SciShow Tangents - Weather

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents. It's the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. Or just some regular folk who are friends with each other. showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series size show happen or or just some regular folk who are friends with each other this week as always as sometimes I am joined by Sam Schultz what's the most satisfying size of battery oh you know what I can't stand triple a batteries I I hate those. Anything bigger than a AAA, and actually, watch batteries too.

Starting point is 00:00:49 I like them all except a AAA. That's such a bad size for some reason. It's weird. I think about that all the time. Finally found something that you're actually passionate about with my question. I figure if I get weirder and weirder, I will locate more things that sam

Starting point is 00:01:06 cares a lot about have you licked a d battery that that's why that one's my favorite the nine volts not the d battery nine volt yeah you're right square ones i want to really bad but i'm scared oh it's just like no i've done it my guitar uses them and so like during shows you have to make sure the battery is charged and you can tell by looking at it. Is that why you guys are so smart? Because we charge our brains with batteries. Yeah, we're battery lickers over here.

Starting point is 00:01:33 What's your tagline? Exploring the idea of podcasting from bed. I do sometimes podcast from bed for my podcast I have with my wife. And it is not unpleasant. I will say that. Sari Riley is also my other co-host for the day. Hello, Sari.

Starting point is 00:01:50 Hello. Do you have any idea why there is a large taxidermied squirrel in the parking lot of our office building? I have not been to our office building in months. How large? I would say that if it were a live squirrel, it would weigh four times more than a fox squirrel. And it's mounted to a piece of driftwood. Could be a trap. It's probably like a giant ruse set out to catch you specifically. One of the

Starting point is 00:02:20 scientists we invited for an interview left out a squirrel as a social psychology experiment. How long will it take for these nerds to bring in a taxidermied squirrel into their office yeah it's a trojan squirrel yeah what's your tagline conspiracy of snakes and i'm hank green and my tagline is printers be damned take off the hat every week here on tangents we are trying to one-up amazin to let each other with science facts and we're also trying to stay on topic but we're not going to even though we're trying we're also going to play for glory but we are also awarding chin coins from week to week because we need to keep track of who is winning and who is not so that we can feel bad or good about ourselves just as last week we're bringing in the new season by trying out some new games.

Starting point is 00:03:06 So each week in January, one of us is bringing a new game for the show. If we like it enough, might put it into our regular rotation. And I can't wait to see what Sari's mystery game is. But first, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem this week from Sari. All I'm going to say is shanties are in right now.

Starting point is 00:03:23 Oh, boy. There once was a forest of old birch trees struck by lightning for all to see the rain welled up the leaves swirled round oh blow my bully boys blow soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region one day when the thunder is done we'll take our leave and go. She had not been two weeks in spring when down on her the clouds did bring the hail and ice and wind did sting her face with all that

Starting point is 00:03:54 snow. Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region. One day when the blizzard is done, we'll take our leave and go. And then the summer days get hotter. The sun beats down and we're chugging water. Turn up the fan.

Starting point is 00:04:10 I'm glad we bought her before the sky did glow. Soon may the weatherman come to bring us a forecast of this region. One day when the heat is done, we'll take our leave and go. Thank you. Holy crap. You need more than one point we have established that parody songs get more than one point oh we also established that the poems don't get points anymore yeah oh fuck i went all out for just to scare myself you know you gotta feel alive during a pandemic sometimes yeah i hope by the time this episode comes out,

Starting point is 00:04:46 sea shanties are still a thing. But I also hope by the time this episode has been out for four years, that sea shanties are still a big part of popular culture because it is the main thing that I have, have like just had so much joy brought into my life by. So thank you for doing a sea shanty cover. And the topic for our day is not just weathermen,

Starting point is 00:05:06 but also just the weather in general. So Sari, what is weather? Well, weather is all kinds of events that happen in the Earth's atmosphere, usually in the troposphere, which is the part of the Earth's atmosphere that is closest to the surface and under the most air pressure, just from like other atmospheres squishing down on it and being pulled down because of gravity. And it can be temperature and wind and humidity and storms and all that stuff.

Starting point is 00:05:39 If you point outside and are like, look at that, that's the weather. How does wind work? That's air pressure. You can think of high pressure as when molecules are crammed close together. So like a crowded room and you can think of low pressure as when things are more far apart. So like everyone has an, is an arm's distance is six feet away from everyone else, hypothetically. And naturally to balance out to like reach an equilibrium, things move from high-pressure zones to low-pressure zones. So they move from the more crowded areas to the less crowded areas. And so air moves from high-pressure zones to low-pressure zones. And that movement of air is wind.

Starting point is 00:06:18 Do you know where the word weather came from? I do. It comes from Carl Weathers. He invented it. Wasn't around until, like, the 70s. I don't know who Carl Weathers is He invented it. Wasn't around until like the 70s. I don't know who Carl Weathers is. Who is he? He's an actor.

Starting point is 00:06:30 He's a predator. He's the strong guy who's not Arnold Schwarzenegger when they do the cool arm wrestling thing. The meme. Yeah, the meme. He's the other guy in the movie. He's the other meme. Arm. Okay.

Starting point is 00:06:42 It could have been him if he's a time traveler. The root word is we or weh. I don't know how to say it, but it's spelled W-E, which means to blow. Oh. It's thematic with the shanty. And then that changed into Proto-Indo-European wedro. And then it got passed around Europe as like wetter or wetar or wetter to mean like a storm or wind, but then weather in general. I couldn't find like when we started to differentiate or I couldn't find

Starting point is 00:07:12 any separate words for good weather and like storm or bad weather, but in ancient Greece, at least they used weather to describe like inclement storms and bad things happening but sunny weather like calm weather was a different word and then at some point we mushed them all together or like you didn't need that word this is like that's that's normal it just is outside all right sari well it is also now you're going to continue it's going to be all you this is the sari episode of tangents because now it's time for you to share with us your mystery game okay i just have written in all caps hello this is brainstorm so that's the name of my game brainstorm here's how it works i will give a prompt and the number of answers i have on my list

Starting point is 00:08:00 and you'll have one minute as a team to guess them with no penalties for wrong answers. You both get points equal to the number of correct answers you guessed, and I get points equal to the number of unguessed correct answers. Okay. So for example, a prompt might be, Kool-Aid was invented in 1927 when a man named Edward Perkins figured out how to make a powdered juice concentrate as an alternative to the liquid concentrates available at the time.

Starting point is 00:08:25 The question is, what were the six original flavors of Kool-Aid? You have a minute to guess. And if you guessed after that minute, grape and cherry, you would both get two points and I would get four points for the remaining four flavors.

Starting point is 00:08:38 But if you guessed grape, cherry, orange, root beer, lemon, lime, and raspberry, you both would get six points and I am doing not so great with zero points. I would not. No, I've gotten root beer, lemon lime, and raspberry. You both would get six points, and I am doing not so great with zero points. I would not. No, I've gotten root beer. Root beer, cool, eh? That's an advanced flavor. Apparently, they had it figured out right there

Starting point is 00:08:54 at the beginning. Yeah, how have we moved backward so substantially from root beer, cool? What I want is some very flat root beer. Question number one. is some very flat root beer. Question number one. We learn basic types of precipitation in school, like snow, rain, or hail.

Starting point is 00:09:23 But sometimes animals can get sucked up into the sky by extreme weather phenomena like tornadoes and water spouts, which are just tornadoes over water, and then fall back out, like it's literally raining cats and dogs. What are three kinds of animals that have been well-documented to fall out of the sky, kind of like precipitation? Ready, set, go. Fish. Yes. Obviously. Frogs.

Starting point is 00:09:38 Yes, also frogs. Phew, what's the last one? I don't know. What other kind of... No wrong answer penalties, so you can just keep going lizards nope uh birds no okay jellyfish no oh uh uh rabbits no but good thought. Mice. No. Also good thought. Rats. No. Is it a rodent? No.

Starting point is 00:10:10 Is it a mammal? No. Oh, well, why did you say good thought? Just like you were getting smaller. Lizards feel like you were getting, like, slowly getting bigger, and then chickens. There's all sides of lizards. I don't think anybody said chickens. Is the answer chickens?

Starting point is 00:10:22 Oh, stop. The last answer, or the final one, was worms one was worms earthworms okay when did worms fall out of the sky it's happened a couple times it's happened in the united states a few times a big one was 2015 in norway where uh a scientist found thousands of earthworms on the surface of the snow and they thought or they thought that the worms were dead, but when he put them in his hand, he found that they were alive, and so he assumed that they got sucked up

Starting point is 00:10:50 out of mud somewhere and then just dumped on the snowy earth. Did I make up that there was once a shower of raw meat? There was a shower of raw meat somewhere. I think somewhere in the United States. It was called the Kentucky Meat Shower, everyone. Some small chunks of red meat

Starting point is 00:11:07 landed near Rankin in Bath County, Kentucky. And we're not sure how it happened, but the most popular theory is the vulture theory. A group of vultures regurgitated their meals.

Starting point is 00:11:18 So that's not, that's not weather related. Yeah, that's vomit out of the sky. Anyone could do that. No weather involved. Because, that's vomit out of the sky. Anyone could do that. No weather involved. Because you got fish and frogs, you get two points each. And because you missed worms of the three answers, I get one point.

Starting point is 00:11:34 Okay, I like this game. Question number two. It's really important to monitor weather before flying a plane. So in the U.S., there are these things operated by the Federal Aviation Administration called AWOS or AWOS, maybe, units, which stands for Automated Weather Observing Systems. The latest and greatest specs I could find are for AWOS-4, which measures both general atmospheric things and specific dangers that plane pilots might want to know about because they could delay takeoff or require some maintenance on the plane. So what are eight distinct types of things that automated weather observing systems measure? Ready?

Starting point is 00:12:11 Go. Temperature. Yes. Wind speed. Yes. Humidity. No. Wind direction.

Starting point is 00:12:20 Does that count as a difference? I lumped that with wind speed and gusts and direction oh please uh precipitation yes yeah precipitation type and amount i lumped into one okay there's like a billion more what does the sky do it um think about planes what do they need to know? Okay, I'm thinking about them. And it's not helping me at all. Height of something. Hank, you go. Height of fog? Yeah, visibility or cloud height.

Starting point is 00:12:54 Visibility. Good job. Four more. Okay, time. Something that turbulence related. Oh, shit. Oh, time. Were birds?

Starting point is 00:13:03 Was birds one of them? Birds was not one of them. Oh, that would have been good. Good guess. So the remaining ones were barometric pressure. Oh, duh. Lightning or like extreme storms, which is separate from precipitation. Ice or freezing rain.

Starting point is 00:13:18 And runway surface conditions, which surprised me. Right, because it could be clear now, but it could still be wet. Yes. I wouldn't have got that last one. Pressure, I feel like a total jackass for not getting it. That's like what weather is, is my understanding at this point. Yeah, we just talked about it. Still just barely winning.

Starting point is 00:13:37 You got four, and then there are four that you didn't get. So we both got four, or we all got four points that round. Question number three. Weather modification has had its ups and downs in history, but one thing that countries have consistently tried is cloud seeding. Water vapor naturally condenses on dust particles or tiny bacteria, collectively called condensation nuclei, to form clouds. So cloud seeding involves spreading condensation nuclei, like silver iodide or even dry ice, to make clouds, usually for two purposes. One is to fight off drought, or one is to use up the water vapor so there's clear weather in days ahead.

Starting point is 00:14:14 Some countries have experimented once or twice in particularly dire weather situations or have patchwork regional organizations. But I've narrowed down a list of 10 countries that have had well-established cloud seeding programs for years or even decades. What are those 10 countries? Ready? Go. Russia. Yes. China. Yes. The United States of America. Yes. We do? Oh, states of america yes we do oh england gets lots of rain so not them south africa no canada yes canada argentina not argentina okay the united the united kingdom i'm gonna try it not the uk they get a lot of rain hank come on well but maybe they want to clear it up. There was another reason. Oh, okay. The United Arab Emirates. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:09 Good job, Sam. Oh, nice. Yeah. I guess that makes sense. Saudi Arabia. No. Do we have more? There's more?

Starting point is 00:15:16 You have more. You have five more. Oh, my God. Five more? Time's up. Sorry. Oh, God. You got to say countries. Sam couldn't think of a country. I couldn't think of a country. It's up. Ah, sorry. Oh, God, you got to say countries. Sam couldn't think of a country.

Starting point is 00:15:25 I couldn't think of a country. It's true. The ones that you missed are India, which has been... Oh, yeah, totally. ...had cloud seeding programs since the 1950s. And it's some of the longest and biggest programs in Southeast Asia. You missed Israel. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:15:40 They're on Israel 4, randomized seeding experiment. So it's definitely been going for quite a bit, at least since 1975. Yeah, at least four experiments for decades. You missed Thailand, which I thought was interesting. It was a project initiated in November 1955 called the Thailand Royal Rainmaking Project. And they have a Department of royal rainmaking and agricultural aviation cool and then bulgaria they have a hail suppression agency uh that protects regions of farmland from hail crops and you missed australia oh does it work so scientists are mixed on it but it works

Starting point is 00:16:21 enough and consistently enough that a lot of people are researching it and looking into it. China was interesting because they used it before the Beijing Olympics to make sure it was clear on the first day of them. So that worked because there wasn't rain in their giant stadium. But I think the biggest problems that people are wondering about are making it work consistently or like in a meaningful way, because you can make it rain by spraying condensation nuclei into the sky, but at what pollution cost? Or does it have enough water to like significantly change farmland or crops or anything? Like, does it really increase the water that much? And effects on other countries, too. So if you, like, create clouds, and then those clouds fly over to a different country

Starting point is 00:17:09 and then mess up their weather system, what do you do about that? So you got five, and then you missed five, so we all got five points. If we just named the biggest countries by land area, we would have gotten seven. Yeah, but I couldn't remember what they were. I said all the countries I knew, okay?

Starting point is 00:17:29 Same as those three countries. Next up, we're going to take a short break, and then it'll be time for the Fact Off. Welcome back, everybody. Here are our scores. We got me and Sam tied with 11 because that's how that game worked. And Sari with 10. But you should honestly have 12 after that parody song.

Starting point is 00:18:07 Not too bad. You don't. And now it's time for the fact talk. Sam and I have both brought science facts to present to Sari in an attempt to blow her mind. And Sari has points that she can award to the fact that she likes the most, and it will decide the winner of the episode. I can tell by where we're at right now.

Starting point is 00:18:22 But to decide who goes first, Sari has a trivia question for us to answer. Grapple is sometimes called soft hail or snow pellets, but it isn't really hail and it isn't really snow. It's super cooled water droplets that freeze onto snowflakes to form tiny balls of rime ice. So how cold can these super cooled water droplets be before they freeze? I will say negative 10 degrees Celsius.

Starting point is 00:18:47 Oh, I'll say lower than that. I'll say negative 15 degrees Celsius. The answer is negative 48.3 degrees Celsius. Holy cow. Why doesn't that water freeze like at a normal freezing temperature? It's so clean. There's no nucleation site. So if you've got extra, extra clean air and just water floating around, then it can get very cold until a snowflake shows up and there's a nucleation site.

Starting point is 00:19:13 So then it gloms on and freezes. In the same way where you can put in a water bottle into the freezer and it can become super cooled without being ice. I guess I'll go first. So in 2021, we have all kinds of computer models and electronic instruments to tell us many days in advance when bad weather is coming. And this lets people like board up windows or build sandbag embankments and take lots of other precautions to minimize the loss of life and property damage that a big storm can cause. But in England in the year 1850, they were mostly still relying on a combination of folk knowledge and telegraphs from places that were currently experiencing storms. So this meant that storms could pretty much come out of nowhere.

Starting point is 00:19:51 And if you were in one of the coastal towns that was supposed to send the telegraph if you were in a storm, you were already in a storm. So there wasn't really that much you could do about it. And England was also losing ships at sea to storms because there wasn't really any way to communicate what the weather was like on the ocean. So this combination of problems set the stage for the invention of weather forecasting. And a footnote in that process is Dr. George Merriweather and a bunch of leeches.

Starting point is 00:20:18 While doctors at the time didn't necessarily believe in balancing humors, they still practiced bloodletting. And it was like a treatment for basically any disease you could think of at the time, I think. And they loved to use leeches to do bloodletting. So they had big jars of leeches sitting around doctor's offices, basically. So Dr. Merriweather spent a lot of time with leeches and noticed that his leeches got all worked up when bad weather was on its way. And they would like writhe around and climb up the sides of the jars and just like flip out. And from a modern lens, people think that possibly what was happening

Starting point is 00:20:49 was that leeches can sense drops in pressure from a coming storm, which means that rain is coming and that they can travel farther than they could otherwise in their search for blood. But inspired by this observation and a poem by Edward Jenner, who is a scientist whose work also helped popularize the smallpox vaccine. The poem was about how animals react to coming rainstorms because like animal instinct was also a big new discovery that they were trying to figure out. The poem featured the line, the leech disturbed is newly risen quite to the summit of his prison. I don't really know what that means, but to Dr. Merriweather, it meant that he should spend several months putting together an idea for a new type of weather prediction device that used leeches. I also think there were lots of types of barometers that existed at this point that also detected atmospheric pressure.

Starting point is 00:21:36 So he was sort of reinventing the wheel, but with leeches. I don't think he knew that, though. He didn't. Yeah. Yeah. he knew that though he didn't yeah yeah uh so anyway he came up with 12 corked glass jars were placed in a big circle at the base of this contraption and some water and a leech were placed in each one he wrote that he used glass jars to prevent the affliction of solitary confinement in the leeches aka so they wouldn't be lonely so they could see each other and be like hey leech

Starting point is 00:22:01 so each jar had a string through the cork and into the bottle and the other end of the string was tied to a bell hammer positioned by a big bell that was in the middle of the jars like on a big pedestal and he called his invention the tempest prognosticator so the idea was that when the weather got bad the leeches would start to freak out and climb up the walls of the bottle to go blood hunting i guess And they would move the string and ring the bell. So the more ringing there was, the worse the weather was coming was his idea. So he did a bunch of these tests through the 1850s, and he had maybe some possibly successful results.

Starting point is 00:22:35 He would send predictions out to different scientific organizations around the country. And at least one of them wrote him back a letter that said that he had successfully predicted a storm by up to 12 hours. But I don't know how many letters he sent out. So he maybe just got lucky. It's a false positive, yeah. So he thought his invention could save lives and he wrote letters to the government

Starting point is 00:22:55 asking them to adopt the prognosticator as the official storm detecting device of the Navy. And he made a really ornate version of it and showed it off at the Great Exhibition in 1851, hoping to sell them to rich people. But as far as anybody knows, nobody ever bought a single one, probably because you had to change the water

Starting point is 00:23:12 and feed the leeches and also they were full of leeches. He didn't get a government contract either. The Navy tested, they think the Navy tested the prognosticator, but they ended up going with the storm glass, which was a device championed by Admiral they ended up going with the storm glass, which was a device championed by Admiral Robert Fitzroy. And the storm glass basically was just a bottle of mineral

Starting point is 00:23:30 water and it definitely didn't work. So they might've been better off going with the leeches that maybe worked a little bit. I love the idea of any science that at its core isn't actually science. It's just a clever animal. And so you just like build this beautiful device around like 12 leeches or whatever. Gross little worms. And the only thing that's happening is a leech is moving. You're harnessing the raw power of animal instinct. That's what he thought you were doing.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Exactly. It's like the Flintstones. Like in the Flintstones, that's what everything was. Yeah. It's like the remote control for your television. It just a bird that come out like flew and turned the the tv but it's also kind of like if the flintstones lived in a world where there were already tv remote controls and then they built the remote control that the bird flew out of and they didn't know that they were doing the same thing and he did really make a beautiful thing we'll put a

Starting point is 00:24:21 picture of it in the show notes you can just type in tempest prognosticator on google also because like nobody's ever named anything else that since then i also while i was looking this up saw a bunch of pictures of leeches and i was like you know they're kind like a leech can be a little bit beautiful like snake skin patterns and like lots of contrast and then it's like off that freaking that freaking head. Pretty bad. All right. You guys want to hear my fact? Yeah. Yeah. It is in a similar vein because the way that we determine what the weather is, is really important to us.

Starting point is 00:24:56 And we have, it has evolved a lot over the years since the Tempest prognosticator. And it has been kind of, messed up by COVID. And maybe not in the way that you would expect. One of the things that was important to do and that has continued to happen over the last too long now, since March, is that planes are not flying as much anymore. And that has messed up weather forecasts, which is a wild thing to me that I never would have expected. And it turns out that every commercial aircraft since the 1970s is part of a worldwide network of weather data collection called the Aircraft Meteorological Data Relay Report.

Starting point is 00:25:44 All of these aircrafts constantly collect data. So 3,500 aircrafts flown by more than 40 airlines globally, they take temperature and wind measurements every few seconds during takeoff and landing and every few minutes while the plane is at cruising altitude. And so something like 680,000 observations are sent into this every day if there isn't a pandemic. But starting in February, the number of flights dropped 50 to 75 percent depending on the month.

Starting point is 00:26:14 And that in turn led to a lot fewer of these Amdar reports. So a scientist named Jing Chen at Lancaster Environmental Center in the UK decided to see how this reduction in data affected meteorological forecasts from March until May. And he found that in general, weather forecasts have worsened more in the Northern Hemisphere, which is where you usually get more aircraft data than in non-COVID times, because that's where most of the land is and also most of the rich people. In particular, accuracy of surface temperature forecasts was off by as much as two degrees Celsius in Greenland and Siberia, because those are locations that are more remote and they don't have as many conventional meteorological stations. So airplanes are

Starting point is 00:26:54 the majority of the data they get or a lot of the data they get. Other places with a lot of air travel like North America and Southeast China and Australia, so places where there were lots of planes, a density of planes, they also experienced worse forecasts. But one area that didn't do that badly was Western Europe, which just has a really extensive network of meteorological stations on the ground that were able to provide the data to compensate for the loss of this Amdar network that provides just a tremendous amount of data that we kind of just stopped getting for a while.

Starting point is 00:27:23 Yeah, I never thought about the fact that planes could have useful instruments on them besides carrying people. But it makes sense. Well, if you're going to use all this fuel to get people from place to place, you might as well get as much utility out of that as possible. Yeah, and this goes back a long, long way. This first happened like when pilots first started happening basically so the weather bureau would pay pilots in 1919 they started doing this to fly with little things called aerometeorographs that would be attached to the plane's wings and you'd get a 10 bonus for every thousand feet you flew over 13 000 feet oh do they still get bonuses or is it just something they do? I don't think so. Yeah, no. But I love the idea that you just get paid to fly

Starting point is 00:28:11 because the weather people are like, holy crap, we can find out what the weather's like up there. It's amazing. So Sarah, you've either got Sam's fact that Dr. George Merriweather, I can't believe his name was Merriweather, invented the Tempest Prognosticator to try and forecast storms using leeches. Or my fact that COVID is affecting weather forecasting because less commercial planes are flying and we're not getting all of that good Amdar data. It's harder and I have to do it by myself. I'm going to give Sam three points and Hank two points because I didn't know about either of these things before. And even though Amdar is going to change how I view plane travel, I love the leeches. And I would love to find an old leech machine and restore it and just have it as like, this is my leech machine.

Starting point is 00:28:59 And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch, where we've got some listener questions for our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This is from at gingersnap273. Is acid rain a real thing I should actually be concerned about? Uh, yeah, but less so, right? And it's bad for buildings and not necessarily as bad for people, right? Is that the thing? Well, it's bad for people in that it's bad for forests. But, like, you don't have to be worried about it.

Starting point is 00:29:25 You don't have to be worried about like getting your face melted off by a rain. Yeah. So there's different amounts of acidity. It's all based on the pH scale, which you've probably heard about if you've ever taken a chemistry class, which I'm sure people who have listened to SciShow Tangents have or are going to at some point in their life because they're a bunch of nerds. But lower numbers on the pH scale are more acidic and higher numbers are more basic. So seven is neutral, pure water. All rain is slightly acidic because there's carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that dissolves in the water to make carbonic acid, sort of like how our blood is slightly acidic. Rain is usually around a pH of

Starting point is 00:30:05 about 5.6. And acid rain is more acidic than that. It's a pH of about 4 instead of 5.6. And based on the way the pH scale works, that's like a 10 times difference. It's a logarithmic related scale. And it's caused naturally by things like volcanoes erupting or decay of vegetation, but also things that we do as humans, like power plants that release gases or cars that release emissions, particularly gases like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides lower the pH of rain. It can neutralize materials that can be washed away by acid rain so that's why like certain stones the acid will react with the minerals and neutralize but then wear away at the building material four is like less acidic than orange juice yeah so like okay orange juice

Starting point is 00:31:01 won't melt you yeah you could put orange juice on face, but you wouldn't want to put it in your eyes. It wouldn't hurt them, but it might hurt, you know? But it is enough to harm things like insects or fish whose skin is less protective against water. When I was a kid, acid rain was like the scariest thing. Like in the 90s, you'd hear about it all the time. So what happened to it? Did we just get like, that's going to happen. We can't do anything about it. No, we created really pretty tight regulations on the emission of sulfur dioxide from coal plants, which is the primary place that sulfur dioxide was coming from. So we created a cap and trade scheme where it was like, you basically can only release a certain amount. And if you release more than that, you have to buy it from a different power plant that

Starting point is 00:31:46 has figured out how to filter out or scrub out the sulfur dioxide. And that was extremely effective in lowering sulfur dioxide, which actually did a really good job of decreasing the amount of acid rate in America. A policy was happened. Yeah, it worked. Cool. Yeah. Regulations.

Starting point is 00:32:02 Turns out we can combat climate change and like the effects we're having if we enact policy if we if we try hard yeah

Starting point is 00:32:11 and it was expensive for the coal coal plants and they didn't want to do it and then they did it and we're okay that and the hole in the ozone layer

Starting point is 00:32:19 we also fixed that I mean we didn't fix it but it's better if you want to ask the science couch your question you can follow us on twitter at scishShowTangents,

Starting point is 00:32:26 where we tweet out our topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at NeonMolly, at SpaceHikes, and everybody else who tweeted us your questions for this episode. Final scores! Sari with 10, Hank with 13, and Sam with 14, which means, Sam, you get another chin coin. I already had one? I think so, yeah. So you got two, and I've got one, and Sari's, you get another chin coin. I already had one? I think so, yeah.

Starting point is 00:32:46 So you got two, and I've got one, and Sari's got none. Oh, no. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's very easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That's helpful, and it helps us know what you like about the show. You can also tweet us people you might think would be good guests for SciShow Tangents, because we're thinking about having more guests in the future. Or you can tweet out your favorite moment from the episode. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents because we're thinking about having more guests in the future. Or you can tweet out your favorite moment

Starting point is 00:33:05 from the episode. Finally, if you want to show your love for SciShow Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. And I've been Sam Schultz.

Starting point is 00:33:15 SciShow Tangents is created by all of us and produced by Caitlin Hoffmeister and Sam Schultz, who edits a lot of these episodes along with Hiroko Matsushima. Our social media organizer is Paola Garcia Prieto.

Starting point is 00:33:23 Our editorial assistant is Debuki 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,

Starting point is 00:33:31 the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be pretty strong to contend with extreme weather since they can't really like escape or hide from it because they're stuck outside in the ground one of the things that can impact their resilience is butt rot, a disease caused by fungi that eat away

Starting point is 00:34:07 at the butt of the tree, which is where the trunk gets a little bit thicker at the bottom and intersects with the ground, which apparently is like

Starting point is 00:34:15 the like secret weak spot of trees. From the outside, the trees don't show any sign of butt rot, but they rot away on the inside, making them weaker

Starting point is 00:34:24 and prone to topple over in bad weather. And everybody knows that a tree's butt is on the inside. Mm-hmm. Every science is worth a salt. If ever we do a conference again, and if we do like a signing line or something, I want that to be the secret code, that people will be like,

Starting point is 00:34:41 where's the tree's butt? On the inside! Yeah. We need a super fan chance of some sort. Yeah.

SciShow Tangents - Weather

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.