The Chaser Report - Antartica's Having a Hot Girl Winter

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

In past week's we've lied about doing a positive episode, so no more lies. This episode is straight up pessimistic. Antartica is melting in Winter. I don't even wanna talk about audio quality so don't start. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Now, Charles, in recent weeks, we've been accused of saying we're going to have an upbeat, positive episode, with good news, and then there's always been a sting in the tail, and things have actually been utterly terrible. Shall we not go through that charade this time? Yes, let's not go through that charade at all.

Let's just say this is going to be a horrible episode. It's going to be horrible, depressing, but realistic. And if you are wondering whether climate change is real and is going to have a dramatic effect, if you were one of the very few people who don't think that it is, well, we can't change your mind because you're clearly an idiot. But the facts that Charles is about to reveal to you. Yeah, not good. Yeah.

Not good. I mean, probably shouldn't have had the children I had in the past five years. Probably going to suggest that they don't. Yeah. Anyway. Well, they won't be able to. Don't worry about that. Maybe there's a way out.

Let's find out, shall we? Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at Fizz.ca.

Okay. You know, Belkir. You're going to start with that. Yes, I know Bell Curves, Charles. So the way the shape of the Velcrover goes up and the majority of everything is basically in the 80% middle. Clusted in the middle. We're almost all middling. The way those edges are described is their sigmas, right? So essentially as you get further and further away from the middle, that next section, which gets smaller and smaller and smaller, is each section is called a sigma, right?

So each sigma is rarer and more improbable, right? Yes. And it gets very, very small, very, very quickly because it's asymptotic, right? So literally, you know, if you're, if it's a four sigma event, like you say you've got just a normal climate pattern, climate change hasn't happened yet, you just, you know, normal pattern. A fourth sigma event would be on the very edge of the bell curve and you're talking about something that would happen, say, once every 100 million years.

Very unlikely. extremely unlikely to ever happen in your lifetime. So just recently, like literally this week, the Antarctic, you said it's the dead of winter in the Antarctic now. There is no sunlight down there, right? You'd think it'd be a little bit chilly. You would think that it'd be quite cold, yeah. Yeah.

This is the time when, basically, if you're a scientist in Antarctica, you basically hunker down for months on end, you can't go outside. Yes. Really, it's just hell. Right. Hell on earth. So somewhat balmy conditions, Dan,

in Antarctica this winter, to the extent that it's so warm that instead usually what happened at this time of year is all the ice that's melted or much of the ice that's melted during the summer and dropped into the ocean, then gets reformed. And there's a whole, so Antarctica actually grows in size each winter to make up for the fact that it's shrunk in summer with all the melting of the ice. This winter, dead of winter, this week, there's been just these incredible images of ice in the dark falling off the cliffs in Antarctica into the ocean. So essentially Antarctica is melting in the dead of winter. So not only is it not re-freezing.

At this point, it's supposed to be adding to the landmass of Antarctica. Yes. What's actually happening is that even though it is the middle of winter, bits of it are falling off. That doesn't sound good. It doesn't sound good. Not only does it not sound good. It is something that had not even occurred to any climate scientist in the world until this week. It had never occurred to them that Antarctica at this stage would actually start melting in the dead of winter.

Right. Like it was just like, it was just so inconceivable. And I'll tell you, it is considered a 6.4 sigma event, right? Which? Okay, so remember the bell curve, you know, once every 100 million years is like the 4 Sigma. A 6.4 Sigma event is an event that would happen during the normal course if the climate change wasn't. It would normally happen once every 13 billion years. So essentially it would be once in the history of the universe.

Oh, Charles, we are so lucky to be alive to see this. I know, I know. I would have thought one is six billion. I know. We thought this was going to be a depressing episode, but, you know, it's really uplifting. And that's not all. I mean, I don't generally associate Antarctica, which I'd never been. I'd love to visit.

I don't think of it as T-shirt weather, but clearly it's, if you want to go and see the penguins and the seals, well, before they die out, this is the time. Well, I think, don't pack any, you know, cold gear, you won't need it. Well, apparently the Antarctica Tourist Board have just hired the head of the Hawaiian tourist board. Yeah. Best beaches you can get? That's right. And new, untouched beaches.

No, no, but the thing is, Don, that what is also fascinating about this event is the climate change is happening, right? Yeah. And as a result, those bell curve predictions have all changed, right? So what was previously, a 6.4 Sigma event 30 years ago might have been like 13 billion, you know, once every 13 billion years. Now a 6.4 Sigma event is actually considered a one in 7.5 million year event, which just shows you how much more weird our weather is becoming. So essentially what people have been saying this week is that, you know, like there's actually, you know, a way in which the sort of events that we think of as reportable on the news because, you know, it's things like, you know, the hail store. So there was, I think it was something like 40 days of above 40 degree heat in Italy or something. Some extraordinary, you know, in the last month.

And then there was those hailstorms where it were literally tennis ball-sized hailstones, raining down and creating these floods of ice going through the hot streets of Italy, in, you know, in southern Italy, this week. Those sorts of events, you know, up until now have been sort of notable, right? They're the things that make the news bulletin. And what is going to happen is what the guy who wrote the Uninhabitable Earth is saying is those events are going to be what we know as weather. So it's not going to be once in 7.5 million years. No.

It'll just be like Tuesday. It's like Tuesday. Oh, yeah, there was hailstorms that took it. And there's fascinating things. So nobody understands how tornadoes relate to climate, right? Like, there's actually no scientific theory that makes you go, well, climate change will do this to tornadoes or make them more common here or whatever. But the empirical evidence is that in America, tornadoes are now 500 miles further north than they have ever been before, right? Oh, so there's going to be tornadoes in New York City.

In the last 10 years, they've just slowly crept up further and further north. Yeah, exactly. So instead of it just being Kansas City, it'll be Chicago, where the Windy City. Well, I mean, in Greece, I don't really saw the news, but they've just had to evacuate 19,000 people from the island of roads because there's just fires everywhere. It's essentially the summer we had a couple of years ago. I think that's Wednesday, isn't it? Yes, that's Wednesday. They've had to, it's the biggest evacuation from a blaze in the history of Greece.

They've had to bring in all these special rapid deployment teams. It's a disaster. And most notably, I don't know whether you saw this week, it rained in England. That's amazing. Yeah, that was quite good. It was not a one-in-one-seven. Big fan of that news. Yes, I mean, the bottom line is we might just need to update our predictions.

For instance, I mean, if you're anywhere near the water, I mean, people talk about islands in the South Pacific getting wiped out, Micronesia and so on. Maybe some bigger targets are going to go down. I wouldn't want to live in London right now, for instance. I think it's going to be... Well, no, but... No, that's it. Unreliated.

You wouldn't. I'm glad it. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply.

Details at fizz.ca. The Chaser Report. News a few days after it happens. No, it's absolutely terrible. And the thing that, the article that I read about this said that they can't work out whether the melting is being caused by the sea being hot or the air being hot. Or poc annualistas, both of them being ridiculous. So, and this is obviously, it's worth noting the way that climate change works.

It takes a long time between the release of the carbon emissions and the effects on the weather. So where this is the first phase, it's going to get worse. I matter what we do, even if we today, as a world, decided, let's stop. There's a lot more of this baked in already in terms of what we've already admitted, right? Well, this is why, Dom, I think this is a good news podcast. This is a happy podcast. And this is my theory is that it's so catastrophically shit and doomed and definitely going to get better

that we sort of don't have to worry anymore. It puts things in perspective. Yeah. Like, you know, you zoom out and you look at that bell curve. and you go, and you know that it's just definitely going to get worse. You know, let's stop sweating the small stuff. That's very true. I mean, yesterday, on yesterday's podcast,

we fell into the trap, Charles, of worrying about, you know, allegations that Peter Dutton was aware of corruption and didn't do anything about it. Yes. He talks about Elon Musk's social network, but when you realize that they will soon be engulfed into a fiery pit along with the rest of us, who cares? Who cares? Who cares what the final social network

that we post messages about are, you know, impending engulfment. Sydney Theory Company's just released On the Beach, which is a play based on the Neville shoot novel about the end of the world, and basically the plot is there's a nuclear holocaust in the northern hemisphere. It takes a while for the radiation to make

to the south, they think, for a while they'll survive. They don't. They all die. Spoiler alert! And so it's about what happens in the months when they know it's inevitably coming. My mum saw that play. She said it was the most grinding play in the world. It's basically we're all on the beach

We're all in that grinding play now Look, it's Tommy Murphy We know from a long time ago So I'm sure it's wonderfully done Very good reviews it got Charles But it's not an upbeat play But it's the play for our times We are all potentially

In that so unless we roll with it Unless we start getting Fireproof gear Unless we start learning How to live in a volcano We can't control The world is going to get hotter But we can create control

Our reaction to it We've got to learn a bit from psychology here. Yeah. You know, like, we can't control that we're all going to be engulfed in water, and our children and our grandchildren are going to die in misery and famine and poverty. No. Well, we could have controlled it for about 50 years.

Oh, yeah, yeah. But we chose not to. Well, and also, we probably can control it now, you know, and mitigate it. We're not going to it. But what we can control is our reaction to it. Like, should I be happy or sad about that? And I think the answer is happy. Happy.

Because why not? I'll give you another example. Charles, we know that due to the actions of, let's be very clear, overwhelmingly, very wealthy, developed nations, some of the world's smallest and most vulnerable countries, our neighbours, our neighbours and, dare I say, friends in the South Pacific are going to have a horrible fate, not of their own causing. Their islands are going to go under, right? Yes. So one thing we could do would be if we were in Australia with a lot of space, we could let them. in. We could just say, look, we're going to have a climate

refugee program. If your home is about to be, you know, underwater, we don't mind coming and just relocating. We are good neighbours. As your neighbour would do. We could do that. We're not going to because they're not white. But were they white? Yes. Were they white?

We might do that. Yes. And really, that's on them for not being white. I mean, some might say there are some more complexities to that, but I'm very happy for you just to leave it at that. So, all right, the bottom line, Mine is, it's all about attitude.

I choose to be upbeat because I like hot weather. I do. I once went to visit Charles. In Japan, I went to visit the Hacone region, which is, there's an amazing place where you can go, and there's like pits of bubbling mud, volcanic mud, and you can cook eggs in them. And they come out black and they're delicious. That's going to be all we can eat pretty soon. Yes.

But it was really enjoyable. It's a tourist attraction. We'll be bathing in mud pits. It's the only option we'll have until they become too hot for humans to see. survive, and then we all die in a faroe pit. Well, my one takeaway from this whole thing, and look, you can accuse me of being a little mercurial in this takeaway, is that I hear that there's opening up some really interesting sort of waterview land in Antarctica that's likely to become very, very amenable, even in

winter months. Yeah, I wouldn't build a development. on it. I think it'll probably end up in the water. Well, no, but I'm just saying, like, you know, get in quick. Like, I mean, it seems there must be underneath all that ice. There must be some land. Or is it's just ice? It's just ice.

Oh, there's probably some rocks somewhere. Yeah, so what I'm saying is, I don't think that would be very expensive. No, it would be expensive. But if you can build it. Get in now and then ride the boom. And get sensible about it. What you need to do is build your house, your new Antarctican house, out of the carbon fibre submersibles.

When it inevitably hives off and I think they call it carving, don't they, when an iceberg splits into smaller icebergs, and your house goes underwater, you'll be okay until you sink to the bottom of the ocean, then you won't, because it will imply it. But there's a window of hope there, and that's we're focusing on home. Yes, yes. But also, Charles, we're old. We've had a good life. You know, we're in our mid-forties.

We've had decades of not worrying about this. We've been part of the plume. Occasionally, we've whined about it and written scathing, satirical articles, promoting the lack of progress. We haven't done the thing, just winged about it. We've had a good run. Time to hand over the baton to our 14-year-old children. That's right.

I mean, look at Greta Tunberg. It's now their job. Greta Tunberg, who got, was protesting and got dragged away by the police today because they had previously told her to, you know, comply with police orders. She's upset about this whole climate thing, so she came back and protesting anyway, and they're dragged away. That's what you want to do. Just move them away.

Move them away. Yes, out of sight, out of mind. We've got to enjoy it. Like, this is the whole problem. Greta is looking at the climate crisis. And the way she's responding is by getting angry and upset and all these negative emotions. Terrible trap. She wants us to do more.

And whereas if she just realized that she's in control of how she reacts to this. 100%. And if she was, you know, decided to be happy. Own your vibe. Greta. Yes. Own your vibe. I mean, look, maybe she should come to Sydney.

And she doesn't travel by plane because of self-righteous reasons, but she can come by boat. She'll take a very long time. She can travel across the oceans by self-righteousness. She could actually... Powered only by her own. She could actually go, you know what, at this point, she wouldn't even need an ice bracket itself via the Antarctic. It's open seas, Arizona.

She'd come and see on the beach at Sydney Theatre Company. Sit there and go, this is us. This is where we all are. I could choose to be miserable about this and spend every moment my waking life heroically battling with every breath I have left of my body just saying this is wrong, do something about it

or I could go, oh well, look, too hard, let's just have some fun. Greta, where's the fun? Where does Greta Dunberg make time for fun? Yes, where's the fun? Exactly. Come on, a bit more fun, please. A bit more fun.

Maybe if you went drinking with the UN. I can't imagine that scene. How dare you not shout around? How dare you? Our gear is from Road. We are part of the Iconiclass Network. And we've just delivered an optimistic. Yes.

Go to Apple Podcast. That's worth five stars. Five stars. Five stars. Greta, if you're listening. Love a review from Gatornberg. Thank you very much. Thank you for your patience.

Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. Fizz is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at fizz.ca.