Climate Change Apocalypse Part 1
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/iz3rN-mJp60
Hey everybody, it’s a heatwave! Or maybe it’s just between heatwaves where you are! Either way, this summer we’ve faced a series of national emergencies because of an oppressive heat dome that’s strangling the life out of everything the light touches. And it’s all on fire! Fire everywhere! It’s like sitting in Satan’s asshole right now -- the walls are sticky… I am dripping down every crevice and natural ravine of my body. For more on that, check out my OnlyFans.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the five-alarm total structure fire destruction of the earth.
It’s actually been hard to film this because I keep getting news alerts about record-breaking temperatures and other catastrophic situations around the U.S. Every time I hit record I have to stop and add more stuff to the video. If you’re watching this, I’ve finally made it through.
This is a three-part series and in it I’m going to thoroughly cover everything you’ve ever wanted to know about climate change, including some really surprising things, and of course, some truly awful and horrifying realities.
Let’s start by talking about why we’re dealing with an ever-increasing amount of bazillion-degree days. Then in part two we’ll look at pervasive myths about climate change, and in part three we’ll go over what you and I can actually do about any of this in our everyday lives.
The first thing we need to pin down is why so many people have a hard time making the distinction between weather and climate. Weather -- climate, climate -- weather. Climate. Climate? Climata. Chlamydia. Cliamatia-meatza-ballza! That’s how you say climate in Italian. I bet you uh… I bet you didn’t know that.
Okay, so. Weather happens, very concisely, on a brief timescale. Is it snowing? Is it not snowing? That’s the weather. Weather is what happens today, or within a few days. “Here we go, I’m checking the weather! Wouldn’t want it to rain on my Hitler Youth reeducation picnic sponsored by Tesla. There are some big banners coming, but none of them are quite big enough to hold the girth of the obesity of our American youth in their prime.”
Climate is a long-term trend of weather patterns. Measured from, at the very least, thirty years. It’s an aggregate of weather averages over a long-term period. Climate data tracks things like record high temperatures, record rainfall, and exactly how many dinosaur farts are trapped within a particular cavernous pocket in that sinkhole underneath your garage. Of course we can measure that. And someday, someone will also measure how many of your farts are trapped under the earth, too. I’m not sure if I’m sorry about that or not, it’s just science. Climate is what happens over a very long time -- epochs, aeons, ages of the earth, journey to the center of the earth, and even middle earth, where fossil fuels are precious.
When people talk about and debate about climate change now, if they’re doing it in good faith, anyway, they’re talking about anthropogenic climate change, or the accelerated effects of human activity on the planet. Now, we can literally see this happening. We can measure the output of natural gasses in the atmosphere before the Industrial Revolution vs. after the Industrial Revolution into the modern day. It’s not rocket science. It’s actually like geology, and volcanology, and oceanography, and like some others. A lot of this can be seen in realtime. 2023 was the hottest year on record so far, and the ten hottest years since we’ve been measuring annual temps have been within the last decade.
Canada had a record wildfire season this year due to the fact that fire conditions are damn-near constant now, and those of us on the East Coast who don’t have to deal with that specific danger are finally experiencing the consequences of air quality emergencies while whole cities start to smell like a campfire for weeks at a time. And you can’t even make any goddamned smores out there.The global sea level has risen 8-9 inches in the last 200 years, and there are interactive maps that show you a fun little progression of the ocean’s future encroachment wherever you are in the world to let you know exactly when your whole family is going to drown. It’s lots of fun.
A lot of people dismiss the whole thing because sometimes it still gets cold outside. And actually, cold weather events are increasing in severity and frequency too, even as the average temperature of the Earth is rising. So yeah, what’s going on with that? We know that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency across the spectrum -- cold, frigid, blazing hot, lukewarm, all of them. So cold weather is not actually the counterpoint that some people think it is. What happens is that increased moisture in the air from hotter than normal ocean water is collecting in the atmosphere at unheard of rates, and that’s causing snowmaggedon conditions on a regular basis. There have been twice as many extreme snow storms in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half. All of the shitty weather is getting worse -- this being a weather trend, is therefore -- guess what? -- climate change. Climate change is really just another way to say shitty weather all the time.
Another important point we need to make in order to engage in a conversation about climate change is the idea of good faith. Maybe the single thing that makes me feel like I’m boofing crazy pills the most is the fact that nuance and intellectual honesty have been entirely removed from the conversation about the Earth’s climate. This isn’t unique to climate discussions, it’s unfortunately a fun feature of our new post-fact reality. Part of this is intentional, caused by interest groups that benefit from keeping action against climate change at a minimum, and part of it happens because the public starts to believe the misinformation and obfuscation that comes from this effort and perpetuates faulty arguments and talking points like good little soldiers. So adorable.
I think that where everyday people get mixed up here is in the fact that they expect the experts to just have all the answers. We’re all human, I think, we just tend to get frustrated when we don’t have access to a straight answer about something. And no one can actually predict all of the things right now. We know a whole lot about what anthropogenic climate change is doing to the planet, but we simply can’t predict all the damage it’s going to do in all the particular ways it’ll be done. We just don’t know yet.
Anytime there’s an absence of an answer doesn’t mean you throw in with conspiracy theorists or decide that pursuing the answers with the best tools available is a bad idea. It’s all we have. And eventually, we will understand everything there is to know about climate change, whether through rigorous study, or simply by doing nothing like we are now and waiting to see what terrible things it has in store for us. Ultimately, it would be really cool if we didn’t get to find out that way.
There really is an objective climate change situation happening, and the danger of this can be explained truthfully with a little history and logic. For instance, the climate has changed drastically over the 4.5 billion years since the planet was formed, multiple times, in fact. Sometimes, changes in orbit fostered ice ages that covered much of the Earth in a Game of Thrones long winter. Other times, new life evolved that altered survivability for other living things. Each time things changed, new conditions led to the evolution and prospering of vast new species, which, in turn, actually changed the climate again through the output of their biomechanics and gaseous byproducts. Case in point: my gaseous byproducts are constantly affecting the survivability of my family each and every night while they sleep.
As another example, when plantlife spread from the oceans onto land 500 million years ago, it introduced oxygen into the atmosphere at such a rate that it doubled in concentration, and carbon dioxide levels plummeted. We’re only around and alive today because this process occurred. But, other living things that depended on the particular mixture of atmospheric gases to survive before that point, well, they had themselves a very personal climate crisis.
And I think what detractors miss the most in this conversation is that humans are also living organisms that have to exist under exact conditions. I think that gets lost in the sacred Gaia, Earth Mother, new-age spiritualism that sometimes pervades progressive talking points on the issue. The Earth will do whatever it does when we’re gone. It truly doesn’t care whether we’re here or not. It’ll either die completely and become a barren rock like Mars, turn into a boiling atmospheric hell of superheated gasses like Venus, put on a bunch of weight and collapse under its own mass like your mom’s a**, or it’ll clear out the remnants of human interference and go right back to shitting out diverse lifeforms that can cope with the current state of atmospheric reality.
The main point is, people will be gone. Because we require this current era of the Earth to be in this exact state for us to be alive -- we require the current climate, the current mixture of gasses in the atmosphere, at the current temperatures, to be able to keep on keepin’ on. If any of that changes, then we’re absolutely going to face the very same extinction that other living things faced during the previous eras of atmospheric upheaval. It’s not that the Earth’s climate hasn’t ever changed before, so big deal -- it’s that, if the Earth’s climate alters so much to form conditions other than the ones that can support human life, that’s going to be a bad time. All life on Earth survives under certain conditions. It’s a basic Boolean statement: if these conditions are true, happy sparrows get to frolic in the misty branches outside your window while you cook pancakes in the nude -- if these conditions are not true, then everybody’s f*cked. And quickly.
Which leads me to another major point about the nature of climate change: and that is -- time.
So, sure, the Earth’s climate really has changed multiple times in the past. Lots of opponents of reality use this fact as a reason to say climate change isn’t a problem. But we’re talking on a geological level, over millions of years. And it killed off a ton of stuff too, and changed the whole face of life on the planet. And right now, we’re messing with the climate at a massively accelerated pace, way more efficiently than nature ever has, in a totally observable way that we can see with our own eyes, let alone our instruments, satellite data, and ice core samples, and it isn’t going to go well for us if we don’t do something to stop it. Evolution and adaptation don’t happen overnight. We’re not going to sprout gills and live in the ocean just because Kevin Costner says we should. It would take millions of years of hot Water World action before the first human-pufferfish hybrid burst on the scene. These things are not instant. They’re measured in a million generations or more.
Of course, there’s a ton of misinformation out there clouding the narrative, because again, we can’t ever seem to argue anything fairly, so we have to navigate each and every issue we face as a species as if we’re running through a time-traveling maze that’s made entirely of bees.
The situation is not super complicated when you think about it. You have multiple industries, each composed of gigantic corporations that work in an inhumane, autonomous fashion to systematically accumulate as much revenue as they physically can each and every moment they’re allowed to operate. That is their only function, practically and legally. They are unfortunately not going to let some tiddly detail like the habitability of the planet we all live on get in the way of their profits.
For evidence of this, we just need to look at one of the original discoverers of the entire climate change phenomenon, which was none other than Exxon Mobile. Staff at Exxon researched and documented the future catastrophic effects of long-term fossil fuel use in the 1970s. And yet, much like the tobacco industry and any other industry that refuses to let existential reality get in the way of its relentless acquisition of cold, hard cash, they ignored their own findings and adamantly denied the harm they knew they were causing. Fascinatingly, last year in 2023, Harvard researchers found that not only was Exxon aware of the problem back then, but they actually created a truly phenomenal and very accurate model of climate change and the future problems it would cause, fifty years ago, before the public knew it needed to be worried at all. Exxon joined with the rest of the oil and gas lobby in donating millions of dollars a year to political candidates and their PACs, from a paltry sum of just 11 million dollars in 1990 and peaking at just under 90 million dollars in 2020. It sure seemed like they wanted to keep this out of the public eye, or at least fund political candidates who were willing to simply ignore the whole thing.
Not only that, it was none other than BP, or British Petroleum, that popularized that super crunchy and now ubiquitous term, “carbon footprint.” And they did so as a complete PR move. The whole thing was an attempt to shift the responsibility from gigantic corporations who actually cause all the harm over to the average citizen. They wanted us to look at our own influence on the planet and all the horrible things we’re doing, like buying things wrapped in twelve layers of plastic all the time, never mind that they’re the ones who make and distribute all that plastic. With one simple phrase they succeeded, probably beyond even their own wildest expectations, at placing the burden firmly on the shoulders of the individual when it comes to fixing the complete garbage fire the planet is heading toward. And to be clear, we’re in this mess in the first place because of the actions of these companies. But they have big marketing teams and you don’t, so they can make anything your fault in the public narrative that they want. I actually heard the other day that your favorite afternoon snack is honey salted babies. My marketing team is already spreading that around and there’s nothing you can do.
Stick around for part two, where we’ll go through the climate change myths that just won’t quit. We’ll also debunk them completely and give you the information you need to talk to your friends and family who may not have all the facts. It’ll be a great time and you don’t want to miss it.
Let’s do some f*cking good about climate change!!!!!
Sources for the climate change series:
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