SciShow Tangents - Climate Control

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

This episode of SciShow Tangents was created in partnership with Bill Gates, inspired by his new book “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster,” available now. To learn more, visit http://gatesnot.es/3qNsH4kFrom roaring fires to air conditioners to fuzzy slippers, humans have a knack for inventing things to keep them at just the right temperature. Unfortunately, they also have a knack for messing up the temperature of the planet… Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @slamschultz Hank: @hankgreenIf you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Fact Off]Skinner Air Cribhttps://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1037/1089-2680.3.3.155https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/skinner-air-cribhttps://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/history-cribs-other-brilliant-bizarre-inventions-getting-babies-to-sleep-180972138/https://psychology.fas.harvard.edu/people/b-f-skinnerMountain goat coolinghttps://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225456https://www.vice.com/en/article/epggvp/americas-iconic-mountain-goats-are-being-threatened-by-melting-ice-and-snowhttps://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-12/wcs-mga121019.php[Ask the Science Couch]Varied climates on planetshttps://climate.nasa.gov/news/2948/milankovitch-orbital-cycles-and-their-role-in-earths-climate/https://www.universetoday.com/35796/atmosphere-of-the-planets/[Butt One More Thing]Racecar butt air conditioning https://jalopnik.com/the-nismo-gt-r-gt3-has-air-conditioning-for-your-butt-1682925080

This episode of SciShow Tangents was created in partnership with Bill Gates, inspired by his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. You can find out more about how we can all work together to avoid a climate disaster by checking out the link at the show notes or heading to gatesnotes.com slash books. Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase. I am your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Riley. Hello. How are you?

Doing okay. Climate science. I just finished editing a couple scripts about it. So fresh in my brain. Yeah, it's a little bit always fresh in my brain, I have to say. It's one of my chief anxieties, as it should be. I do worry about a lot of things that maybe are not that important, but this one seems pretty vital, Sari. Am I wrong? It's up there. It's one of the big things. I think I neglected it for a lot of my educational career. things. I think I neglected it for a lot of my educational career. And then it became this looming cloud above me of like, oh, I need to know a lot about this and then feel very helpless, but maybe a little bit empowered. Yeah. Well, we're always learning. And, you know, I think that the point, the hope is that it motivates for action, not just despair. And we also have joining us our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hello. Sam, how are you feeling about climate change?

Well, from my only slightly less informed opinion than Sari's, pretty bad. I mean, I have to agree with you. To me, it feels promising, and this is maybe a weird thing to say, that the onus of it is shifting from personal responsibility to governmental responsibility. That seems to be like a tide that's coming in, which feels good that I don't have to worry about driving my car every single time I drive it and feel horrible about that. Yeah, I mean, this is very clearly not something that we can make personal decisions out of. We can make contributions. You know, we can talk about it. We can hope that a raised level of anxiety. This is the thing I hear sometimes. We humans are really good at solving problems,

and so I'm not that worried. And so if this is a big problem, we'll solve it. And I'm like, but we're only good at solving problems when we get really freaked out by them. when we get really freaked out by them. We don't, like, it's not like, it's not like, oh, like, we can relax. No, it's we have to be freaked out so that we can solve the problem. And that kind of goes for all of us because that's going to affect how we vote.

It's going to affect, you know, potentially where we live. It's going to affect behavior. But more than anything, it's going to affect, like, the policies that will eventually get enacted and the sacrifices that we as a society will vote to take because it won't be easy. That's the other thing I hear all the time is that it's going to be easy. It would be so simple to just not do any of these things. But no, it will take a certain amount of sacrifice, but also a lot of innovation and investment.

Oh, but it's going to be a thing. But to introduce the topic, would you like to get a science poem for you? Please. Maybe it will go some of the way towards solving climate change. It'll bring the people together. Everybody knows that poetry is how it really gets done. We've proved together that we can make things hot. Now we have to see if we can cool them down. There are things we can do, though I know that it's not as easy as some

people like to make it sound. We've got a problem on a scale that is unprecedented, and there's no simple fix that we can just call out. There are many new technologies that need to be invented, and policy is a plenty that we need right now. But let's imagine we accept that this challenge is real, and we can't pretend that things are just getting strange. We need to start making changes that are really big deals and new policies and strategies for climate change. So we need to make big change and we need to do it faster. So read Bill Gates' book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster.

It's the kind of poem that you snap after. it's the kind of phone that you snap after yeah like if you could tunica you put like a little baseline beneath it yeah some bongos and so our topic for the day is not climate change it's actually how you can change your climate around you yes it's about climate control it's about air conditioners and uh and i guess heaters to some extent as well. Maybe there's some animals changing temperatures too.

Who knows? Also, just wearing shirts. That's kind of it. A hoodie. That's climate control. And all these things have impacts on the climate too. Especially clothes

are like real bad, right? Well, yeah. Clothes are bad. Look, man. Almost everything's bad. Air conditioners are bad god i've got terrible news but yeah textiles are have way more of an impact than you would imagine on the environment have you seen the good place sam uh-huh it's like it's like anything you

can imagine on earth gets you negative points for climate yeah so, Sari, what is climate control? You both mostly defined it for me, but I think climate is the key word there that a lot of people throw around for meaning a lot of different things. And so in the atmosphere, you have weather, which is like day to day, it's rainy or it's sunny or it's snowy. And climate is like the average weather conditions of a given region. And so I think when it's applied or it's snowy. And climate is like the average weather conditions of a given region. And so I think when it's applied to indoor stuff or broadly, it's like the average weather conditions,

whether that's temperature, humidity, or air pressure or things like that of a region, whether that region is your house or your backyard office or wherever you may want to. My car. Yeah. Do you know the origin of the word climate? Because that one feels like it must have something weird to it.

There is something a little weird to it. So it comes from the Latin clima, which means slope or zone. And so climate used to denote a part of the earth between two lines of latitudes. So they were just like you can go to that climate it was like a physical place you could go to and then it was uh expanded to any region of the earth so like you could go to the american climate and that would be like you're traveling there and then eventually it referenced atmospheric conditions specifically all right that means it's time to move on to our game.

We are always experimenting with new games, but this week we don't really have a new game. We have an old game because we're just going to do I have prepared for you three facts. One of them is true and two of them are false. And they are all about things that we or other organisms need to do to maintain the temperatures they need to not be in distress.

Okay. Fact number one. Robots are great. And soft tissue robots are even cooler. So this is a thing that we're starting to do right now where we're creating robots that function very much like how our muscles function. very much like how our muscles function. So instead of just having like pistons and stuff, they actually like have contractile tissues almost of the sort that they can pull and push

much more like the way that muscles work. And there are lots of advantages to this, but one of the disadvantages is that like our muscles, sometimes these things can overheat and then they work less efficiently. So scientists have actually developed and are working on soft tissue robots that thermoregulate, control their own temperature, and can shed heat by sweating.

Sweaty robots. Fact number two. People are always telling me that pelicans cool off by sticking their spines out of their mouths. This is not true. They stretch their gular flap over their neck. this is not true. They stretch their gular flap over their neck. And so like their neck is sort of pushing up through the flap,

but their spine is no more exposed when they do this than any other time. In fact, it is less exposed because it has an extra layer of skin over it. Anyway, pelicans do however, have unique ways of cooling off. One of them, they will fill their pouches with a little bit of water

and they basically gargle that water until that water warms up, and then they squeeze it out of their beaks, just like they would normally squeeze water out, and thus use the water to cool themselves down. Or, fact number three, divers are always looking for ways to stay warmer while traveling in cold water. Sometimes it's so cold that you can only be in there for a pretty short amount of time, even in a pretty advanced wetsuit. Especially Navy SEALs are interested in that ability. Now, whales are super good at staying warm in cold water. So Navy SEALs are thinking about taking inspiration from whales and have been experimenting with

injecting tiny amounts of fat into their subcutaneous tissues to keep them warm in cold water. So you get a little bit of fat injected in you, then you put your wetsuit on, and so far, experiments have shown that they can stay underwater for 20% longer

than they would without the injected subcutaneous fat. And it would go away eventually, or what? Yeah, their body just absorbs it eventually. It's been so long

that I forgot that two of these weren't real, so I wasn't thinking critically about it. This is just the game where we sit and learn. That's it. Three fun facts from Hank.

Yeah. So the three facts. Sweaty robots, pelican gargles, or subcutaneous fatty navy seals. Oh, my God. I want that last one to be real so bad where do they oh i hate it where do they get it from uh just like the normal places you get oil from i feel like we excrete a lot of oil yeah there's there's plenty of biocompatible oils yeah i guess i was thinking human fat but it doesn't necessarily have to be that. No. Yeah. Okay. Probably shouldn't be that. No, I think that would be pretty bad if you took your own fat out of your body just to inject it back in.

Maybe it would be fine. You move it around. You take it out of one part and put it in another. So, I don't know, Sarah. You think that one seems pretty unlikely, huh? I honestly don't know. I'm also rusty with truth or fail. It doesn't sound good to me.

I feel like before I would inject myself with fat, I would like lather myself in fat and try to achieve a similar result. Oh, but that's just going to be sitting on top. This is like all intermixed with your interstitial fluids. But you got wetsuit, lard, cumin. It would be easier to slide in and out of your wetsuit too. Yeah.

Which is important for Navy SEALs. They get to the beach, and then they're just like, whoop! They just pop out of it like one of those popsicles. It's like, Jeff, Jeff, can you squeeze my foot? Whoop! That's real bonding there. Once you can squeeze your friend out of a wetsuit like a tube of toothpaste. Oh,aty robots.

Why not? That one seems plausible to me because water is a really good way to cool down. And then what was the second one? Oh, pelican gargling. Hank probably thinks about pelicans so much that it's impossible to know if this is a flight of fancy on his part or not. I think you can write it off, though, personally. Wow.

I haven't seen a tweet about this, so. I have not heard anything about gargling, but same logic applies as sweat, where it feels like a very good way to get rid of heat very quickly. If they don't do it already, they should be. Hank, as our ambassador to the pelican species, please let them know.

I think I'm going to go. God, I'm so tempted by the Navy SEAL one. I think I'm going to go. I'll go a sweaty robot. So that one seems so real. I'm going to go a sweaty robot too, I guess. I don't like the other two. Do it.

Heck yes. You're both right. Oh. Nicely done. Yes. Sweaty robots is real. As for the other two, they are not looking at injecting Navy SEALs with fat, though they are in such good shape.

I would think that maybe it would be a good idea because they have no body fat because they're always exercising and stuff. I don't know. I've never actually looked that hard at a Navy SEAL. But there is a thing that they're doing where they take a normal wetsuit and then they like stick it in an autoclave with a bunch of heavy inert gas. So like xenon and that's like creates these tiny little pockets, but they replace those pockets with xenon instead of with nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere. And because those molecules are so big,

they take longer to escape and create a better sort of like seal against the outside and can decrease heat transfer by 30%, I said. But you shouldn't autoclave yourself, I imagine. Never autoclave yourself. Okay. And then as far as pelicans go, they do use their flaps to cool off. And so they will sit there and open their mouths and just like flap air in and out of their pouches. And then there's like blood vessels in there that sort of are radiating the heat out. But they, as far as anyone can tell, do not gargle the heat away,

though it does seem like it would work. But finally, yes, they are, they have created these systems that are actually passively controlled. So they have little sponges that when the sort of area around them reaches 30 degrees Celsius, they actually start to contract. And the hotter they get, the more they contract. And as they contract, they're connected to these tiny little pores and it's put some water on the surface of these robot muscles and it evaporates and cools them down. One of the problems that they indicated with this system is that

there isn't like a way to automatically replenish the sponges that are in there. And so they were like, well, that means that the robots will need to drink. And I'm like, ah! I want a sweaty car. I originally wrote this fact as a fake fact that people were designing planes that sweated.

But I figured Sarah would poke a hole in that immediately and be like, there's no way. You'd like haul extra water and also ice. And it's not that hot up there. Yeah. Should have gone with sweaty cars. I would have believed it. Do you think the cars from Cars sweat? Like the Disney movie?

I think they probably drink water. No, they just have, they just do all normal car stuff. They're normal cars. Just sentient. Yeah. I don't think you ever see them ingest anything. Except gasoline. I don't even know if you see that. I feel like they have to sip gasoline from a soda

can at some point in that movie. I don't know. I don't think I've seen it, but. According to Cars 2 and Time Travel Mater, cars do drink water. However, Cars 2 shows Mater using his mouth to drink it, while in Time Travel Mater, the cars have the water going into the holes in their radiators instead of their mouths.

So cars use both ways. We're not saying that there's an inconsistency here. Cars use both ways to drink water. How does he put the cup to his mouth? I mean, I'm going to watch this immediately. Oren, I've seen cars like 85 times, but I've never seen cars too. Because every time I turn it on, Oren's like, no.

Tell Oren it's for science and that I really need to know whether cars drink water and if they sweat. I need to know who the heck time travel mater is. Alright everybody, that means that Sari and Sam are tied. And also, it means it's time for a

short break and then the fact off. This episode of SciShow Tangents was created in partnership with Bill Gates, inspired by his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster. In the book, Gates draws on his own experience in the worlds of technology and global health, as well as knowledge gained from countless climate change experts to lay out the challenges we face and what we can do to make a difference. This book looks at climate change from all angles, asking and answering tough questions like,

will this impact my day-to-day life? And how much is this going to cost anyway? But he also makes the humanitarian case for action on climate change, focusing on issues like how much more the consequences of climate change will impact those living in poverty. How to Avoid the Climate Disaster, like the title says, is full of solutions, including a whole chapter called A Plan for Getting Us to Zero, in which Gates discusses the policies and changes the world's governments and industries will need to make

in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. You can find out more about the book and how we can all work together to avoid a climate disaster by checking out the link in the show notes or heading to gatesnotes.com slash books. That's G-A-T-E-S-N-O-T-E-S.com slash books. Welcome back, everybody. And now it is time for the fact off. Our panelists have brought in science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. After they have presented their facts, I will judge and award them Hank Bucks any way I see fit. And to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question. In How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, we learn about the role of malaria

in the invention of modern air conditioning. A Florida physician, John Gorey, had a theory that cooler air would help his malaria patients. So he set about creating a machine, basically a swamp cooler, that could cool the air in his malaria ward by blowing air over melting ice. In what decade did he invent his machine?

John is such an every decade name. It is. It's true. If his name was like Hunter, then that would narrow it down. Thank goodness. That was like the furthest from the seed that I was trying to pull apart to figure out what decade it is. I was like trying to think of what malaria treatments were. I did not pay attention to the band's name at all. Then you should go first.

Well, the problem is, is I didn't get any closer than if I had looked at the name John. But I will say 1860. 1860 for Sari. I will say 1910. The answer is 1840. I remember the 1800s had malaria stuff going on. That is also true of all of the other centuries. We were starting to get a handle on it maybe at that point.

Well, I'm happy to go first. Okay. So climate control is all about making more comfortable environments to exist and stay healthy in, so it would make sense that we would specifically develop climate control technology for some of the most fragile and particular

humans, babies. And I'm not a parent, but from watching TV, I know a big problem is getting babies to nap comfortably. True, Hank? Yes, it is. Okay. And so cribs are pretty standard fare. You basically leave them, check in on them in person or with a baby monitor, and then free them when they're done napping. I think that's how you do babies. But the future version of this would be a fancy climate-controlled baby crib. So they have clean, filtered air.

They're in the scientifically perfect temperature and humidity conditions to take a nap. And you don't need to worry about wrapping them in blankets and them getting fussy about overheating or being too cold. To have that kind of control, this crib is more like a little room lined with comfy mattresses at the bottom that are easily removable for cleaning any drool or other baby fluids. And it's elevated so you don't have to bend down and hurt your back. But your baby also has no risk of falling out because it's enclosed and there's a sturdy transparent wall so you can always see in and they can see out. And you can still hear them and all the normal crib stuff. Again, I'm not a parent, but I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of smart crib became standard in wealthy households of the future. But it turns out that this is the exact description of the Skinner Air Crib, an invention from 1944 that flopped horribly,

not because it was scientifically unsound, but because of bad marketing. B.F. Skinner was a fairly prominent behavioral psychologist, and after raising one baby and another was on the way, he wanted to apply some of the lessons he learned to hopefully make baby care for all parents better with a cozy climate-controlled crib for naps. But when he published an article in the magazine Ladies Home Journal that he called Baby Care Can Be Modernized, the editors retitled it Baby in a Box, and the misinformation spread from there. You don't have to parent anymore. Just close it up. Yep.

Put some packing tape over the top. Basically. So even though any parent who used the air crib had positive things to say and the children grew up normally, including Skinner's daughter, a lot of people had opinions and the narrative quickly escalated basically to what you were saying. Like BF Skinner's daughter, a lot of people had opinions and the narrative quickly escalated basically to what you were saying. Like BF Skinner was experimenting on his baby and encouraging other parents to treat their children like lab rats and make them live in this box 24 hours a day. Like you can see the propaganda from magazines. And Skinner also had an unfortunate early partnership with a shady salesman. So some early customers got screwed over with not good models or no product after purchasing it.

So even when he found a reputable engineer to work with and create the Air Crib Corporation and sold a few hundred of them, his reputation was in the dirt. So he went out of business in 1957, and the invention was lost as a vague bad idea of history. But who knows? Under different circumstances, he was just way ahead of his time, and someone else is probably going to get rich. 1957 and the invention was lost as a vague bad idea of history but who knows under different circumstances he was just way ahead of his time and someone else is probably going to get rich out of a smart crib idea at some point it sounds like a bad kickstarter totally they'd have to make a public apology after some horrible things happened i mean so they're this is weird for two reasons one do you know what a skinner box is? He's the same guy who did the Skinner box.

Yeah. So a Skinner box is like a really common tool. It's not like it's a technical name, but a really common tool in psychology studies, particularly with like rats. Like it's just a conditioning box where you like teach a rat something and you like learn about them and like, will the rat push a button? And like if it gets a reward or if it hurts another rat or if it gets this kind of thing versus that kind of thing so like that the fact that like bf skinner made two boxes and probably you probably made the

skinner box first the psychology experiment box and so people probably like maybe saw that and like applied it to this other box and saw it as sort of like, that's creepy. You've seen what this guy does with boxes. We can't. Yeah, exactly. The other thing is that in my experience, it's not really about climate control. It's about like simulating a car ride. So I think that like if I was going to like make a smart crib, it would just pretend to be a car.

They just want to be inside a car. You got to put your baby in Mater and then he'll drive them around. But only time travel Mater. No, don't put your baby in time travel Mater. You never know where they're going to end up. Also, I do not trust that guy. My turn?

Your turn. So if you're a human being and it's real hot out, you might have the option of staying indoors where the sun can't get you, turning on your air conditioning and waiting out the heat. And if you're an animal, you are also susceptible to getting too hot, just like people are. And you might be able to, if you're an animal, go into your burrow or sit under a shady tree or even take a little swim. But some animals don't live in places where they have the luxury of being able to dig a hole or have lots of trees around or bodies of water they can swim in. But some animals don't live in places where they have the luxury of being able to dig a hole

or have lots of trees around or bodies of water they can swim in, but they also need to keep cool. And there are ways that they do that, but climate change is making that harder and harder all the time. So one of these animals is the mountain goat, a species of goat native to North America that live mostly in the Rocky and Cascade Mountains. They live very high in these mountains, scaling rocky cliff faces and foraging around for grass. Since they live up so high in the Rocky and Cascade Mountains. They live very high in these mountains, scaling rocky cliff faces and foraging around for grass. Since they live up so high in the mountains, it's pretty cool all the time, even in summer. So mountain goats are built exclusively

for cold weather living, basically. They are in fact so built for cold weather living that they are extremely prone to overheating in spring and summer months. And also since they live in the mountains, they don't have easy access to trees or large bodies of water. So in order not to overheat, they search out patches of snow and glacier ice to literally chill out on. So knowing that goats searched out snow to do that, to like cool down on, but not really being sure of how important this behavior was to their survival,

a group of researchers, including some from the university of montana did a study on mountain goats in glacier national park they went out and did field observations and basically watched the goats breathe and timed how how many breaths they were taking it's the most boring research just counting goat breaths i feel like it's meditative in the way that like counting your own breaths is. And then you just start to breathe with the goats where you're like. Everybody breathe with a goat. It's a new meditation app.

This probably would be especially relaxing when they're on snow because their breathing rate decreased by 15% of its normal. Oh, wow. And this might not seem super exciting or important, but the less and slower that goats have to breathe, the more energy they're conserving by not wasting a bunch of breath trying to cool themselves down. Just like in people, being too hot can cause mountain goats

to suffer hyperthermia, which is like the opposite of hypothermia. Then that can put a lot of stress on your body, but it can also be deadly. So researchers observed that mountain goats didn't seem as capable of effectively thermoregulating their bodies as other similarly large mammals and resting in banks of snow was basically necessary for them to like live a comfortable, healthy life. And then on top of that, they also figured out from observing where the goats went, that mountain goats are making

conscious decisions to stick as close to snow as possible because every kilometer distance increase there was from a snow bank you were 70 less likely to find a goat so they were living by right by snow so since the world's getting hotter snow this is yes now now now comes the bad news yeah this is all adorable i love it sam okay we're done snowpack and glaciers are disappearing which means that goats are having a really bad time finding places to cool down. And it also means that since they stick by snow, they're basically out of places that they want to live.

And the researchers estimate that their habitat could shrink by up to 86% of what it is now, which is already extremely small. It's basically just a strip of land that runs from Montana to Southern Alaska. And the researchers said that other large cold weather mammals like reindeer basically use the same methods to cool down. So it's

not just goats who are in trouble. Enter B.F. Skinner and his new invention the Goat Box. Well I had an ending but that was better than my ending. So it's finished there. There's one correction I will make that mountain goats aren't goats. Well, I looked into this because I've heard you say that a million times. And it's they're part of the genus that includes all goats.

Yeah, that's not how goat works. But they're part of the goat family. They're sheep. Sheep are also part of the goat family. Look, it's complicated. And the more we look into it, all of these taxonomic distinctions are just very, very wibbly.

So I just wouldn't let come out and say mountain goats are a species of goat. People are going to come at you for that. That's all I'm saying. Let them come, man. Sam, resident everyman,

is just going to call them what's in their colloquial name. And it has goat in the freaking name. Okay, now it is up to me alone to make the decision of how I will distribute points. And this is the only thing that matters since you both got the truth or fail right. Climate-controlled baby crib invented in the 40s failed to gain traction due to bad marketing and just a total pr disaster

for uh amazing behavioral scientist bf skinner or sam mountain goats seek out patches of snow to regulate their body temperature but they're losing access to their snow patches which is probably unpleasant for them i'm going to award sam 10 points and Sari 14 because I really like I really like any product like I like the idea that it could have been that we ended up in this world but it just like a stupid decision got made and they called it a baby box and it was all over from there and thus the episode final scores sherry with 15 sam with 11 now it's time to ask the science couch where we ask a listener question to our virtual couch of finally honed scientific minds how important is it for a planet to have varied climates what an interesting question from tuxedosaurus it seems both important but also

unavoidable because of how planets are so round. That's what I wrote too, is like, it's not so much important as it is inevitable. And then I just thought about that for a while and came to no conclusion. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's more than that. So on a planet that was a perfect sphere, which is possible mostly if it is a water world, because of the way that a sphere works, there will always be a point at which the rays of the sun are hitting directly. And thus there will be a higher concentration of energy hitting that spot in areas where it will be hitting sort of at an angle. So there's always, it's always going to be hot where the sun is hitting directly and cold where the sun is hitting sort of at an angle. So there's always, it's always going to be hot where the sun is hitting directly

and cold where the sun is hitting at oblique angles. The other constant of all these spherical planets and planetoids is like the changing movement of them is that they are in orbit around the sun or like some larger gravitational body, but they're also rotating around an axis. And those are phenomena that create different kinds like on the earth, like the point of our orbit around the sun

is what influences seasons because it also influences like what parts of the sphere get more light. As long as you have an atmosphere too, like the rotation creates a Coriolis force, like where the wind will travel at different speeds because when you're spinning, the point at the top isn't moving at all. And the point at the equator, wherever that is, is moving at the maximum speed of however fast it's spinning. And so that affects how the winds are going to move as well. But climates aren't required.

Would they be required for a planet? Planets don't care. Would they be required for a planet? Planets don't care. Would they be required for life? It probably is good for there to be variable, but not too variable patterns of effects for life. Is that mostly because it's pushing water around to different places? It moves stuff. Water, of course, falling on land and going down into the ocean is really important for land life, but also water moving around inside of the oceans is very important. And this is like climate that we don't think of. Like under the water, there's weather too.

The top of the ocean is warmer, but the lower down areas are colder and hold more nutrients. And sometimes those two things will invert and there will be a bunch of new nutrients available to the ecosystem. Yeah. And like that kind of nutrient cycling is such an important part of having weather and climate is different ways that the things that we need to survive and the things that plants need to survive and everything like nitrogen and carbon and all those different elements get cycled around.

So I assume no matter what planet you're on and no matter what type of life form we're dealing with, if we're going as far to say like silicon-based life or whatever, they will also need a cycling of nutrients of some sort. Because sometimes you're thirsty and sometimes you're hungry and sometimes you need to build bone and sometimes you need to build skin. And so when you need to build different things, you need different nutrients. And that's just like a part of life as we know it. And I can't imagine life differently than that. Maybe because I have small brain. But you need stuff to move around for sure. There's no like if everything stays in the exact same spot, then there really isn't any

way that life can happen because you use up your resources and then you die. But when you got fluids, which air and water are both fluids and then they can move around, they will move around as long as they are on a rock that is spinning and or being hit by the energy from a star or just has internal energy. If there is any energy at all in the system, it will cause things to move around because things will heat up and go system, it will cause things to move around because like things will heat up and go up and things will cool down and move down.

That's a good point. Like volcanic activity on a planet can also cause varied climates and it has caused varied climates on earth because of like the shielding effect of ash on the incoming sunlight and things like that. Yeah, and also in deep sea vents with these sort of boiling chemical columns

that are dumping a bunch of nutrients for the animals that live there into the water and then like mixing all the water up because the heat has to move around. If man, there could be life like, you know, thousands of kilometers away from the nearest light on earth. And there are there are these, you know, animals that don't move around. They just sit there and filter feed. And it's like, what are you even eating? There's no food there, but they're making it work. I'm like, oh man, there's definitely life on the ice moons. Like no doubt in my mind, we gotta get a drill. Gotta get a drill to Enceladus right now. Let's fuck it up.

Bill Gates wants us to protect the planet, but let's go to Enceladus and drill Enceladus is Bill Gates can write a book about that later not our problem if you want to ask the science couch your question follow us on twitter at scishow tangents where we'll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes every week thank you to at last comment 314

at hurricane brie and everyone else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. And actual human Earth Bill Gates really does have a good grip on some of the ways that we can interface with this very large problem of climate control on our own planet. The book is called How to Avoid Climate Disaster, and you can get it wherever books are at. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful. And it also helps us know what you like about the show.

You could tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining me. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who also edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima.

Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia-Pietro. Our editorial assistant is Deboki Chakravarti. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. And we couldn't make any of this without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you, and remember, the mind is not a car that had been sitting in the hot sun was a big problem year-. Correct, Hank? Correct. Very hot bad. Doubly so if the car had leather seats.

Luckily, cars have air conditioning that can sort that problem out relatively quickly. So your poor little legs only fried to the hot seat for a little while. But if you're a Formula One type race car driver, your car is hot as hell and there is not an air conditioner to save you. Since race cars are designed to be very fast and not very comfortable air conditioners are generally considered nothing but dead weight

and race car engines get really really hot meaning that the cockpit can get as hot as 122 degrees fahrenheit enter the race car driver box we just need boxes cool boxes to save everybody but times have changed and some racing authorities are requiring some kind of air conditioning to keep drivers safe enter the nismo gtr gt3 which has air conditioning but since it's got an open cockpit the cool air needs to be piped directly into parts of a driver that get the hottest such as the helmet or and here's the butt part the seat to give this driver's sweaty sweaty ass a little relief so like up until this year they were just driving around with swamp ass i suppose oh yeah no that's

i mean that's part of the part of the joy is knowing that you're you're uncomfortable and now they're like no we're gonna force you to air condition your balls you're not gonna drive as fast if you're enjoying it exactly i. I got to get this done with. I got to get to that finish line. I'm hot. I got to air some things out.