Comparing something to trees usually feels like a good thing, so I was not ready for "Humanity is like a forest in that it is precipitating a mass extinction event."
Humanity is much worse than the forest though,cause we make much more animals suffer. We are capable of making everything better,despite the fact that we are currently making everything worse.❤ We have to change for the better,and i believe we can.
@@charlieistryinghisbest I'm pretty sure back when trees caused a mass extinction, the animals that used to eat the plants that went extinct suffered quite a bit while they went extinct.
That last coal fired power plant is so close to my home I can see it from my living room window. It’s so weird to not see the steam from the cooling towers now.
Do annual cancer screening tests. Being so close to a coal powerplant for many years could have exposed you to high levels of radiation (if regulations were not strictly followed).
I have some great photos of it from driving past on our way to wales this summer. Yet another bit of “history as it happens” that we managed to unknowingly stumble across. The 2020s are being a strange decade so far!
Visible from where I live too in Ilkeston. But then the cooling towers are huge. I work on the Trains and at East Midlands Parkway they are truly imposing. Nostalgia is there, but in some ways I'll be glad when they have gone.
There was a fun xkcd comic this week talking about how over the course of the industrial revolution the UK dug up and burned 3 inches of their entire country.
It actually blows my mind that there was a time where wood existed but NOTHING could decompose wood. Like yeah it makes logical sense, but the idea that organic material can just be sitting around and they'd never decompose because nature just... didnt know how to is mindblowing to me
@@Thelango99 samples taken from the great garbage patch have found microbes able to digests different plastics, but people reading this comment have good odds of already being algo fed that information too
I wonder what that unique period of time in our planet's history smelled like. Wood can come in a wide variety of scents, and while the types of wood were certainly very different to today, and probably less varied, it still makes me wonder. What other unique smells have been lost to time? We can recreate individual smells in a lab, but recreating the unique blend of scents that made up entire ancient ecosystems is drastically more difficult. It also make me wonder about ambient sound levels. Nowadays, animal and insect life has to compete with modern machinery to communicate with one another. So one would think that the average animal and insect ecosystem is louder on average than pre-civilization. But, occasionally I'll read about ancient animals or reptiles having calls that could be heard for miles, and I start to wonder what ancient ambient soundscapes were like. Was Earth really loud millions of years ago? Or would the average person today find ancient Earth super quiet in comparison to the bustle of city life and cars of our highways of today?
British person here. Much as we are trying to reduce use of fossil fuels, our main target is to try to use sarcasm as a source of fuel. Once we crack that, then we can power the world. Or at least, the parts of it that can spell colour and aluminium correctly.
If the Brits could find a way to harness the power of sarcasm we could surely reach warp speed. We could reach other galaxies. We could unravel the mysteries of the universe.
Here in Canada our goal is to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels by 2035 and replace them with maple syrup and unnecessary apologies. We've reduced fossil fuel usage by 41% since we started using Justin Bieber songs to power most of Eastern Canada, but they're not a renewable resource so it isn't ideal
Hank got too used to saying "I'll see you tomorrow" but he won't see him until Tuesday now 😭 (Thanks for a great Pizzamas - everything is a little stressful and this has been good!)
The next time it's raining sideways and I'm staring forlornly at the tattered remains of another umbrella I'll remember to thank "the complete geographic luck that is the UK's relatively fantastic position with regards to wind resources". Clean air, wet heads, can't lose! 🌧️
Where I am from in South Wales, a lot of people complain about the wind turbines sprouting up everywhere. They ask. "Why do we have to have them here?" I point out that it's because we have some of the best wind in the country...
You painted a hilarious picture in my head. Does the wind really destroy your umbrellas like that? I know England is cloudy and rainy, but I didn't know about the wind!
@@Tritailed-Shenanigans The wind blows from the west. There's nothing to stop it as it comes in from the Atlantic before it gets to us. And all the hurricane systems they get down in the south east USA eventually make their way up and across the Atlantic to us. Normally they're not quite as destructive but they can still be a bit blowy. Our garage blew down just before Christmas of '78. The local school roof blew off a couple of years ago.
@@Tritailed-ShenanigansUmbrellas don't break all the time but yeah it is the reason I don't actually own an umbrella anymore, too much hassle to keep attempting to fix them.
Longtime British viewer here, thanks for the little spotlight! I’m amidst similar circles in celebrating, it’s an exciting milestone that I just hope can encourage others to set a goal to do the thing, and then *do the thing*!
Yours is a ridiculously ill-informed comment. Britain's co2 footprint has risen year on year and will continue to do so. The actions that Britain has taken have only increased that rise.
So what I'm hearing is that a group of tree from millions of years ago accidentally caused a mass extinction event. And now, those exact same trees are gonna help accidentally cause another mass extinction event. Wonderful, just wonderful.
Well it's kind of fair if you think of it as necromancy where we disturbed the graves of the ancients and now their vengeful spirits are bent on taking us down with them.
Not exactly the same. The trees we're burning now are from the Carboniferous, the ones that triggered the Late Devonian were... in the Late Devonian. Separated by millions of years, and with very different species assemblages. But still, close enough.
This video has a few mistakes. Hank mentions the late devonian mass extinction, but it has nothing to do with what he's talking about. The crash of CO2 concentrations happened in the LATE CARBONIFEROUS, 300 million years ago. Also, the pangea picture he shows is from the triassic period, not even the paleozoic! In the late carboniferous the land masses were not fully assembled together like that yet. Also, the extinction event of the late carboniferous is not considered a MASS extintion, because it wasn't that much big of a deal for animals, only for plants. It is usually denoted as "The late carboniferous forests collapse", which caused the break up of big forests into smaller and scattered ones, eventually leading to the partial desertification of the permian period. So he mixed the devonian mass extintion with a carboniferous event and showed a map of the triassic... what a mess!
Just want to clarify that the Devonian Kellwasser event took place around 372 Ma, the Coal Measures in the UK are from about 318 Ma, and Pangea was full assembled at 250 Ma. These events are ultimately related in Earth's story, but they happened about as far apart from each other as we are from the dinosaurs
Maybe, when Octupi are writing their ancient history in 50M years, they'll say: Humans. Quaint little creatures. Killed themselves quickly. Some of them seemed nice.
*Octopodes. Octopus is a latinisation of a Greek word, not a true Latin word. So either it’s octopuses as an English pluralisation, or if you’re being prescriptivist it would be octopodes from the original Greek, the Latin pluralisation makes the least sense of all.
@@MartcaptAll human language use is correct language use. Every dialect is correct. Every accent is correct. A community uses it in the correct way for that community. Octopi is a word because lots of people have used it, and know what it means. It's one of the many correct words that people use for the plural of octopus. ❤ With love from a linguist.
The "nothing could break down lignan" hypothesis is starting to be called into question. There are thoughts that the coal band is mostly just a coincidence of an era where lots of biomass got buried.
@@ObjectsInMotion Coal burning, since the coal is made from trees. His argument was since they didn't do it on purpose the first time, we can extend the loosey goosey 'blame' on them the second time as well, though really its just humans, but at least some humans stopped burning coal for power. Guessing they are still using coal for steel, but thats a different thing entirely
This really bummed me out when I first heard it, since I liked the story of lignan-creation evolution outpacing lignan-eating evolution, but its good chance to confirm I do not have faith in in my beliefs and am open to them being challenged, so bring it on questions!
Aye, it never sounded right to me. We're already seeing fungi and bacteria that can break down plastic, so the idea that it would take hundreds of thousands if not millions of years for fungi to evolve to break down lignin seemed... Incorrect. That they got buried, turned into peat and then into coal, the same way it still happens now (just getting buried in anoxic swamps where the decay process can't occur before it gets compressed and fossilizes into coal) always made far more sense to me. I'm glad to see someone else bringing it up.
I always get weirdly emotional thinking about how everything throughout history led to this moment of me living in incredible plenty at the expense of the environment. Beautiful and tragic
Me when I was 6 and having an existential crisis thinking about how every single one of your ancestors had kids and if you decide to not you are the first one in a million years of a previously-unbroken chain
0:34 With all due respect, this isn't _quite_ right. The forests you're talking about here sound a lot more consistent with what was going on in the Carboniferous period, not the Late Devonian when they triggered the extinction. The earliest forests arose roughly 390 MYA (at least this is the earliest ones we have found so far, though those are diverse enough that they likely arose even earlier and this will be pushed back, as it already has been) and occurred in Euramerica, before Pangaea assembled! By 300 MYA these forests had already been around for quite some time and advanced a lot to the point of having early seed plants, not just a 50 million year sprint to the sky. Additionally, the diversity of tree species in the Devonian was rather poor (IIRC, for a bit during the Late Devonian Archaeopteris was the sole dominant tree species) and their roots were actually pretty shallow, the Lycopsids in particular are notorious for having weak root systems that caused them to topple all the time. Additionally, much of the famous coal formation of the Carboniferous was partly due to the marine transgressions triggered by the Late Paleozoic Icehouse, from the already lowered CO2 from all the vegetation. So, yeah trees _are_ triggering a mass extinction again in a way, but its not quite the same trees responsible for both, they're separated by at least a few millions of years and consisted of vastly different species. Additionally, its important to note that deforestation is causing massive sedimentation in the modern day, not unlike the sedimentation triggered from aforestation in the Late Devonian.
Something only tangentially related that I learned recently: the Appalachian mountains in North America are so old that they had been forming for hundreds of millions of years _before trees had evolved._ When trees happened, the rock layers in the Appalachians were already hundreds of millions of years old. Edit: fixed auto-incorrect
I live in the Appalachian Mountains part of VA and we were hit hard by the remnants of the hurricane (although not as hard as NC, GA, etc.; but there were massive power outages and some roads are still blocked). Anyway, coal is still considered to be an important part of history here (although a very deadly one). But, I didn't know it was important to the UK until years ago when I studied abroad in the NE part of England and found out they had a strong historical connection with coal mining as well. They moved on to create other jobs, a metro system, etc. in that former coal mining community and it was pretty cool. I'm glad to see the UK succeed in moving away from coal.
"I didn't know it was important to the UK until years ago" Seems a bit odd, as that's what fuelled the industrial revolution! I guess it's natural for me to know about these things, growing up in the middle of it all in the South Wales coalfields, in the Rhondda, the centre of coal production, with my grandfather having been a miner.
Just a note: "Natural gas" is mostly methane (about 80-90%), which you probably know, but the natural gas industry does a metric fck ton a greenwashing to pretend that they aren't part of the problem. Anyways, it's always great to hear good news. Great video! :)
The hydrogen lobby is even worse, since over 95% of hydrogen is just cut from said natural gas at the moment. No viable commercial electrolysis method exists.😅
They are part of the solution though. If it wasn't for natural gas, we'd still have to be burning coal. Natural gas, being easily turn-off-and-onable, means it can be switched off almost entirely when there's enough wind blowing.
@@paulsengupta971 the problem is that natural gas used for energy is responsible for a good amount of the methane in the atmosphere, while coal is only CO2 (considering it has good scrubbers). so it's arguable if natural gas is much better.
While I'm sure they do a lot of purposeful green washing, I believe that the name "natural gas" actually comes from a time when it was a competitor to coal and wood gas, which need to be produced at a factory.
@@danilooliveira6580Coal does produce around twice as much CO2 per kWh of electricity produced though, and as you say relies on proper maintenance of scrubbers, without which all sorts of carcinogens abound.
My favorite time of Earth's history; before fungus had evolved to break down woody material. Trees the size of buildings, too mighty, their roots couldn't support them. Toppling other trees. Thousands of years worth of trees, still whole undecayed. No fungus is site.
I love the part of history where fungus starts to take over, but wasn't prepared for the fact that mammals already won that war before it even started. Fungus basically just cleared out a niche for us. So neat to see how that happens.
We might be in the same situation with plastic now. There's bacteria that can already break down PET, and all the other plastics in our landfills are food for any bacteria willing to evolve the right set of enzymes.
"They didn't know what they were doing, but it does seem like they did do it." - Hank Green, prosecutor, defendant, judge, and that courtroom vending machine that's perpetually out-of-order.
Knowing this about the placement of easily accessible coal in the world, mixed with the idea that the old world was only able to conquer and oppress the new world as a result of the fact that local species in the old world are more easily domesticated and therefore put to human use; it really paints a picture of how the UK became such a global superpower, and how it really had very little to do with the people living here. We were never better than anyone else, we just spawned in the luckiest part of the map.
add in the country being an island which necessitated good ship technology and sea faring culture, it was poised to be at the centre of world trade during the industrial revolution.
Well tbf while they were certainly lucky with the resources, they also had that protestant work ethic that likely helped birth the start of capitalism. And I say this as an Irishman who doesn't like to give credit to the Brits if I can help it
@@Gavolav I'll be honest I'm pretty doubtful that religion plays any serious role in people's work ethic. And there does seem to be at least some evidence to suggest that the idea of "protestant work ethic" in specific is an invented idea, rather than reflective of any real life tendencies. I imagine if you're looking any population group there are going to be people who get satisfaction from working hard, and people who don't, and that's going to be the ultimate difference maker in how much work they do, rather than their religion.
@@mylittledashie7419religion was used to guilt people into working hard. But also, saying that a people’s culture has no bearing on their mindset and therefore behavior on a macro-scale is bananas. Absolutely baffling.
It was only lucky in the past less than 1000 years. In many ways Europe was pretty resource poor before that. Before that the ancient resource wealth was in the east.
This is an even more mind-blowing and long-term example of "Yes, what happened a long time ago matters and is still affecting us today" than we usually talk about!
Any idea on what caused the plummet in co2 production in the early 1900’s? The Great Depression perhaps. Surely not the world wars, because industrial production would have been running at peak capacity during those years. 2:44
I love how ancient that screen with the uk power mix looks 😅 I'm also mildly reassured by our small amount of progress Thanks for an excellent pizzamas, all at complexly!
Any time someone says "the climate just changes naturally," I'm like "yeah it does, but it's not supposed to happen this fast." We're talking cycles of tens of thousands of years, and that's just within the ice age we are still currently in. If we're talking about changes between ice ages and greenhouse periods, those changes happen over the span of millions of years. The rate at which our climate is warming is *not* normal.
And _even if_ the current rate of climate change _was_ natural (it's not), it's going to have some pretty devastating consequences. So if we have _any_ ability to reduce/mitigate those effects ... *_maybe we should‽_* 🤷♀️
This wasn’t an intended message of the video, but one of the takeaways I got was that if we ruin the planet enough to cause a mass extinction, we will be accidentally making a new environment for new types of life to thrive in (just like the big trees made a new environment for us to thrive in). This would be a pretty terrible outcome for us humans, but it is still sort of beautiful in its own way.
Hi from the UK. It took us about 200 years to dig up and burn 30 billion tonnes of coal. It'll take the next 200 years to reverse that carbon debt. Today, we ride trains on a Victorian rail network that was originally smelted with coal. British coal fuelled our ships of trade and war, that transported soldiers to expand and control the empire. Coal mining communities campaigned for, and won, the civil rights that were the bedrock of those we have today. Entire villages, towns, and cities were built around the mines - they are still the cultural core for many communities 30 - 40 years after their closure. Men, Women, and children carved out the caverns and shafts beneath our feet, deep enough to bury 4 stacked Eiffel towers, running 6 miles out below the floor of the North Sea. But our Carbon Heritage is much more than the inherited carbon footprint. It's the community organising and innovation that lives in the bones of these places, that we're starting to draw on now for meaninfgul climate action.
It was one of our new government's manifesto pledges to become a "clean energy superpower" by 2030, massively increasing investment in renewables and getting rid of our reliance on gas (especially our expensive and volatile foreign gas imports). Let's see if they actually deliver on it!
So here’s a thought: as far as I’m aware, significant amounts of coal were required for consistently reaching the vast heat needed for mass-producing high-quality steel and developing early forms of industrial power-production; also as far as I’m aware, there might literally not be a way to reach many other advanced technologies without accessing those things first (very possibly including any-kind of aerospace industry); and it sounds like, as far as we’re aware, literally the only way for significant amounts of coal to happen is for there to have been a multi-million-year era of un-decomposable, CO2-storing life (like trees) appearing in ludicrously huge quantities approximately a few hundred million years before the coal is needed. Meaning; if that’s all true, or even mostly true; that sounds like another reason for the Fermi paradox not looking quite so paradoxical…
I was one of the ones who celebrated. It honestly brought a tear to my eye, not just because it's a positive to our planet, but because it was such a long time coming -- the birthplace of industrialization being one of the first to turn off its plumes of smoke! I think too, positively, it shows that perhaps in fifty years, it will be rather strange for anyone to use coal at all. These things can happen more swiftly than we think. And perhaps as a side effect of AI wanting ever-more power, we will innovate and be forced to confront much better energy systems going forward. One can hope.
Something I've been thinking about a lot: Much of our fossil fuel reserves are, to my knowledge, based on this kind of singular event where there was a lot of plant matter to bury and not many things to break them down. Thus they created our current reserves. Presuming that is true... Have we salted the earth for future civilization? Granted, we've got a sample size of one, but presuming humans don't stick around for several million years is the next intelligent species gonna be stymied before the industrial revolution because earth isn't refilling these fossil fuel deposits? I think it's far less likely to jump from wood burning stoves to photovoltaics, massive scale wind farms, nuclear, etc without fossil fuels first. Second thought: is that a potential great filter? Needing something like oil and gas to jump start the energy an advanced civilization needs to develop.
Yes (future civilisations) and arguably yes (filter; though I wouldn't like to guess at how large a filter it might be) :) People have argued that we should intentionally leave some fossil fuel deposits in the ground for use by potential future civilisations - or even the remnants of our own civilisation in some kind of post-apocalypse scenario - for the reasons you give. I find it hard to disagree with that, tbh, especially when we have other energy sources and thus don't _need_ to use fossil fuels.
I'm so excited about the sale! I've been pining for the blanket but it was out of budget and now it's not! I'm heading over to buy it right *now* before its too late!! Thank you for letting us know!
@@pattheplanter There are so many options. I could take it to the beech, or use it to spruce up the room, I'm not ash-amed to admit I might just use it fur alder places I cedar need!
@@gelfling Sub-lime and pear-fect. Though I am sure I am your elder, you have box-ed me in. I may admit defeat. It is plane that I am br-oak-en. Willow-ered ourselves enough. Yew and I must stop, I am sure we would be sycamore.
That final power station is near me and I have some mixed feelings about its closure. I know that it’s a net positive for the world and I feel good about that but whenever I travel it’s on the main road I usually come home on so seeing it is a comfortingly familiar landmark. I’m glad to be without coal and glad to have decarbonised but as it’s demolished I am going to miss those towers
I lived in the UK for 2 years (before the Climate Change Act was passed) and I understand the attachment people have to that old infrastructure. So much of the Victorian era coal-driven architecture is aesthetically pleasing, like St Pancras station in London, suggesting that people of the time needed beauty to compensate for all the smog and slag heaps and whatnot they were generating. I hope the towers are not just knocked down. PS -- Chicago has an abandoned coal power plant in the heart of the city, on the riverbank, and I think it looks very cool from the outside (with ivy growing on it).
I forgot it was Pizzamas, that's why the recent day by day uploads! And, coincidentally, I'm watching this whilst having my usual Friday night dinner of pizza 😄
I love the title, because it's one of those titles that sounds dumb until you watch the video and go "oh wait that makes sense". Also reminds me of Liquid Trees and wanting more creative solutions to climate change and stuff, yeah. It was a fun pizzamas, peeps, what a ride!
It's an oversimplification to suggest that that flood happened because the atmosphere holds more water. That difference is a few % at best. The flood would have been huge anyway, just because of the track of the tropical cyclone forcing wind against the mountains. The unusual track was far more important than climate change to what made this event severe. Climate change really does make the hydrologic cycle stronger, enhancing both dry and wet. But it's not as big as many people suggest, because the dry atmosphere warms more than the most atmosphere. What I mean by that is that dry air gets warmer faster under climate change than moist air. So, the average temperature of the earth's surface has warmed more than the average temperature of the air in saturation.
Bought a bucket hat. I've never worn a bucket hat, but I get the distict impression it's too small for me, so the end result is my niece is getting a bucket hat.
Here lies Hank’s Chemo curls, 2023-2024 The hair is almost back to normal. How are you feeling about that, Hank? Do you like the reminder being gone, or will you miss it?
Rare UK win. But it's also worth noting that the decision to stop mining coal in the UK nearly 40 years ago was an entirely political one (ending coal miners' strikes that disrupted the power supply) that devastated communities centered on mines, many of which have never economically recovered. A day to celebrate the end of coal in the UK is also a great day to say "Screw Thatcher".
@@gideondurham924you can say “screw Thatcher” but in reality the seeds of the miners strike began growing on the night of 9th June 1983, the 1983 General Election night during which in an interview given to the BBC Scargill refused to accept the result of the election, even as millions of democratic votes were being counted and called for revolution on the streets. She really didn’t have a choice and truthfully of those mines that defied Scargill and voted on the proposals of her Government anyway, all but one voted to accept them.
XKXD had a comic(2992) that concluded Britain had lost the equivalent of 3 inches of its surface if all the coal ever mined was distributed evenly across it. Throw that in with 4-5 inches of sea level rise caused in part by that burning of coal, we've lost a fair bit of Britain in recent(ish) years.
As much as I love the achievement of my country I wanna point out some little bits of I fo that might be overlooked. The trees becoming coal because they died before bacteria and fungus evolved to digest lignin is a myth. There's evidence to suggest this ability evolved in tandem with trees it's just this swampy place also had plenty of anaerobic places where the wood could get squished and buried. Also as I live near one of these coal plants i can say that they're not all offline. Many now burn a bamboo like plant which is grown as a biofuel. Coal powerplants don't much care what burns so long as it burns. This is obviously better for the environment though. Finally some plants are getting experimental nuclear upgrades because coal power plants don't even care if something is burning or just a really hot rock.
I've lived through three hurricanes, two tropical storms, one wildfire, one extreme freeze, and this year missed a fourth hurricane and a freak derecho in my hometown because I moved away (though I got to worry for all my family and friends who are still there). All of these things have happened with increasing regularity for the past 20-plus years, to the point where we now expect at least one extreme weather event a year. Even when these events aren't happening, the extraordinary heat all through the summer has become worse and more punishing than ever. All of these situations strain our power grid to the point where it regularly fails, causing even more injury. These things happen to such a degree that I sometimes find myself getting illogically mad when I perceive more people to be talking about bad weather events when they happen elsewhere; I have this "where was your care when we were suffering" feeling that is probably some sort of undiagnosed trauma response, and I have to remind myself that that thought is gross and unhelpful. In the context of all this death and destruction, I get extremely pessimistic about humanity's (and my home state's) seeming indifference to the realities of climate change. But to see the UK get coal free after nine years of good, hard work... that's something to feel good about, and to imagine can be possible here. In general, when you speak optimistically about striving to mitigate or reverse climate change, it helps me feel a little less pessimistic. So thank you.
I was gonna die from lack of sunlight but then I got high I was gonna not generate enough sugars and wilt away but then I got high I was gonna not pass my genes down cause I was gonna die but then I got high then I got high then I got high
So the UK is excellently geographically for many reasons. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, very little proper flooding, no volcanoes, no dangerous animals and no land connected to anywhere with dangerous animals. The worst we've got is a bit of rain.
I can't help but notice that on that graph of the UKs power generation mix, when Coal dropped, "Import" jumped up. But like, importing from where and from what source? Did they just replace domestic coal with foreign coal?
No, there are interconnects between the UK and France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and Norway. France is the largest. Imported electricity from France is mostly nuclear. When the wind blows, power flows the other way, exporting wind energy to France. Imports from Norway are mostly hydro, Denmark mostly wind.
✅ Buying Pizzamas merch early to avoid it selling out. ✅ Waiting to buy Pizzamas to get those sweet potential discounts. ✅ Buying Pizzamas merch early not caring about potential discounts because all the money goes to charity. IT'S ALL VALID AND WORTH CELEBRATING! HAPPY PIZZAMAS, EVERYONE! ❤
I think people have been burning coal (at a marginal rate) since before 2000 years ago. I think a more common use of coal pre-1700 was carving things out of jet coal.
Wow, we got emissions down to the 1850 level!! ...by moving those emissions to Chinese factories. Too much of EU greening is based on exporting our production to other countries for me to celebrate this.
Yep we have a lot of wind and hot air here in the UK. I blame the diet. It was a good moment going 0 coal, but in the scheme of things, we are a small island on the Atlantic coast. Other bigger countries need to step up. Now I have another thing to add to the "Things invented in the UK", Trees. That'll confuse people.
![Blox Fruits Dragon Rework Update [Full Stream]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/EqDAp8udhm0/mqdefault.jpg)
“And if you didn’t get high, you were in the shade, and you died” -Hank Green out of context, 2024
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I legit thought he was talking about humans before I started the video 😂
I came to the comments to say exactly this :D
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I think its a bit fascinating that if you think about it, it's not just "trees" that are involved in the two events, it's THE SAME TREES
Ancient trees are now responsible for two periods of mass extinction. They're clearly out of control and must be stopped!
So... We are undoing it, essentially?
Yeah basically.
They are playing the long game
Literally the same carbon atoms
Comparing something to trees usually feels like a good thing, so I was not ready for "Humanity is like a forest in that it is precipitating a mass extinction event."
Humanity is much worse than the forest though,cause we make much more animals suffer.
We are capable of making everything better,despite the fact that we are currently making everything worse.❤
We have to change for the better,and i believe we can.
@@charlieistryinghisbest I'm pretty sure back when trees caused a mass extinction, the animals that used to eat the plants that went extinct suffered quite a bit while they went extinct.
@@bramvanduijn8086 It wasn't 2 trillion a year for decades i hope.
Like it is now.
@@charlieistryinghisbest all the other extinction events moved in slow motion compared to this one so...
makes sense
That last coal fired power plant is so close to my home I can see it from my living room window. It’s so weird to not see the steam from the cooling towers now.
At least you have nuke power. You’ll be way more promised to have power after a storm
Will they put a nucleal plant there? When the 'green' nonsense washes through.
Do annual cancer screening tests. Being so close to a coal powerplant for many years could have exposed you to high levels of radiation (if regulations were not strictly followed).
I have some great photos of it from driving past on our way to wales this summer. Yet another bit of “history as it happens” that we managed to unknowingly stumble across. The 2020s are being a strange decade so far!
Visible from where I live too in Ilkeston. But then the cooling towers are huge. I work on the Trains and at East Midlands Parkway they are truly imposing.
Nostalgia is there, but in some ways I'll be glad when they have gone.
There was a fun xkcd comic this week talking about how over the course of the industrial revolution the UK dug up and burned 3 inches of their entire country.
I'm honestly surprised it wasn't more. But I guess we were also digging resources from other countries, so maybe that slowed us down
Xkcd is how I found out they stopped using coal.
I was kind of hoping Hank would mention it, honestly!
@@mariannetfinches Really? I think 3 inches is a lot...
Good ol' randall.
It actually blows my mind that there was a time where wood existed but NOTHING could decompose wood.
Like yeah it makes logical sense, but the idea that organic material can just be sitting around and they'd never decompose because nature just... didnt know how to is mindblowing to me
A bit like plastic.
@@Thelango99 samples taken from the great garbage patch have found microbes able to digests different plastics, but people reading this comment have good odds of already being algo fed that information too
I wonder what that unique period of time in our planet's history smelled like. Wood can come in a wide variety of scents, and while the types of wood were certainly very different to today, and probably less varied, it still makes me wonder.
What other unique smells have been lost to time? We can recreate individual smells in a lab, but recreating the unique blend of scents that made up entire ancient ecosystems is drastically more difficult. It also make me wonder about ambient sound levels.
Nowadays, animal and insect life has to compete with modern machinery to communicate with one another. So one would think that the average animal and insect ecosystem is louder on average than pre-civilization. But, occasionally I'll read about ancient animals or reptiles having calls that could be heard for miles, and I start to wonder what ancient ambient soundscapes were like. Was Earth really loud millions of years ago? Or would the average person today find ancient Earth super quiet in comparison to the bustle of city life and cars of our highways of today?
fungi has entered the chat.
It could be decomposed, just not as fast as their growth back in that time.
It's debated though, see the paper "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production" by Nelsen and colleagues.
British person here.
Much as we are trying to reduce use of fossil fuels, our main target is to try to use sarcasm as a source of fuel. Once we crack that, then we can power the world. Or at least, the parts of it that can spell colour and aluminium correctly.
We need to get a nice hot cup of tea in every transport research lab.
You mean Coulour and Aulumuinuim?
*color *aluminum /j
If the Brits could find a way to harness the power of sarcasm we could surely reach warp speed. We could reach other galaxies. We could unravel the mysteries of the universe.
Here in Canada our goal is to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels by 2035 and replace them with maple syrup and unnecessary apologies. We've reduced fossil fuel usage by 41% since we started using Justin Bieber songs to power most of Eastern Canada, but they're not a renewable resource so it isn't ideal
Hank got too used to saying "I'll see you tomorrow" but he won't see him until Tuesday now 😭 (Thanks for a great Pizzamas - everything is a little stressful and this has been good!)
Or will I....
@@vlogbrothers Oooooo okay I'm interested
@@vlogbrothersIs there a Saturday extra bonanza?
@@vlogbrothers🤔🤷🏻♀️😁😂
@@vlogbrothers does this have anything to do with that significant tuberculosis news which definitely has nothing to do with books... 👀
The next time it's raining sideways and I'm staring forlornly at the tattered remains of another umbrella I'll remember to thank "the complete geographic luck that is the UK's relatively fantastic position with regards to wind resources". Clean air, wet heads, can't lose! 🌧️
Where I am from in South Wales, a lot of people complain about the wind turbines sprouting up everywhere. They ask. "Why do we have to have them here?" I point out that it's because we have some of the best wind in the country...
You painted a hilarious picture in my head. Does the wind really destroy your umbrellas like that? I know England is cloudy and rainy, but I didn't know about the wind!
@@Tritailed-Shenanigans The wind blows from the west. There's nothing to stop it as it comes in from the Atlantic before it gets to us. And all the hurricane systems they get down in the south east USA eventually make their way up and across the Atlantic to us. Normally they're not quite as destructive but they can still be a bit blowy. Our garage blew down just before Christmas of '78. The local school roof blew off a couple of years ago.
Yep, geographic luck does not necessarily mean nice weather.
@@Tritailed-ShenanigansUmbrellas don't break all the time but yeah it is the reason I don't actually own an umbrella anymore, too much hassle to keep attempting to fix them.
Longtime British viewer here, thanks for the little spotlight! I’m amidst similar circles in celebrating, it’s an exciting milestone that I just hope can encourage others to set a goal to do the thing, and then *do the thing*!
You have the highest heating cost in the world at the moment. Nothing to be productive of...
You mean the thing of outsourcing to make it someone else's problem?
Yours is a ridiculously ill-informed comment. Britain's co2 footprint has risen year on year and will continue to do so. The actions that Britain has taken have only increased that rise.
So what I'm hearing is that a group of tree from millions of years ago accidentally caused a mass extinction event. And now, those exact same trees are gonna help accidentally cause another mass extinction event. Wonderful, just wonderful.
holy crap, I hadn't thought about it that way. that's kinda mind-blowing 🤔
Well it's kind of fair if you think of it as necromancy where we disturbed the graves of the ancients and now their vengeful spirits are bent on taking us down with them.
@@fsihfhsifihsfshifhis This is much more horrifying, but also so metal.
Not exactly the same. The trees we're burning now are from the Carboniferous, the ones that triggered the Late Devonian were... in the Late Devonian. Separated by millions of years, and with very different species assemblages. But still, close enough.
@fsihfhsifihsfshifhis The graves of…trees?
This video has a few mistakes. Hank mentions the late devonian mass extinction, but it has nothing to do with what he's talking about. The crash of CO2 concentrations happened in the LATE CARBONIFEROUS, 300 million years ago. Also, the pangea picture he shows is from the triassic period, not even the paleozoic! In the late carboniferous the land masses were not fully assembled together like that yet. Also, the extinction event of the late carboniferous is not considered a MASS extintion, because it wasn't that much big of a deal for animals, only for plants. It is usually denoted as "The late carboniferous forests collapse", which caused the break up of big forests into smaller and scattered ones, eventually leading to the partial desertification of the permian period.
So he mixed the devonian mass extintion with a carboniferous event and showed a map of the triassic... what a mess!
this needs to be bumped
bruh
😂
So, in summary - youtuber has no idea what he's talking about. What else is new?
Huh
0:55 "and if you didn't get high... you died"
I came here to make this exact comment.
Just like high school
@@newtonpritchett9887just like quarentine
Just like my daily life, both pre- and post-Covid 😂😂
"I can't believe I get to be a witness to the story of Earth" is such a cool thing to say
"... Because if you don't get high, then you're in the shade and you're dead"
"Right on ma'an. I'll smoke to that."
I wish I could favorite RUclips comments ✨🤣👍✨
Just want to clarify that the Devonian Kellwasser event took place around 372 Ma, the Coal Measures in the UK are from about 318 Ma, and Pangea was full assembled at 250 Ma. These events are ultimately related in Earth's story, but they happened about as far apart from each other as we are from the dinosaurs
Oh cool, where did you learn this?
@@lupakajsalisa3652 in Coallege...bdum tish.
Maybe, when Octupi are writing their ancient history in 50M years, they'll say: Humans. Quaint little creatures. Killed themselves quickly. Some of them seemed nice.
Humans will not go extinct because of Climate Change. We're a pretty resilient species.
*Octopodes. Octopus is a latinisation of a Greek word, not a true Latin word. So either it’s octopuses as an English pluralisation, or if you’re being prescriptivist it would be octopodes from the original Greek, the Latin pluralisation makes the least sense of all.
@@mynameisjoejeans but I like it
@@mynameisjoejeans You're literally being prescriptivist right now. Yes, literally. :)
@@MartcaptAll human language use is correct language use. Every dialect is correct. Every accent is correct. A community uses it in the correct way for that community. Octopi is a word because lots of people have used it, and know what it means. It's one of the many correct words that people use for the plural of octopus. ❤
With love from a linguist.
The "nothing could break down lignan" hypothesis is starting to be called into question. There are thoughts that the coal band is mostly just a coincidence of an era where lots of biomass got buried.
Interesting! I will keep an eye on this!
@@vlogbrothers Wait, how are trees destroying the earth a second time?
@@ObjectsInMotion Coal burning, since the coal is made from trees. His argument was since they didn't do it on purpose the first time, we can extend the loosey goosey 'blame' on them the second time as well, though really its just humans, but at least some humans stopped burning coal for power. Guessing they are still using coal for steel, but thats a different thing entirely
This really bummed me out when I first heard it, since I liked the story of lignan-creation evolution outpacing lignan-eating evolution, but its good chance to confirm I do not have faith in in my beliefs and am open to them being challenged, so bring it on questions!
Aye, it never sounded right to me. We're already seeing fungi and bacteria that can break down plastic, so the idea that it would take hundreds of thousands if not millions of years for fungi to evolve to break down lignin seemed... Incorrect.
That they got buried, turned into peat and then into coal, the same way it still happens now (just getting buried in anoxic swamps where the decay process can't occur before it gets compressed and fossilizes into coal) always made far more sense to me. I'm glad to see someone else bringing it up.
I always get weirdly emotional thinking about how everything throughout history led to this moment of me living in incredible plenty at the expense of the environment. Beautiful and tragic
It's only the appearance of incredible plenty.
Everything is a shell of what it needs to be.
Me when I was 6 and having an existential crisis thinking about how every single one of your ancestors had kids and if you decide to not you are the first one in a million years of a previously-unbroken chain
0:34
With all due respect, this isn't _quite_ right. The forests you're talking about here sound a lot more consistent with what was going on in the Carboniferous period, not the Late Devonian when they triggered the extinction. The earliest forests arose roughly 390 MYA (at least this is the earliest ones we have found so far, though those are diverse enough that they likely arose even earlier and this will be pushed back, as it already has been) and occurred in Euramerica, before Pangaea assembled! By 300 MYA these forests had already been around for quite some time and advanced a lot to the point of having early seed plants, not just a 50 million year sprint to the sky. Additionally, the diversity of tree species in the Devonian was rather poor (IIRC, for a bit during the Late Devonian Archaeopteris was the sole dominant tree species) and their roots were actually pretty shallow, the Lycopsids in particular are notorious for having weak root systems that caused them to topple all the time. Additionally, much of the famous coal formation of the Carboniferous was partly due to the marine transgressions triggered by the Late Paleozoic Icehouse, from the already lowered CO2 from all the vegetation.
So, yeah trees _are_ triggering a mass extinction again in a way, but its not quite the same trees responsible for both, they're separated by at least a few millions of years and consisted of vastly different species. Additionally, its important to note that deforestation is causing massive sedimentation in the modern day, not unlike the sedimentation triggered from aforestation in the Late Devonian.
Something only tangentially related that I learned recently: the Appalachian mountains in North America are so old that they had been forming for hundreds of millions of years _before trees had evolved._ When trees happened, the rock layers in the Appalachians were already hundreds of millions of years old.
Edit: fixed auto-incorrect
So life there really is older than the trees, but younger than the mountains :P
I believe Greenland has some places that are nearly 4 billion years old.
@@hedgehog3180I think Western Australia is the oldest part of Earth
thank you so much for mentioning helene, we are working hard to reconstruct here in western nc. it’s been truly gut wrenching and heartbreaking here
Haywood County resident here. Hold strong and fast, we'll get through this somehow.
"all for the love of the bit" is such a pizzamas mentality. I love it.
I was happy to see this in the news this week!! - swampmonster with agency
++
as always, thank you hank for paying attention and doing all the research it takes to deliver us good news like this with this much care and context
The one thing I've always wanted is fantasy-style maps that are actually just Earth's continents at different points in time.
I live in the Appalachian Mountains part of VA and we were hit hard by the remnants of the hurricane (although not as hard as NC, GA, etc.; but there were massive power outages and some roads are still blocked).
Anyway, coal is still considered to be an important part of history here (although a very deadly one). But, I didn't know it was important to the UK until years ago when I studied abroad in the NE part of England and found out they had a strong historical connection with coal mining as well. They moved on to create other jobs, a metro system, etc. in that former coal mining community and it was pretty cool. I'm glad to see the UK succeed in moving away from coal.
"I didn't know it was important to the UK until years ago"
Seems a bit odd, as that's what fuelled the industrial revolution! I guess it's natural for me to know about these things, growing up in the middle of it all in the South Wales coalfields, in the Rhondda, the centre of coal production, with my grandfather having been a miner.
Just a note: "Natural gas" is mostly methane (about 80-90%), which you probably know, but the natural gas industry does a metric fck ton a greenwashing to pretend that they aren't part of the problem.
Anyways, it's always great to hear good news. Great video! :)
The hydrogen lobby is even worse, since over 95% of hydrogen is just cut from said natural gas at the moment. No viable commercial electrolysis method exists.😅
They are part of the solution though. If it wasn't for natural gas, we'd still have to be burning coal. Natural gas, being easily turn-off-and-onable, means it can be switched off almost entirely when there's enough wind blowing.
@@paulsengupta971 the problem is that natural gas used for energy is responsible for a good amount of the methane in the atmosphere, while coal is only CO2 (considering it has good scrubbers). so it's arguable if natural gas is much better.
While I'm sure they do a lot of purposeful green washing, I believe that the name "natural gas" actually comes from a time when it was a competitor to coal and wood gas, which need to be produced at a factory.
@@danilooliveira6580Coal does produce around twice as much CO2 per kWh of electricity produced though, and as you say relies on proper maintenance of scrubbers, without which all sorts of carcinogens abound.
My favorite time of Earth's history; before fungus had evolved to break down woody material.
Trees the size of buildings, too mighty, their roots couldn't support them. Toppling other trees. Thousands of years worth of trees, still whole undecayed. No fungus is site.
Fungus was there. They just didn't know how to eat wood.
I love the part of history where fungus starts to take over, but wasn't prepared for the fact that mammals already won that war before it even started. Fungus basically just cleared out a niche for us. So neat to see how that happens.
We might be in the same situation with plastic now. There's bacteria that can already break down PET, and all the other plastics in our landfills are food for any bacteria willing to evolve the right set of enzymes.
@Croz89 thank god
"They didn't know what they were doing, but it does seem like they did do it." - Hank Green, prosecutor, defendant, judge, and that courtroom vending machine that's perpetually out-of-order.
Knowing this about the placement of easily accessible coal in the world, mixed with the idea that the old world was only able to conquer and oppress the new world as a result of the fact that local species in the old world are more easily domesticated and therefore put to human use; it really paints a picture of how the UK became such a global superpower, and how it really had very little to do with the people living here. We were never better than anyone else, we just spawned in the luckiest part of the map.
add in the country being an island which necessitated good ship technology and sea faring culture, it was poised to be at the centre of world trade during the industrial revolution.
Well tbf while they were certainly lucky with the resources, they also had that protestant work ethic that likely helped birth the start of capitalism. And I say this as an Irishman who doesn't like to give credit to the Brits if I can help it
@@Gavolav I'll be honest I'm pretty doubtful that religion plays any serious role in people's work ethic. And there does seem to be at least some evidence to suggest that the idea of "protestant work ethic" in specific is an invented idea, rather than reflective of any real life tendencies.
I imagine if you're looking any population group there are going to be people who get satisfaction from working hard, and people who don't, and that's going to be the ultimate difference maker in how much work they do, rather than their religion.
@@mylittledashie7419religion was used to guilt people into working hard. But also, saying that a people’s culture has no bearing on their mindset and therefore behavior on a macro-scale is bananas. Absolutely baffling.
It was only lucky in the past less than 1000 years. In many ways Europe was pretty resource poor before that. Before that the ancient resource wealth was in the east.
Okay this was genuinely fascinating.
This is an even more mind-blowing and long-term example of "Yes, what happened a long time ago matters and is still affecting us today" than we usually talk about!
4:30 every living things that we know has existed has been a witness to Earth's story
I'm happy with the hoodie blanket I got!
Profound final vid.
Thanks for a great Pizzamas.
All I heard was Hank telling me that being higher than everyone else is a very strong genetic advantage.
Way ahead of ya', Hank.
Those trees, first by living and then by dying, have had a wild overall impact on the client.
Oops 🌲 did it again
Tree played with your heartwood
3:15 "Hold my Reactor, Watch this!" ~Germany
It's a shame that the green lobby was so anti-nuclear that Germany has to continue to use a lot of coal in its generation!
Any idea on what caused the plummet in co2 production in the early 1900’s? The Great Depression perhaps. Surely not the world wars, because industrial production would have been running at peak capacity during those years. 2:44
"If you didn't get high you were in the shade, and died"
Truly poetic.
Happy Pizzamas to all, and to all a good Friday.
I love how ancient that screen with the uk power mix looks 😅
I'm also mildly reassured by our small amount of progress
Thanks for an excellent pizzamas, all at complexly!
Those trees knew exactly what they were doing
As a Brit, this video made me feel a bit proud without feeling bad about it. It's a strange feeling. 🇬🇧
Any time someone says "the climate just changes naturally," I'm like "yeah it does, but it's not supposed to happen this fast." We're talking cycles of tens of thousands of years, and that's just within the ice age we are still currently in. If we're talking about changes between ice ages and greenhouse periods, those changes happen over the span of millions of years. The rate at which our climate is warming is *not* normal.
And _even if_ the current rate of climate change _was_ natural (it's not), it's going to have some pretty devastating consequences. So if we have _any_ ability to reduce/mitigate those effects ... *_maybe we should‽_* 🤷♀️
This wasn’t an intended message of the video, but one of the takeaways I got was that if we ruin the planet enough to cause a mass extinction, we will be accidentally making a new environment for new types of life to thrive in (just like the big trees made a new environment for us to thrive in). This would be a pretty terrible outcome for us humans, but it is still sort of beautiful in its own way.
This is inevitable with nature. Something will always grow to thrive in the environment we create
Yeah, it's not a question of whether Earth will survive humans, but whether humans will survive humans.
F-ing Awesome. I already miss pizzamass. Thank you all
Hi from the UK. It took us about 200 years to dig up and burn 30 billion tonnes of coal. It'll take the next 200 years to reverse that carbon debt.
Today, we ride trains on a Victorian rail network that was originally smelted with coal. British coal fuelled our ships of trade and war, that transported soldiers to expand and control the empire.
Coal mining communities campaigned for, and won, the civil rights that were the bedrock of those we have today. Entire villages, towns, and cities were built around the mines - they are still the cultural core for many communities 30 - 40 years after their closure.
Men, Women, and children carved out the caverns and shafts beneath our feet, deep enough to bury 4 stacked Eiffel towers, running 6 miles out below the floor of the North Sea.
But our Carbon Heritage is much more than the inherited carbon footprint. It's the community organising and innovation that lives in the bones of these places, that we're starting to draw on now for meaninfgul climate action.
You would not be watching this RUclips video without the Industrial Revolution.
@@wodanthevikingWeird addition but alright
3:04, now to get that one immediately below it "Gas" also to 0.
It is the UK's most expensive source of power so...hopefully!!!
It was one of our new government's manifesto pledges to become a "clean energy superpower" by 2030, massively increasing investment in renewables and getting rid of our reliance on gas (especially our expensive and volatile foreign gas imports). Let's see if they actually deliver on it!
This is a tremendous accomplishment! Good work UK!
Happy Pizzamas! Here's to more good news to everyone around the world.
Hank I'm crying. Thank you for giving me much needed hope.
If you can't get high you stay in the shade and die.
Feels like there's a metaphor somewhere there about something.
So here’s a thought: as far as I’m aware, significant amounts of coal were required for consistently reaching the vast heat needed for mass-producing high-quality steel and developing early forms of industrial power-production; also as far as I’m aware, there might literally not be a way to reach many other advanced technologies without accessing those things first (very possibly including any-kind of aerospace industry); and it sounds like, as far as we’re aware, literally the only way for significant amounts of coal to happen is for there to have been a multi-million-year era of un-decomposable, CO2-storing life (like trees) appearing in ludicrously huge quantities approximately a few hundred million years before the coal is needed.
Meaning; if that’s all true, or even mostly true; that sounds like another reason for the Fermi paradox not looking quite so paradoxical…
I was one of the ones who celebrated. It honestly brought a tear to my eye, not just because it's a positive to our planet, but because it was such a long time coming -- the birthplace of industrialization being one of the first to turn off its plumes of smoke!
I think too, positively, it shows that perhaps in fifty years, it will be rather strange for anyone to use coal at all. These things can happen more swiftly than we think.
And perhaps as a side effect of AI wanting ever-more power, we will innovate and be forced to confront much better energy systems going forward. One can hope.
Or we decide that AI, fake currency, mass travel and social media arguments are not worth the effort of powering them.
The UK wins Pizzamas! Good job!🎉
Climate change has long challenged me in having hope for the future. here's proof one step at a time change can happen.
Let's take it far.
Something I've been thinking about a lot: Much of our fossil fuel reserves are, to my knowledge, based on this kind of singular event where there was a lot of plant matter to bury and not many things to break them down. Thus they created our current reserves.
Presuming that is true... Have we salted the earth for future civilization? Granted, we've got a sample size of one, but presuming humans don't stick around for several million years is the next intelligent species gonna be stymied before the industrial revolution because earth isn't refilling these fossil fuel deposits? I think it's far less likely to jump from wood burning stoves to photovoltaics, massive scale wind farms, nuclear, etc without fossil fuels first.
Second thought: is that a potential great filter? Needing something like oil and gas to jump start the energy an advanced civilization needs to develop.
Yes (future civilisations) and arguably yes (filter; though I wouldn't like to guess at how large a filter it might be) :)
People have argued that we should intentionally leave some fossil fuel deposits in the ground for use by potential future civilisations - or even the remnants of our own civilisation in some kind of post-apocalypse scenario - for the reasons you give.
I find it hard to disagree with that, tbh, especially when we have other energy sources and thus don't _need_ to use fossil fuels.
I'm so excited about the sale! I've been pining for the blanket but it was out of budget and now it's not! I'm heading over to buy it right *now* before its too late!! Thank you for letting us know!
You are lucky it was not poplar. Sorry, are we not doing tree puns? Was that accidental?
@@pattheplanter There are so many options. I could take it to the beech, or use it to spruce up the room, I'm not ash-amed to admit I might just use it fur alder places I cedar need!
@@gelfling Sub-lime and pear-fect. Though I am sure I am your elder, you have box-ed me in. I may admit defeat. It is plane that I am br-oak-en. Willow-ered ourselves enough. Yew and I must stop, I am sure we would be sycamore.
Now if only they would stop burning ancient forest from British Columbia
That final power station is near me and I have some mixed feelings about its closure. I know that it’s a net positive for the world and I feel good about that but whenever I travel it’s on the main road I usually come home on so seeing it is a comfortingly familiar landmark. I’m glad to be without coal and glad to have decarbonised but as it’s demolished I am going to miss those towers
Dream would be if it was converted to a nuclear power station.
I lived in the UK for 2 years (before the Climate Change Act was passed) and I understand the attachment people have to that old infrastructure. So much of the Victorian era coal-driven architecture is aesthetically pleasing, like St Pancras station in London, suggesting that people of the time needed beauty to compensate for all the smog and slag heaps and whatnot they were generating. I hope the towers are not just knocked down. PS -- Chicago has an abandoned coal power plant in the heart of the city, on the riverbank, and I think it looks very cool from the outside (with ivy growing on it).
As someone born in England, I feel like both a hero and a villain of this story!
I forgot it was Pizzamas, that's why the recent day by day uploads!
And, coincidentally, I'm watching this whilst having my usual Friday night dinner of pizza 😄
recent developments have strongly dashed my optimism about our climate (why must you be like this America)
I love the title, because it's one of those titles that sounds dumb until you watch the video and go "oh wait that makes sense". Also reminds me of Liquid Trees and wanting more creative solutions to climate change and stuff, yeah. It was a fun pizzamas, peeps, what a ride!
It's an oversimplification to suggest that that flood happened because the atmosphere holds more water. That difference is a few % at best. The flood would have been huge anyway, just because of the track of the tropical cyclone forcing wind against the mountains. The unusual track was far more important than climate change to what made this event severe.
Climate change really does make the hydrologic cycle stronger, enhancing both dry and wet. But it's not as big as many people suggest, because the dry atmosphere warms more than the most atmosphere. What I mean by that is that dry air gets warmer faster under climate change than moist air. So, the average temperature of the earth's surface has warmed more than the average temperature of the air in saturation.
Thanks, Hank, I needed this kind of news.
Bought a bucket hat. I've never worn a bucket hat, but I get the distict impression it's too small for me, so the end result is my niece is getting a bucket hat.
Here lies Hank’s Chemo curls, 2023-2024
The hair is almost back to normal. How are you feeling about that, Hank? Do you like the reminder being gone, or will you miss it?
I think about that era and how the trees must have stacked up and then how forest fires would take years to wear themselves out.
Rare UK win. But it's also worth noting that the decision to stop mining coal in the UK nearly 40 years ago was an entirely political one (ending coal miners' strikes that disrupted the power supply) that devastated communities centered on mines, many of which have never economically recovered. A day to celebrate the end of coal in the UK is also a great day to say "Screw Thatcher".
Genuine question: Were those coal mines even profitable at the time - or were they subsidized to prevent devastating said communities?
I still say "Screw Thatcher."
@@gideondurham924you can say “screw Thatcher” but in reality the seeds of the miners strike began growing on the night of 9th June 1983, the 1983 General Election night during which in an interview given to the BBC Scargill refused to accept the result of the election, even as millions of democratic votes were being counted and called for revolution on the streets. She really didn’t have a choice and truthfully of those mines that defied Scargill and voted on the proposals of her Government anyway, all but one voted to accept them.
3:10 I can't believe how exciting it was to watch that digital readout hit 0. They stuck the landing!
as a british person, i'd like to formally apologize for the british spreading our problems around the world even before humanity even existed...
XKXD had a comic(2992) that concluded Britain had lost the equivalent of 3 inches of its surface if all the coal ever mined was distributed evenly across it.
Throw that in with 4-5 inches of sea level rise caused in part by that burning of coal, we've lost a fair bit of Britain in recent(ish) years.
Most of it has not sunk, though there are sinkholes in some parts. Several old underground mines in Manchester have collapsed a little.
It's always something
As much as I love the achievement of my country I wanna point out some little bits of I fo that might be overlooked. The trees becoming coal because they died before bacteria and fungus evolved to digest lignin is a myth. There's evidence to suggest this ability evolved in tandem with trees it's just this swampy place also had plenty of anaerobic places where the wood could get squished and buried. Also as I live near one of these coal plants i can say that they're not all offline. Many now burn a bamboo like plant which is grown as a biofuel. Coal powerplants don't much care what burns so long as it burns. This is obviously better for the environment though. Finally some plants are getting experimental nuclear upgrades because coal power plants don't even care if something is burning or just a really hot rock.
The bamboo sounds interesting.
You're telling me the UK has just been vibing there since before humans?
At least 1 million years, often with land bridge to Europe.
Ha, "They didn't know what they were doing." That's exactly what they want you to believe!
01:45 I feel some foreshadowing going on
I've lived through three hurricanes, two tropical storms, one wildfire, one extreme freeze, and this year missed a fourth hurricane and a freak derecho in my hometown because I moved away (though I got to worry for all my family and friends who are still there). All of these things have happened with increasing regularity for the past 20-plus years, to the point where we now expect at least one extreme weather event a year. Even when these events aren't happening, the extraordinary heat all through the summer has become worse and more punishing than ever. All of these situations strain our power grid to the point where it regularly fails, causing even more injury. These things happen to such a degree that I sometimes find myself getting illogically mad when I perceive more people to be talking about bad weather events when they happen elsewhere; I have this "where was your care when we were suffering" feeling that is probably some sort of undiagnosed trauma response, and I have to remind myself that that thought is gross and unhelpful. In the context of all this death and destruction, I get extremely pessimistic about humanity's (and my home state's) seeming indifference to the realities of climate change. But to see the UK get coal free after nine years of good, hard work... that's something to feel good about, and to imagine can be possible here. In general, when you speak optimistically about striving to mitigate or reverse climate change, it helps me feel a little less pessimistic. So thank you.
Misread the title as "teens are destroying the earth again" and my first thought was "wait, had they stopped?"
Well, they're still doing a good job of destroying language, if half the noise about Gen Z/Gen Alpha slang can be believed.
AMAZING!!! WELL DONE UK!!!! 😆 (sorry that I can't stop singing the 1812 overture when these things happen)
I was gonna die from lack of sunlight
but then I got high
I was gonna not generate enough sugars and wilt away
but then I got high
I was gonna not pass my genes down cause I was gonna die
but then I got high
then I got high
then I got high
So the UK is excellently geographically for many reasons. No hurricanes, no earthquakes, very little proper flooding, no volcanoes, no dangerous animals and no land connected to anywhere with dangerous animals. The worst we've got is a bit of rain.
What do you mean no dangerous animals? The reason we don't have them isn't because they didn't exist, it's because we killed them all.
I can't help but notice that on that graph of the UKs power generation mix, when Coal dropped, "Import" jumped up. But like, importing from where and from what source? Did they just replace domestic coal with foreign coal?
Shush you. Don't burst these lemmings' bubble!
Russia
@@OHHHHUSBANT "Russia" isnt a power source... Is Russia burning coal to send the UK that power?
No, there are interconnects between the UK and France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and Norway. France is the largest. Imported electricity from France is mostly nuclear. When the wind blows, power flows the other way, exporting wind energy to France. Imports from Norway are mostly hydro, Denmark mostly wind.
Germany still has coal generation (thanks to the green lobby not liking nuclear!) but that's not a major part of the UK's imported electricity.
For just a second there I really thought Hank was gonna say "... because now... you know better." :D
✅ Buying Pizzamas merch early to avoid it selling out.
✅ Waiting to buy Pizzamas to get those sweet potential discounts.
✅ Buying Pizzamas merch early not caring about potential discounts because all the money goes to charity.
IT'S ALL VALID AND WORTH CELEBRATING! HAPPY PIZZAMAS, EVERYONE! ❤
I think people have been burning coal (at a marginal rate) since before 2000 years ago. I think a more common use of coal pre-1700 was carving things out of jet coal.
i am not destroying the earth, please stop spreading misinformation.
now if you'd mind i'm very busy with photosynthesis.
You know what you did, 320 million years ago.
What an incredibly realistic and motivating frame. Thanks Hank
I'm early! I have nothing to say other than I just ordered socks this week and I am very excited
Wow, we got emissions down to the 1850 level!!
...by moving those emissions to Chinese factories.
Too much of EU greening is based on exporting our production to other countries for me to celebrate this.
Roller coaster that’s always goes up? Someone is a fan of John Green novels
Oh, I didn't get that one! Is it from TFIOS?
Yep we have a lot of wind and hot air here in the UK. I blame the diet.
It was a good moment going 0 coal, but in the scheme of things, we are a small island on the Atlantic coast. Other bigger countries need to step up.
Now I have another thing to add to the "Things invented in the UK", Trees. That'll confuse people.
So you could say that plants were the root cause of the Devonian mass extinction event.
As someone from the UK, we never heard about this…should have been a bigger story. Thanks for sharing this information!
UK: 🎉 _[shuts down its last coal power plant]_ 🎉
Meanwhile in China: 🏭📈🏭📈🏭📈🏭📈🏭
Great Pizzamas this year! Every video was a banger and was just what i needed each day.