Some More News - Some More News: Teaching Jordan Peterson That Climate Change Exists, Part One
Episode Date: August 6, 2024Hi. Climate change is real. We all know that. But, Jordan Peterson does not. Today, let's go through the science and see if we can convince him. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/fWUAGfduUlg Hosted... by Cody Johnston Executive Producer - Katy Stoll Directed by Will Gordh Written by Helen Floersh Edited by Gregg Meller Produced by Jonathan Harris Associate Producer - Quincy Tucker Post-Production Supervisor - John Conway Researcher - Marco Siler-Gonzales Graphics by Clint DeNisco Head Writer - David Christopher Bell How Climate Change Affects Extreme Weather Around The World: https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world/ SOURCES: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qGGlOArzyPZPF-ixj1uIq5KL2qd1jOSWtEz6ES3Pap4/edit MERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.com Give Trade a try and see how you can make better coffee at home. Right now, they’re offering 30% off your first order when you visit https://drinktrade.com/MORENEWS and subscribe. You gotta check out the new softside Luggage from Away. Head on over to https://awaytravel.com/smn Right now, get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription - but only for our viewers - at https://Babbel.com/MORENEWS We’ve worked out a special offer for our audience. Receive 15% off your first order of Arma Colostrum at https://tryarmra.com/MORENEWS or enter code MORENEWS to get 15% off your first order. Right now, Hungryroot is offering Some More News viewers 40% off your first delivery and free veggies for life. Just go to https://Hungryroot.com/MORENEWS to get 40% off your first delivery and get your free veggies. SUBSCRIBE to SOME MORE NEWS: https://tinyurl.com/ybfx89rh Subscribe to the Even More News and SMN audio podcasts here: Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/some-more-news/id1364825229 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6ebqegozpFt9hY2WJ7TDiA Follow us on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/SomeMoreNews Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/SomeMoreNews/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SomeMoreNews/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@somemorenews
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Discussion (0)
Good Weather to you.
Welcome to Some More Weather,
our new program centered around Cody Schoti
about cloudies, cloudies, clouds.
We're working out the kinks, the kinkies.
And here is some more weather.
Floods in Afghanistan and tornadoes in Brazil.
That, no, sorry.
Floods in Afghanistan and Brazil,
and tornadoes in Tallahassee and Tennessee,
and wildfires in Mexico, and what else?
Oh, a record-breaking heat wave in India and the Philippines.
Wait, wasn't that last year?
No, last year and this year.
Okay, hold on.
And another one in Burkina Faso.
Okay, well, isn't there always a heat wave in Burkina Faso?
Okay, you know what?
Screw it.
Let's just do another episode about Jordan Peterson.
["The Daily Show Theme"]
Teaching Jordan Peterson about climate change, part one.
So...
Huh, Biden dropped out.
Couches?
I mean, they do have those folds.
I get it.
Dolphins too, oh buddy.
Okay, so we're just gonna put that on silence.
Anyway, hi.
Sorry, we were trying to court the 18 to 25 weather demo,
but we did absolutely no research on current weather.
Luckily, we did do way too much research on climate change.
The thing this episode is about, no, no, no, no,
Jordan Peterson, it's about, the episode is about,
Jordan Peterson, tell your friends, like and subscribe.
Like and subscribe.
So here's some news.
Jordan Peterson, the guy this episode is definitely about,
seems to believe that people who worry about climate change
are part of some cult.
It's honestly hard to know for sure
based on like the words he says.
The climate pseudo religion is based on characterization of nature as something like a hapless,
what would you call hapless, defenseless, fragile virgin.
Okay, just skip ahead to where he starts making sense.
And so the reason that narrative has force is because it draws on
underlying religious archetypes and so to characterize the world properly. No, not there,
keep going, I'll wait, I got nothing to do. With regard to the rapacious tyranny, let's say, well,
you know, any industrial system or any human organization can exploit the natural world
to the point where that's not sustainable
and it can become oppressive and tyrannical.
That's the evil king, ancient part of religious mythology
going back as far back as we can chase it.
Boy, he is just not talking about anything.
Wow, we should do an episode just about him at some point.
But if you squint with your ears,
you sort of see what he's maybe trying to say.
I don't know, it's confusing.
And that's probably because Jordan Peterson
is famously very confused about what climate change even is.
There's no such thing as climate, right?
Climate and everything are the same word.
And that's what bothers me about the climate change types.
It's like, this is something that bothers me
about it technically.
It's like, climate is about everything.
So, okay, but your models aren't based on everything.
Your models are based on a set number of variables.
So that means you've reduced the variables,
which are everything, to that set. Well, how did you decide which set of variables. So that means you've reduced the variables, which are everything, to that set.
Well, how did you decide which set of variables
to include in the equation if it's about everything?
Now, to Peterson's credit,
it seems like his opinion has congealed since this clip.
And what I mean is that he's gone from being
weirdly confused about what climate change is
to lightly denying that climate change exists.
Congratulations, Pete, your Giorgio is showing.
Here he is in March
when he invited streaming politics gamer, Destiny,
onto his podcast and talked over him for two hours.
And at one point he voiced the idea
that we just don't have reliable data on climate change
and therefore can't be too concerned about it.
But right now we're like standing in traffic
with our eyes closed saying the car hasn't hit me yet
so I don't think there's any coming.
I think it's pretty undeniable at this point
that there is an impact on climate across the planet.
I just don't know-
I think that's highly deniable.
We have no idea what the impact is from.
We don't know where the carbon dioxide is from.
We can't measure the warming of the oceans.
We have terrible temperature records going back 100 years.
Okay. Cognitively speaking,
I guess that's an improvement from incoherence,
but it's not great otherwise.
Of course, Peterson was just getting started.
And about a month after this video,
he went on the show of Catholic podcaster, Matt Fradd,
and pushed the idea that science is like
this subjective debate and
implying that actually having high CO2 is totally good.
Everywhere you look, if you're a scientist, everywhere you look into any given question
deeply you run into conundrums and profound sources of disagreement even about what's
hypothetically fundamental in the climate
Science is a good example of that. That's an appalling scam
So if you look at the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last
Number of hundreds of millions of years like a pretty whopping time frame. We're at a very very low level
We dropped to about 350 parts per million by
say 1850, something like that. Plants start to die at 250, right, because they need carbon
dioxide. So we were almost at the point where the plants were going to start to die. That's
how low the carbon dioxide levels are. Now they have been increasing.
So we've gone from no one knows what climate is all the way
to actually it's good when the earth heats up
which I suppose it's doing.
Also it's an appalling scam.
I think he might have no idea what he's talking about.
I mean, to be fair and
balanced Jordan Peterson did serve for two years
on a Canadian subcommittee on sustainable development
for the UN secretary general,
and also read a lot of books.
One of those books he specifically cited
was specifically written to downplay global warming,
but sure, man, weird that you say you're qualified
to talk about this, but also seem to have no idea
how people measure the climate or what the climate is.
And all of these climate scientists are like,
he doesn't know what he's talking about.
So you know what?
I have an idea and it just came to me,
just popped into the old beard holder,
totally improvised, don't think about it.
But in the spirit of debate,
let's see if we can teach Jordan Peterson a thing or two
about global warming.
This video and the next video is for Jordan Peterson only
because he either is pretending for some reason
or he just needs somebody helpful and patient and nice
to explain it to him.
So if you know him or see him on Twitter,
the X, the everything app,
be sure to let him know that we made this
for him specifically and we're nice.
Okay.
Jordan only.
Is he here? Is he watching?
Is he?
Oh, hi. Hi, Jordan.
Yeah, no, no, no.
Don't say hi back.
It's a video.
Come on, Jordan.
Get comfortable in your lobster bean bag, bucko,
because we are going to break down
how climate science works
and why we know that climate change is real and a problem.
And then in the next video we make,
we'll talk about the future of our planet
and what we can do about it, if you even care, Jordan.
And so let's start with the very basics.
Are you ready?
Too bad, creepy!
How do we measure global warming?
Okay, well, for starters,
the global average temperature is...
Oh God.
The global average temperature
is the average temperature of the globe.
Okay, that checks out.
Excellent.
That's why they call it that.
Are you writing this down, Jordan?
Good, but more specifically,
when climate scientists talk about things
like one degree Celsius or five degrees Celsius of warming,
the thing that's doing the warming
is the global average surface temperature.
That's the air temperature taken on land
and a few meters above the surface of the ocean.
We use this one because at least in the United States,
we've been doing it since around 1870.
So we have pretty good records on it.
And other countries have similarly long histories
of doing that.
It's good to be consistent, right?
Very science of us.
And also because the surface temperature
is the most relevant thing to measure.
But who's we?
A cabal of weathermen who sacrifice infants
to Al Gore's awaiting ma awaiting mob needle-like teeth?
That would be kind of neat.
But no, no.
It's government academic institutions like these,
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association,
UK's Met Office Hadley Center, they spelled it wrong,
Japan's meteorological agency, also Berkeley Earth,
and something called NASA, NASA, nasal,
spelled that wrong, it should be an L at the end.
These institutions and others have weather balloons,
satellites, ships, and weather stations all over the world.
Physical buildings taking readings.
A building is a structure with stuff inside.
Write it down, Jay!
NASA alone has at least 20,000 of these weather stations.
They collect their data independently,
then bring it all together to compare.
And historically, their numbers have been pretty in sync.
This chart shows all of the data sets
from the four biggest agencies all in one place.
And while it only includes global temperatures
from the late 1800s to about 2012,
you can see that there's not a ton of deviation
between the numbers.
And the trends overall are exactly the same.
That's pretty compelling evidence.
Four completely different entities
are taking temperatures with different instruments,
and they all say the same thing.
You see how science is often testable and measurable
and always cool and hip?
Of course, in order to make the claim
that the global average surface temperature is increasing,
you need to have historical context.
So how do you get that?
According to this climate historian and adorable nerd,
there are lots of different ways.
Some of the indicators we use, we went to Greenland, we drilled through the ice sheet.
A mile down in Greenland is colder than the top and it is colder than the bottom because
it has not finished warming up from the ice age.
And how cold that is takes a long time to heat the middle of a turkey in an oven.
It takes a really long time to heat a two mile ice sheet.
And how cold that is tells us how cold the ice age was.
We have this amazing range of indicators
across physics, chemistry, biology, isotopes, and more
that actually do give us a picture of how the world changed
with a great amount of confidence, to be honest.
Hey, that makes sense.
He goes on to say this.
The history of climate looks more like greenhouse gases
than anything else.
And of those greenhouse gases,
it looks like CO2 has been the biggest control on it.
And this is an emerging picture
that has come out in my career,
but I think we were surprised.
I think we expected other things to be more important,
but what we see is CO2
mattering a lot.
And then he finishes with this extremely good point.
You may know somebody, right? People say, oh, climate's always changed, so we don't
need to worry about changing the climate. Right? I have had elected officials tell me
that. Right? The logic is fantastic, right? It is equivalent to nature has always caused fire, so we do not need to worry about arson.
It is exactly the same logic, right?
We have always died, so we don't need to worry about investigating murders.
I'm sorry, this is sort of crazy.
But when you look back, they drew those lines where things died. And we could do things that big and we might do them faster.
Right.
Saying the climate has always changed is a non-argument.
And when you think about it for more than a second,
it's a really silly one at that.
And it sounds like the science is pretty clear
that CO2 was a huge player in climate change historically
and that it is now too.
That climate historian in the clip, by the way,
is Dr. Richard Alley, who published a research paper
in 2004 that included the data used to make this chart.
If it looks familiar, it's probably because you've seen it
on Twitter where Jordan Peterson, that's you,
posted it in 2023 as evidence that the Earth's climate isn't actually the hottest
it has ever been.
Because look at how high those lines go.
The problem here, as anyone who isn't a liar can tell,
is that the chart ends in 1885.
So, bad job, Jordan.
Also, Jordan, didn't you claim that we can't measure
the global temperature, and now you're posting this chart
of global temperature like it's evidence of something?
Which is it?
But that chart is meaningless in the context
of debunking climate change.
For starters, it comes from a single core of ice
in Greenland.
Alley himself told fact-checking site VerifyThis.com that Peterson's use of his chart was misleading,
adding that,
The existence of warmer times in the past does not cast doubt on the human cause of the ongoing warming
or on the dangers of that warming.
Boy, he should debate Jordan Peterson if only so we can hear this one brilliant muppet
lay into the dumb lying muppet.
That's you again, Jordan.
Okay, so that's how we measure global temperature.
Jordan and we agree.
How did we like link that to carbon dioxide
and global warming?
Well, I know this might sound silly to dwell on,
but I think it's actually important
and hopefully kind of cool and interesting. and global warming. Well, I know this might sound silly to dwell on, but I think it's actually important
and hopefully kind of cool and interesting.
So many climate deniers and liars and weirdos
try to frame this issue like we either
don't know anything actually,
or like it's some grand conspiracy or hoax
that everyone's in on,
some new Democrat hoax or whatever,
as opposed to it being about scientists
doing science for decades and decades,
smart people noticing things and doing tests
and then discovering more things and testing again,
and then another person discovering something else
and so on.
It's actually pretty cool how we know things.
So did the hoax start in 1856
when a scientist noticed that gas heats up
when exposed to sunlight?
Is this a hundreds of years long conspiracy
of scientists making stuff up,
but also publishing papers that you can read
with information that you can verify?
Maybe, but probably not.
Let's try to explain.
How did we discover climate change?
So as you saw, we have lots of ways of measuring
both global temperatures today and historical ones.
But how did we get to the point that we realized
human activity was affecting the climate?
Great question, Jordan.
Sorry, I should do that again.
How did we get the information? How did we know? Great question, Jordan. Sorry, I should do that again. How did we get the information?
How did we know?
Great question, Jordan.
Thanks for staying focused.
In 1856, an amateur American scientist
and women's rights activist named Eunice Foote
discovered that when the sun hits a closed container,
the gas in the container would warm up.
She even speculated that if you applied this idea
to the earth itself, the whole planet might heat up.
She wrote,
An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature.
And if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present,
an increased temperature must have necessarily resulted.
She would go on to call this the Eunus Puneus.
Don't write that down, Jordan.
That was fake.
You fell for it, Jordan.
You're so gullible.
It didn't have a name at the time,
but what she was describing
was essentially the greenhouse effect
where gases in the Earth's atmosphere,
including carbon dioxide,
absorb radiation from sunlight and warm the planet.
Scientist John Tindall, who had access to fancier tools
that could measure this phenomenon in much more detail,
discovered the mechanisms behind how CO2 concentrations
caused the heating of the atmosphere.
Somewhat ironically, Foot and Tyndall
made their discoveries about the greenhouse effect
at the height of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.
That's like inventing the word diarrhea
while eating raw chicken you found behind a trash can. at the height of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain. That's like inventing the word diarrhea
while eating raw chicken you found behind a trash can.
A made up story.
A made up story.
But at the time, they likely had no idea
that the thing they were describing was going to be directly linked
to all the societal changes happening around them.
But another researcher, Swedish scientist, Sponte Arrhenius,
did make this connection in the early 1900s.
He even went as far as to say, quote,
the slight percentage of carbonic acid in the atmosphere
may, by the advances of industry,
be changed to a noticeable degree
in the course of a few centuries.
Arrhenius later suggested that this might even be
a good thing because it would make the planet's various climates
more equable.
Adorable?
That's just like what you said, Jordan.
Remember how you said that having more CO2 might be good?
Like a guy from 100 years ago would say?
I wonder if it's bad that you have the same opinion
as people who took heroin to cure a toothache anyway.
So most scientists completely dismissed
these early observations because they thought
there was no way humans could influence something
as vast as Earth's climate,
especially through carbon dioxide.
And like, I get it.
The Earth is big.
We're tiny, squishy, too many holes.
It's hard to imagine we would make a huge dent,
especially in the 1900s.
I'm pretty sure wolves were still a problem then.
Take the reaction to Guy Callender,
a British steam engineer and not a fake name
someone made up on the fly,
who was thought to be the first to put together
that industrialization was causing Earth to get hotter.
In the 1930s, he went around collecting records
from nearly 200 different weather stations
all over the world,
along with approximations of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere from the early 1900s.
He estimated that fuel combustion from industrialization
had added about 150 billion tons of CO2
into the atmosphere since the late 1800s.
The records he collected show that the temperature
had risen by about 0.005 degrees Celsius per
year since then.
With the help of some complex physics, Kalender made the case that about 0.003 degrees Celsius
of that was attributable to what he called the artificial production of carbon dioxide.
He published a paper explaining his findings in 1938.
And while some of the scientists who reviewed his work
were impressed, most were skeptical.
Understandably, considering the calendar
wasn't a trained meteorologist,
normally that's a red flag.
But more than that, scientists of the time also believe
that water vapor, not carbon dioxide,
absorbed the most radiation from the sun,
and thus would be responsible for any global warming going on. After all, the atmosphere
does contain a lot more water vapor than carbon dioxide, so at the time it seemed like a logical
conclusion to draw. That changed in the late 1950s, when research findings using better technology backed up the idea that CO2 from
human activities was indeed warming the earth. Hey Jordan, remember when you tried to say that
water vapor was actually the thing warming the planet, a read that the putative contribution
of carbon dioxide to global warming
is less than the margin of error
for measurement of the effect of water vapor.
Yeah.
Do you know if that's true?
That's really sad if that's true.
That's true.
That's really sad if that's true.
Good news, Jordan!
That's not true!'s true. That's true. That's really sad if that's true. Good news, Jordan!
That's not true!
Don't be sad!
But boy, Jordan, a lot of your opinions are a century old.
What's up with that?
Here's a thought.
Maybe it's weird you have to whip out ridiculously old science to make your point. Science that, as I just said,
has been disproven for decades now.
Peterson saying this in a modern climate conversation
is like if your doctor told you they needed to drain the
ghosts from your skeleton to make more room for bile.
It is shockingly archaic in a way that should make him,
you Peterson watching this, feel ashamed
and also be widely discredited
because we're actually really good
at detecting CO2 in the air.
Back in 1956, a scientist named Dr. Charles Keeling
began taking measurements of CO2 in the air
atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii.
He found the amount of CO2 there
was rising from one year to the next,
which he attributed to the burning of fossil fuels.
And while the technology has gotten a lot better
since then, we use similar methods to measure
how much CO2 is in the air today.
Keeling's son, Ralph Keeling, a scientist
at the Scripps CO2 program in San Diego,
gives a basic overview of how it's done
in this video from 2018.
First step is taking an air sample,
and this is a glass flask that's been evacuated, it's done in this video from 2018. dioxide is in it. After the flasks are brought back into the lab, they're mounted here where they're analyzed
for carbon dioxide concentration by sending the air sequentially, one flask at a time,
through an analyzer.
When the analysis is done, we then mount them here where the air is pumped away.
The carbon dioxide is retained in these little glass tubes where it's subsequently measured
for its isotopic composition.
That helps us decide whether the carbon dioxide,
say came from a car or it came from a plant
or it came from the oceans.
Boy, science is so cool and not always,
but often definitive.
They are just taking the air from the same spots
and measuring the CO2.
It's weird that anyone would question this stuff,
you know, unless they're a liar.
Keeling's findings at Mauna Loa
led to the famous Keeling Curve,
a graph that shows how concentrations of CO2
in the atmosphere change month to month and year to year.
As you can see, over the long term, it only goes up.
Go science!
Yay!
The Earth is dying. Go science! Yay! The Earth is dying.
Fire emoji!
Woo!
Continuing on our super fun timeline,
in 1967, a pair of researchers named
Sakura Minabe and Richard Weatherold
revealed the first accurate computer model
of Earth's climate,
which vindicated Callender's earlier theory
and showed definitively that CO2 and
global temperature are closely related.
Their model estimated that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere would raise its temperature
by about 2 degrees.
When modern scientists compared those figures to how much the temperature had actually risen
since pre-industrial times, they found they weren't too far off.
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was about 50% higher in the century since the 1880s,
and the temperature had gone up by about 1.1 degrees Celsius.
Then in 1985, the evidence got a lot more real.
Scientists took samples of ice cores from Antarctica
and looked at the bubbles inside of them,
which gave an idea of what atmospheric CO2 levels
and the global surface temperature were,
hundreds of thousands of years
before humans started burning fossil fuels.
This endeavor proved successful
as only two of the scientists exploded into tendrils
before being lit up by a flame thrower.
And these icy bubbles made two things crystal clear.
First, that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere
and temperature were tightly linked. And second, that the levels of CO2 and another greenhouse gas, methane,
were higher than any point in at least 800,000 years, give or take. So analysis of the gas in
the bubbles showed that things had been pretty stable right up until the early 19th century,
when that artificial CO2 production
Callender talked about was really taking off
all over the world.
By the time the Antarctica researchers
were doing their thing,
it was 50% higher than it was
before the Industrial Revolution.
So, hashtag Callender was right.
Wild that he predicted climate change
and invented the way we measure days and months.
What a guy.
And of course, Jordan Peterson,
if you still don't believe these scientists
and their constant use of the scientific method
to determine information about the physical world
and our effect on it,
perhaps you'll believe fossil fuel companies
like Exxon Mobil and Shell,
both of which knew about their effect on climate change
during the mid and late 20th century,
but hid that information.
This is all to say that no, Jordan,
climate change isn't some Marxist hoax
devised to implement the woke agenda.
It's a real thing that was discovered by smart people
and observant people who went,
oh, that gas got hot.
Why is that?
Oh, it's carbon dioxide.
It's getting hot.
Oh, that's interesting.
Oh, the temperatures rise.
They did science.
So stop lying to people
for whatever your stupid weird reasons are, Jordan.
I think that thing had my car keys.
We should go to ads.
When we return, we will take this history lesson
all the way to today times, by which I mean 20 years ago.
And then ask the question we're all excited for,
how bad is it?
Cool, by which I mean hot, by which I mean too hot,
way, way too hot.
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Vote Katie for Dark Lord of America.
Hi, remember me?
Host a news show, puppets, beard,
dealing with some stuff right now?
For starters, there appears to be an infestation
scurrying in my walls and floors,
gathering my possessions for what I can only assume
to be a nest.
And secondly, the planet I live on is slowly dying.
So mostly those two problems are what I'm dealing with.
And on that subject,
we were telling Jordan Peterson specifically
about how we measure the climate
and how we know that our warming earth is related to CO2.
We brought you through centuries of scientists
figuring this exact thing out.
And at this point,
it's worth noting that everything these people were saying
was being confirmed again and again.
It wasn't a single scientist or guess, but scores of them.
And once science continued to advance,
we saw predictions happening in real time.
For example, let's jump ahead, by which I mean behind,
to December 2004, when a scientist in the UK
named Pete Stott published a very alarming paper
showing that climate change could double the risk of a heatwave like the one that had swept through Europe the year
prior when it killed at least 35,000 people and probably more than 70,000 overall.
We didn't have to wait five decades to see if Stott would be correct.
That risk came to fruition in 2022.
The new report says that nearly 62,000,
get that around your head,
62,000 people in Europe died
from heat related causes last summer.
That is enough to fill
New York's Madison Square Garden three times.
To put that in perspective,
that prediction was made during the Harry Potter craze
and came true before the last Harry Potter film was released.
Remember the specials of Dumbles?
The magical wish ventures of Clibby Spoodwatt.
You know the movies, I don't, but you do.
Stott's work led to a scientific movement
known as extreme event attribution.
That is a type of study where scientists
take a major weather event like floods
or a severe heat wave and use climate models
to figure out whether global warming might have made it worse or even more likely to begin with.
Carbon Brief, a climate media company funded by the European Climate Foundation,
has a whole database that literally puts hundreds of these studies on a map, which we will link in the show notes.
The Shoats! Their analysis found that man-made climate change
has contributed to 71% of the extreme weather events
around the globe since the European heat wave in 2003.
If you're feeling masochistic enough
to go through each of these events one at a time
like we were, you'll see that researchers' estimates
of just how much climate change factored in
varies quite a bit.
If anything, maybe that tells you that they're trying
their best to be accurate and not just hoax you
into thinking every single weather event
is climate change's fault.
Also, these kinds of studies are worth paying attention to
because they put real tangible experiences to a phenomenon
that can otherwise feel kind of abstract,
like eating a Jackson Pollock painting.
Then in 2007, scientists from 60 different countries
descended upon the North and South Poles
for the International Polar Year,
a research effort with a deceptively fun sounding name
that's also inaccurate because it lasted two years
and not one, liars, hoaxers.
This was the fourth ever expedition of its kind,
but this time around, it had a new and depressing goal,
to get estimates on just how much global warming
was affecting the polar ice caps.
By the scientist's logic,
Earth's coldest places were going to be the first
to be affected by global warming.
So they were likely a harbinger of what was to come
for the rest
of the world.
So how'd that go?
Was it good?
In the summer, that ice always melts back, and then in the winter it regrows.
And so we try to monitor what happens in the summer and also the winter.
The results that we're releasing today is how much that ice grew back this winter.
And what we're finding is this.
Over the last six years, it's been growing back
less each year. And right now it's missing a Texas-sized area of ice. The other thing though,
and this is some other exciting results, is we finally developed the techniques to measure the
thickness of that ice. And what we're finding is that the ice is thinner now than it's ever been.
Yeah, no. Wild how excitedly he's explaining that the planet is dying. Dude loves science more than he loves us.
Anyway, so yeah, as expected, the researchers' findings
from the International Polar Year showed that the polar ice caps
were indeed heating up at a faster rate than anywhere else.
And the permafrost that normally coated Greenland and the Arctic
was melting faster than at any point in the past 10,000 years.
Losing the polar ice caps perpetuates global warming Arctic was melting faster than at any point in the past 10,000 years.
Losing the polar ice caps perpetuates global warming
through what's called ice albedo feedback.
Also the name of my synth pop band,
not I've got many fake bands.
When there's plenty of ice, radiation from the sun
bounces back into space, cooling the planet down.
But with less ice to reflect off of,
that heat just hangs out.
We all know about this, don't we, Jordan?
Remember when you were in elementary school
or whatever they call it in Canada?
And a teacher or whatever they call it in Canada
would say that wearing white cools you down
because it reflects the sun
or whatever they call it in Canada.
Same thing.
This is very basic kid stuff.
And it's one of many examples of feedback loops
scientists have identified that they think
may be making climate change related extreme weather
and natural disasters a whole lot worse.
It's a spiral like smoking meth to cure a hangover.
Sure, it works.
Great.
But now we don't have any meth.
Where are you gonna get your meth, huh?
Jimmy Snaps?
Jimmy Snaps died, remember Jordan?
Where are you gonna get your meth?
And we've seen a lot of these feedback loops
in the 15 years or so since the international polar year,
along with a lot of new commitments
to take action on climate change.
The most famous is the 2015 Paris Climate Accord,
a group of rules signed by 193 countries
that lays out the action they will take to reverse global warming.
They set their target to keep the world from getting 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial
levels on average over the next 20 years.
But by some assessments, it's already too late to stop a lot of the worst consequences of climate change from happening.
That was the conclusion of a very doomy report issued in 2021 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
an international group of policymakers and scientists from roughly the same member countries that signed the Paris Climate Accord.
Their 2021 analysis showed that the world is likely to go over its 1.5 degrees target within just 20 years,
meaning that things like ocean acidification,
sea level rises, dwindling Arctic ice, and more
are basically set in stone at this point.
So that's how we know that climate change is a thing,
Jordan.
I hope that kept your attention.
Sorry, I didn't talk about lobsters at all,
but they also will get affected by heating oceans actually.
So that's neat to be specific.
Lobster populations in Southern New England
will dwindle as the ocean gets too warm.
Luckily, thanks to even colder waters in Maine,
now heating up, all of those lobsters are moving north.
Next stop, Canada, Jordan. Is that why you like climate change so much? You want all those lobsters are moving north. Next stop, Canada, Jordan.
Is that why you like climate change so much?
You want all the lobsters to yourself?
You're so selfish, Jordan.
I'm just joking.
It's a fun little joke for Jordan Peterson fans.
Anyway, how bad have we ruined the planet?
Where are we now?
Is it good?
Well, for the year of our blood serpent lord, 2023,
the global average surface temperature came in
at about 15.08 degrees Celsius.
That's 59.14 degrees Fahrenheit for all you commoners.
And by you, I mean me.
You disgust me, me.
Ow!
To be clear, other global temperature taking organizations
got roughly the same number.
More importantly, they also found that 2023
was the hottest year ever recorded.
1.18 degrees Celsius or 2.12 Fahrenheit gross
over the 20th century average to be exact.
The last time that temperature record was broken was 2016,
which I'm told was really only eight years ago.
That feels wrong.
Jordan, did you know that the global average temperature
has set new records in three of the past 10 years?
Did you know that?
Now, maybe you're thinking to yourself,
in your internal Kermit voice,
59.14 degrees Fahrenheit doesn't really sound all that hot.
What about the oppressive nature of archetypes
as it relates to the worship of Gaia?
Something about crones.
But Jordan, you have to remember
that's just the average surface temperature.
There are gonna be extremes on either end.
And even without going to extremes,
fragile ecosystems like the ones in the ocean
can't handle
too much change. Remember what I just said about the lobsters, Jordan? That they went
up to Maine, and as Maine continues to warm, they might not survive in those waters either?
Well, that drastic change is due to an increase of just 0.8 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years.
We forget that humans are pretty removed from ecosystems.
Lobsters and fish and insects don't have air conditioning
and jackets and the new Taco Bell big cheese
at Crunchwrap Supreme.
They really want to have those things,
but they haven't invented them yet.
Idiots.
They rely on specific plants and other creatures to survive.
And so if one thing vanishes, it creates a domino effect.
And so what sounds like a little to us is a lot to them.
And while we may think we're removed from that ecosystem,
lobsters, for example, affect an entire industry,
which in turn affects an economy and so on.
Not to mention the slow heat death of the planet,
which is all to say that we should probably do something
about all of this.
Make lobster sized air conditioners.
And so speaking of doing something,
that 1.5 degrees target agreed upon
by the countries who signed the Paris Climate Accord
may seem oddly specific, but it's grounded in science.
It's based on how much human activity has warmed the earth
since the industrial revolution, when we started spewing loads of carbon into the air to power our shiny
thing-making machines. Since then, the average global surface temperature has risen by 1 degree
Celsius. Climate scientists have found that for every one-tenth of a degree of warming,
the weather gets more extreme because Earth's meteorological patterns have to shift to accommodate the extra heat.
By their estimates, going more than two degrees above pre-Industrial Revolution temperatures
will have catastrophic, possibly irreversible, consequences, which is why they set the limit
to 1.5 degrees of warming when they wrote up the Paris Accords.
Now, this isn't to say that if Earth gets even a tiny fraction above 1.5 degrees hotter,
that everything is going to implode.
As Sergei Paltsev, Deputy Director of MIT's Joint Program
on the Science and Policy of Global Change writes,
there is nothing magical about the 1.5 number
other than that is an agreed aspirational target.
Keeping at 1.4 is better than 1.5,
and 1.3 is better than 1.4, and so on.
The science does not tell us that if, for example,
the temperature increase is 1.51 degrees Celsius,
then it would definitely be the end of the world.
Think of it like exercise or eating healthier.
Having only one cronut every day isn't good,
but it's still better than having two cronuts every day.
Having a cronut every other day is't good, but it's still better than having two cronuts every day. Having a cronut every other day is even better.
Whereas having three cronuts every hour for 12 hours
or until you stop moving is probably bad.
And much like the cronut considerations
that haunt me every day of my life,
with the climate, there's a set number you can aim for
where ultimately things are trending better
instead of worse.
That's good news because here's some bad news.
In 2023, we kinda already overshot our goal.
Too many cronuts.
Last year's global average surface temperature
was right at 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter
than the pre-industrial average,
with most of the major data sets calculating somewhere
between 1.36 and 1.54 degrees more.
That's the hottest average global temperature
since researchers started keeping official records
around 1880.
It's likely that we will go past 1.5 degrees of warming
again in the next four years.
It might even happen this year.
Neat!
January, 2024 was the hottest January on record and was 1.56 degrees warmer
than in pre-industrial times.
There's a one in three chance this year
will wind up beating out 2023.
Cool, we did it guys.
But again, as Paltsev pointed out,
that doesn't mean all is lost.
It's okay if we go a little too far
as long as we actually do something
to get back on track in the long run.
You know, if we do something.
But according to the IPCC's report from 2021,
the policies currently in place around the world
are projected to result in 2.7 Celsius warming
above pre-industrial levels
by the year 2100.
So that's, I mean, not even gonna look, it's bad, it's bad.
I think most people, except for Jordan Peterson,
know somewhere in the back of their skulls
that we are not doing great
when it comes to mitigating climate change.
To put it in cronut terms,
we haven't even tried to eat fewer cronuts.
And in fact, the cronut industry has taken over our house
and is paying us billions of dollars
to eat as many cronut as possible.
And a lot of people won't even admit
the cronut are bad for us.
After all, croissants are kind of good for us
if you take away all the bread parts.
And so the croissant cancels out the donut.
We're at net zero cronut, you see.
Anyway, these numbers still feel a little bit abstract.
So next we need to ask the question, how bad is it?
What is the actual logical conclusion
of eating so many cronuts that you can't move?
Maybe it's good.
Maybe we are rewarded somehow.
Is my phone missing?
This sneaky little...
Wait a second.
I think I hear it.
You have reached Sally Mae,
the nation's number one private student loan lender.
For new applications, press one.
Okay, well, I'm gonna go take a sledgehammer to my wall.
Feel free to cut to ads if you want.
I don't care.
Hi, Katie here.
Boy, I'm a real talk a muffin.
Yapping and such.
Sometimes I just stand there for hours talking to my feet.
Man, if they only spoke English.
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Hello?
Cancel, cancel, cancel loan?
Cancel, cancel loan?
They hung up.
They were laughing and they hung up.
It was automated laughing.
Well, I guess I can study art history or something.
I'm sure there's a big future in that.
Hey, speaking of the future,
hi Jordan, welcome back.
I know you're probably confused about the puppet stuff,
so just go back and watch the show
from the start of the year, you'll catch up.
You're not slow, are you Jordan?
By now you've been convinced by me
that scientists can absolutely measure
and detect global warming and its causes,
and have been doing that for decades upon decades,
to the point that they've set a specific
temperature goal for us to hit if we want to mitigate
the damage which we are currently not hitting.
And so that brings us to the dark third act of this saga,
the night journey into the belly of the whale
to put it in your Jungian terms or whatever
helps you understand.
Here's the big question.
How cooked are we?
So to be frank, I'd have to fill out a bunch of paperwork, wait for it to get approved, call everybody I know
and be like, it's Frank now.
So to be Cody, one of the purposes of this video
you are watching is to give an unflinching look
at our situation.
We're not gonna coat it with something sweet,
meth for example.
We're not gonna meth coat that cronut, crank nut.
But let's start with the good news,
because it's more fun to raise hopes and then crush them.
Glass of piss half full, et cetera.
Global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels
rose less than 1% in 2022.
That's far less than in 2021, when they rose a whole 6%.
To be clear, 2021 was a banner year
for burning dinosaur corpses,
because humanity collectively and incorrectly
decided the pandemic was over and went hog wild.
Still, according to the International Energy Agency,
a forum operating under the Organization
for Economic Development and Cooperation, one of the main reasons CO2 emissions
from fossil fuel burning rose so little in 2021
was because of new sources of clean energy,
things like solar and wind power, heat pumps,
and yes, electric vehicles.
Thank you, Elon.
Such a, such a cool truck you've built.
What if we did a whole episode
just about how your stupid fucking truck sucks shit?
God, wouldn't that be a fun episode?
Stay tuned.
All right, what's most encouraging
is that the 2022 figure was even lower than expected
given the seriously energy intensive geopolitical events
that took place that year.
Like when some European countries had to go back
to using coal for power after Russia invaded Ukraine.
Really Putin folks in a rough spot there.
Also the invasion of war stuff.
So that's, well, that's rough.
Overall, clean energy tech kept 550 million tons
of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.
In some countries, these statistics are part
of a longer downward trend in CO2 emissions.
And before you complain about the economy, Jordan,
like a whiny loser who likes to make up problems
in order to not address the actual problem,
you should know that 27 countries managed to cut down
on emissions while still growing their economies
between 2012 and 2022.
This goes to show that carbon cutting policies
don't necessarily have to conflict with economic growth.
Although counterpoint, who gives a shit?
Economic growth isn't necessarily the best sign
of a healthy country.
And what good are jobs
if we're all too extinct to occupy them?
But I guess our bones will make great oil
for whatever alien species takes over.
The fossil fueler has become the fossil fuel head.
Okay, now let's look at glass of piss half empty.
Even with CO2 emissions growing more slowly
than in years past,
again, 2023 was still the warmest year on record.
The United States, which takes second place
in the global ranks of the top CO2 emissions charters, 2023 was still the warmest year on record. The United States, which takes second place
in the global ranks of the top CO2 emissions charters,
cut its total shards by 2% in 2023.
That's not bad, but it's less than a third
of how much we need to cut back
if we hope to meet the guidelines laid out
in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Basically, if we want to stay in line with those goals,
we're gonna have to reduce emissions
by almost 7%
every year between 2024 and 2030.
In case you're confused,
because frankly all of this is very confusing,
let's put it another way.
If humanity wants to keep the globe from warming
by more than 1.5 degrees by 2100,
the world will need to cut its CO2 emissions in half by the end of the decade
and get to net zero carbon emissions by the 2050s.
And just so we're clear, net zero doesn't mean
we don't produce any carbon.
It just means we'll need to take as much carbon
out of the air as we put in.
We will talk about one plausible way
that can be achieved in part two of this series
along with its inevitable pitfalls.
But first, it's time to drag us all further
into the pit of despair
and ask the question everyone is thinking about,
except for you, Jordan.
You're browsing loud ties on Amazon.
But for everybody else,
what's the worst, worst case scenario here?
The worst, worst case scenario. That The worst worst case scenario.
That's bad, Jordan.
So let's say the whole world wakes up one day
and decides that despite everything we've seen so far,
climate change just doesn't exist.
I don't know, maybe they all got a job at ExxonMobil.
We stop trying to cut back on carbon emissions,
we scrap all the contracts,
and we keep pumping fossil fuels out of the ground
like it's your stomach on your 21st birthday.
Congrats!
According to Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivet-Karnak,
two of the folks involved in developing
the Paris Climate Accords,
if we did nothing at all,
we'd have fewer than 26 years
before the planet turns into an actual hellscape.
Two, six.
That is not a long time.
Vin Diesel will still be making Fast and Furious movies
in 26 years, although I'm guessing those films
and his name won't be as fun at that point.
In their book, The Future We Choose,
they lay out in horrific detail what this might look like.
Quote, more moisture in the air
and higher sea surface temperatures have caused a surge
in extreme hurricanes and tropical storms.
Coastal cities in Bangladesh, Mexico, the United States, and elsewhere have suffered
brutal infrastructure destruction and extreme flooding, killing many thousands and displacing
millions.
News stories tell of people living in houses with water up to their ankles because they
have nowhere else to go.
Because multiple disasters are often happening
simultaneously, it can take weeks or even months
for basic food and water relief to reach areas
pummeled by extreme floods.
Diseases such as malaria, dengue, cholera,
respiratory illnesses, and malnutrition are rampant.
And so on, and so on.
It's bad.
The opening montage to a Mad Max film
or the middle section of a Deadpool movie, you get it.
This is after the part about violent mass migrations
and how all the air tastes like acid, not the good kind.
And before we get to the part about melting permafrost,
releasing ancient microbes
humans have never encountered before,
which hopefully kills all those hypothetical people off
quickly because the alternative is less fun.
Now, lest you think this is the fictional nightmare fuel which hopefully kills all those hypothetical people off quickly because the alternative is less fun.
Now, lest you think this is the fictional nightmare fuel
of two randos working for Big Doom,
we should point out that everything they described
is taken from real concerns of climate scientists,
and some of it is already happening.
Take the melting permafrost, for instance.
Permafrost is a layer of ice, gravel, or rock
at or just under the Earth's surface.
It's found in parts of the world
that rarely rise above freezing,
like Siberia and the Arctic.
And there are about 1.5 trillion metric tons
of CO2 trapped inside,
twice as much as what's in the atmosphere right now.
It's also filled with all kinds of nasty stuff,
including some new and exciting strains of bacteria
that humans have never encountered before,
and others that may already be resistant to antibiotics.
Neat.
It's like a mystery prize box from a Lovecraftian game show.
What's behind door number unfathomable thing,
or this other door number unfathomable concept.
There are plenty of people living
on top of permafrost already.
So if it melts and they catch these gnarly ice bugs,
it's not implausible that we'd wind up in a scenario
that really does make COVID look like a bad cold.
Maybe we'll get Andromeda strained or the happening happened
will be happened to.
It's very bad is my point, Jordan.
This is the worst, very bad.
Lots of death, hard to even describe the scale of death.
My comedy news show on YouTube isn't equipped
to portray the gravity of the scenario.
It's like a million warm bows all crying out.
Got it.
And that's not what has to happen.
In fact, there is a timeline where we steer this clown train into Goodsville. Not Greatsville,
Okaysville. Decentburg. Philadelphia. This is also known as
the best best case scenario.
So on the flip side, let's say we're successful in cutting CO2 emissions by half every decade
for the next 30 years, perhaps by upping our investment
in green energy and curbing our addiction to fossil fuels
and convincing Jordan Peterson specifically
to stop spewing all that hot air.
Just kidding, Jordan, couldn't resist.
I'm not kidding, you should shut up.
This is the best best case scenario,
the one that keeps us under 1.5 degrees of warming.
Here's what the world might look like
according to Figueres and Rivet Karnak.
Quote, in most places in the world,
the air is moist and fresh, even in cities.
The air is cleaner than it has been
since before the industrial revolution.
We have trees to thank for that.
The forest cover worldwide is now 50%
and agriculture has evolved to become more tree-based.
The result is that many countries are unrecognizable
in a good way.
All homes and buildings produce their own electricity.
Every available surface is covered with solar paint
that contains millions of nanoparticles
which harvest energy from the sunlight
and every windy spot has a wind turbine.
They're even making good Star Wars movies again.
I added that last part, but yeah, sounds lovely.
But to be clear, this is still O'Kaysville.
It's not a utopia where the atmosphere is sparkling clean
and cars emit a minty vapor that heals all wounds,
both physical and emotional.
In other words, this best best case scenario
is not totally free from all climate turmoil.
We are already in the hole.
We've already done the damage.
So our ideal situation is still one
where we are offsetting that harm.
Again, Cro-Nuts.
This is the world where we've stopped eating Cro-Nuts
altogether, but still have to deal with decades
of eating nothing but Cro-Nuts.
We have to get our blood sugar down, exercise,
burn down the local bakery, and so on.
In the world imagined by those authors,
the CO2 and other greenhouse gases
already in the atmosphere have nowhere to go.
So they continue wreaking havoc
in the form of extreme weather.
All that wild weather creates resource shortages
and makes the existing wealth gap
even bigger than it is now.
Also, those Star Wars movies aren't amazing.
Like they're just pretty good.
Like they plan them in advance
so they feel more cohesive and intentional,
but ultimately Star Wars is for kids
and kind of boring, you know?
It's time to move on.
But still, that weather and the wealth inequality
would both be much less extreme than they would
if we did nothing at all.
Even if it's not perfect,
this is still something we should aspire to.
This is the obtainable goal, the dream on that low bar.
Let's talk about what happens
if we don't quite meet that goal,
the middle point between total victory and Cronut's defeat.
The best-ish case scenario.
This is the scenario where we overshoot
the Paris Climate Accord, but still stay below two degrees.
At this point, even if the whole world managed
to achieve net zero carbon emissions,
the Clown Train has already left the station
for some consequences.
For one, it's clear from climate change models
that the ocean is gonna keep rising no matter what,
which is bad news for coastal communities,
but great for any mermaids obsessed with human objects,
even woke mermaids.
Still, just how much the ocean will rise
is to some degree up to us.
By the IPCC's models, sea levels will go up
about two to three meters over the next 200 years
if global warming doesn't go past 1.5 degrees.
But if the world gets warmer by two degrees,
that could double to up to six meters.
If things stay that way for long enough,
that will completely melt the ice sheets
in Greenland and West Antarctica forever.
No back seas.
And if we get really freaking wild
and heat shit up by five degrees,
the ocean would rise by as much as 22 meters
and wipe out entire countries and parts of other countries.
Again, great news for that one freak mermaid.
And I guess any water world cosplayers out there,
bad for everyone else, bad for most people.
But it doesn't have to be that extreme.
If we overshoot the Paris Climate Accords goal
by a little bit and the world winds up
about 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer by the end of the century,
two things are still pretty well boned,
coral reefs and alpine glaciers.
With 1.8 degrees of warming,
scientists estimate that about 10% of the world's coral reefs and about 20 glaciers. With 1.8 degrees of warming, scientists estimate
that about 10% of the world's coral reefs
and about 20% of glacial sheets will still be here by 2100.
Or to put it another, perhaps more urgent way,
90 and 80% will be gone.
Gone, Jordan!
Are you listening?
Or did you get distracted by the mermaid thing?
Are you writing a lecture on mermaids and Jesus right now, Jordan?
Anyway, that's obviously better
than the worst worst case scenario
where the reefs and glaciers are completely destroyed,
but it's still pretty devastating.
So, all right.
That's the spectrum of possibilities,
the rainbow of terror,
which would be a good name for a Halloween drag show.
Someone should do that.
So where are we on track to land?
The worst, worst case scenario,
the best, best case scenario,
or the best-ish case scenario?
Obviously, it depends on us, but also obviously,
we can kinda guess what humans will do.
So let's open this mystery box
and stick our entire faces inside
and hope it's not a bunch of razors.
The most likely scenario.
It's kinda razors.
So like we said earlier,
the world has been knocking out warming records
left and right over the past 10 years.
And 2023 was the hottest one yet.
But we are at least trying to put the brakes
on CO2 emissions, which is why,
by scientists' latest estimates,
we're probably not going to wind up
in the worst, worst case scenario.
Congratulations-ish, good-ish news,
but we're unlikely to do what it takes
to reach the best, best case scenario either.
Less good news.
And nor are we on track for the best-ish case scenario,
the one where we don't really reach our climate goals,
but we don't go too far past them either.
Ungood news.
That puts the needle a little above
that we're all gonna die level,
but just shy of the most of us won't die level.
Like it's not moonfall or 2012
where we all spectacularly perish,
but it's also not the core where most of us get saved
and the problem is solved.
Remember the core, Jordan?
Remember it?
They hacked the planet in multiple ways.
Jordan, watch the core.
So instead of reaching those goals,
according to a United Nations report published in 2022,
the policies as they stand put us at about 2.4 degrees of warming by 2100.
If emissions rates don't change, that rises to 2.8 degrees.
So what does that look like for us?
Well, even under the best best case scenario,
extreme weather was still the norm.
A scenario where we go up to 2.4 degrees Celsius
means it gets even wackier, if you find death wacky.
Even the less than extreme temperature rises
we're currently seeing are messing with weather patterns
pretty profoundly.
Case in point, in the United States,
2023 saw the highest number yet of natural disasters
that each caused over a billion dollars in damage.
The previous record was 2020.
High cost disasters are a general trend
that's been going on for decades
with the worst effects in the Southeast United States.
Now these numbers aren't just driven by climate chaos.
As the NOAA pointed out in its report,
they're also due in part to population growth
in areas that weren't previously quite as populated,
which means there's gonna be a lot more property damage
when disaster strikes.
Still, the disasters are a hell of a lot worse
than they were in the past.
For example, some parts of Texas and Arizona
were the hottest they've been since record keeping began.
And Texas, as a whole, went through its second hottest summer
and its hottest year overall. I mean, it is Texas, so it whole, went through its second hottest summer and its hottest year overall.
I mean, it is Texas, so it's gonna be hot,
but that heat is starting earlier in the year
and lasting longer.
Thank goodness they have really competent people in charge
who aren't obsessed with punishing migrants
and pointless culture war garbage.
Can't feel the heat if you're not woke.
It's not just that these disasters are happening.
It's that they're happening so often
that it feels like they never end. You don't even have time to recover from the last one. Look! It's not just that these disasters are happening. It's that they're happening so often
that it feels like they never end.
You don't even have time to recover from the last one.
You get numb.
Last summer, for example,
while Arizona baked in a killer heat wave,
floods in the Northeast trapped people in their homes.
Less than a month later,
a massive wildfire cooked parts of Maui
and California got hit by a super rare tropical storm.
Meanwhile, outside the United States,
northern China witnessed extreme flooding
and torrential rainfall at the highest levels in 140 years.
Sure, summer is peak disaster season
in many parts of the world, including the United States,
but the time between the big ones is getting shorter and shorter.
According to the NOAA, there were just 18 days on average
between disasters that caused
over a billion dollars in damage between 2018 and 2022, compared to 82 days between them in the
1980s. And remember earlier in the episode when we talked about extreme event attribution,
where researchers calculate just how likely it is that an event was made worse by climate change?
Scientists think that was the case
for all the disasters we just mentioned,
along with plenty of others that went down
during the rest of the year.
And of course, all that extreme weather
and the natural disasters it causes
are bad news for farming and agriculture.
A report from a farming advocacy group
called the American Farm Bureau Federation
estimated that 2023's natural disasters and severe weather
caused nearly $22 billion in crop losses.
And that's just in the United States.
While it's impossible to calculate just how much drought
and floods and extreme heat cost farming operations
elsewhere in the world, we do know that the countries
that are already at the highest risk of food insecurity
are also the ones that are most impacted the highest risk of food insecurity are also the ones
that are most impacted by climate change, even now.
For example, a long drought caused by climate change
caused an ongoing famine in the Horn of Africa.
Also, before anyone says it's Jordan,
yes, higher levels of CO2 is actually good for plants.
There's even some evidence that climate change
might even improve agriculture in some parts of the world.
But those benefits will be offset by the fact
that extreme weather and heat is gonna fuck up
the vast majority of places that supply the world's food.
Jordan seems to think that more CO2
will just make the entire planet
a beautiful lush green paradise.
Plants can't thrive if they're bulldozed by a hurricane
or if they're on fire.
So in short, with everything as it stands,
we have a lot more famine to look forward to
by the end of the century,
especially in the places that contributed least
to manmade climate change.
The good news, if you want to call it that,
is that it probably won't be an extinction level event,
or rather climate change won't be.
Technically, we could still potentially
Jurassic world ourselves and make all of this moot.
And frankly, having dinosaurs back
would actually be less horrifying than the reality,
unless Chris Pratt's doing the voices.
But I would much rather die from getting trampled
by a Stegosaurus than famine.
Man, why couldn't this video be about dinosaurs?
I guess in a really abstract way it is about them,
their bones, so that's neat.
I broke your toilet.
No, no, no.
Little shit.
I'm not gonna eat it.
I really wanna eat it.
I'm gonna get some traps and then I will discuss
with myself if I'm gonna eat them.
I'm not gonna eat them.
I'm gonna eat them.
I'm gonna trap you.
I'm gonna trap you fuckers.
Okay, so Jordan, I really hope this cleared up
some confusion for you.
I know you don't want to admit it's a problem
because you don't trust anyone but yourself
to solve problems or think about stuff.
And I know it's really depressing
to take a hard unflinching look
at the actual science behind climate change.
It's like turning on all the lights after a rave.
No one wants to see that.
And so I think it's a lot easier
for people to just not think about it at all,
or tell themselves that it's really not that bad.
I mean, in your case, Jordan,
it's more likely that you're just getting paid
to lie to other people,
but to the other people who tell themselves
it's not that bad, I get it.
Most people can't really do anything to stop it,
not directly at least.
But the other thing you can't do is deny it.
I mean, you can, apparently, but in order to do that,
you have to either completely shut out scientists
or create an elaborate narrative
where they are all out to get you
because ultimately climate change is just a thing
that's happening.
Just look at this entire video.
We never spoke in vague emotional terms
or brought up political ideas to justify these beliefs.
It's not a political issue.
It just is.
Researching this video is no different
than researching gravity or the earth being round.
These are just basic scientific facts.
And if anyone is denying them,
they are either very, very misguided
or a liar with an agenda that doesn't care if billions of people are killed?
Which one are you, Jordan?
So this sucked.
Bummer episode.
But here's a question.
Is there anything we can do about climate change
at this point?
Well, in our next episode,
we're going to answer that question.
We're going to talk about the path forward.
And unfortunately, the many people blocking that path.
I'll give you a hint, they rhyme with sex on scrotal.
So stay tuned, Jordan, because that video is also
for and about you specifically.
Tell your friends.
Like and subscribe, partner.
You're the only cool one. call you cow bow little cowboy cowboy you're alright
What do you ride? What do you wrangle?
What do you want to do today?
I got time now, we're done.
You want to hang out?
I'm gonna get you!
I'm coming after you, my man!
Oh, we're stomping down on the little guys!
They go squish, squish, squish!
All day long!
Okay, I'm gonna go get you!
I'm gonna get you!
I'm gonna get you!
I'm gonna get you!
I'm gonna get you!
I'm gonna get you!
I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! I'm gonna get you! Oh, we're stomping down on the little guys.
They go squish, squish, squish all day long.
Okay.
Hi, how's it going?
Just kidding.
That was miming.
See, at least this one's fine.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
He's doing great.
Like and subscribe like he said in the video.
Like and subscribe like he said in the video.
Be sure to check out our patreon.com slash some more news.
We've got a podcast called Even More News.
We've got this show as a podcast.
It's called Some More News.
Check both of those shows out at the podcast place and on YouTube to watch on video.
You know, you saw this one just now.
We got merch with, I guess guess their grand horror on stuff I don't even know
what's going on with this relationship or this plot but we're gonna find out I
promise you that so yeah merch store honestly the only thing I have left to say is we go stomp, stomp, stomp on the little guys.
They scream.
He's fine.
On the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll hear amazing stories from people that have
lived them from spies to CEOs, even an undercover agent who infiltrated the
Gambino crime family.
You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show
with Jack Garcia, who did just that.
My career was 24 out of 26 years
was solely dedicated working undercover.
I walk in, I'm in the bar.
Now there's a bar made there, good looking young lady.
She's serving me, Julia, what would you like?
I usually, my drink was, give me a kettle, one martini, three olives, glass of water on the side.
I finished the drink, the guys come in,
I'm gonna go, go in my pocket,
take out the big wad of money, bam, I give her $100.
If you're with the mob, I say, hey Jordan,
you're on record with us.
That means we protect you, nobody could shake you down.
We could shake you down, but you're on record with us. For more we protect you. Nobody could shake you down. We could shake you down,
but you're on record with us. For more on how Jack became so trusted in the highest levels of the
Gambino organization, check out episode 392 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.