The Chaser Report - Bogan Aspen

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

The world may be on fire, but at least we'll have somewhere to ski in Western Sydney. 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. I am the aforementioned Dom. Oh, so that makes me Charles? It does. Oh, there you go. Yeah, nicely explain.

So look, there's been some doom and gloom around the place. Charles, there's been some depressing stories. The world's not necessarily going well. This is going to be another one of those. Oh, great. Yeah, you've got to enjoy this. This is the report, it's really the scorecard, I guess, from the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO. They've published their annual State of the Climate Report, ahead of Earth Day, last week.

And it's essentially a health check-up for this. Like when you go and you see your GP and just say, how am I travelling? What am I doing? Yes. How are you going health-wise? Before we go to know how the world's going, let's tease this one out how how's your health are you all right no no you know this

I went to and saw the doctor at the beginning of the year and she gave me five months to live really well she gave me five months to turn my body around I can't believe we didn't focus on this in more detail we've had a clock running down because that's May like we're on the verge of I know I think it was like early June

I have to go back early June but no and basically Basically, she said, like, either you completely change your life. I've lost 10% of my body weight. That's good. Yeah, that's good. And, like, don't eat anything interesting ever again.

And stop drinking and stop doing anything fun or that makes life worth living. Yeah. Or you'll have to go on these terrible drugs that apparently, and they apparently have lots of bad side effects. But the best one that I heard, which somebody said, They went, oh, yeah, I had to be on them for a while. And, yeah, you don't want to be on them, mate. And it's like, why not? And it was like, yeah, because no sex drive, no sex drive.

Oh, no sex drive? So you get to live, but life is not worth living. Okay, so you get to live a fractured shell of your past self. Yeah, that's right. Okay, so from June on, you basically, all the wind's got out of your sails. Well, hopefully, no, hopefully I've turned my life around. Well, five months, if someone is hopeless as you, you can transform their lives, and in particular.

Have you seen my guns? Actually, yeah. My God, they're genuine. That's actually a thing. Oh, my God. I've been doing tons of, look, I'm the type of person now, Dom, who's most of their medical appointments are with the physio because I work out so much. You've got bulk.

I've got bulk. I haven't even noticed. I've been bulking up. I'm used to you being so scrawny. And my wife, because I was doing my arms and my wife said, can you add the pecks in there? Just for, so I've done to do pecky exercises. Okay. All right, so in other words, you, it turns out, are not a good analogy for the planet

because you've managed to apparently turn things around relatively rapidly and frankly, it can't have been that hard. So in terms of the planet, yeah, 2022 wasn't so good. What they do is for the state of the climate report, they go through a few indicators, you know, just kind of red flags, levels of planet heating pollution. I'm quoting CNN here, sea level rise, ocean heat. to understand how the planet's responding to climate change and the impact it's having on people in nature.

Now, wait a minute. Are these the people, I think I heard about this, are these the people who say we should give up on trying to save glaciers? Is this the same report? Well, we'll get to that point. I'm not entirely sure what we do with the glaciers. That'll be a little spoiler further on. I don't know if, I don't know if these are those people.

I haven't seen the conclusion. No, I just thought it was nice having the experts come out and just be a little bit more. sort of realistic instead of going, we must save the glaciers. Before we get to that, it's true. Do we need glaciers? I mean, the penguins and polar bears might.

No. But they can go to this. The Sydney Aquarium's full of penguins. He's put a few more in there. But also, we've got plenty of pictures of glaciers now. That's all we need. I mean, but also, you know that in Western Sydney, they're building an artificial ski slope.

There's a massive artificial ski slope. If that's not some sort of giant metaphor. Yeah, I mean, it's basically using the technology from Dubai and the Abu Dhabi. Derby and places like that. And the amazing thing about it, I read the press release, and they almost convinced me that it was environmentally sustainable. They were going, oh, you know, we're using solar power.

We're pretty lightly on the land. Is it like ski Blacktown? It is. It's all ski Rudy Hill. Maybe you can ski down really hill itself, I'm not sure. Mount Druid or something. You know, the lofty heights of Mount Druid. Counter-chair lift to the top of Mount Druitts.

No, it's quite a nifty building, actually. Just to digress on that for a moment. It's an amazing-looking building. I think it's the Western Sydney ski adventure or something like that. Yeah, and car park. And car park, yeah, that's right. But they're collecting rainwater, they're importing snow. What?

They're making some snow. From where? I don't know, presumably the snowy mountains. But still, it's still eco-friendly. There's nothing bad about it. It's good for the environment. But surely, if you're going to import snow, you'd import it from, like, Whistler or the Alps or something. Yeah, just ship it down.

That won't have a bad effect on the environment. So anyway, so that's the point we're at, where it's like essentially a museum of coldness. Yes. We're going to have to go, our children's children won't know what it's like to be cold. I'll have to go to a special, you know, like those, you know those bars where they have minus five degrees and there's like vodka and you drink it out of a cup made of ice ice ice ice. That's what it'll be like. Right, okay. There'll be no ice.

Are you sure you're not confusing that with the Central Coast and the ice epidemic? No, that's also a possibility. So anyway, okay, so where we're at, here's a slew, Charles, a slew of climate records were broken, many of which have been, and I quote here again, or on course, you've broken again this year. So 2022, disastrous, 2023 on track to be worse. Oceans record high temperatures,

60% of the ocean had at least one marine heat wave, global sea levels higher than ever in history, due to glaciers and warming oceans. The sea ice dropped to 1.92 square kilometres in February, the lowest until the record was broken. again this year. But as against that, Charles, that's a lot of sea ice. 1.92 million square kilometres. Like, got a bit of room to move there, don't we?

That's fine. As long as we've got a few swimming pools worth of glaciers. No, exactly. I mean, let's say that the Sydney Harbour. You could, maybe we should make the Sydney Harbour into a giant glacier and freeze it. You can imagine skating on ice skates from circular key over to North Sydney. It'd be fantastic. Oh, yeah, it would eliminate the need for the second harbour tunnel.

It would. It'd be a little bit awkward. But what a fantastic. You just build a nuclear power plant to power the giant kind of freezer. It would have to freeze it. Yeah, yeah. So it would be climate friendly. It would be wonderful with the climate. Yeah, it would.

What else? The Alps in Europe had a record for glacier melt. Lost 6% of its glacier volume in a year. Yes. So ski Switzerland while you can. Sooner to be grass skiing that you do over there. Well, as soon as it'll soon be comparable to Western Skiy. Sydney. It will. It will. It will. It'll be the Mount Druitt.

Mount Blanc, Mount Druitt, very similar situation. Levels of planet warming pollution, methane, CO2, record highs for 2021. That's the last year, for which we have data. So, essentially, everything is bad. But what did this do? I mean, sure, okay, the weather got a bit hotter.

That can be a good thing. I quite like hot weather. Not so much. Climate change-fueled extreme weather affected tens of millions of people, drove food insecurity, boosted mass migration and cost billions of dollars in loss and damage. But as against that, provided amazing opportunities to make billions out of fake ski resorts. Yes, yes.

Look, yeah, there's pros and there's cons, aren't there? To everything. In Pakistan, for instance, had $30 billion worth of damage for those floods we talked to Samishara about. Do you know the wetball temperature thing? I think we talked about this before, but remind me, because I remember not believing it. Because we're getting close to the sort of wetball temperature problem, right?

which is very soon there'll be parts of the world where it's hot. It may not be the hottest place in the world, but basically if you get to a point where it's over about 36 degrees in shade and a tennis ball that's wet doesn't dry out in that shade, I think it's the sort of thing, because it's too humid, then you will die if you go into that heat. Oh, right? As a human being, you'll last about 15, 20 minutes.

You'll have an agonizing death. But also, it'd be terrible for tennis. I mean, I love playing tennis. Tennis balls won't ever dry. Well, and all your ball boys would keep on dying everywhere, because it would be so hot. So, and that's because the human body has to be able to, like, above about 34 degrees, the human body has to work out some way to get rid of temperature. And what it does, it sweats.

And if you can't sweat. Oh, because the air is so moist. Because the air is so moist. you die. You're getting kind of cooked sous-veed in a fashion. Exactly. And so, I mean, that's long been hypothesized as something that will start off. Indonesia is a huge candidate for that, you know, the fourth most populous nation on earth to our north.

But it will very soon creep down and they're saying that by the mid-2030s, you're talking about Brisbane. Like certainly Cairns, but even Brisbane may have days. Mid-2030s when the Olympics is going to be held in Brisbane. Yeah, there may be days when the wetball temperature soars above 34 degrees. Well, the south of India will get to that point as well where there's hundreds of millions of people in the same sort of... So as long as we can just manage to mass relocate people from the entire equatorial region that holds so many hundreds of millions of people, that will be fine. The good news, though, Charles, is that generally speaking, the history of migration has been that people in fortunate countries are always happy to welcome refugees. Yes, rich companies just go, okay, come on in.

You said rich companies, not countries, but that's a Freudian sleep. That's much the same thing. The other thing that I should just note, Dom, which you seem to have left out for some reason is, did you know that the Antarctic marine sort of environment provides the nutrients for 75% of the world's oceans? That's why I left that, because I didn't know that that was the case. Oh, right. Yeah. So the point is that if we have a collapse of the marine life down in basically where Australia,

the South Antarctic, places like Macquarie Island and all those islands, they are actually Australia's responsibility. Right. We actually have responsibility for a huge chunk of the Antarctic. And we supply 75% of the world's nutrients for all sea life, for all ocean life, right? So basically, I'm saying we've got a bit of leverage here in Australia. Oh, that's very hardy, yeah. And the great thing is Tasmania, let's be honest, it is expendable.

Oh, yeah, yeah, if it came to it. Although, to be fair, with it weren't bullish, isn't it the other way around? We'd all have to move down there. We've talked about this before. I think the point is that we will become refugees. I keep on saying to my wife, because she always says, let's fix the environment and stuff of there. Yeah, too late. That was for the 80s and nice.

Just buy property in Tasmania. Or Macquarie Island. No, except the fucking Labor government's trying to make it into a sanctuary. Sanctuary for lefty refugees from... No, for fucking penguins. So, okay, so another aspect of this is we're going to have an incredibly bad El Nino towards the end of this year. What? El Nino.

We're going straight from La Nina where it's been rain. No. No, straight back. We don't get a normal near in the middle. And it potentially is super El Nino. It's, yeah, it's going to happen. What? But I've been checking.

the Bureau of Meteology every day. It's part of this article that predicted arrival later in the year of El Niño and 2023 and 4 will continue to smash climate records. So Charles, I was wondering what would happen if the glaciers melted. One of the things that would happen

is that there's a lot of bacteria locked up in them that would be released. So we'd have a massive wave of bacteria we haven't seen for many years coming through. That's the premise of The Last of Us, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. So that's part of it. But Stanford Research, which just published a couple of weeks ago, points to the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica.

Have you heard of this? This is a glacier that if it melted, just itself, it would, it's called the Doomsday Glacier. Oh, great. If it melted, ocean levels would rise by 25 inches just from this one glacier. 25 inches, two feet. Yeah. About the size of a... 65 centimetres.

Yeah, okay. I mean, they'd take out a lot of the eastern suburbs of Sydney. It should be pretty entertaining. But bad. Would it really? Would it take out? Oh, not that much yet. But that's one glacier.

This is the thing. Because I once looked up the sea rise's thing. And we'd take out the whole of Bangladesh, right? Oh, I mean, the whole of the Pacific Islands nearby are screwed, right? Tuvalu, you know. Nauru's... Nauru, Kira, I think Kiribati is already gone. Only the bits, presumably, where the guano mine was.

Those bits will remain. But in Australia, the interesting thing was, you're right, there's like, you know, a couple of streets in a city, Sydney that would go out. But actually, Sydney's sort of built up a bit. The only place in Australia that would be devastated would be Glenelg in Adelaide. Glegg. Yes, Glenelg is the most, is the lowest suburb in Australia. We're at a price we can pay. And I sort of think it might actually improve Adelaide to get rid of course.

It certainly make it very picturesque with the water views coming into the city So there's another glacier called the Pine Island Glacier which may well raise sea levels just itself again 59 inches within the next 1,000 or 2 years Yeah

Within a thousand years Yeah So Oh well that's all right There's a matter I mean we're not talking about anything Our kids are going to have to worry about But also why don't we just build

Some sort of in western Sydney Some sort of indoor activity that reminds people that it wasn't once a flooded dystopia. We just do dry land. Why don't we just... We got a dry land. What we could do, yeah. But also the other thing we could do is we could actually go down to Antarctica.

We use this cutting-edge technology they're using Western Sydney. And just build a giant ski slope. Just build a giant freezer dome over the top of Antarctica. Yes. To keep all the glaciers nice and chilly. Yes. And that would be fine. It would be incredibly expensive.

And we definitely need nuclear power to run it. We import some snow. Yep. Well, from Western Sydney. From Western Sydney for the snow machines. Yeah. And it would be a ski resort. I mean, the whole of Antarctica would be a ski resort.

Of course, you'd have lights and work year-round. Probably nuclear power plants on the roof. Do you think on the giant dome over all the glaciers? Well, yeah, and I think that it would actually be very efficient because it'd be cold outside, wouldn't it? So, like, all those power plants would work with maximum efficiency. Yeah. And you could land 747s on the dome, so it would be easy to get down to an...

Oh, that would be, that would be an attraction in itself. Wouldn't that be fun? Watching the 7th 4-7s land on ice. Yeah, yeah, there'd be a giant dome. And so I'm essentially thinking of like a giant kind of warehouse thing over the top of the whole of Antarctica. Okay. We just, just like a chilly room in the... In the Simpsons.

You know, like the dome at Springfield? But I'm thinking, you know, when you walk into your bodilow and there's the cold room where the beers up? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the whole, just that for Antarctica. Well, that's where we should put all the beer. Isn't it? That's a brilliant idea. The world's strategic beer reserve

if we're located in Antarctica. So, well, Charles, I must say this has cheered me up. I actually feel there's nothing here that isn't manageable with Western Sydney snow technology. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's right for the Albanese government to not be concentrating on, say, shutting down all the gas wells. No, you need the gas.

But instead, to focus on some good technology to set up ski fields in Western City I think that's like a really because I presume what it means is people will fly in directly to Bedricks Creek yes to the new airport

and it'll become a ski town Bedreys Creek will become this Oh year round ski town Yes it'll be like Vale or Aspen Except entirely indoors For Bogans Bogan Aspen

There's a t-shirt I spend my winters in Bogan Aspen Yeah fantastic I think we just found our episode title there So there you go. I was thinking I was going to lower the mood as I... You know when I read these articles out and it's a bit dower and it's sort of heavy-handed sarcasm?

No, I feel strangely relaxed. There's nothing that the environment can throw at us that human technology can't conquer. Yeah? I don't know. I've got to worried about this. Our gear is from Ryd be a part of the iconoclast network. I don't know whether it's worth coming in tomorrow.

But if it is, we'll see it here. Yeah.