crowded areas to the less crowded areas. And so air moves from high pressure zones to low pressure zones. And that movement of air is wind. Do you know where the word weather came from? I do. It comes from Carl Weathers. He invented it.

Wasn't around until like the 70s. I don't know who Carl Weathers is. Who is he? He's an actor. He is a predator. He's the strong guy who's not Arnold Schwarzenegger when they do the cool arm wrestling thing. The meme. Yeah, the meme.

He's the other guy in the meme. He's the other meme. Arm. Okay. It could have been him if he's a time traveler. The root word is we or weh. I don't know how to say it, but it's spelled W-E, which means to blow. It's thematic with the shanty.

And then that changed into Proto-Indo-European wedro. And that changed into Proto-Indo-European wedro. And then it got passed around Europe as like wetter or wetar or wetter to mean like a storm or wind, but then weather in general. I couldn't find like when we started to differentiate or I couldn't find any separate words for good weather and like storm or bad weather. weather and like storm or bad weather but in ancient greece at least they they used weather to describe like inclement storms and bad things happening but sunny weather like calm weather was a different word and then at some point we mushed them all together or like you didn't need that word this is like that's that's normal it just is outside all right sari well it is also now you're going to continue. It's going to be all you.

This is the Sari episode of Tangents. Because now it's time for you to share with us your mystery game. Okay. I just have written in all caps, Hello, this is Brainstorm. So that's the name of my game, Brainstorm. Here's how it works. I will give a prompt and the number of answers I have on my list, and you'll have one minute as a team to guess them with no penalties for wrong answers. You both get points equal to

the number of correct answers you guessed, and I get points equal to the number of unguessed correct answers. Okay. So for example, a prompt might be, Kool-Aid was invented in 1927 when a man named Edward Perkins figured out how to make a powdered juice concentrate as an alternative to the liquid concentrates available at the time. The question is, what were the six original flavors of Kool-Aid? You have a minute to guess. And if you guessed after that minute, grape and cherry, you would both get two points. And I would get four points for the remaining four flavors. you would both get two points,

and I would get four points for the remaining four flavors. But if you guessed grape, cherry, orange, root beer, lemon, lime, and raspberry, you both would get six points, and I am doing not so great with zero points. I would not. No, I've gotten root beer. Root beer, cool.

That's an advanced flavor. Apparently, they had it figured out right there at the beginning. Yeah, how have we moved backward? substantially from root beer? Cool. What I want is some very flat root beer. Question number one. We learn basic types of precipitation in school, like snow, rain, or hail. But sometimes animals can get sucked up into the sky by extreme weather phenomena like tornadoes and water spouts, which are just tornadoes over water, and then fall back out like it's literally raining cats and dogs. What are three kinds of animals that have been well-documented to fall out of the sky, kind of like precipitation?

Ready, set, go. Fish. Yes. Obviously. Frogs. Yes, also frogs. Phew, what's the last one? I don't know.

What other kind of. No wrong answer penalties. So you can just keep going. Lizards. Nope. Birds. No. Okay.

Jellyfish. No. Rabbits. No. But good thought. Mice. rabbits no but good thought uh mice no also good thought rats no is it a rodent no is it a mammal no oh well why did you say good thought just like you were getting smaller lizards feel like you were getting like slowly getting bigger and then chickens there's all sides of lizards i I don't think anybody said chickens. Is the answer chickens? Oh, stop. The last answer, or the final one,

was worms. Earthworms. Oh, okay. When did worms fall out of the sky? It's happened a couple times. It's happened in the United States a few times. A big one was 2015 in Norway where a scientist found thousands of earthworms on the surface of the snow. And they thought that the worms were dead.

But when he put them in his hand, he found that they were alive. And so he assumed that they got sucked up out of mud somewhere and then just dumped on the snowy earth. Did I make up that there was once a shower of raw meat? There was a shower of raw meat somewhere i think somewhere in the united states it was called the kentucky meat shower everyone some small chunks of red meat landed near rankin in bath county kentucky and we're not sure how it happened but the most popular theory is the vulture theory a group of vultures regurgitated their meals. So that's not weather related. Yeah, that's vomit out of the sky.

Anyone could do that. No weather involved. Because you got fish and frogs, you get two points each. And because you missed worms of the three answers, I get one point. Okay, I like this game. Question number two.

It's really important to monitor weather before flying a plane. So in the U.S., there are these things operated by the Federal Aviation Administration called AWOS, or AWOS,

maybe, units, which stands for Automated Weather Observing Systems. The latest and greatest specs I could find are for AWOS-4, which measures

both general atmospheric things and specific dangers that plane pilots might want to know about because they could delay takeoff or require some maintenance on the plane. So, what are eight distinct types of things that automated weather observing systems measure? Ready? Go.

Temperature. Yes. Wind speed? Yes. Humidity? No. Wind direction? Does that Humidity? No. Wind direction. Does that count as a different one?

I lumped that with wind speed and gusts and direction. Oh, please. Precipitation? Yes. Yeah, precipitation type and amount I lumped into one. Okay. There's like a billion more. What does the sky do?

Think about planes. What do they need to know okay i'm thinking about them and it's not helping me at all um height of something hank you go height of a fog yeah visibility or cloud height visibility good job four more okay time related oh shit oh time with birds was birds one of them Invisibility. Oh. Good job. Four more. Okay. Time. Something that's turbulence related. Oh, shit. Oh, time.

Were birds? Was birds one of them? Birds was not one of them. Oh, that would have been good. Good guess. So the remaining ones were barometric pressure. Oh, duh. Lightning or like extreme storms, which is separate from precipitation.

Ice or freezing rain. And runway surface conditions, which surprised me. Right, because it could be clear now, but it could still be wet. Yes. I wouldn't have got that last one. Pressure, I feel like a total jackass.

That's like what weather is, is my understanding at this point. Yeah, we just talked about it. Still just barely winning. You got four, and then there are four that you didn't get. So we both got four, or we all got four points that round. Question number three.

Weather modification has had its ups and downs in history, but one thing that countries have consistently tried is cloud seeding. Water vapor naturally condenses on dust particles or tiny bacteria, called condensation nuclei to form clouds. So cloud seeding involves spreading condensation nuclei like silver iodide or even dry ice to make clouds, usually for two purposes. One is to fight off drought or one is to use up the water vapor so there's clear weather in days ahead. Some countries have experimented once or twice in particularly dire weather situations or have patchwork regional organizations. But I've narrowed down a list of 10 countries that have had well-established cloud seeding programs for years or even decades. What are those 10 countries?

Ready? Go. Russia. Yes. China. Yes. The United States of America. Yes. We do? Oh. out russia yes china yes the united states of america yes we do oh england gets lots of rain so not them south africa no canada yes canada argentina not argentina okay the united the

united kingdom i'm gonna try it not the uk they get a lot of rain hank come on well but maybe they want to clear it up oh yeah there was another reason oh okay um the the united arab emirates yeah good job sam oh nice yeah i guess that makes sense saudi arabia no uh do we have more if there's more you have more you have one yeah five more oh my god five more time's up ah sorry oh god you gotta say countries sam couldn't think of a country is true ones that you missed are india which has been oh yeah since the 1950s and it's some of the like the longest and biggest programs in Southeast Asia. You missed Israel. I don't know.

They're on Israel 4, randomized seeding experiment. So it's definitely been going for quite a bit, at least since 1975. Yeah, at least four experiments for decades. You missed Thailand, which I thought was interesting. It was a project initiated in November 1955 called the Thailand Royal Rainmaking Project. And they have a Department of Royal Rainmaking and Agricultural Aviation. Cool. And then Bulgaria, they have a hail suppression agency that protects regions of farmland from

hail crops. And you missed Australia. Oh, does it work? from hail crops. And you missed Australia. Oh, does it work? So scientists are mixed on it, but it works enough and consistently enough that a lot of people are researching it and like looking into it. China was interesting because they used it before the Beijing Olympics to make sure it was clear on the first day of them. So that worked because there wasn't rain in their like giant stadium. But I think the biggest problems that people are wondering about are making it work consistently or like in a meaningful way because you can make it rain by spraying condensation nuclei into the sky. But at what pollution cost or does it have enough water to like significantly change farmland or crops or anything like does it really increase the water that much and effects on other countries too so if you like create clouds and

then those clouds fly over to a different country and then mess up their weather system what do you do about that so you got five and then you missed five. So we all got five points. If we just named the biggest countries by land area, we would have gotten seven. Yeah, but I couldn't remember what they were. I said all the countries I knew, okay? Same, those three countries. Next up, we're going to take a short break and then it'll be time for the fact off.

Welcome back, everybody. Here are our scores. We got me and Sam tied with 11 because that's how that game worked. And Sari with 10. But you should honestly have 12 after that parody song. Not too bad. You don't. And now it's time for the fact talk.

Sam and I have both brought science facts to present to Sari in an attempt to blow her mind. And Sari has points that she can award to the fact that she likes the most and it will decide the winner of the episode. I can tell by where we're at right now. But to decide who goes first, Sarah has a trivia question for us to answer. Grapple is sometimes called soft hail or snow pellets, but it isn't really hail and it isn't really snow. It's super cooled water droplets that freeze onto snowflakes to form tiny balls of rime ice. So how cold can these super cooled water droplets be before they freeze?

I will say negative 10 degrees Celsius. Oh, I'll say lower than that. I'll say negative 15 degrees Celsius. The answer is a negative 48.3 degrees Celsius. Oh, why doesn't that water freeze like at a normal freezing temperature? It's so clean. There's no nucleation site. So if you've got extra, extra clean air and just water floating around, then it can get very cold until a snowflake shows up and there's a nucleation site.

So then it gloms on and freezes. In the same way where you can put in a water bottle into the freezer and it can become super cooled without being ice. I guess I'll go first. So in 2021, we have all kinds of computer models and electronic instruments to tell us many days in advance when bad weather is coming. And this lets people like board up windows or build sandbag embankments and take lots of other precautions to minimize the loss of life and property damage that a big storm can cause. But in England in the year 1850, they were mostly still relying on a combination of folk knowledge and telegraphs from places that were currently experiencing storms. So this meant that storms could pretty much come out of nowhere. And if you were in one of the like coastal towns that was supposed to send the telegraph, if you were in a storm,

you were already in a storm. So there wasn't really that much you could do about it. And England was also losing ships at sea to storms because there wasn't really any way to communicate what the weather was like on the ocean. So this combination of problems set the stage for the invention of weather forecasting. And a footnote in that process is Dr. George Merriweather and a bunch of leeches. While doctors at the time didn't necessarily believe in balancing humors, they still practiced bloodletting. And it was like a treatment for basically any disease you could think of at the time, I think. And they loved to use leeches to do bloodletting. So they had big jars of leeches sitting around doctors' offices, basically.

So Dr. Merriweather spent a lot of time with leeches and noticed that his leeches got all worked up when bad weather was on its way and they would like writhe around and climb up the sides of the jars and just like flip out. And from a modern lens people think that possibly what was happening was that leeches can sense drops in pressure from a coming storm which means that rain is coming and that they can travel farther than they could otherwise in their search for blood. But inspired by this observation and a poem by Edward Jenner, who is a scientist whose work also helped popularize the smallpox vaccine, the poem was about how animals react to coming rainstorms because animal instinct was also a big new discovery that they were trying to figure out. The poem featured the line,

the leech disturbed is newly risen quite to the summit of his prison. I don't really know what that means, but to Dr. Merriweather, it meant that he should spend several months putting together an idea for a new type of weather prediction device that used leeches. I also think there were lots of types of barometers that existed at this point that also detected atmospheric pressure. So he was sort of reinventing the wheel, but with leeches.'t think he knew that though he didn't yeah yeah so anyway he came up with 12 corked glass jars were placed in a big circle at the base of this contraption and some water and a leech were placed in each one he wrote that he used glass jars to prevent the affliction of solitary confinement in the leeches aka so they wouldn't lonely, so they could see each other and be like, hey, leech.

So each jar had a string through the cork and into the bottle, and the other end of the string was tied to a bell hammer, positioned by a big bell that was in the middle of the jars, like on a big pedestal. And he called his invention the Tempest Prognosticator. So the idea was that when the weather got bad, the leeches would start to freak out and climb up the walls of the bottle to go blood hunting, I guess. And they would move

the string and ring the bell. So the more ringing there was, the worse the weather was coming was his idea. So he did a bunch of these tests through the 1850s and he had maybe some possibly successful results. He would send predictions out to different scientific organizations around the country. And at least one of them wrote him back a letter that said that he had successfully predicted a storm by up to 12 hours. But I don't know how many letters he sent out.

So he maybe just got lucky. It's a false positive, yeah. So he thought his invention could save lives and he wrote letters to the government asking them to adopt the prognosticator as the official storm detecting device of the Navy. And he made a really the government asking them to adopt the prognosticator as the official storm-detecting device of the Navy. And he made a really ornate version of it and showed it off at the Great Exhibition in 1851, hoping to sell them to rich people. But as far as anybody knows, nobody ever bought a single one, probably because you had to change the water and feed the leeches.

And also they were full of leeches. He didn't get a government contract either. The Navy tested, they think the Navy tested the prognosticator, but they ended up going with the storm glass, which was a device championed by Admiral Robert Fitzroy. And the storm glass basically was just a bottle of mineral water and it definitely didn't work. So they might've been better off going with the leeches that maybe worked a little bit. I love the idea of any science that at its core isn't actually a science.

It's just a clever animal. Yeah. And so you just like build this beautiful device around like 12 leeches or whatever. Gross little worms. And the only thing that's happening is a leech is moving. You're harnessing the raw power of animal instinct. That's what he thought you were doing.

Exactly. It's like the Flintstones. Like in the Flintstones, that's what everything was. Yeah. It's like the remote control for your television was just a bird that flew and turned the TV on. But it's also kind of like if the Flintstones lived in a world where there were already TV remote controls and then they built

the remote control that the bird flew out of and they didn't know that they were doing the same thing. And he did really make a beautiful thing. We'll put a picture of it in the show notes. You can just type in Tempest Prognosticator on Google also, because, like, nobody's ever named anything else that since then. I also, while I was looking this up, saw a bunch of pictures of leeches, and I was like, you know, a leech can be a little bit beautiful,

like snake skin patterns and, like, lots of contrast. And then it's like, ah,, a leech can be a little bit beautiful, like snake skin patterns and lots of contrast. And then it's like, ah, that freaking head. Pretty bad. All right. You guys want to hear my fact? Yeah. Yeah. It is in a similar vein because the way that we determine what the weather is is really important to us.

And it has evolved a lot over the years since the Tempest Prognosticator. And it has been, kind of surprisingly, messed up by COVID. And maybe not in the way that you would expect. One of the things that was important to do and that has continued to happen over the last too long now, since March, is that planes are not flying as much anymore. And that has messed up weather forecasts, which is a wild thing to me that I never would have expected. And it turns out that every commercial aircraft since like the 1970s is part of a like worldwide network of weather data collection

called the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay Report. All of these aircrafts constantly collect data. So 3,500 aircrafts flown by more than 40 airlines globally, they take temperature and wind measurements every few seconds during takeoff and landing and every few minutes while the plane is at cruising altitude. And so something like 680,000 observations are sent into this every day if there isn't a pandemic. But starting in February, the number of flights dropped 50 to 75 percent depending on the month. And that in turn led to a lot fewer of these Amdar reports. So a

scientist named Jing Chen at Lancaster Environmental Center in the UK decided to see how this reduction in data affected meteorological forecasts from March until May. And he found that, in general, weather forecasts have worsened more in the northern hemisphere, which is where you usually get more aircraft data than in non-COVID times, because that's where most of the land is and also most of the rich people. In particular, accuracy of surface temperature forecasts was off by as much as two degrees Celsius in Greenland and Siberia, because those are locations that are more remote and they don't have as many conventional meteorological stations. So airplanes are the majority of the data they get, or a lot of the data they get.

Other places with a lot of air travel, like North America and Southeast China and Australia. So places where there were lots of planes, a density of planes, they also experienced worse forecasts. But one area that didn't do that badly was Western Europe, which just has a really extensive network of meteorological stations on the ground that were able to provide the data to compensate for the loss of this Amdar network that provides just a tremendous amount of data that we kind of just stopped getting for a while. Yeah, I never thought about the fact that planes could have useful instruments on them besides, like, carrying people. But it makes sense. Well, if you're going to use all this fuel to get people from place to place, you might as well get as much utility out of that as possible. Yeah, and this goes back a long, long way. This first happened like when pilots first started happening, basically. So the Weather Bureau would pay pilots in 1919, they started doing this, to fly with little things called aerometeorographs that would be attached to the plane's wings and you'd get a 10 bonus for every

thousand feet you flew over 13 000 feet oh do they still get bonuses or is it just something they do i don't think so yeah no but i love the idea that you just get paid to fly because the weather people are like holy crap you can find out what the weather's like up there that's amazing so sarah you've either got sam's fact that Dr. George Merriweather, I can't believe his name was Merriweather, invented the Tempest Prognosticator to try and forecast storms using leeches, or my fact that COVID is affecting weather forecasting

because less commercial planes are flying and we're not getting all of that good Amdar data. It's harder and I have to do it by myself. I'm going to give Sam three points and Hank two points because I didn't know about either of these things before and even though Amdar

is going to change how I view plane travel, I love the leeches and I would love to find an old leech machine and restore it and just have it as like, this is my leech machine. And now it's time for as like, this is my leech machine. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds.

This is from at gingersnap273. Is acid rain a real thing I should actually be concerned about? Uh, yeah, but less so, right? And it's bad for buildings and not necessarily as bad for people, right? Is that the thing? Well, it's bad for people in that it's bad for buildings and not necessarily as bad for people, right? Is that the thing? Well, it's bad for people in that it's bad for forests, but like you don't have to be worried about it. You don't have to be worried

about like getting your face melted off by a rain. Yeah, so there's different amounts of acidity. It's all based on the pH scale, which you've probably heard about if you've ever taken a chemistry class, which I'm sure people who have listened to SciShow Tangents have or are going to at some point in their life because they're a bunch of nerds.

But lower numbers on the pH scale are more acidic, and higher numbers are more basic. So seven is neutral, pure water. All rain is slightly acidic because there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that dissolves in the water to make carbonic acid, sort of like how our blood is slightly acidic. Rain is usually around a pH of about 5.6. And acid rain is more acidic than that. It's a pH of about 4 instead of 5.6.

And based on the way the pH scale works, that's like a 10 times difference. It's a logarithmic related scale. And it's caused naturally by things like volcanoes erupting or decay of vegetation, but also things that we do as humans, like power plants that release gases or cars that release emissions, particularly gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, lower the pH of rain. It can neutralize materials that can be washed away by acid rain, so that's why certain stones, the acid, will react with the minerals and neutralize, but then wear away at the building material.

Four is less acidic than orange juice. Yeah. Okay. Orange juice won't melt you. Yeah. You can put orange juice on your face, but you wouldn't want to put it in your eyes. It wouldn't hurt them, but it might hurt, you know? But it is enough to harm things like insects or fish whose skin is less protective against water. When I was a kid, acid rain was like the scariest thing. Like in the nineties, you'd hear about it all the time. So what happened to it? Did we just get like, that's going to happen. We can't do anything about it. No, we created really pretty tight regulations on the emission of sulfur dioxide from coal plants, which is the primary place that sulfur dioxide was coming from. the primary place that sulfur dioxide was coming from. So we created a cap and trade scheme where it was like,

you basically can only release a certain amount. And if you release more than that, you have to buy it from a different power plant that has figured out how to filter out or scrub out the sulfur dioxide. And that was extremely effective in lowering sulfur dioxide, which actually did a really good job of decreasing the amount of acid rate in America. Wow. A policy was happened yeah it worked cool yeah regulations turns out we can combat climate change and like the effects we're having if we enact policy if we if we try hard yeah and it was expensive for the coal coal plants and they

didn't want to do it and then they did it and we're okay that in the hole in the ozone layer we also fixed that i mean we didn't fix it but it's better if you want to do it. And then they did it and we're okay. That and the hole in the ozone layer. We also fixed that. I mean, we didn't fix it, but it's better. If you want to ask the Science Couch your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents where we tweet out our topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at Neon Molly, at Space Hikes,

and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final scores! Sari with 10, Hank with 13, and Sam with 14, which means Sam, you get another chin coin. I already had one? I think so, yeah. So you got two, and I've got one,

and Sari's got none. Oh, no. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. You can also tweet us people you might think would be good guests for SciShow Tangents, because we're thinking about having more guests in the future. Or you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us.

Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto. Our editorial assistant is Debuki Chakravarti.

Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish and we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you. And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled,

but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Trees have to be pretty strong to contend with extreme weather since they can't really like escape or hide from it because they're stuck outside in the ground one of the things that can impact their resilience is butt rot a disease caused by fungi that eat away at the butt of the tree which is where the trunk gets a little bit thicker at the bottom and intersects with the ground which apparently is like the like secret weak spot of trees from the outside.

The trees don't show any sign of butt rot, but they rot away on the inside, making them weaker and prone to topple over in bad weather. And everybody knows that the, the, a tree's butt is on the inside. Every science is worth a salt. If ever we do a conference again,

and we, if, if, if we do like a signing line or something, I want that to be the secret code that people will be like where's the tree's butt

on the inside yeah we need a super fan chant of some sort yeah