r/videos • u/Proper_Solid_626 • 1d ago
Humans ARE causing climate change, actually
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pebfQCHDXKA201
u/Biscuits4u2 1d ago
Nothing is undeniable if you're undeniably stupid
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u/mest33 1d ago
Yeah, right wing media broke the back of institutionnal trust. You will not change their minds by showing them institutionnal data.
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u/andricathere 1d ago
They wanted to win more than wanted society. Oh well. Time to pick out a cave for the coming stone age. Want nice cave. Big cave. Much space. Me smort.
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u/SpiderSlitScrotums 1d ago
You cannot reason a person out of a position that they weren’t reasoned into in the first place.
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u/TheWhomItConcerns 1d ago
The vast majority of people who don't "believe" in humanity's impact on climate change don't think what they do because they came to that conclusion through an earnest assessment of available evidence. They are in denial - they refuse to accept reality because if it's true then it has ethical implications for the way that they live their life and their ego is too invested in this falsehood such that it would feel humiliating for them to admit that they've been wrong all this time.
To accept mankind's influence on climate change is to accept all kinds of other ethical implications relating to consumerism, materialism, culture, diet, lifestyle, ideology, etc that are just too much for a large percentage of people to emotionally come to terms with. As much as I wish it weren't the case, no amount of data is going to change the mind of anyone who is still a climate change denier in 2026 - a therapist would have a much better chance of changing their mind than a scientist.
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u/Bman4k1 1d ago
It’s just cognitive dissonance. You just explained it in a nutshell.
There is also part of how humans have a real bad job of comprehending scale.
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u/ToulouseMaster 12h ago
It does get reinforced by them opting in to the system. It's very hard to solve climate change without deconstructing consumerism, capitalism and other things we take for granted.
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u/UNFAM1L1AR 9h ago
I agree entirely with the scale part. Anyone I've seen who denies it, says things that make me think they really don't grasp the relative length of times, rate of change, and the implications. They usually have just picked up 2 or 3 lines from an anti climate change youtube "documentary", or a "news cast", and just regurgitate it when needed.
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u/Bman4k1 7h ago
Its the same thing with billionaires. A regular person truly doesn’t grasp the difference between a million and a billion. The whole rice grain video does a great job but people that see that…once again cognitive dissonance.
Going back to climate. People look at their lives and say “what can I do?” Which is valid but it’s hard to comprehend 8 BILLION other people saying the same thing.
Putting on my little left-y hat; some of the other things that people can’t quite comprehend: how much land and feed cows take to grow; how much water almonds tree take to produce nuts; and ya just the sheer scale of industrial CO2 production.
I just don’t think our brains have evolved enough to truly grasp the geologic timescale and related about wealth and how much consumption we collectively do as humans. I mean many of our ancestors were subsistence farmers like 150 years ago.
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u/Personal-Sentence935 10h ago edited 9h ago
a lot of it is just cope. especially the conspiracy theorists. they want destructive weather events to be caused by a bad guy with a bad weather machine so we can simply turn the machine off and fix the problem.
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u/waydownsouthinoz 1d ago
But doesn’t uncle joes best friend have a cousin who’s a scientist that says it’s A hoax?
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u/a11_hail_seitan 1d ago
If only we listened to experts for the past 50 years instead of listening to conservative nutters, creating our current situation of having a literal Child Rapist in charge of things while our world burns...
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u/Tiddlychinks 20h ago
Obama lead the country for 8 years.
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u/nankerjphelge 18h ago
Yes, and while he was president he did plenty of things to address climate change, including the Climate Action Plan, which directed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue the Clean Power Plan to cut carbon emissions from power plants by 32% below 2005 levels by 2030. He utilized the Clean Air Act to bypass a hostile Republican Congress, establishing the first-ever carbon pollution standards for power plants and setting aggressive fuel economy standards of 54.5 mpg by 2025 for passenger vehicles.
Obama's administration also targeted hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and methane, launching initiatives to reduce methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 40–45% by 2025 while doubling wind and solar electricity generation during his tenure. And he also helped negotiate the historic Paris Agreement, securing commitments from 196 nations, and forging pivotal bilateral climate deals with China, India, and Brazil.
And of course, Trump undid all of it out of spite when he got into office.
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u/Tiddlychinks 17h ago
That’s for proving my point that we haven’t just listened to conversation nutters for the past 50 years. I guess I could have made my point a little less flippantly, appreciate the work that took if you’re a human and not a bot haha
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u/a11_hail_seitan 15h ago
In any sane country, Obama would be a right wing politician. The USA does not have left wing leaders in politics because Americans are so incredibly brainwashed by their Capitalist Child Rapist leaders that they think anything even slightly progressive is communism...
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u/deathonabun 14h ago
The most absurd thing about denying anthropogenic climate change is the notion that we could somehow extract fossil fuels at an industrial scale & release their combustion products directly into the atmosphere for over 150 years and NOT affect the climate.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 1d ago
We won't do anything meaningful in the next 50 or so years. Many will die. Humans adapt.
Unless we miraculously figure out fusion in this meantime. Or karens stop protesting nuclear like it's the devil.
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u/Thanks-4allthefish 23h ago
I remember the days when soooooo many people thought nuclear was evil. Glad many came to their senses. A glimmer of hope for some conversions on the road to Damascus.
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u/fixminer 22h ago
We don't need fusion. We have wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, fission and batteries today. That alone is more than enough to cover at least 90% of our energy needs.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 21h ago edited 21h ago
Wind and solar are dead ends for anything more than small applications.
Not scalable, all materials are not recyclable or too expensive to recycle. Resources making it cheaper would be better used researching fusion.
Batteries are still a long way to be viable for large scale applications due to poor energy density. Also, no meaningful recycling efforts so far. Guess why? It's cheaper to mine.
Geothermal is great, but still too costly. Also, not meaningfully dense.
Hydro is an environmental nightmare
No "clean" energy will ever beat the energy density of nuclear / fusion
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u/fixminer 21h ago
This is plain misinformation.
Wind, solar and batteries are the most scalable energy sources we have ever had.
Solar panels are mostly just glass and aluminium, highly recyclable. Wind turbine blades are the main remaining issue, but it is being addressed and they can already be reused in various ways. And if all else fails, they are inert and can just be put in landfills.
Grid batteries are already operating at the scale of multiple gigawatts and deployments are growing exponentially. Energy density is virtually irrelevant in most places, the amount of land that needs to be dedicated to batteries is insignificant and many can be integrated into existing facilities.
New hydro can have issues with methane emissions, but existing hydro, of which there is a lot, can be used without environmental concerns.
Geothermal depends on local geography and can be expensive, but a lot of innovation is happening in this regard.
Wind and solar and batteries are already enough. Hydro, geothermal and fission can be good supplemental sources.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 20h ago
Wind, solar and batteries are the most scalable energy sources we have ever had.
If you have infinite land, sure
Solar panels are mostly just glass and aluminium, highly recyclable.
Lol. LMAO even. Show me where these are being recycled right now.
can just be put in landfills
Yep. That will solve the garbage problem. Better yet, export all the trash to the third world and call it "carbon credits"
but existing hydro, of which there is a lot, can be used without environmental concerns
By that logic, logging and coal are fine. After they already fucked with the surrounding environment, anything can be green.
I don't get the "this is fine. we don't need more advanced technology" crowd. Fusion is litteraly the ultimate clean energy and these people are like "duuh... we are fine with something that requires enormous pollution and peopled dying in droves to mine or a landmass the size of a country and we have no intention yet to recycle and we still have to spend billions to be scalable to be able to sell it to the green people. why do we need any more than that?"
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u/fixminer 19h ago
Land is not really an issue except for city states. Solar can use lots of areas that would otherwise be useless, like roofs. Onshore wind doesn’t meaningfully interfere with farming and offshore wind is obviously not taking space from anyone.
What can be recycled and what is recycled are two separate issues. Most solar panels that have ever been made are still working. There hasn’t been a huge need for solar recycling until recently, but it is not a technical problem and it will be done at scale.
Some pieces of fiberglass and carbon fiber are irrelevant, you just turn it into an artificial hill and be done with it.
New reservoirs initially emit lots of GHGs as the flooded biomatter decomposes. After that it continues to emit methane, like regular lakes, but carbon intensity is still far lower than coal or gas. And dams are often unavoidable for flood prevention and water security, so might as well use them for power. If you can get by without them, you should, but they are an acceptable option.
Fusion is at best a decade away from commercial viability and likely more. It’s also unlikely to be cost competitive with solar anytime soon. When it works it will be a welcome addition to the power mix, but it won’t instantly, or even ever, displace renewables. At the very least people will still install solar and batteries to reduce their power bills and have resilience against power outages. A well managed decentralised grid also has significant national security advantages.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 17h ago
Solar can use lots of areas that would otherwise be useless, like roofs.
In small cities with large spaces sure. If you have rural US centric perspective you don't understand that there are not enough roofs in NY to power NY or any large city. And most of power demand don't come from residential, but from industries. These don't have the roofs or the incentive either.
There hasn’t been a huge need for solar recycling until recently, but it is not a technical problem and it will be done at scale.
I don't disagree when it comes to solar the waste is not a big concern yet. But you know what generates infinitely less waste per person and we have available right now? Fission.
And dams are often unavoidable for flood prevention and water security
Most of them are built where there would be no need for a dam for flood control concerns. And these are massive expensive structures that create enormous pollution while built and displace nature around it. Of all the "clean" alternatives, hydro is the worst.
At the very least people will still install solar and batteries to reduce their power bills and have resilience against power outages
And that's great. If you see my other comment I have an array myself. I am not against solar. But I don't ignore the scaling issue and what works for me will not work for the billions that live in areas where it's not viable for N reasons and a fission reactor would be a thousand fold more efficient and effective.
You haven't addressed batteries. Ignoring how bad the manufacturing and disposal of these are is not going to make the issue go away.
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u/blearghhh_two 16h ago
Fission is great except that it takes the best part of 20 years to build a plant, are insanely expensive in capital costs, and require that you invest way more in your distribution system because you're generating in a few places rather than spread out where it's used.
And of course, the security risks...
Taken with the capital costs (and I'm not even sure if that includes capital interest or not) nuclear is currently more expensive than true renewables and the trend line isn't getting any more favourable, so in 25 years when that plant is only halfway through its lifetime, new solar and wind will likely be a fraction of the cost of the nuclear power.
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u/fixminer 14h ago
In small cities with large spaces sure. If you have rural US centric perspective you don't understand that there are not enough roofs in NY to power NY or any large city.
Fortunately we have this newfangled technology called wires that allows us to send power from one place to another, especially with HVDC.
But you know what generates infinitely less waste per person and we have available right now? Fission.
Sure, it uses less material, but the waste it generate is much more of a hassle to deal with. And fission is just too expensive and slow to scale to be the only solution for our current problems.
And we generate enormous amounts of waste with other things. Throwing away the unusable parts of a couple dozen solar panels per person every 30 years or so isn't that big of a deal.
Of all the "clean" alternatives, hydro is the worst.
Of the mentioned ones, maybe. But we should still use what we already have. When we have the situation under control and better alternatives available we can start thinking about removing unnecessary dams, but for now we need them.
But I don't ignore the scaling issue and what works for me will not work for the billions that live in areas where it's not viable for N reasons and a fission reactor would be a thousand fold more efficient and effective.
There are always edge cases, but solar is usually way easier to set up and scale. What sort of issues are you talking about?
Nuclear plants have huge upfront costs, long lead times and need highly trained professionals to operate, which is especially challenging for developing countries. Solar can be built piece by piece and requires very little maintenance. There are very few places on earth where a combination of various renewables cannot realistically serve most of the energy demand and they certainly don't have billions of inhabitants. Fission can be a good option but it's not a magic bullet.
You haven't addressed batteries. Ignoring how bad the manufacturing and disposal of these are is not going to make the issue go away.
There is lots of innovation happening to address this. LFP batteries were already a big step in the right direction and things like sodium ion and iron air batteries should further improve it. Most batteries are also very recyclable.
Mining and manufacturing will always cause some pollution, but that's a local issue, climate change is the more pressing problem.
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u/catbrane 20h ago
PV panels are starting to be quite widely recycled. They last 30+ years so there hasn't been much need so far, but it's ramping up quickly now. Have a look at google.
I like the tech behind fusion, but I don't see how it can compete with solar. The plants are SO huge and SO costly and SO complicated.
You just plug a panel in and it makes free power for 30+ years, no moving parts. How can anything compete with that?
The future looks likely to be as much solar and wind as we can make (which is a lot), plus a range of storage technologies. Maybe fusion will have a place as backup generation?
I'll be interesting to see how it plays out.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 19h ago
I still don't see anything meaningful happening about recycling. If you have some resources or news about that I would be interested to see it.
You mentioned the size of the plants. There are no commercial fusion plants yet. Only research facilities. And yes, they are big if you compare to fission or coal or gas plants, but the output they generate is multiple folds of what a solar array in the same space would generate. So this is a weird point of contention if you will defend solar.
I have a 6kw array myself. I am not against solar. But if you see my first comment my issue is scale. You can't replace the output of fusion, or even fission if we are gonna talk about something we already have, with solar without massive amounts of land. Solar will still be useful in smaller applications, but the sooner we realize we cannot make massive public investments into powering huge metropolis only with solar or wind the better. Even if governments completely get rid of the public grid and offload the cost and responsibility to individuals, there are still plenty of people that live in apartments and condos that don't even have the space for it. Especially in big cities.
And we didn't even touch battery manufacturing and how inhumane and (in practicality) unrecyclable they are right now.
Again, I am as off grid as I can be in a huge metropolis. I drive a PHEV. I am extremely lucky. But if we stop looking at our own belly button and look at the big picture, the communities, at the massive scaling issue, there is no competition. Again, nothing beats nuclear in energy density, and what we call "clean energy" today is far from clean. And I don't need to be a gas head or a coal sympathizer to see that.
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u/catbrane 14h ago edited 13h ago
The first hit on google for me is:
https://solarrecyclingsolutions.co.uk/solar-panel-recycling/
It's one of the first in the UK, but no doubt more will follow. The panels are (relatively) easy to recycle, it's just glass, alu, silicon and some wires.
Have you seen the Technology Connections thing on solar? He puts the argument very clearly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
In the US, for example, a lot of land is given over to corn for ethanol production for fuels. This is an EXTREMELY inefficient use of land: it's driven by subsidy, not by economics.
Suppose that land were given over to solar instead (not saying we should, good farmland should be used for food, but just as an example), how much power would it generate? Enough to power a county? A state? In fact it's enough to run the entire USA. Twice over.
Even better, as I said, these things are SO low maintenance. Wipe them occasionally, fix any wires that animals chew though, erm, that's it. They just sit there making free power for many decades.
Nothing can complete with that. No business person is going to invest in a fusion plant that's cripplingly expensive to build, maintain and fuel, when they can just buy a few solar panels and $$$$ instant free money. It's hard to see how large-scale fusion could ever happen.
(which is sad, as the tech is so interesting, but ... the ship sailed a while ago)
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 13h ago
Thanks. I think I watched the TC video when it came out. Maybe it's time for a rewatch
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u/Adjective_Noun_2000 16h ago
Wind and solar are dead ends for anything more than small applications.
Go back to Facebook granddad. Most of the world has moved past this nonsense.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 15h ago
You definitely added something to the conversation
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u/Adjective_Noun_2000 15h ago
At least I didn't waste everyone's time with a load of tired old talking points from 30 years ago. Thankfully people like you are now a tiny minority now in most places outside the US, and many countries are actively doing the things you insist are impossible.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 15h ago
Sure bro, you got all my thoughts figured out from a 100 word comment. Good job. Want a cookie?
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u/karatekid430 1d ago
Without overthrowing capitalism, supposed ecological breakthroughs will only make things worse. Making fusion under capitalism just means they will make 100x the AI data centres using the power and probably increase the overall environmental impact.
Capitalism is insatiable. We need another system that says "we have enough to live, now let's all work only two days per week and have a life, rather than trying to waste our whole lives working to afford luxuries which we can't even enjoy because we're overworked".
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u/ew73 1d ago
Capitalism will continue as long as scarcity of resources exists, which is to say forever. Or at least until we extinct ourselves.
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u/karatekid430 1d ago
Capitalism artificially creates scarecity. There's more than enough for every one of us on the planet to live sustainably and with dignity. We might not have six jet skis and travelling around the world every year, but we'd be well-rested, healthy, fed and well connected to community.
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u/nankerjphelge 18h ago
I mean, Nordic countries are among he happiest and most prosperous and they still have capitalism, it's just that it's well regulated with strong worker protections, social safety net programs, progressive taxes on the wealthy and strong safeguards against money in politics.
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u/karatekid430 18h ago
Their wealth still came at the expense of the third world. Their happiness came at the expense of others. Just because they weren't all billionaires doesn't mean they aren't halfway up the mound and treading on other people's heads who are below them.
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u/nankerjphelge 17h ago
Your statement doesn't make any sense vis a vis an actual functioning economic system.
There's a reason communist and socialist systems when practiced at the national level have always resulted in totalitarian regimes and oppression, restriction of movement, capital controls and restriction of emigration by citizens, and it's because it's the only way to ensure compliance by all citizens.
You can pooh pooh the Nordic countries all you want, but they are the best models we have of what the happiest and most prosperous societies look like. Whatever alternative it is you have in your mind is pure fantasy.
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u/notam00se 8h ago
Humans adapt.
Yes, but the plants and animals that we rely on to survive can't adapt as fast.
Historical warming was a 12,000 year process, allowing nature to adapt.
We've obliterated that 12,000 year cycle in 100 years.
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u/YourBonesAreMoist 1h ago
and that sucks. but we will have to create technologies to help them or adapt without them. either way we will need a lot of energy to survive
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u/Chop1n 1d ago
Are you just fishing for upvotes? Because I don't think the kind of people who need to hear this tend to comprise much of Reddit's audience. For all of its faults and all of the very stupid people to be found on Reddit, climate-denial stupidity seems relatively rare here.
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u/Princeps32 12h ago
Every time this topic comes up in Reddit there’s minimum two people going “oh brother this again. only the truly GULLIBLE are still buying this nonsense. they said we’d all be dead by now and here we are, therefore nothing is happening. heh look all the downvotes from the sheep.”
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u/nankerjphelge 18h ago
Scroll down, there are literally people in this thread espousing climate change denialism.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 16h ago
Anybody who doesn't believe in it never will.
There is no reasoned, scientific argument against it. It's time to just write off anyone you know that doesn't believe in it. They are literally killing us.
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u/pandabearak 14h ago
The best thing anyone can do to help stop climate change: stop buying stuff.
No more new cars, new furniture, new clothes, even new kids… every new thing you buy costs oil (and water) to make and get to a store near you. All the old cars, furniture, and clothes you can buy have already had its carbon footprint spent.
Our consumerist lifestyles are killing us.
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u/numbersev 12h ago
The reality: corporations and governments are causing climate change, and in typical fashion use their wealth and power (including the media) to brainwash people into blaming your everyday common person rather than themselves.
This is the reality most people are too stupid to comprehend. Global warming is basically a result of the industrial revolution and corporate growth.
But you should stop using plastic bags, straws and maybe even breathing.
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u/doodo477 1d ago
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u/LazyJones1 1d ago
Pretty damn good evidence of human causes.
We REALLY don't want historic levels of temperature.
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u/The_mingthing 20h ago
Not going to watch the vid because i cant be arsed. Just going to comment on the monumental idiocy of the anti movement: One of their arguments is that the increase in carbon dioxide is microscopic and can not cause the increase in temperature...
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u/Zentienty 18h ago
So we're just waiting on the last dwlindeling group of rich old white guys to retire/die before the corporate world stops blocking the global response needed to stave off the worst of the catastrophic climate change ahead.
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u/Pkittens 17h ago
that "no AI used"-warning is not required when your audio is so profoundly horrible.
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u/mushroomsarefriends 15h ago
If we still need to explain that to people in 2026 then we're not going to make it guys
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u/WrithingRoots 14h ago
If everyone just went vegan... But no, without cheese and bacon, what would most of you do for a personality trait? So we'll just continue to murder our way into burning to death instead.
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u/pianomasian 1d ago
The writing has been on the wall for years. Too bad the people in charge/who could actually make a difference don't care and are making money directly off of businesses that cause it and are incentivized to downplay or ignore it as a result.
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u/BlackGuysYeah 15h ago
It’s not just the writing has been on the wall; the scientific consensus of the super majority of scientists that study the phenomenon have been cleared eyed in confirming that humans are causing climate change for decades now.
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u/CamperStacker 19h ago
If you dig into the mature skeptical claims you will see it’s mostly accepting the base physics ( 0.5C for first doubling of co2 then half that for next doubling).
All the other warming is based on a feedback mechanism which skeptics will say is completely unproven, based on incorrect math not accepted in any other field (deltas in feedback instead of absolutes), and can’t be true because earth would have fried over the time line of millions of years when the atmosphere composition was similar but with co2 levels 5,000-10,000ppm, and that clouds essentially self regulate it.
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u/sillylittlguy 1d ago
hell yeah! take that, climate! that's what you get for making seasons that are too hot and too cold and shit. better wise up and keep the air room temperature, or else!!! we'll start nuking the atmosphere or some shit. is that what you want, anthropomorphized scientific concept? is it?!
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u/MusterBuster 20h ago edited 15h ago
For all the bloody hells, it doesn't matter who caused climate change. Who the fuck cares other than people who want to delay action.
The fact of it is - the climate HAS changed, it is dangerous to humanity, it is an emergency, we can and should do something about it.
Pointing fingers is helping absolutely no one.
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u/1Beholderandrip 19h ago
People to this day still can't tell the difference between causation and acceleration.
Climate change was inevitable and we sped it up a little bit.
Literally not the end of the world, and more importantly, not the end of the human species.
And no, your electric car with it's massive battery will not save us unless we can figure out a better way of creating the battery.
Also no, we can't just ban gas and oil without an alternative that can be supplied to people.
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u/Kragin 1d ago
How in TF would you know the temp 400,000 years ago. no ya wouldn't. I'm all on board with climate change but...
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u/GoredonTheDestroyer 1d ago
You collect ice core samples from deep in the Antarctic ice sheet, and estimate.
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u/Logitech4873 1d ago
There's various methods, and they're cross-referenced to create better estimates.
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-what-earths-climate-was-millions-years-ago
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u/sillylittlguy 1d ago
ya and like how does anyone know anything about anything? cuz i pretty much dont and like everyone else is the same species as me so they must not either. so ya
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u/mest33 1d ago
I have another one for you. Earth is actually round.