What is Climate Change?: Crash Course Climate & Energy #1

Summary

The script from 'Crash Course Climate and Energy' explores the intimate and impersonal aspects of climate change, emphasizing its impact on daily life and global systems. It discusses the greenhouse effect, the role of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, and how human activities, especially since the Industrial Revolution, have accelerated global warming. The script also touches on the challenges of predicting weather from climate data and the unequal consequences of climate change, urging a collective response to this planetary crisis.

Takeaways

• 🌍 Climate change is a deeply personal issue impacting everyday activities like grocery shopping and commuting, yet it's also a vast, impersonal phenomenon involving geological timescales and processes.
• 🔍 Understanding climate change requires looking at it from various scales: personal, societal, and planetary, as well as through time and space.
• 👩‍🔬 Eunice Foote was one of the first scientists to link carbon dioxide levels to atmospheric heating, conducting experiments in the 1850s that demonstrated the greenhouse effect.
• 🌡 The greenhouse effect is a natural process where greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, similar to how glass panels in a greenhouse trap heat.
• 🌉 Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor play a crucial role in regulating Earth's temperature and climate.
• 📈 Small increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide can lead to significant temperature changes, contributing to severe weather events, melting ice caps, and a more challenging environment for life on Earth.
• 🔬 Scientists study ancient rocks and fossils, as well as ice cores from glaciers, to understand past climate conditions and the correlation between greenhouse gas levels and global temperatures.
• ⛰ Earth has experienced extreme temperature fluctuations throughout its history, including 'Snowball Earth' periods and warm periods that made the poles ice-free.
• 🚀 The rapid increase in global temperatures in the last 200 years is unprecedented, largely due to human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution.
• ☀️ The current rate of global temperature increase is significantly faster than at any point in the last 100,000 years, with serious implications for weather patterns and the planet's ecosystems.
• 🌱 Human-induced climate change is causing a range of impacts, from melting ice caps and rising sea levels to shifts in agricultural productivity and an increase in extreme weather events.

Q & A

How does climate change affect our daily lives?

Climate change affects our daily lives in various ways such as impacting grocery prices, fuel costs, voting decisions, water usage, and even the need for adjusting clothing due to changes in seasonal weather patterns.

What is the relationship between greenhouse gases and global warming?

Greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere, leading to an increase in global temperatures, which is a phenomenon known as the greenhouse effect.

Who was Eunice Foote and what was her contribution to climate science?

Eunice Foote was a scientist in the 1850s who conducted experiments showing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can trap heat, making her one of the first to establish a link between carbon dioxide and atmospheric heating.

How do ice cores provide evidence of past climate conditions?

Ice cores from glaciers contain trapped air bubbles that are samples of the Earth's atmosphere from the past. By analyzing these bubbles, scientists can determine the historical levels of greenhouse gases and past climate conditions.

What were the 'Snowball Earth' periods mentioned in the script?

The 'Snowball Earth' periods refer to times in Earth's history when it was extremely cold, with ice sheets and sea ice possibly extending to the equator, due to factors such as volcanic ash blocking sunlight or a drop in carbon levels.

How have human activities contributed to the current rate of global warming?

Human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels during the industrial revolution, have released large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to an unprecedented rate of global warming.

What is the difference between climate and weather as discussed in the script?

Climate refers to long-term trends in temperature and precipitation patterns across the globe, while weather is the short-term atmospheric conditions experienced in a specific location. Climate change can influence the frequency and intensity of weather events.

Why are extreme weather events more likely in a warmer climate?

Extreme weather events are more likely in a warmer climate because the increased heat trapped in the oceans and atmosphere provides more energy to fuel these events.

What are some of the global impacts of climate change mentioned in the script?

The script mentions impacts such as melting ice caps, rising sea levels, shifts in agricultural productivity, more frequent and severe storms, floods, and droughts, which can lead to economic losses and geopolitical tensions.

How does the script suggest that climate change affects different regions unequally?

The script indicates that regions least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions often face the most severe consequences of climate change, suggesting an unequal distribution of impacts.

What is the call to action presented in the script regarding climate change?

The script calls for a collective effort to understand and address climate change, exploring various solutions and pathways forward for a new way of living together on Earth.

Outlines

00:00

🌍 Climate Change: Personal and Universal

The paragraph introduces climate change as a dual phenomenon that is both intimately personal and cosmically impersonal. It affects everyday activities like grocery shopping and gas filling, and also involves geological timescales and processes. The concept of zooming in and out to understand climate change is introduced, emphasizing the need to consider both individual and systemic perspectives. The paragraph also highlights the collective and systemic nature of the problem, affecting populations and global systems like energy grids and trade. The historical context is provided by introducing Eunice Foote, who in the 1850s conducted experiments linking carbon dioxide to atmospheric heating, one of the first to demonstrate the greenhouse effect.

05:04

🔍 Understanding Climate Change Through Science

This section delves into how scientists study climate change by examining ancient rocks and fossils to understand past temperatures and atmospheric compositions. It discusses the use of ice cores from glaciers as a more recent record, showing how they contain bubbles of ancient atmospheres. The paragraph explains that throughout Earth's history, temperature fluctuations have been closely tied to the levels of greenhouse gases. It then takes a journey through time to describe past climate states, such as the 'Snowball Earth' periods and warmer times when polar ice caps did not exist. The industrial revolution is highlighted as a turning point, with the burning of fossil fuels releasing carbon dioxide and leading to unprecedented rates of global warming. The paragraph concludes by emphasizing that human activity is the cause of the rapid temperature increase observed in the last 200 years.

10:06

🌡️ Climate Change Impacts and Global Consequences

The final paragraph discusses the complexity of linking climate and weather, explaining how warmer climates can lead to more extreme weather events due to increased energy in the atmosphere. It touches on the efforts of meteorologists to improve forecasting models and the general outcomes predicted if the current pace of climate change continues, which include melting ice caps, rising sea levels, and increased frequency of storms and droughts. The paragraph also addresses the uneven impact of climate change, noting that regions least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions often face the severest consequences. It raises ethical questions about our responsibilities to each other and the planet, and suggests that while there are no easy solutions, there are many ideas for tackling climate change. The paragraph ends with a call to explore these potential solutions for a sustainable future.

Keywords

💡Climate change

Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, especially those caused by human activities such as burning fossil fuels. In the video, climate change is described as both intimate and personal, affecting everyday actions like grocery shopping, and also cosmically impersonal, involving geological timescales and processes. It is a central theme as the video discusses its impacts on a personal level and its broader implications for the planet.

💡Greenhouse effect

The greenhouse effect is a natural process where certain gases in Earth's atmosphere trap heat from the sun, keeping the planet warm enough to sustain life. The video explains this concept by comparing it to a greenhouse that uses glass to trap heat for plants. However, it also discusses how an increase in greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, is enhancing this effect and leading to global warming.

💡Carbon dioxide (CO2)

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that is released through natural processes such as respiration and volcano eruptions, and also through human activities like burning fossil fuels. The video highlights Eunice Foote's experiments that linked CO2 to atmospheric heating, and it is central to the discussion of how human activities are increasing its concentration in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

💡Fossil fuels

Fossil fuels are energy sources like coal, oil, and natural gas that were formed from the remains of ancient plants and animals. The video points out that the Industrial Revolution's heavy reliance on fossil fuels for energy and heat release large amounts of carbon dioxide, which is a major driver of climate change.

💡Ice cores

Ice cores are samples of ice extracted from glaciers, which contain trapped air bubbles that provide a historical record of the Earth's atmosphere. The video mentions how scientists study ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica to understand past climates and the relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature changes over hundreds of thousands of years.

💡Global temperature

Global temperature refers to the average temperature of the Earth's surface. The video discusses how global temperatures have been rising at an unprecedented rate in the last 200 years, largely due to human activities, and how this is causing various environmental changes and challenges.

💡Weather vs. Climate

The video distinguishes between weather, which is short-term atmospheric conditions in a specific location, and climate, which is the long-term average of weather patterns in a region. It explains that while weather can be variable and seem at odds with a warming planet, climate change affects weather patterns on a global scale.

💡Snowball Earth

Snowball Earth refers to a hypothesized period in Earth's history when the planet was almost entirely or completely frozen over. The video uses this term to illustrate extreme climate conditions in the past and how they contrast with current rapid warming trends.

💡Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period of significant industrial growth that began in the late 18th century, marked by the shift from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, improved efficiency of water power, the increasing use of steam power, and the development of railways. The video connects the Industrial Revolution to the rapid increase in greenhouse gas emissions due to the widespread use of fossil fuels.

💡Greenhouse gases

Greenhouse gases are gases in Earth's atmosphere that trap heat. The video explains that besides carbon dioxide, other gases like methane and water vapor also contribute to the greenhouse effect. The concentration of these gases in the atmosphere is a key factor in determining the planet's temperature.

💡Eunice Foote

Eunice Foote was a 19th-century scientist who conducted experiments on the heating effects of different gases, including carbon dioxide. The video highlights her as one of the first scientists to establish a link between CO2 and atmospheric heating, and her work is foundational to our understanding of the greenhouse effect.

Highlights

Climate change affects everyday activities like shopping and driving.

Climate change involves complex interactions of gases, rocks, and chemicals over billions of years.

Climate change is a systemic problem impacting populations and global systems.

Understanding climate change requires examining various time scales and perspectives.

Eunice Foote's experiments in the 1850s linked carbon dioxide to atmospheric heating.

The greenhouse effect is likened to a volleyball game where the atmosphere traps heat.

Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor play a critical role in Earth's temperature.

Ancient rocks and fossils reveal past climate changes and atmospheric compositions.

Ice cores provide a detailed record of Earth's climate over hundreds of thousands of years.

Earth's climate has varied greatly, with periods both much colder and warmer than today.

The industrial revolution and burning of fossil fuels have led to a rapid increase in global temperatures.

The rate of global temperature increase in the last 200 years is unprecedented.

Human activity, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, is the primary cause of current global warming.

Climate change can lead to extreme weather events due to increased energy in the atmosphere.

The impacts of climate change are global but experienced differently by various regions.

Climate change can result in economic losses, displacement, and geopolitical tensions.

Regions least responsible for emissions often face the most severe consequences of climate change.

There are many potential solutions and approaches to tackling climate change.

Crash Course Climate and Energy explores the challenges and potential pathways forward in addressing climate change.

Transcripts

Climate change is intimate and personal.

At this point, it affects you every time you go to the grocery store, or fill your gas tank,

or vote, or flush the toilet, or put on your long underwear for a later-than-usual snowfall.

And every year, it will affect you more.

At the same time, it’s cosmically impersonal.

It involves gases, and rocks, and chemicals that have been operating in relationship for

billions of years before there were any persons…or underwear to contend with at all.

In between these two levels — the sphere of your bedroom and the sheer vastness of

the history of the universe — there are still other vantage points to look at climate change from.

Climate change is a collective and a systemic problem — dealing not just with individuals

but with entire populations and global systems — like energy grids and international trade.

So, we have to kind of zoom in and zoom out.

Travel through time and space.

And as centuries of mad scientists have taught us, that’s not an easy task!

Hi hi! I’m M Jackson, and this is Crash Course Climate and Energy.

[INTRO]

Think about it.

There’s the human lifetime, where we all live — where there’s weather and politics

and hard choices and beautiful moments of collaboration.

And then there’s hundreds of years that contain full human lifetimes — the generations

yet to come that will be impacted by the climate-related choices of today and yesterday.

On top of that, there’s the multi-billion-year timeline of Earth, which is entirely alien

to our human perception.

But we won the planetary lottery with our habitable Earth — the only one out of the

thousands of planets known in our galaxy where life like ours can survive.

So, yes, truly understanding climate change across all these timelines is tough.

Sometimes, it’s downright mind blowing.

But it’s on us to grapple with what’s happening not just to the Earth — but to

all of its inhabitants — as the climate changes faster now than ever before.

And I mean that…the Earth’s climate has never changed this fast.

Let’s start at the human scale… a single human actually.

A human named Eunice Foote.

In the 1850s, she was reading an issue of Scientific American — and became curious.

And like any good scientist, she nerded out about how the sun heats up the Earth.

She wanted to see how density and the mixture of gases in the air affected how much heat

the atmosphere could hold onto, and she tested that with a series of experiments.

In one of them, she noticed that high concentrations of so-called “carbonic acid gas”

made the air heat up faster and stay warmer for longer.

Based on her experiments, she concluded that, if the atmosphere ever contained more of this gas,

then we might also expect the global temperature to be higher.

Today, we know carbonic acid gas as carbon dioxide.

So, Foote became one of the first scientists to make the link between carbon dioxide and atmospheric heating.

It was one of the first experiments demonstrating the greenhouse effect.

You know that wash of warm air you get when you go into a greenhouse?

It happens because glass panels do a great job of trapping the sun’s heat to nurture

your tomato plants.

Well, imagine scaling that up to the entire Earth, but instead of glass trapping heat,

it’s gas.

Specifically, gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, which are known collectively

as greenhouse gases.

You can think of the greenhouse effect like a giant volleyball game between the sun and

the surface of the Earth, where the atmosphere is the net.

And instead of one ball, there are trillions.

The sun serves these balls as different forms of radiation — what you and I might experience

as visible light, UV light, or infrared radiation, which is another fancy way to say: heat.

Some of that radiation makes it over the metaphorical net.

It passes through the atmosphere and hits the planet’s surface.

A lot of that energy is then absorbed by the land and the sea.

Hey, where’d my ball go?

The land and sea naturally reflect back some of their heat energy, but with the greenhouse effect,

more and more heat energy is getting trapped by the net.

Then, the energy gets absorbed by the atmosphere instead of escaping into space —

the other side of the court.

That causes the energy to bounce back down toward the surface of the Earth, warming it up.

The Earth is losing the cosmic volleyball game, returning fewer and fewer of the Sun’s

serves every year as the amount of greenhouse gases goes up.

Now, instead of having a constant number of balls on our side of the court…

we have more each day.

Although greenhouse gases only make up a small portion of the atmosphere, they play a major

role in controlling our planet’s overall temperature, and its climate.

Even increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by just a few parts per million,

can lead to temperature changes that fuel severe weather, melt ice caps, and make

life on Earth generally more difficult.

How do we know this?

By studying the chemistry of rocks and fossils that are hundreds of millions of years old,

scientists can piece together how ancient temperatures fluctuated, and how, in parallel,

the composition of our atmosphere fluctuated.

But if we want a more recent picture, we can get an even better record from —drumroll—glaciers.

Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctic ice caps have preserved tiny bubbles of our actual

atmosphere from hundreds of thousands of years ago that today, scientists like me can study.

What all of these records tell us is that, throughout Earth’s four and half billion birthdays,

at times, it’s been a lot colder than today, and at other times, it’s been a lot warmer.

And guess what is one of the most consistent variables that leads to that temperature fluctuation?

You got it: the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

So, let’s travel through time and space to see what things looked like

when those bubbles were in their prime.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

Back when Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago, it was hot.

And I don’t mean “eating your bodyweight in popsicles” hot.

I mean, “covered in an ocean of molten rock,” hot.

Earth was still being pummeled by debris from the formation of the solar system, and volcanoes

were spewing out a whole lot of carbon dioxide, helping to trap all that heat.

Over millions and millions of years, the molten rock solidified, forming a solid surface on the Earth.

And millions and millions of years after that, the primitive ocean formed.

As a result, the Earth continued to gradually cool down.

And then, a couple of times throughout its early history, before animals we’d recognize

today even evolved, things got really cold.

So cold that researchers think ice sheets and sea ice extended all the way to the equator.

These are called Snowball Earth periods.

And scientists have a few ideas about why they happened, ranging from volcanic ash blocking

out the sun, to a drop in carbon levels, which was possibly a result of things like

early plants sucking in the gas for photosynthesis.

After that, it got hot again a few times over the next half a billion years, most recently

about 56 million years ago.

Back then, average global temperatures were as high as 23 degrees Celsius.

There would have been no ice at the poles, and palm trees and crocodiles could be found at the Arctic.

If humans had been around, we’d probably have been building tropical water parks at the North Pole.

Because if there's one thing we know for certain about our species, it's that we love a twisty slide.

But maybe thankfully for everyone, modern humans wouldn’t evolve for over 55 million years.

We know our fragile civilizations, water parks and all, wouldn’t have stood a chance through

these dramatic shifts in Earth’s climate.

Thanks, Thought Bubble!

Now, luckily for the human species, the ice core record of the last 800,000 years reveals

much gentler temperature fluctuations…

at least, until we get to the last 200 years.

In just a couple of centuries, temperatures have gone up faster than ever seen before

in recorded history, and the average temperature on Earth today is the highest it’s been

in 100,000 years.

We’ve never experienced this before.

Even when Earth emerged from previous ice ages, the planet warmed up at a rate of only

about one degree Celsius per 1,000 years.

But today, global temperatures have shot up by 0.7 degrees Celsius per 100 years.

That’s almost ten times faster!

So what changed in the last 200 years?

Well, there was one big thing: the industrial revolution, when humans discovered we could

do things a lot faster, and with a lot less effort, by burning fossil fuels.

Fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas provided a reliable source of heat and electricity.

So, when we went for them in a big way, they helped to shape our modern civilization.

And that’s how you ended up here, watching this video on an internet largely powered

by fossil fuels.

But burning these fuels comes at a cost: It releases carbon dioxide.

And as we’ve burned more of them to keep up with our growing population and energy needs,

our emissions have gone up as well.

And that volleyball match keeps getting harder to watch.

So, this is what we know.

The average global temperature has gone up, and carbon dioxide emissions have gone up,

and we know that carbon dioxide is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas.

As scientists have put those things together, it’s led them to an inescapable conclusion:

Human activity has caused the Earth to warm up at an unprecedented rate.

We can measure this warming with every passing month.

But its global effects aren’t as straightforward.

There’s a big difference between what scientists study as climate, and what you and I experience as weather.

Weather is where we live.

So when you wake up in Istanbul in March, and see that it’s weirdly cold and also snowing, that’s weather.

And although it may seem at odds with a warming planet,

it’s happening as a result of climate shifts elsewhere on Earth.

Climate deals with multi-decade, broad-scale trends in things like

temperature and precipitation patterns across the globe.

But since climate and weather are so closely linked, it can get complicated.

For instance, scientists agree that atypical, extreme weather events are more likely when

the planet’s climate is warmer, but that’s only because there’s more heat trapped in

the oceans and atmosphere to power these weather events.

Meteorologists are constantly working to improve their forecasting models, for both short-term

weather and long-term climate, based on how much energy is in the atmosphere.

By comparing and refining their models, scientists can now reliably predict some general outcomes

if the current pace of climate change continues.

And it might come as no surprise that it’s not looking good.

We can expect — and are currently already seeing in some cases — melting ice caps,

rising sea levels, shifts in agricultural productivity, more storms, more floods, more droughts.

Basically, climate change amplifies any weather you might typically experience.

And these effects can ultimately lead to global economic losses, displacement of vulnerable communities,

and almost inevitably, geopolitical tensions.

Changing climate and changing weather patterns will have a significant impact on everyone,

all over the globe.

But not everyone will experience the same consequences of those impacts,

or be able to adapt to them in the same way.

And those who have been and may continue to face some of the most severe consequences,

are often in regions least responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions driving global climate change.

So the question becomes: what do we owe to each other, as roommates on this singularly

lucky planet, where we live alongside tomato plants and vibrant blue glaciers and

frill-necked lizards and blob fishes and incredible human creativity?

We know temperatures have fluctuated dramatically over Earth’s long history, but by burning

so many fossil fuels and flooding the atmosphere with gases like carbon dioxide, we also know

we’re causing temperatures to rise faster than ever.

And while this is a massive challenge that won’t have easy solutions, there are lots

of fascinating ideas for how humans might tackle climate change from a number of different directions.

We don’t know all the answers and we can never return to the Earth of 250-years-ago.

But we’ll explore the many cobblestones that might make a pathway forward

towards a new way of living together on our Earth.

Even if it’s a bit bumpy.

Special thanks to Stephan Saar, our volleyball coach for this episode.

Stephan: thanks for never spiking the ball at our face — except for that one time —

and for being a Patreon supporter.

Crash Course Climate and Energy is produced by Complexly with support provided by

Breakthrough Energy and Gates Ventures.

This episode was filmed at Castle Geraghty Studio and was made with the help of these nice people.

If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.