- Hey, smart people.

Joe here.

I don't know how to feel about 2023 for anyone paying attention to the climate.

It was an absolutely bonkers year.

Well, it was bonkers in a lot of other ways too, but especially climate.

Here's why July was the hottest summer humans have ever recorded.

The average temperature of the ocean surface blew all previous records out of the water.

Sea levels are the highest since our records started.

While Antarctic sea ice levels reached an all time low, massive wildfires, may be worst of all, the Earth's average temperature briefly reached two degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial average for the first time ever.

All thanks to our greenhouse gas emissions, which keep going up.

Now.

Yes, climate phenomenon like El Nino have boosted some of this warming, but it can't account for all these changes.

Looking at all this data, it makes me feel a lot of things like confused, worried.

The one thing, I'm not feeling optimistic.

I talk about climate change a lot, so I shouldn't be surprised by all this.

It seems like 2023 was really bad.

So should I be worried that climate change is speeding up, getting worse than scientists thought?

Or is this just exactly what scientists warned would happen all along?

I need answers Now.

One way I, and maybe you can figure out how to feel about this whole climate change thing, is to ask climate scientists how they feel.

So that's what I did.

- My name is Catherine Hayhoe and I am a climate scientist.

- I'm Michael Mann.

I am a professor and I'm also the author of the recent book, our Fragile Moment.

- I figured two of the top climate scientists around could put this data in perspective for me.

- The great Steve Schneider used to say The truth is bad enough.

The models have predicted that we will continue to warm as long as we continue to put carbon pollution into the atmosphere.

And that's what it's doing.

At more or less the rate that the models predicted decades ago - For over 130 years, we have known what would happen to global temperature.

And what we have known also is the more carbon we produce, the faster the temperature's gonna change.

And that is exactly what we see happening today.

So - The warming we're seeing today is exactly what scientists said would happen if we added more carbon to the atmosphere.

And we knew this over a hundred years ago.

Yet here we are feeling all surprised.

Humans are weird.

Y'all though, does that mean that every awful weather thing that has happened this year was caused by climate change?

No, because that's the wrong way to look at it.

These events aren't the result of climate change.

They are climate change.

Yeah, that was a pretty mind blowing epiphany for me too.

Like it's easy to fall into that bad stuff can happen in any year, right?

Trap, especially since climate and its influence on weather is super complicated.

But data doesn't lie.

And it tells us that these extreme weather events that we're seeing, this is the climate change they warned us about.

- What we've seen is sort of the emergence of what we call the signal over the noise in the form of these extreme weather events.

And so with each passing year, we go sort of further up that that warming ramp.

Now we're seeing the impacts of that warming in the form of extreme weather events.

- Picture it like this.

Wherever we live, we have this pair of weather dice and we always have a chance of throwing a double six naturally.

- And the higher the number, the worse the flood heat wave or storm.

- But as the planet warms decade by decade global warming, it's sneaking in and taking one of these numbers on our dice and turning it to another six, and then it's taking another number and turning it into a seven.

And all of a sudden we're rolling double sixes and even some double sevens, - Our dice are messed up, y'all, and we're high rolling our way to chaos.

2023 feels like we've rolled the dice and lost.

And I mean the last time there was more CO2 in Earth's atmosphere than now Greenland had no ice on it and sea level was 50 meters higher than it is today.

If that happened now, Tokyo, New York and Shanghai would be underwater.

So this is the new normal, right?

Not so fast.

There is nothing normal about any of this.

This is a famous graph published by Michael Mann and his colleagues in 1998 before the Industrial Revolution, Earth's temperatures were pretty consistent, actually, at least as far as when humans were around.

But once we started pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, trapping more of the sun's heat, thanks to the greenhouse effect, temperatures began to climb.

This wacky part at the end became known as the hockey stick and not 'cause it feels like taking one to the face, but because it's going almost straight up spoiler, it still is.

This isn't the worst that global warming has been in the entire history of the world, but it's the worst that's been in human history.

Like since our species was a thing and since we are humans trying to live on this planet, that's not great news.

All of this climate change data is overwhelming time to give up, right?

- I know as a scientist that we can make a difference.

- So there are so many ways that we can have a positive impact, and it's important for people to understand that, - Okay, so hold up.

These scientists who look at scary data all day, they're not freaking out.

They think we can slow down climate change.

Wait, so why aren't we fixing this then?

Is it because of all those pesky climate deniers?

- Climate denial really isn't the main obstacle anymore because we can all see what's happening with our own two eyes.

It doesn't mean that polluters and those advocating for them have given up.

They've turned to other tactics, delay deflection division, and ironically doom mongering or despair mongering.

Because if they can convince us it's too late to do anything about the problem, it potentially leads us down.

That same path of inaction is outright denial.

Hey, if we can't do anything about the problem, then why try?

- So that's what stands in the way of us and progress in reversing climate change.

The real threat is climate doism, as the cool climate scientists call it.

We cannot go full emo and get all sad in our rooms and just give into hopelessness.

- And that means that it is just the right time to start doing as much as all of us can.

It's as if we've already been smoking a pack of cigarettes a day for years.

Some amount of change is already inevitable, but we don't have emphysema, we don't have lung cancer, and we're not dead.

So when's the best time to stop smoking as soon as possible?

How much?

As much as possible?

And that's exactly where we are with climate change.

- A funny thing happens when we set doism aside.

We can see that we're actually kind of making progress on climate.

Electric cars now cost almost the same amount of money as gas ones.

So people are buying them in 23 countries.

More than 5% of new car sales are electric vehicles, which a lot of people think is a key tipping point for getting more EVs on the road.

One third of all the solar panels ever used were installed in the last two years.

Renewables generated more energy than coal in the United States for the first time ever in 2023.

And the world is on track to get the majority of its energy from renewable sources by 2025.

So we still have a chance of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius or less, which is what we need to do if we wanna minimize the impacts of a changing climate.

So yeah, scientists got it right and climate change is spiking just like they said it would.

I'm like, I want to end this video on a hopeful note because climate change is bad and this data, well, it's not great.

I don't know how to interpret all the weird and scary things that happened to earth's climate in 2023, but I do know one thing doing this, talking about it, sharing good scientific information about what's happening and what we can do about it.

Well, that's maybe the greatest hope we've got.

The way I see it, we have a choice about what to do with all these awful firsts of 2023.

We could look back and say, wow, I wish I'd known that 2023 was the best it would ever be.

Or we can look back and see that 2023 was the worst it ever got to make that happen.

We've gotta flip our mental switches from doism to activism because doing something beats the heck outta doing nothing.

And if that's not something to be hopeful about, I don't know what is.

Stay curious.

Thank you guys so much for making to the end of the video.

If you got this far, let me know how you're feeling about 2023 or you know, leave me a comment, pick your favorite emoji.

And speaking of things that give me optimism, I would like to thank everyone who supports the show on Patreon.

You guys rule, you make this show possible.

You let us talk about things that are important, like this video instead of what just might be, you know, in the memes and the trends and whatever.

Thank you all so much for your support.

If you would like to join that community, maybe get your name here or down in the description or a lot of other things we do over on the Patreon page.

There's a link down in description where you can learn more.

See you in the next video.

How's that sound?

Ready?

Good.

Were you rolling?

I don't have another one stored up.

Sorry, not a circus animal.

I.