Prof. Guy McPherson: We are SO F#%KED! AMOC is COLLAPSING!

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:04]Oh, ladles and jelly spoons. Welcome back to another episode of whatever you want to call this. What the hell is going on with us? That's the name of the show now. It's what the hell is going on with us. Uh today with me again, Professor Guy McFersonson. How are you, Guy?

[00:00:19]>> I've been worse, thank you.

[00:00:24]>> Um I brought you back on because there was this article I read. It has shocked me and I thought maybe you could shine some uh light upon all this. And so so far it says new 2026 study finds the am collapse is accelerating far beyond previous models. New data reveals we have already surpassed the atmospheric threshold for recovery and the coming global collapse is significantly more severe than predicted. How do you feel about that?

[00:00:51]>> I'm surprised it took this long to build up to that kind of event. Really? Excuse me.

[00:00:59]>> I mean, we were talking right before we started and you were saying that uh there's going to be an El Nino event that's going to be pretty bad. Tell me a little bit about that.

[00:01:07]>> Yes. James E. Hansen, the famous client scientist, has indicated that we are headed for the worst El Nino in the history of our species. It's he's calling it a super El Nino. And that added on top of the collapse of the Atlantic myadonal ocean circulation, which is difficult for me to say, and that's why everybody calls it the AOK.

[00:01:35]I guessed wrong the other day. I said something like it's the American medical. No, it was the uh Atlantic.

[00:01:43]Yeah, I I'll leave it to the scientists and the educated people to make these distinctions. Um, so I'll read a little bit as we go. Uh, for everybody who is wondering, the the Atlantic meadonal overturning circulation, say that five times fast, the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that keep the northwestern Europe temperate drives monsoon rainfalls across Africa and South America and that distributes heat across the entire planet. Now, we're looking at that's approaching a threshold from which there is no return.

[00:02:13]And my friend Guy has been telling us this for years, or Gee, as he's called in Scotland.

[00:02:20]Um, a landmark 2026 study published in the communications of earth and environment by neon will wonderling ganopolski and rostrom sounds European.

[00:02:32]Um, has delivered one of the most consequential findings in recent climate science. If the am collapses, it will almost certainly never recover as long as atmospheric CO2 remains above 350 parts per million. We're currently at Would you want to take a guess on this?

[00:02:48]Oh, I know. It's in the 420 neighborhood. Maybe 418, something like that.

[00:02:54]>> 425.

[00:02:57]And that figure is still climbing. Yeah.

[00:02:59]So, is that true? What? And tell me, what is this about? You're talking about uh uh what happens when this gets above, you know, 450 or 500? Well, interestingly, during the Ronald Reagan administration, the intergovernment intergovernmental panel on climate change replaced the advisory group on greenhouse gases. The advisory group on greenhouse gases had much more dire things to say about when we reach a certain threshold. They said when we get to 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that would trigger tipping points from which we can never recover. They also indicated that one degree C above the 1750 baseline is cause for serious concern. And so it's no surprise that during the regular administration that organization was replaced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was it was basically designed to fail. That's why they brought it in was to tone everything down, make everybody feel good, and it's all going to be fine.

[00:04:10]There's everything in our society right now feels like that. Like we're just saying whatever sounds good so we can just keep going. Um kick the can down the road. I think they say uh the Oh, says so. It says the potam Institute for Climate Impact Research reported April 2026 that the Amuk shutdown would flip the Southern Ocean from a carbon sink into a carbon source. The Southern Ocean currently absorbs an enormous quantity of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, acting as one of the planet's primary buffers against warming. How do you feel about that? That accurate?

[00:04:46]>> Yes, absolutely. And you know, if you if you go back to an essay I wrote a long long time ago, um, let's see. I wrote I wrote an essay at guymfirsten.com on June 20th, 2012 called We're Done.

[00:05:10]We're done. and it indicated that we had triggered self-reinforcing feedback loops, sometimes called tipping points, from which we could not recover. You cross one of those boundaries and you can't recover. The IPCC finally caught up and indicated in their IPCC special report on the ocean and cryossphere in a change in climate which they released on September 24th, 2019.

[00:05:34]And here's the quote from page 77. Ocean acidification and deoxxygenation, ice sheet and glacier mass loss and perafrost degradation are expected to be irreversible on time scales relevant to human societies and ecosystems.

[00:05:50]And this IPCC report indicated an overheated ocean was responsible for the irreversibility of climate change. So even the designed to fail intergovernmental panel on climate change concluded that climate change was irreversible as a result of an overheated ocean in 2019. That was a while ago. And and yet I still hear people arguing about whether we're going to cross a tipping point ever. I identified 68 of them. All of them rooted in the peer-reviewed literature in my long essay at guy mcfersonen.com climate change summary. It was called climate change summary and update for years until I moved to bise and I couldn't afford to pay the internet costs there to to keep updating it. So it just became climate change update uh climate change overview or something like that.

[00:06:46]>> Yeah, it's crazy. I mean you've we've watched this happen. Don't you need There has to be Oh, and by the way, if you're watching this uh watching on Guy's channel, come over to HR News, watch it over there. And then if you're on my channel, go over to Naturebats last and uh watch it twice, folks. Helps us out immensely. But you have to see it coming there. How many of these scientists have the wrong idea about humans in the sense that they make this false assumption that humans are fundamentally decent and will fundamentally do the right thing when the evidence becomes apparent. I mean there's a lot of hope there that shouldn't be.

[00:07:25]>> Yeah. you know, and and Louis CK, the stand-up comic and occasionally an actor, he he has a lot to say about how brilliant we are.

[00:07:36]And it's it's not always good things.

[00:07:38]You know, we have a long history of violence and not being kind to each other. And a lot of us aren't even kind to ourselves.

[00:07:51]And yet somehow someway governments of the world think we're going to overcome all of that and turn into decent people because we need to to survive, right?

[00:08:04]>> Uh yeah, I think no human being could say no to any amount of excess, whether it's an extra bag of rice or a foot rub or, you know, you thousands and millions of barrels of oil that's been pulled out of the ground. No matter what it is, we need it. We've got to have it. We've got to consume it. And uh no, if anybody gets in our way, we'll we'll bomb them to kingdom come and call them Malthusian or or what what have you.

[00:08:32]Um the regional human consequences of a mut collapse are themselves enormous. We have northwestern Europe would experience dramatic cooling and disrupted rainfall. West African and South Asian monsoon systems which feed billions of people would be severely disrupted. You have sea levels on the eastern seabboard of North America would rise significantly uh way faster than the global average.

[00:08:54]And uh these aren't even speculative worst case scenarios anymore. These are uh modeled physical consequences of a circulation shutdown that's documented across decades of oceanog I'm sorry oceanographic research and it's now sharpened by the 2026 findings into something considerably more urgent. Sounds about right. And here you have a little graph for everybody who likes graphs. Very pretty graph about how screwed we are. We have the boundaries here. Ocean acidification. That's a big one. Don't don't want to do that, but we're we're doing it anyway. Biosphere integrity, not doing so good. Freshwater change. I don't know much about the freshwater situation. I know that we've we use quite a bit of it. What what's what's that like?

[00:09:45]>> We're, you know, we do a lot of things and we overdo almost everything we do. And this is just another classic example. When it comes to fresh water, we think it's endless and then we start tapping the water and after a while the water runs out. And people in various parts of the world are already coming to the conclusion that they can't drill for any more water. They they've drilled it all out from below ground and it's just not falling like it used to in other places.

[00:10:18]So I I still find it hard to believe that people think everything is infinite when in fact pretty much everything is finite.

[00:10:30]Everything that we depend upon for our survival is finite. Yes, the water will remain on the planet as long as there's an hydraologic cycle. But will it be the kind of clean water, the kind of portable water we need?

[00:10:48]I don't know. I don't think so.

[00:10:49]Especially with the microlastics now.

[00:10:51]They're everywhere.

[00:10:53]That'll uh that'll make your bull run.

[00:10:56]Have a little microlastic water.

[00:10:59]Delicious. Um so the concept of planetary boundaries. So I guess people initiated we have the nine earth system processes together define a safe operating space for human civilization.

[00:11:12]Makes sense.

[00:11:14]uh they was developed by the Stockholm Resilience Center. Okay. Um as a framework for identifying the limits within the planet's stabilizing systems and how it can continue to function.

[00:11:27]So up according to the planetary health check 2025 published in May 2026, it confirms that those nine boundaries, seven are now formally breached.

[00:11:42]I think that's a bad thing.

[00:11:43]>> I think that's a terrible thing. But they make it sound like it's no big deal. It's only seven. We got two more to go. Really?

[00:11:51]>> Really? Each of those is a planetary boundary that cannot be crossed without serious consequences. And we threw out seven of them.

[00:11:59]>> Yeah.

[00:12:00]>> And you're telling me that's fine. We got two more to go. Oh, >> that's Well, what haven't there's there's other historical moments when we've done the same where we thought, oh, well, yeah, we got where's enough left? And like Easter Island, they probably Oh, we've got one tree left.

[00:12:16]That'll do.

[00:12:18]It only takes a hundred years to grow.

[00:12:21]What's the big deal?

[00:12:23]Yeah, this is the kind of I like to I say if you want to study politics, you got to study zoology because you got to see how people really are like animals in order to know what they're going to do, which is breed, breed, breed, eat.

[00:12:40]>> We're not just like animals. We are animals, >> right? Sorry.

[00:12:44]>> Right. I mean, we are homo sapiens. It's an animal.

[00:12:50]And largely though, we tell ourselves that we're separated from that as a human story.

[00:12:56]>> In fact, one of the worst insults you can say about somebody is they're an animal.

[00:13:01]>> We're all animals.

[00:13:06]>> Yeah, it's it's the feel-good story of the year. Uh humans are special. We put a man on the moon and this makes us superior to say cows.

[00:13:17]But I never saw a cow, you know, purposefully, you know, pollute the environment with harsh, you know, persistent chemicals.

[00:13:27]>> I never seen a cow.

[00:13:28]>> Although there's that poem I learned when I was a kid about a cow jumping over the moon.

[00:13:33]>> Oh, sure.

[00:13:34]>> So >> I I think he was he was doing it. That's that's green energy, though. He's using the power of his >> Oh, methane.

[00:13:45]Exactly. rocket fuel sends him right over. You wonder how he jumped over the moon? Methane. That's the That's the scientific answer. Um, so the big thing is ocean acidification, right? So, which transitioned from safe to transgressed, so sometime in late 2025. And this is the oceans the ocean absorbs roughly a quarter of all anthropogenic CO2 emissions. And that absorption comes at a chemical cost. So carbonic acid formation which lowers the pH of seawater and dissolves the calcium carbonate structures upon which shellfish corals sorry peterapods and much of the base of the marine food web depend. That's the thing too. This is a delicate balance of you know a house of cards of biodiversity down there that you know we think that won't affect us. Well, I just won't go to the ocean and I'll be fine.

[00:14:40]Or I just I don't like fish anyway, so I I'll be fine.

[00:14:44]>> Well, and I should mention in the late 1800s, there was a peer-reviewed paper that was published about climate change, and it referred to car carbonic acid in the atmosphere. That was that was the way of stating back then that there was too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They called it carbonic acid.

[00:15:05]>> Really? So, we've come a long way. We've changed a couple of words in our vocabulary in 150 years. Look at us go.

[00:15:15]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We like to soften the language. We like to change the language. We think that that's going to change the condition.

[00:15:24]Um Yeah. So the alongside acidification, the boundaries for climate change, biosphere uh integrity, land system change, freshwater change, novel entities, synthetic chemicals, microplastics, pharmaceutical pollution, and bio biogeeochemical flows have all been crossed. So >> that's all you got?

[00:15:44]>> That's all I've got in this paragraph.

[00:15:48]Uh what makes this finding quantitatively different uh than simply listing seven bad environmental trends is that the planetary boundaries are defined precisely because these systems interact. So as they start to collapse themselves then they start collapsing each other like um like bowling guess bowling pins >> right these various factors do interact with each other and not in a good way not in a positive way as far as our continued survival is concerned >> some people might find modest benefits for their region but on the whole I think the bio biosphere uh biodiversity university collapse will be bad for everybody on Earth and it will affect everything.

[00:16:35]>> Of course, this is like the people who say, "Well, look in a greenhouse, they pump in carbon dioxide to make the plants grow better, >> right?"

[00:16:43]>> Well, well, yeah, okay. But this assumes everything else stays the same. And when we're pumping carbon dioxide into our atmosphere, into our monster greenhouse, not everything is staying the same.

[00:16:56]>> Yeah.

[00:16:57]Is it one of the things that like the storms that are going to essentially tear down more trees and stuff like this? Obviously, you could say, "Oh, yeah, CO2 is good for the planet." So, and and I read this thing from NASA that said, "Oh, yeah. It's greening. Like, the Earth is a little bit more green than it was, but then again, isn't it more [ __ ] chaotic, too?"

[00:17:18]>> Oh, yes, absolutely. Yes. There are places where it's greener, places where it's not. And so cherrypicking those spots where it's greener is probably not a scientific approach, >> but it's it's standard right now. It's standard yet.

[00:17:37]>> Uh because we have to keep rosy these thoughts and we don't want to interrupt the business interests, god forbid. Um so the global tipping points uh report 2025 produced by 160 scientists. Are you're not on that, are you with the pot stamments to they wouldn't have you.

[00:17:54]You're too you're too fringe.

[00:17:56]>> Um marks a grim milestone. What they what they found the widespread die off of warm water coral reefs is identified as the world's fully realized climate tipping point. The estimated threshold for these ecosystems is 1° C to 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming. The current warming stands at approximately, drum roll, 1.3 Celsius to 1.4. So we're not approaching this threshold. We are in this area now.

[00:18:30]There you have another very beautiful graph. Um all this wonderful right here.

[00:18:36]Thanks to Marcus for creating these.

[00:18:39]Um, so coral reefs cover less than 1% of the ocean floor, but support an estimated 25% of all marine species.

[00:18:48]>> And they're responsible for absorbing an enormous amount of carbon dioxide.

[00:18:53]>> Is that true? I did not know that. I I I know that they they provide little aloves and stuff and and homes and stuff for these creatures to live in. I'm suppose there's microbiology that feeds off the um the corals. Um, yeah.

[00:19:09]>> Coral when you when you add up coral reefs and the tropical rainforests, that's well over half of the carbon dioxide that's absorbed from the atmosphere.

[00:19:19]>> Is that their that's is that their job, too? Can they absorb quite a bit?

[00:19:24]>> Oh, yeah. Yes. I I'm not sure they get paid for it, but that is their job.

[00:19:31]>> It's tough being a coral reef.

[00:19:34]>> Yeah. Slave labor. You get what you pay for. No, they they do they do good work.

[00:19:38]I mean, and all we what does they say?

[00:19:42]Nature does everything. It feeds us. It protects us. It gives us what we need to survive. And all it asks in return is that we protect it. And we have failed to even do that. Um I think you were the one that told me the story about reindeer, right? that overshot their own they overshot their own ecosystem quite easily without any thought or you know >> Yes. Yes. They were they were trapped on an island and that's best case scenario for an ecological researcher is they're in a place that has boundaries.

[00:20:19]>> Yeah.

[00:20:19]>> And and they overshot in a very short period of time.

[00:20:24]>> Excuse me.

[00:20:25]>> Poor guys. These poor guys. So the mass bleaching events in the recent years uh each more geographically intensive and thermally severe than the last one aren't even one-off disasters uh which reefs can recover from. They are the tipping point expressing itself in real time season by season. So that report was clear and that that this isn't a process that can be halted at the current warming levels and the question is no longer whether large scale reef systems will collapse but how rapidly the collapse will propagate and how much is associated with marine ecosystem as they unravel with them. So not a pretty thing. The other thing that they found is that the rate of global warming has significantly accelerated. I mean, this is old news, I think, but it's always more, you know, it's always worse than the models predict, which I suppose is typical, >> right? And let me address that just for a second. Every ecologist and almost nobody else understands that the rate of environmental change is the most critical factor affecting the survival of ecological entities. Ecological entities include communities, populations, and species. for example.

[00:21:38]And so the if you if you rapidly change the environment that an organism has evolved in, then that's that organism is no longer able to survive there.

[00:21:50]>> Yeah.

[00:21:52]>> And it makes perfect sense when you think about it for more than about 3 seconds, but almost nobody ever has.

[00:21:59]>> I'm telling you, it's the feel-good story. They don't want to Nobody wants to talk about the bad things. We always focus on the good. Our economy is predicated on guys with boundless optimism about the stupidest [ __ ] that goes nowhere. This is what fuels our, you know, our entire country. So it's not surprising.

[00:22:22]Um, so here I'll share this one. Here's another one for you guys. Here's some of the threshold limits. You can write them down, check them out. Uh you've got your warm water, west Antarctic ice, Amazon rainforest, amox. This is the uh tipping point matrix we're in.

[00:22:41]So the plan's been warming at approximately about.35 uh Celsius per decade, nearly double the average of8 uh per decade observed between 1970 2015. The decade since 2015 has been by this measure the most thermally intense in the modern instrumental record.

[00:23:01]Uh the acceleration matters enormously how we interpreted all the other findings in this article. The tipping point threshold, species extinction projections, ice sheet loss timelines, agricultural viability windows, all of these were modeled against historical warming rates. So if the actual rate is nearly twice as fast, then the timelines compress accordingly. A threshold projected to reach 2060 at historical rates may now reach in the 2040s. the window for meaningful intervention is already narrow and narrows further still. So, we're looking at an exponential window of opportunity closing where you say, "We've got four years." And then you blink and they say, "Oh, we've got 15 minutes.

[00:23:46]Oh, and there it goes. There went our opportunity." And now we're just sort of playing out the clock or, you know, taking a knee till the end of the game or >> Well, well, that's pretty interesting that you bring that up because I read and hear very frequently that if we're done, if our species is going to go extinct. For some people, that's a get out of jail free card. Right now, I can do whatever I want because we're all going to die anyway.

[00:24:16]>> Yeah. And for other people, it's an opportunity to be the best human they can possibly be. And that's the approach I try to take is if we are the last of our species, why would we not demonstrate the best of of the behaviors associated with our species?

[00:24:34]Yeah, this is the basic philosophy that I abide by is that h hurtling through space on a giant rock in a void, in a vacuum, in the darkness, the spark of consciousness, why would I fill that with horror for somebody else?

[00:24:53]You know, >> even if it's an earthworm, why would I why would I? I had a frog in my yard last night. I said he might want water.

[00:25:01]I then I found out that they drink through their body and I said, "Okay, well, let me get him a rock and let me get him." And now he's, you know, out there drinking it up. Be nice. The [ __ ] does it take away from you to be nice?

[00:25:14]>> It's not that difficult, folks.

[00:25:17]>> It really isn't.

[00:25:18]>> That's like the end of this movie. I recommend if you guys are doomers and gloomers like we are, go check out Don't Look Up. Great movie. And at the end they basically say, "Well, obviously nobody's in charge and nobody cares, so let's just get together with the family, have some drinks, have some laughs." You know, >> that final that final scene was perhaps the best part of that movie and any movie I've seen for the last 50 years.

[00:25:46]>> Really?

[00:25:46]>> Yeah. They decided we're screwed. Let's just come together, have a decent meal, and interact with each other in a positive manner. Let's act like the best of our species.

[00:25:59]>> Yep. Yeah, I found it great. And then there's an extra Well, we I guess we just ruined the movie for everybody, but you got to check it out. No spoilers. Uh either way, you'll love it, but uh and then at the end when the rich people finally make it to the some other planet and the aliens, you know, eat them. Um wonderful. Just one >> No plot no plot spoilers or anything.

[00:26:20]>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You It was five years ago. Come on.

[00:26:25]Um, so we're burning up and we're so, you know, all of this is it's a domino effect that's happening to one hits the other. Here you go. Got a little graphic here. You've got accelerated global warming comes Amazon transpiration fails. Yeah. And then the AOCH shuts down. Oh, and then the It's a selfdriving machine. You see the circle, people? That's not good.

[00:26:51]This is this is this is the the description of a self-reinforcing feedback loop. As each of those increases, they contribute to to the increase of the others and so everything goes faster and faster and faster and faster. The rate constantly increases.

[00:27:08]>> So here we go. This is the juicy part that we were talking about earlier. The physical drivers of this acceleration are understood. Reduced aerosol pollution from shipping following new sulfur emission regulations in introduced in 2020. removed a layer of protective particullet from the atmosphere that had been partially masking or underlying the warming. I had to throw that in there. Combined with the record ocean heat content and a recent El Nino cycle, the system has shifted into a new gear. There is no indication from current atmospheric CO2 trajectories that this acceleration will reverse. So again, what do we call this?

[00:27:42]What's the scientific name for this um thing?

[00:27:47]>> The uh aerosol. Are you talking about the aerosol masking effect?

[00:27:50]>> Of course. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:27:51]>> Yes. And James E. Hansen refers to it as our Fouian bargain.

[00:27:56]>> So we think the good thing is to reduce carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere.

[00:28:01]But in fact when you do that it comes at a cost. That's our Fian bargain.

[00:28:07]>> Uh pay robbing pay Peter to pay Paul.

[00:28:10]>> Right.

[00:28:11]>> Right. I I refer to it as the bestkept secret in climate science because it is so difficult to find somebody who includes it in anything they write or say.

[00:28:22]>> Yeah. And what why why is that? What's the real what's the real skinny on that?

[00:28:26]Is that's more of the optimism that they they need to just be optimistic and to talk about something like that would be too damning or what's the real >> Absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:28:37]It's almost impossible to get a paid climate scientist to speak or write about the aerosol masking effect.

[00:28:45]>> Uh it seems vaguely important. I'll just say that.

[00:28:50]>> I think it's a little more than that.

[00:28:52]>> Yeah. Um so the other thing that the people at Potam found that the Antarctic ice sheet obviously is it's the ice sheet is not a single mass with a single threshold. It's a collection of interacting drainage basins, each with its own geometry, its own relationship to the ocean, and its own tipping threshold. And crucially, those thresholds are being crossed at different times, meaning that collapse does not require a single catastrophic warming event, but still will unfold instead as a cascade of basin by basin losses. So, you're looking at something that's not this unsinkable, you know, ship. It's quite fragile and as it warms we're going to see trouble. What do you What do you What do you hear about Antarctica now? How's it How's it doing down there? Not so good.

[00:29:43]>> For a long time, I thought Antarctica was not particularly important because since the 1970s, scientists who focus on climate change have referred to the Arctic as a planetary air conditioner. So, as long as we keep ice in the Arctic, we'll be fine. But then over the course of the last 6 or 8 months, I've come across paper after paper, peer-reviewed evidence indicating that Antarctica really matters, too. And of course, there are far fewer people people in the southern hemisphere than there are in the northern hemisphere. So, of course, we paid closer attention to the Arctic than we did to the Antarctic.

[00:30:24]But it's important. It's hugely important. And it's it's been more difficult to study because it's a huge mass of ice.

[00:30:36]And so collecting peer-reviewed evidence from Antarctica has proven very difficult. But now people are starting to do that in an increasing level. And everything is bad news that I've seen come out of the region.

[00:30:53]>> Yeah. Can you imagine not having the technology to have figured all this out and then now we have the satellites and the drones and all this stuff and then we look and we see, oh yes, it's it's worse. And there hasn't been an environmental study where they ever where they said, "Oh, it's not as bad.

[00:31:10]The pollution is not as bad as we thought." Or something that just doesn't right. It's the same with animal studies where they study animals and they never go, "Oh, they're stupider than we thought they were." No, it's always, oh, they're they actually can do, you know.

[00:31:23]>> Oh, unless they're studying humans.

[00:31:26]>> Yeah, that's true. Well, we had >> there is no bottom there.

[00:31:30]>> We had this great gift and we squandered it and now the science is saying, "Oh, the Flynn effect is, you know, the IQ's are going down, things like this."

[00:31:41]And we're okay with it. We're like 60% of of Americans can't read above a sixth grade level. This is true. This is a true fact. 60% of Americans can't read above a sixth grade level.

[00:31:56]Isn't that sad?

[00:31:57]>> You know, my partner works at the local middle school, so she works with those people regularly, and she she doesn't think it she doesn't think it's that high.

[00:32:11]>> Yeah. Okay. it it's it's more like 4% can read at a eighth grade level when they're in eighth grade. It's it's astonishing really >> the the student has been sent >> and those are the teachers. Yeah.

[00:32:29]Yeah. That's how it is. That's how it is. I don't have much faith in uh that the kid like some kids are all right.

[00:32:35]You'll see them do something. They'll be all right, but they're just up against too much. They will be mutated versions of whatever you know used to be before the industrial revolution. I think the 1800s for all the bad things at least we had not yet screwed everything up. You had there was a window where you could have end slavery of course but then just don't you know screw everything up with the pollution and the machines and the hubris, >> right? But but read the epic works of people like John Mureer who got to the western to western North America before we had completely screwed it up. And and he's not alone. You know, there are these people who came across these unbelievable discoveries like hot water that just explodes out of the ground at Yellowstone and these pools of hot water and all these amazing, incredible things.

[00:33:35]>> Yeah.

[00:33:35]>> And and and every one of those people had an appreciation for what they were seeing, what they were documenting.

[00:33:42]Every one of them found this absolutely promising and amazing.

[00:33:48]And >> yeah, >> I don't I don't get a lot of that anymore.

[00:33:51]>> They had to he had to inspire other people, didn't he? Is he the one that took Teddy Roosevelt out and showed him everything?

[00:34:01]What one of these guys, one of these naturist took Teddy Roosevelt out and showed him how beautiful America was and then he founded the National Park System because you have to force people to notice uh how wonderful nature is, >> which I was no different. And it just took me a long time to really understand it. But ultimately, it's the only good thing that's really worth mentioning, you know.

[00:34:26]>> Well, it's pretty interesting. I grew up in a village in northern Idaho, and it was back in the day, back in the 1960s when, you know, they had freerange children. They don't have that anymore.

[00:34:36]And so my siblings and I, as long as we got home before dark, it's all good. And in northern Idaho, it doesn't get dark in the summertime for a really long time.

[00:34:48]It stays light until 8:30, 9:00 at night. So, but but everybody knows everybody, so you can't get in too much trouble, right? Yeah.

[00:34:59]>> Oh, there's that McFersonson kid playing in the stream. I better call his parents.

[00:35:06]>> Yeah, that's that's that's that was natural there. You're living a natural life. Now you got kids on leashes and uh you know they're supposed to be doctors and lawyers and play the violin before they're you know or they're forgotten completely and they just you know put them in a public school classroom and let them fight it on the playground. Um either way it's not the the the natural part of who we are isn't front and center. We need to to reclaim this if we're going to survive whatever we've created. Right. Absolutely. That, you know, from from the time they're four or five or six years old now, kids are raised with their money in mind, >> their their career earning money, you know, how about give it a break until they're, I don't know, 12, 14, right?

[00:36:05]>> Yeah.

[00:36:05]>> I mean, there's a reason I'm not a parent. And as a consequence, I'm pretty bad, I imagine, at delivering parental messages to people. But but I can't imagine pouring into this empty vessel of a human being the idea that they need to be financially successful from the time they're 8 years old, 10 years old, whatever. That's just that's insane, it seems to me.

[00:36:31]>> Well, and what it what it does is they want you to conform to this how I see it. They want you to conform to this uh this economic system, not necessarily be a person that can critically think and uh and and have a curious mind >> that your parents and the state and the schooling system all is geared towards getting you to memorize [ __ ] first of all and second of all just uh being conditioned to run the machines, whatever the machines happen to be in that day and age. And as long as that there's no there's no room outside of that for anything else. Boys go to wood shop, ladies go to homeck, and then you got to be good at math and you got to, you know, especially where I grew up, it was either the military, maybe a few factories, or, you know, become a cop or what else? Become a drug addict. There was there's not in rural America.

[00:37:28]There's nothing left to do.

[00:37:31]Um, but yeah, I hope I hope that the children like I is there are there going to be jobs here soon? It seems like everybody's getting fired with AI and stuff. Anyway, >> yeah, the arrogant idiot. I mean, AI is is taking over everybody's jobs. It seems like to me, >> they said it was going to make everything better, but it's actually just going to create mass unemployment.

[00:37:55]>> I I read recently, and I don't have a citation for you. I can't remember who wrote or said this, but the two big n big dangers we face are natural stupidity and artificial intelligence.

[00:38:09]>> I I can understand that. I mean, there's a few things, but those are tops. Those are whoppers. Sure.

[00:38:15]>> Yeah. I mean, AI is changing everything.

[00:38:20]>> Yeah. about not just how we interact with machines, but how we interact with the world.

[00:38:30]>> Yeah. I don't Well, it's it's it's warping people from the get-go because they're using it and they're talking to it and they're getting answers from it.

[00:38:38]And that's one sort of manipulation that's happening. But then they're attaching it to weapons in war, >> right?

[00:38:46]>> And attaching it to um the banking system. So I read recently that any time that the you know Wall Street Journal or any American Western media comes out with a thing about stocks AI goes and reads it in you know 30 milliseconds and then buys based on this thing and so it's algorithmic buying um stock and our whole system is is built this way where it's just this self-re repeating cycle where they put out propaganda that paints the economic system in a light fat session. The algorithms buy it. The stock goes up.

[00:39:22]They do another article. They say everything's great. It's >> the machines have won. The machines are now in charge.

[00:39:32]>> Yeah, I guess you're right. I guess it is one of the four horsemen, six, seven horsemen of the apocalypse. Um, all right. Let's go on with the article. I wanted to get to this. We'll skip over uh Antarctica. We know we're screwed there. Uh the other thing that they had was the research from the same pot stamp institute they were identifying rising sea surface temperatures and part of the primary driver behind the 50% to 64% large-scale humid wave. So we're talking about wet bulb temps. U this category of extreme heat is distinct from dry heat waves in a physiologically critical way. It combines high temperature with high humidity, pushing conditions towards and beyond the wet bulb temperature threshold approximately 35 degrees Celsius wet bulb above the human body.

[00:40:26]The human body cannot cool itself through sweating um and regardless of shade or even hydration or rest at that temperature.

[00:40:36]If you get above that uh humid hotness, you just break down. You won't you won't make it. I'll take dry heat. I like a good sauna. But this stuff that they see in Pakistan and and stuff like this, people be dropping like flies. What do you think about the wet bulb situation there, Professor?

[00:40:58]>> I I spent almost my entire life in the inter mountain west. So I grew up in northern Idaho and I went to undergraduate school in the inter mountain west. Went to graduate school in the inter mountain west. spent my career in academia in Tucson, Arizona, and it doesn't get humid there.

[00:41:19]>> Got these big mountains on the coast range and and inland that block humidity from getting into the inter mountain west. So, I thought it was great. People tell me all the time, Tucson, it's a dry heat, so it's no big deal. And if you live there, your response is, yeah, it's a dry heat just like an oven.

[00:41:38]>> Yeah.

[00:41:39]But then you know what I did? I moved to Vermont.

[00:41:43]>> Oh yeah, >> this is this is horrible. This is terrible. I got to move back right away.

[00:41:48]It is so humid here all the time. It get it gets up to 75° here. It's killing me at 75° Fahrenheit. It's killing me because it's so humid.

[00:42:00]>> Yeah. Well, and then you have ticks and everything. The Green Mountain State, it's known for its, you know.

[00:42:07]>> Yes. It's known for its green mountains, which are tiny, by the way, and also for its ticks and other things that don't want you being here.

[00:42:15]>> It's a sure sign that you should have left long ago. Yeah. Well, just thank your lucky stars that you don't live in Massachusetts with all the other mass mass holes.

[00:42:27]That's a different That's a whole different kind of swampy, uncontrollable, hot, heat, humid, sweaty thing. I've been all over the country.

[00:42:37]Vermont was okay. Uh little humid and a little cold in winter, but still, you know, manageable. But, uh, the East Coast, lower down there. Forget it.

[00:42:50]Forget it. These guys, they're going to be coming up where you live here soon, looking for refuge, >> right? Yes. I couldn't agree more. I've been to 49 of the 40 of the 50 states.

[00:43:05]If I've been to North Dakota, it wasn't memorable at all. It's like I can't imagine I miss >> That's the one. Did you go to Delaware?

[00:43:12]>> Yeah. Oh, yeah.

[00:43:13]>> Okay. That's the one I didn't go to.

[00:43:16]>> I I've lived in 14 different states and it's been significant time in 49 50. And I every time I'm I'm in some place for more than a few minutes, I love the inter mountain west even more because it is the dry heat and because it doesn't rain when it's not supposed to rain, you know, like in southern Arizona, never.

[00:43:39]And that's nice.

[00:43:42]It doesn't rain.

[00:43:44]Uh yeah, I think what you lived in New Mexico, which was cheap. How's the price compare now? Have you been looking at real estate in New Mexico versus Vermont? What's the difference there? I know this is off topic for everybody who came for but we're talking. What What's the difference right now? I would live in New Mexico. If I had to live somewhere, you know, nobody messes with you out there in the desert.

[00:44:10]>> Well, and also there's there's the Epstein Ranch right there in New Mexico.

[00:44:14]So, >> Oh, right. Yeah.

[00:44:17]You could do all kinds of stuff out in New Mexico. what, >> you know, as far as I was concerned, New Mexico and Arizona were just not that different >> and and for a long time they were the same territory before they were split into two states.

[00:44:33]>> And so from a the p from a natural world perspective, they're really very similar to each other.

[00:44:43]>> Yeah, they should be. They should just be one thing. Um, so yeah. So, but speaking of the uh the hot heat, the hot heat in Arizona, New Mexico, the human body is a heat engine. Uh and so is humanity.

[00:44:58]Um and and their evaporative cooling through the sweat is its primary thermal regulation mechanism. So, we don't have anything.

[00:45:08]And when the air is already saturated with moisture, sweat can't evaporate and the core body temperature rises and control B. This is very basic um science I guess people would understand >> and and very negative for people who don't understand this. This is not good news.

[00:45:24]>> Yeah. If anybody's >> we have no inherent ability to overcome this significant weakness.

[00:45:34]>> Yeah. Uh what we should do, you know, would be more interesting is look at the way that um media like to find an article that plays it down. Find some mainstream article that's, you know, painting a rosy or like the Wall Street propaganda from Bloomberg, how they're like, we're going to mine the ocean floor and stuff and it's going to be fine. There's no problems. love to I'd love to dissect these too. U but we're preaching to the choir here. Everybody knows all this stuff. Um so we'll do one last little section and then we'll let everybody get back to crying in their beers over all of this. Go back to whatever you did before. Um so a third of all grazing land will become unviable. That's the big uh thing I heard. 2026 PIK study warns that about 36% and 50% of the Earth's land currently suitable for grassland based grazing will lose viability in 2100 due to climate change. The consequences are both ecological and deeply human. Up to 1.6 6 billion grazing animals, cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and the animals of nomadic and semi-nomeadic pastoral cultures on every inhabited continent will face habitat collapse.

[00:46:56]That's not going to be good for the food system. As far as I know, we millions and millions of people um still enjoying and surviving off of meat.

[00:47:08]Approximately 100 million pastoralists, peoples whose entire economic culture, cultural and physical existence is organized around the movement of livestock across uh grassland. They all face the elimination of the landscapes that sustain them. So everything that we originally found at the beginning of human existence 200,000 years ago that gave us the thing that we needed to live. Uh we have screwed that up for you know everybody everywhere. Even the Eskimos will be not able to fish and all these things. They're going to be what what's the term upshitz creek with a turd for a paddle.

[00:47:51]And they represent some of the oldest continuously practiced forms of human land use on earth. Just like I said, yeah, the Sahel, the H of Africa, the Asian steps, the Andian and Tip Plano.

[00:48:02]These uh regions uh were where the loss of grazing viability does not mean farmers switching to a different crop.

[00:48:10]So there you go. A really uh brutal uh what would you say? Prediction of things to come. I don't really imagine it's going to go too well.

[00:48:23]>> Absolutely not. I mean, this is the way humans fed themselves for a really long time. Industrial agriculture is relatively new. The ability for a very few people to grow an enormous amount of food to feed the world, that's new.

[00:48:38]What humans did for a couple million years before the industrial before the industrialization of the planet came along was grow food at a much smaller scale than we're doing now.

[00:48:54]And and growing it feeding a relatively few number of people in a relatively small piece of the property on the planet.

[00:49:06]That's that's how we lived for a really long time. And then we come along and we start having the ability to grow and store especially store a large amount of grain and we can get through the hard times, right? So now we can we can have bread even if we haven't had a crop for the last 2 years because we have the wheat stored in a root seller of some kind.

[00:49:33]So that changed everything and almost all of it for the worst.

[00:49:39]>> Yeah. I have a a hip statistic for everybody out there that I I know that a lot of there's so there's a some some percentage of uh food gets wasted 25 50% some very high amount and people think well it's probably these rich countries throwing away stuff and this is true to an extent. You have places like Qatar and Saudi Arabia, they throw away a lot of food a lot of the time and the United States has their share. But also the lack of of refrigeration and lack of storage facilities and curing facilities and processing facilities in places like Africa are one of the big uh reasons why we lose a lot of this food. So I thought that for sure it was a western decadence thing but it turned out to be a combination of things but nevertheless we are a producing food and then we're just throwing it out basically because of logistics or poor planning or idiocy and >> right interesting >> we discovered refrigeration and everybody just assumed we would have it everywhere all the time but that's not the case.

[00:50:52]Yeah, not quite. And not quite yet. I mean, and even if we did, by the time that everybody gets refrigeration, then we'll really be up Shitz Creek without a paddle, electricity, and the AC and stuff. Not that they the global south should have its time to enjoy all the trappings of the modern world, whatever.

[00:51:11]And I think batteries are getting more efficient, so we'll have some there will be some push and pull there. But the sheer number of people and the things that they'd like to have will never be satiated. They'll always be, you know, hungry for more. And um >> that's our that's our motto as humans, isn't it? Must go faster, must have more.

[00:51:35]>> Bigger, faster, stronger.

[00:51:38]Yeah. I want to go higher than I've ever been in my life. If I'm rich, I need to be richer than everybody else.

[00:51:46]It's the competitive spirit that has been well, you know, our our economic system really drives it home where we we have to do growth for growth's sake. And I'm sure there might be systems you can organize people under. The communists always say, "Well, just be communists and that'll be fine." But really beyond that, there's still really deep flaws with how humans operate where if we were lemur if we were lemurs, we'd be way better off.

[00:52:11]>> Yes, absolutely. And I mean look at China.

[00:52:15]>> Yeah.

[00:52:16]>> The vast quantity of people in the world are now capitalists.

[00:52:21]>> Yeah. They've picked up. They have their own issues with electronic waste. They have their own consumerous kind of push.

[00:52:29]They have more they have more um you know laws against the pollution and regul they have more regulations now as you would get in a Marxist socialist leftist kind of economy. But nevertheless, that they in they just went ahead and did all the things that we did, advertisements and um gizmos and fashion and you know and they they got to be clothed, they got to be fed and beyond that all the frivolous frieries and [ __ ] that uh will satiate them for about 10 minutes and then till they move on to the next thing and and need to go shopping again. This is who >> was the big thing yesterday and the day before. It was about this big gala.

[00:53:15]Right.

[00:53:16]>> Right.

[00:53:16]>> People spending tens of thousands of dollars for an item of clothing.

[00:53:24]and and that they're only going to wear once as a way to a to go to a place that is to showcase opulence and have, you know, just the idea of the red carpet makes me angry because I think how arrogant and unequal our society already is that we need to see this dystopian look at the rich people, look at them, everybody's taking pictures cuz they're so wonderful. And I look at all the little dopes with the cameras and I think you guys are the reason why this is happening. If nobody came, then we wouldn't have half the problems that we have if we stop licking these people's [ __ ] and start focusing on the frogs and the worms.

[00:54:11]I sound like a nut, but it's true. I like I really think we know more celebrities than we know the types of trees that are in our local environment.

[00:54:20]Absolutely.

[00:54:21]>> I know more serial mascots than I know uh you know mushroom species.

[00:54:30]Snap, crackle, pop, the jolly green giant. I know all Why do I know all these but I don't know the [ __ ] names of the plants and animals that are >> because those things have been pounded into you since you were a child.

[00:54:42]>> Honeycomb's big. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:54:46]Um, and we all have to make up of the education in our own time because god forbid that they teach us something.

[00:54:53]Everything has to be in my day, you know, in the 80s they started with the commercials that were geared towards children so that they could also sell them a product. Before that, you had Schoolhouse Rock and these kind of informative kind of things to help children learn but also have fun. Then it was just like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You got to get the latest plastic action figure for and sold to the kids and you know and that's what I grew up in. It's it's amazing. A lot of people didn't make it out. A lot of people didn't make it out alive of that whole thing. Some people are still consuming, you know. And I'll tell you one thing I do hate too is that these people when they have a baby or have a an anniversary or a bar mitzvah or whatever, they need to release balloons into the air. Have you seen this?

[00:55:42]>> No.

[00:55:42]>> Yeah. This is a big thing now to celebrate a a joyous occasion. They'll get some helium filled balloons and they'll get like, you know, all their friends bring balloons and they'll release, you know, 10, 20, 50, 100 balloons just to say, "Yay!"

[00:55:58]Just to, you know what?

[00:56:02]>> Like, where do they think these [ __ ] balloons go?

[00:56:06]>> Away.

[00:56:08]>> Away from me. That's all the out of sight. out of mind.

[00:56:11]>> Mhm.

[00:56:13]Yeah, I got a lot of axes to grind. Um, do you have any axes to grind before we go?

[00:56:21]>> I think I've grown them all down so that you can't even see they're an axe anymore.

[00:56:26]>> He's just got a stump.

[00:56:28]>> Just a sliver.

[00:56:29]>> Just a sliver. All right. Well, let's uh check everybody uh check watch on his channel. Watch on our channel. We're not going to do the traditional collaboration. We're going to post it on both sites so that everybody's got a chance. And uh make sure you watch both so that we all, you know, reap the benefits.

[00:56:48]Um I guess that's it. I will see you in the funny papers. Bye everybody.

[00:56:54]>> Thanks for the conversation.