This video is sponsored by Microsoft Canada, and it's a collaboration with
youtuber Dom Burgess from the channel Every Think so it's gonna be a little bit
different. Now to a dire warning about climate change according to a new report
experts say we have until 2030 to avoid catastrophe it also says that if
unprecedented changes are not made and made soon there will be irreversible
damage to the planet.
Good Morning Global Citizens,
Todays the world's space agencies have come together for what can only be described as
humanity's last hope for solving climate change.
Last hope?
After nearly a decade
of design and construction and four trillion dollars later Project Sunshade
is ready to launch at its core the idea of rockets carrying trillions of small disks
will travel into space and deploy them in orbit around the earth when all disks
are deployed they will automatically arrange themselves into one giant disk
or sunbrella almost 100 kilometres in diameter providing a semi-permanent
shaded area over the earth Sunbrella will reduce the amount of
radiation you receive from the Sun by up to 12% and will in theory stop climate
change in its tracks and now let's go live to the launch site.
are you seeing this?
yeah its ridiculous, right?
yeah amazing
No, not 'good' ridiculous, I mean out of all of
the ridiculous ideas to solve climate change this is probably the hardest the
most expensive and the most over-engineered one there is and believe
me there are some pretty ridiculous ideas out there know what like killing
all the camels in Australia how many times guys you can't solve all your
problems by killing all the camels in Australia seriously it's a real idea
that's been proposed and there's actually some logic to it
look early settlers in the 19th century introduced camels to Australia and now
they're no longer needed and their population doubles every nine years
because they have no natural predators now considering that along with the fact
that each of them emits the equivalent of one ton of carbon dioxide per year
and the fact that there's over a million feral camels down under it's not an
insubstantial amount but it is a tiny fraction of the total 37 billion tons of
greenhouse gases that humans emit each year that's 37 thousand times more so
killing them all won't really solve that much
Dom?
there's one. Go to hell camel scum!
Dom? yeah sorry and I guess there's a fairly big ethical cloud hanging over
camel genocide exactly Dom and it's actually funny that you should mention
clouds do you have any books about volcanoes so what clouds and volcanoes
got to do with climate change well in 1991 a volcano erupted in the
Philippines and it was the second largest of the 20th century it's viewed
out about 16 million tons of volcanic material which spread out into the
Earth's atmosphere producing haze that blocked out so much sunlight that the
average global temperature dropped by 0.6 degrees Celsius
Wow Wow indeed Dom and this actually led some researchers to wonder if we could
use this same principle to help with climate change and that's how the idea
of 'cloud seeding' was born
okay so to make a cloud you usually need two things one is water vapor and the
other is particles like dust or salt the vapor sticks to the particles and allows
them to grow larger into raindrops when you get enough of them together you make
a cloud. One proposed idea is that we use fleets of large drones they would go out
and disperse huge amounts of particles into the atmosphere which would
hopefully create clouds and those clouds would reflect sunlight and that would
cool the earth
I am the ruler of the clouds!
Awesome. Yeah kind of... but the particles used would only add to man-made pollution and
even if we could find something neutral it would still probably have a ton of
unforeseen effects on the Earth's ecosystems and in the best case scenario
it would still take hundreds of years to work for it to stabilize the Earth's
climate so that's a shame I love clouds I guess I've just always looked up to
them. What about ocean tubes then?
What why?
Well I thought would be good for
demonstration purposes plus you know want to be clean when the Sun gets
blocked out. Okay then, anyway some scientists have suggested that we look to our
oceans for a solution after all they do soak up about 30% of the carbon dioxide
in our atmosphere so the idea would be put giant tubes in the oceans these
tubes would encourage the natural process of upwelling whereby cold
nutrient-rich water rises to the surface of the ocean and stimulates the growth
of algae the algae in turn consumes large amounts of carbon dioxide through
photosynthesis lowering atmospheric levels of the greenhouse gas.
Yehaw! Riding the ocean tubes
Won't creating huge amounts of how algae cause havoc with the ecosystem?
Dom, you're not as stupid as you look mmm thank you, i think.
Oh you're welcome Dom. So, a huge rise in the oceans algae population could cause dead spots
areas where the bacteria that can eat the algae they consume all the oxygen
meaning that no other marine life can be supported. Kurtis, is I think you might be
the smartest man on the planet well I'm no hero Dom I'm just doing my bit for
old mother earth
Dom, are you still there? Look at this.
Well that was fun but now back to reality. Okay we should not launch a
giant Sun umbrella to stop our planet from heating up but there are some ways
that technology can help save the planet which brings me to the sponsor that made
this whole video possible Microsoft Canada they have a program called AI for
Earth a 50 million dollar five-year commitment that awards grants to
accelerate research, innovation, and solutions to some of the most urgent
environmental problems of our time all in order to build a sustainable future
for the planet. Now how are Microsoft AI for Earth program grantees helping to
save the planet? While there are several examples here's two. The forests in
British Columbia, the province that I live, in have just experienced the two
most devastating wildfire seasons on the record in the last two years we need to
figure out a way to help our forests regenerate. AI for earth grantees as
the mother tree project are collecting tons of data about forests across
British Columbia and they're using AI to help make sense of that data in order to
understand ways we can successfully renew our forests another Canadian AI
for Earth grantee is WikiNet which is developing tools to help clean up soil
and groundwater that's been contaminated with toxic pollutants these researchers
are collecting data about the remediation of 10,000 contaminated sites
that's just too much data for a human to look through but WikiNet is using AI
to train computers with that data so that it can provide expert
recommendations for how to clean up these huge hazards honestly initiatives
like AI for Earth give me real hope for the future and if you want to check out
more of the climate solving projects that Microsoft Canada is helping make
possible I'll leave a link in the description. If it wasn't already clear
based on the irregularly high quality of video content for this channel this was
a collaboration with youtuber Dom Burgess from the channel Every Think. He
makes these incredibly cinematic short films and
sneeks in educational content like he did in this one. The guy is a wizard the
helicopter he just made that wormholes no problem he'll just make one and
before you know it you're learning about time travel. I'll leave links to a couple
of his videos in the description and I really hope you'll go over there and
check it out and subscribe to his channel it is severely underrated also a
huge thanks to Miriam Nielsen for joining us on this project
she runs a channel that is all about climate change it's called zentouro and
it has taught me a lot about the environment so if you want to go and
learn more about actual solutions to climate change that doesn't involve
killing all of the camels in Australia I'll also leave a link to her channel in
the description and I hope you'll go over there check it out and subscribe
and thanks again to everyone who made this video possible and thank you for
watching