- Hey, smart people.
Joe here. I don't know how to feel about 2023
for anyone paying attention to the climate.
It was an absolutely bonkers year.
Well, it was bonkers in a lot of other ways too,
but especially climate.
Here's why July was the hottest summer humans
have ever recorded.
The average temperature
of the ocean surface blew all previous
records out of the water.
Sea levels are the highest since our records started.
While Antarctic sea ice levels reached an all time low,
massive wildfires, may be worst of all,
the Earth's average temperature briefly reached two degrees
Celsius over the pre-industrial average
for the first time ever.
All thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions,
which keep going up.
Now. Yes, climate phenomenon like El Nino have boosted some
of this warming, but it can't account for all these changes.
Looking at all this data, it makes me feel a lot
of things like confused, worried.
The one thing, I'm not feeling optimistic.
I talk about climate change a lot, so
I shouldn't be surprised by all this.
It seems like 2023 was really bad.
So should I be worried that climate change is speeding up,
getting worse than scientists thought?
Or is this just exactly what
scientists warned would happen all along?
I need answers
Now.
One way I, and maybe you can figure out how
to feel about this whole climate change thing, is
to ask climate scientists
how they feel. So that's what I did.
- My name is Catherine Hayhoe and I am a climate scientist.
- I'm Michael Mann. I am a professor
and I'm also the author
of the recent book, our Fragile Moment.
- I figured two of the top climate scientists
around could put this data in perspective for me.
- The great Steve Schneider used
to say The truth is bad enough.
The models have predicted that we will continue to warm
as long as we continue
to put carbon pollution into the atmosphere.
And that's what it's doing. At more
or less the rate that the models predicted decades ago
- For over 130 years, we have known
what would happen to global temperature.
And what we have known also is the more carbon we produce,
the faster the temperature's gonna change.
And that is exactly what we see happening today. So
- The warming we're seeing today is exactly
what scientists said would happen if we added more
carbon to the atmosphere.
And we knew this over a hundred years ago.
Yet here we are feeling all surprised. Humans are weird.
Y'all though, does that mean that every awful weather thing
that has happened this year was caused by climate change?
No, because that's the wrong way to look at it.
These events aren't the result of climate change.
They are climate change.
Yeah, that was a pretty mind blowing epiphany for me too.
Like it's easy to fall into that
bad stuff can happen in any year, right?
Trap, especially since climate
and its influence on weather is super complicated.
But data doesn't lie.
And it tells us that these extreme weather events
that we're seeing, this is the climate
change they warned us about.
- What we've seen is sort of the emergence of
what we call the signal over the noise in the form
of these extreme weather events.
And so with each passing year, we go sort of further up that
that warming ramp.
Now we're seeing the impacts of that warming in the form
of extreme weather events.
- Picture it like this.
Wherever we live, we have this pair of weather dice
and we always have a chance
of throwing a double six naturally.
- And the higher the number, the worse the flood
heat wave or storm.
- But as the planet warms decade by decade global warming,
it's sneaking in and taking one of these numbers on our dice
and turning it to another six,
and then it's taking another number
and turning it into a seven.
And all of a sudden we're rolling double sixes
and even some double sevens,
- Our dice are messed up, y'all,
and we're high rolling our way to chaos.
2023 feels like we've rolled the dice and lost.
And I mean the last time there was more CO2 in Earth's
atmosphere than now Greenland had no ice on it
and sea level was 50 meters higher than it is today.
If that happened now, Tokyo, New York
and Shanghai would be underwater.
So this is the new normal, right? Not so fast.
There is nothing normal about any of this.
This is a famous graph published by Michael Mann
and his colleagues in 1998
before the Industrial Revolution,
Earth's temperatures were pretty consistent, actually,
at least as far as when humans were around.
But once we started pumping carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere, trapping more of the sun's heat, thanks
to the greenhouse effect, temperatures began to climb.
This wacky part at the end became known as the hockey stick
and not 'cause it feels like taking one to the face, but
because it's going almost straight up spoiler, it still is.
This isn't the worst that global warming has been in the
entire history of the world,
but it's the worst that's been in human history.
Like since our species was a thing
and since we are humans trying to live on this planet,
that's not great news.
All of this climate change data
is overwhelming time to give up, right?
- I know as a scientist
that we can make a difference.
- So there are so many ways
that we can have a positive impact,
and it's important for people to understand that,
- Okay, so hold up.
These scientists who look at scary data all day,
they're not freaking out.
They think we can slow down climate change.
Wait, so why aren't we fixing this then?
Is it because of all those pesky climate deniers?
- Climate denial really isn't the main obstacle anymore
because we can all see what's happening
with our own two eyes.
It doesn't mean that polluters
and those advocating for them have given up.
They've turned to other tactics, delay deflection
division, and ironically doom mongering
or despair mongering.
Because if they can convince us it's too late
to do anything about the problem,
it potentially leads us down.
That same path of inaction is outright denial.
Hey, if we can't do anything about the
problem, then why try?
- So that's what stands in the way of us
and progress in reversing climate change.
The real threat is climate doism,
as the cool climate scientists call it.
We cannot go full emo and get all sad in our rooms
and just give into hopelessness.
- And that means that it is just the right time
to start doing as much as all of us can.
It's as if we've already been smoking a pack
of cigarettes a day for years.
Some amount of change is already inevitable,
but we don't have emphysema,
we don't have lung cancer, and we're not dead.
So when's the best time to stop smoking as soon as possible?
How much? As much as possible?
And that's exactly where we are with climate change.
- A funny thing happens when we set doism aside.
We can see that we're actually kind
of making progress on climate.
Electric cars now cost almost the same
amount of money as gas ones.
So people are buying them in 23 countries.
More than 5% of new car sales are electric vehicles,
which a lot of people think is a key tipping point
for getting more EVs on the road.
One third of all the solar panels ever used were installed
in the last two years.
Renewables generated more energy than coal in the
United States for the first time ever in 2023.
And the world is on track to get the majority
of its energy from renewable sources by 2025.
So we still have a chance of limiting global warming
to two degrees Celsius or less, which is what we need
to do if we wanna minimize the
impacts of a changing climate.
So yeah, scientists got it right
and climate change is spiking just like they said it would.
I'm like, I want to end this video on a hopeful note
because climate change is bad
and this data, well, it's not great.
I don't know how to interpret all the weird
and scary things that happened to earth's climate in 2023,
but I do know one thing doing this, talking about it,
sharing good scientific information about what's happening
and what we can do about it.
Well, that's maybe the greatest hope we've got.
The way I see it, we have a choice about what to do
with all these awful firsts of 2023.
We could look back and say, wow, I wish I'd known
that 2023 was the best it would ever be.
Or we can look back
and see that 2023 was the worst it ever
got to make that happen.
We've gotta flip our mental switches from doism to activism
because doing something beats the heck outta doing nothing.
And if that's not something to be hopeful
about, I don't know what is.
Stay curious. Thank you guys so much
for making to the end of the video.
If you got this far, let me know
how you're feeling about 2023
or you know, leave me a comment, pick your favorite emoji.
And speaking of things that give me optimism, I would like
to thank everyone who supports the show on Patreon.
You guys rule, you make this show possible.
You let us talk about things that are important,
like this video instead of what just might be, you know,
in the memes and the trends and whatever.
Thank you all so much for your support.
If you would like to join that community,
maybe get your name here or down in the description
or a lot of other things we do over on the Patreon page.
There's a link down in description where you can learn more.
See you in the next video. How's that sound? Ready? Good.
Were you rolling? I don't have another one stored up.
Sorry, not a circus animal. I.