If the water on the planet is going to rise up 10 feet, that means the southern part of the United States is gone. England is gone. No.
What's up guys, Rosh here and welcome to All About Climate. So today we're going to be reacting to a video which is currently doing the rounds on social media but it's actually I think two or three years old and it's of a guy called Dan Pena who is an American multi-millionaire businessman kind of guy and as far as I can tell he's at a kind of talk and an audience member is about to confront him about climate change. So let's hear what he has to say. Okay.
I got, yeah, I got a few, Bob, yeah. Okay. You support Trump? Yep.
Okay. I was one of the first endorsers, public endorsers of President Trump. What are you guys going to do when our ocean level rises?
Thank you for asking that question. I have the answer. Don't let me finish.
I have the answer. Let me finish. Thank you.
for the question yeah okay we're changing the gas now you're full of shit sit down i'm gonna answer you shut up shut up and sit down this is getting heated down I've got to finish my question. I'm going to answer global warming. All right, finish the question.
Then answer. Our gas is changing on Earth, and it's changing to CO2. What do you people with the money, what are you doing about this? I'm going to tell you right now. No, I've got children.
I've got 21, 23-year-old children. And what's their future with you people with money? You talk about money all of the time.
Okay, okay. Sit down, please. Sit down, please.
In the front row. row. Excuse me, in the front row, please sit down. Okay, you've asked your question, thank you very much. That was a, yeah, a fiery exchange.
Clearly Dan has strong opinions about this, so I'm excited to see what they are. Okay, in 2011 my wife and I were in Antarctica renewing our vows. For most of you that don't know, Antarctica's on a mountaintop. Um, so this is a bit of a pedantic point, but let's just clarify. Antarctica is a continent.
So to say it's on a mountaintop is a little bit misleading. It has mountain ranges, many mountain ranges in fact, but it has low areas too. Now I'm sure Dan isn't trying to suggest that the entirety of Antarctica is one big mountain, but it is worth clarifying that early on.
Okay, and there is a 500 million dollar facility, scientific facility there, and the scientists came to give us presentations about global warming. and they had cores of ice that they had drilled. They had drilled four or five thousand cores and they only brought 15 or 20. So ice cores are like the bread and butter for any scientist who wants to look into the past and reconstruct how the climate has changed.
Particularly ice cores in Antarctica which has very very very old ice. You can look really far back. Now you might be wondering how can we reconstruct past temperatures from ice cores? And the science on this is actually quite complicated but I'll very briefly summarized because it happens to be an area that I really love and I never miss an opportunity to nerd out. Within ice cores you have a chemical record which reflects past temperature and that chemical record is specifically the balance between two different kinds of oxygen.
Heavy oxygen which is oxygen 18 and lighter oxygen which is oxygen 60. Now ice, as I'm sure you already know, is just frozen water and water contains hydrogen and oxygen atoms. And it's these oxygen atoms that we're talking about. So basically, the colder the world is, the more oxygen-16 ends up in the ice and vice versa. Which means that by looking at the balance between oxygen-16 and oxygen-18, we can effectively work out what the temperature was like when it formed. More light oxygen means it was colder, more heavy oxygen means it was warmer.
Incidentally, this is also true for the light and heavy forms of the hydrogen in ice too. So because the ice cores contain thousands of years of ice, we can effectively reconstruct really long records of temperature change. So they're going through the second or third core and they said 275,000 years ago this was the temperature, and then 55,000 years ago the world was two degrees warmer Celsius than it is today.
This is 2011. Okay, so that's wrong. We made this one up. 55,000 years ago the world was in the midst of the last glacial period. So a glacial period is the scientific term for what most people think of when they think of an ice age. So the world was significantly colder than it is today.
Now if you go back say 120,000 years you get to the last interglacial period. An interglacial period is just kind of a warm period. Now there is data to suggest that during the last interglacial period temperatures were comparable if not slightly warmer than today. However that in no way invalidates the current science that modern warming is caused by man-made emissions of CO2.
And I said, well, what about the things the young woman alluded to? Okay, and he said it's all cyclical and although the gas may have exacerbated it in the cosmos of time It's not a fart in the wind That's an eloquent way of putting it Now within the context of ice core data Which is what Dan was presumably talking to the scientists about you can see these clear cycles, right? You see these warm periods and these cool periods and they're caused by changes in Earth's orbit which of course affect the amount of energy we receive from the sun, which in turn affects climate.
So, Dan is right specifically with regards to what we see in the ice core record, that it is all cyclical. However, it is wrong to suggest that modern warming is part of this cycle. And actually there's two really clear reasons why we know that modern warming isn't part of this natural cycle. The first is simply the rate of warming.
So if you look at these cycles, I mean it looks quite rapid just looking at it like this, but you've got to remember these are thousands of years. So even at its fastest point you would expect warming of no more than about one degree celsius per two thousand maybe a thousand years which geologically speaking is really rapid but of course on human time scales that feels pretty slow and compared to modern warming which is occurring at more than a degree per century that is just not comparable. So modern warming is like over 10 times faster in fact than the warming and cooling that we see in these cycles. Oi! That escalated quickly.
Reason number two is the fact that we know we are currently in the cooling phase of this cycle, and we have been for about 4,000 years, and that would eventually, without human action at least, pull us into a new glacial period. But we're talking several tens of thousands of years down the line, so it's not something we would have to worry about in any meaningful sense. And on top of that we have abundant evidence from multiple different fields which all clearly point to human emissions as being the primary driver of warming at the moment.
So... Dan's right, there are cycles in the past, but he's wrong to suggest that current warming is part of these cycles. In the cosmos of time, of the 13.8 billion years that we've been on this miserable planet, it's not a fart in the wind.
Okay, so 13.8 billion years, that is the age of the universe. The planet isn't 13.8 billion years old, the planet is about 4.5 billion years old. But Dan's point here seems to be, you know, Looking at the grand timeline of the universe, these billions of years, current climate change is just like a tiny blip. It's a tiny piece of paper.
It's basically not worth worrying about. And I mean, sure, but you could say that about literally anything. Then in 25,000 years it's most likely not going to be a problem.
Oh great, this is just reinforcing the point I was making. In 25,000 years it won't be a problem, so why worry? You know, nuclear holocaust, why worry? Just a flesh wound. Every worry you have now won't be relevant in 25,000 years.
You can pretty much guarantee that. So this, this is, yeah, just a dumb argument. Now my direct answer to your question, if that were really true, which you believe, and let's just for a moment say that it is true, that means that the best scenario vis-a-vis global warming is about 10 feet raising water.
That's the best scenario. over the next 40-50 years. That's the best scenario.
The worst scenario is about 100 feet. False. Okay, so that's wrong. The current best research we have indicates that we are likely to get somewhere between one and four feet of sea level rise by 2100. In other words, the worst case scenario is four feet in about 80 years.
So this argument that 100 feet is the worst case scenario in 40 or 50 years is completely ludicrous and not based in any scientific research out there. It would take centuries to get that kind of scale of sea level rise. Well let's just take the 10 feet.
If the water on the planet is going to rise up 10 feet, that means the southern part of the United States is gone. England is gone. Most of Europe is...
Okay so I mean I live in England. And this house where I'm filming this right now is considerably higher than 10 feet above sea level and I'm not that far from the coast. So the idea this whole country of England would go with 10 feet of sea level rise is just wrong.
To be fair to Dan he's emphasizing that 10 feet of sea level rise in 40 or 50 years would be terrible and he's right it absolutely would be because even under kind of the actual way actual science says four feet say in 80 years that's still gonna be hugely problematic so it's not gonna inundate entire countries at least not large countries, perhaps Pacific island nations might be at serious risk, but the risk of sea level rise is more to do with greater areas being exposed to storm surges, for example, or seawater encroaching inland into the water table and polluting groundwater, right? If you salinate groundwater it no longer becomes useful for things like farming. So it's not going to inundate entire countries but it's still a huge problem particularly for coastal communities.
If that's the case... Let's just take Florida for example, which is one of the fastest growing condominium, beachfront condominiums on the planet. In the prospectus when you invest, there should be in the footnotes, if global warming is for real, they won't put it that way, global warming happens and water rises 10 feet, this investment you made is f**k all.
Not one single investment prospectus written. Since 2000... this century has alluded to global warming. Not one mother f***er! Um okay so um that's just again that's just wrong.
Um I'm not in finance but I am aware of several economic and financial reports which absolutely look at climate risk. So this claim that banks and finance institutions aren't taking climate change seriously is demonstrably wrong. If it were really true, the banks wouldn't invest. The banks wouldn't finance. Not one motherf***ing condominium.
So the people that have the money, and I'm jealous of the vice president, Gore, which Sally and I rode on a plane from South America with a few years ago. I'm jealous he came up with a scam before I did. OK, so first of all, I'm loving the kind of dramatic pauses he's punctuating his statements with. The dramatic. Is he all right?
Boz! As if he's got some kind of amazing argument, which, as we've seen, isn't the case at all. And second, let's just briefly bring up this kind of point of Al Gore, because Al Gore always comes up in discussions about climate change.
Hello there. If you look at the comments section under my videos, I guarantee you will find at least one or two mentions of Al Gore. And it makes sense because he came out with An Inconvenient Truth, which was one of the first films or documentaries which really put climate change into the public eye.
That film incidentally has a fair number of inaccuracies, some of which I've covered in other videos. But let's be clear about something. Climate science and the conclusion that human emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are warming the planet predates Al Gore by a long way. So the greenhouse effect, for example, was discovered like 150 years ago. We've known that human emissions of CO2 can warm the planet for at least a century and we've known since the 1950s that humans are in fact warming the planet and since then the evidence has just accumulated and accumulated accumulated.
So this idea, this dismissal of climate change as kind of this recent scam as he put it, which Al Gore came up with, again is demonstrably wrong and you could only make that argument if you have literally no knowledge about the history of climate science. Because the financial institutions the banks of this world know it's not going to happen. Otherwise you couldn't get a goddamn loan in London. You know those 30, 40 year mortgages? The world will be over by then.
No, this argument that the world will be over in 30 or 40 years... No credible, no scientifically credible person would make that argument. I understand that there are climate activists out there who do use this kind of hyperbolic language to describe climate change, who say it's kind of the end of the world is in sight. The end is near! We are all gonna die!
Climate change poses serious risks to humanity, but they're almost certainly not world-ending risks. So if you're one of those people, please understand that is not supported by the science. Is Barclays Bank going to give you a motherf***ing loan?
With the greatest respect, ma'am, it's the greatest fraud that's been perpetrated on mankind this century. Well, that's the video. Normally, when I do these kind of reaction videos, I try and find, you know, common ground. and the good in everyone that I listen to, whether it's Ben Shapiro or Candace Owens or Jordan Peterson, which that video will be coming out soon.
I have to say Dan does not come across as likeable. He's a very abrasive character and he's also clearly got some strong opinions about this and unfortunately those opinions are simply based on A total misunderstanding of what the conclusions we can draw from climate science actually are. Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed the video and if you have, please remember to take the time to like, comment and subscribe.
It only takes three seconds of your time but it really helps the channel grow and it lets me know that you like this content so I'll keep making it for you. And until next time, goodbye.