The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - What if Climate Change Was a Hoax? | Frankly 72

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

(Recorded September 22, 2024) 14.8% of Americans do not believe in climate change. Recently, a study mapping a 485-million-year history of Earth's temperature and CO2 levels has been misinterpreted by some who downplay urgent climate concerns. Their argument suggests that, since the Earth has experienced much higher temperatures and CO2 concentrations in the past, the current rise of a few degrees won't significantly affect us - and that climate concerns are being over exaggerated  What if climate change was, in fact, a "hoax"? What if all of the climate science developed in recent decades was a fraud? Could we then just generally exhale and continue humanity's current economic trajectory unimpeded? Exploring these questions in today's Frankly, Nate emphasizes the limited, 'narrow boundary' perspective of downplaying the urgency of climate change. A more nuanced understanding of ecology reveals that the long-term stability of our planet depends on numerous environmental tipping points, with climate change being just one of them. Even if climate change was a "hoax", we are still causing accelerating harm to the life support systems of Earth , pushing the biosphere beyond its limits in a way which will profoundly impact our future, even our near term future. Show Notes and More Watch this video episode on YouTube  --- Support The Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future Join our Substack newsletter Join our Discord channel and connect with other listeners  

Greetings. A few days ago, there was a paper out in science by Emily Judd, a paleobiologist and her colleagues, looking at a 485 million year history of Earth's temperature records and corresponding CO2. This has been quickly jumped on by people who are kind of narrow boundary analysts, not well versed in climate change science and Earth system science. pointing out that we are near or just coming off the lows of Earth's lowest temperature ever and lowest CO2. And this means that one or two or three degrees Celsius doesn't matter because it's been much warmer and much higher CO2 in the past. I just had a podcast with Stefan Romsdorf. It was interesting to me to see how many comments in the YouTube section were by people.

calling climate change a hoax and that it just exists to fund scientists and scams and government take over of our lives. What if climate change is a hoax? What if all the things that we're talking about in climate are not true? I'm going to briefly give an overview of what that would imply in this frankly. But first on the paper, Judd and her colleagues pointed out several things that are not really being talked about and are being overlooked by these sensationalist graphs floating around Twitter by Jordan Peterson and the like. At no point in the nearly half billion years that Judd and her colleague analyzed did the earth change as fast it is now. Another overlooked point is the sun is bigger and brighter than when

Earth formed by almost 50%. So we require lower CO2 to offset that increase. That increases. salation. Third is this environment with lower CO2 and lower temps has allowed for an explosion of biodiversity. The biodiversity now, even in this somewhat diminished state, the last century or so, is the highest ever recorded in the history of Earth. Another point is some of the big and many of the mini mass extinctions of the past were due to CO2 and lava basalt's volcanic provinces. And another point is we are living at the end of the stability of the Holocene. We evolved during this 10,000 year period of climate stability.

One might also argue that climate change in this sense caused humans, or at least caused us to thrive. One of the prior mass extinctions, we increased by 10 degrees Celsius in 50,000 years. Now we've increased by 1 degree Celsius in about 50 years and that's accelerating. Okay, but what if, what if all of this is a hoax? Let's just for the sake of argument, assume that climate change, climate science is a fraud, is a bunk, is a grift. Let's just for the sake of this, frankly, assume that's the case. Well, what else is going on in the world? Well, first of all, when we have economic growth, our correlation with GDP and material,

use is nearly 100%. A doubling in the economy is a doubling of material use. There was a recent paper in nature showing that human mass, which is our skyscrapers, our asphalt, our roads, our buildings, our football stadiums, our hospitals, our shopping centers, concrete, plastics, wood, all of it outweighs all living things on earth. Not all animals and insects only, but all grass, all trees, all forests. Every living thing on earth is now outweighed by the inanimate infrastructure of the human system. Part of that infrastructure is plastics. And plastics themselves now outweigh all living animals. But part of plastics is microplastics. A new study has shown that one, one half of one percent of human brain tissue is made up of

microplastics. So one out of every 200 pieces of mass in your brain is likely microplastic. Not only is microplastic in our brains, but it's in our bodies, in our blood. We are losing sperm count at 2.6% a year around the world, not just in the United States, but it's global. It's not just humans, it's animals, and it's accelerating. One couple in seven cannot have children in the conventional way. And as the climate warms, by the way, this makes fertility even lower. Human males' testicles descended to be cooler than the rest of the body. So there's a negative correlation between heat and fertility. This plastic endocrine disrupting and other chemicals are also spilling over into the natural world.

We're losing insect biomass one to two percent a year, largely unknown reasons why, but we think it's linked to pesticides and neonicotinoids. One to two percent a year loss of trillions of of trillions of tiny robots doing tasks for which humans have no replacement, they'll be gone in 50 years if that path continues. Insects are, in addition to the work they do, they're food for birds. We're having massive decline in birds and bird populations around the world, partially because of loss of insects, partially because of loss of habitat. What about animals? Let me read you these two quotes. We live in a zoologically impoverished world from which all the hugest, the fiercest, and the strangest forms have recently disappeared. And it is, no doubt,

a much better world for us now that they have gone. Yet it is a marvelous fact, and one that has not been sufficiently dwelt upon, this sudden dying out of so many large mammalia, not in one place, but in half the land surface of the globe. And here's a related quote, decades later. Looking at the subject again with a much larger body of facts at our command, I'm convinced the repent. I'm convinced that rapidity of the extinction of so many large mammalia is due to man's agency acting in cooperation with those natural causes which at the culmination of each geologic era has led to the extinctions of the larger, the more specialized, or the more strangely modified forms. These quotes were from biologists and naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace in 1876,

and then a few decades later in 1911. These are not from yesterday. So in fact, we have lost approximately 70% of the average population size of all animals on Earth since 1970. It's much, much worse than that, though. Right now, for every human that's alive, there's around 2.2 kilograms worth of wild animals, basically the size of a rabbit or a squirrel. This is one 35th of the size of a human when not so long ago, 12,000 years ago, it was 35,000 times larger. It was a thousand times more animal biomass than human biomass. So, we're losing animal populations around the world quite sharply. What about oceans? Ocean impacts are accelerating as well. Some of the ocean impacts are linked to climate change, but if climate

changing is a hoax. Let's just set that aside for now. We have sea level rise. Okay, so that's a link to warming and the melting of glaciers. So let's say that's a hoax. Let's leave that aside. Oxygen in the oceans have declined 2% in the last 50 years, which it's declined 20% of the shallows. Because of this, fish in the oceans are swimming poleward because warmer waters hold less oxygen and in order from them to breathe, they have to swim to cooler waters. So you see fish in both hemispheres swimming towards the pole in order to be able to breathe. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is the big conveyor belt that moves heat from the tropics up to the North Atlantic has slowed over 20% in recent history.

This is a major, major implication for the health of our oceans. We also have ocean acidification, which is aragonite calcium forming shell creatures, which form the food web for lots of other animals in the ocean food trophic webs, are not able to form these shells, the more carbon that is absorbed by the ocean. And of course, something so simple as overfishing. We've hit peak fish in the ocean, the amount of fish that were captured over 30 years ago. We also have planetary boundaries. Six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded.

One of them is climate change, but if that's a hoax, let's forget about that. We've got biogeochemical flows like phosphorus and nitrogen cycles, biosphere integrity, which is genetic and functional integrity of the diversity of species. Novel entities I mentioned microplastics before, but there's a lot of other synthetic chemicals that are way over the safe bounds, land system change, freshwater change, etc. It's understandable why people don't like some of the shrill predictions and the implications that if climate changes is,

as people say, what that means for our future, for the future of our children, for the future of our great, great, great, grandchildren descendants. It also affects our identities, our built stories about ourselves. So it's understandable that people react more about their own identity than the facts of what we face. But if climate change is a hoax, we still are having massive, massive environmental impact on planet Earth. That's a valueless, prescriptionless observation. Talk to you next week.