I Wasn't Ready For This Existential Crisis

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]What's up, guys? Welcome back to my channel. And if you're new here, then welcome to our little corner of the internet. Today, we're going to be watching a video.

[00:00:08]Yeah, today we're going to be watching a video titled This is How the World Ends According to Science. And I've been wanting to watch this video, but I'm scared cuz I feel like I'm going to have like an existential crisis after this.

[00:00:20]So, hopefully I won't. But without further ado, let's see. Let's see.

[00:00:25]>> I'm going to show you a graph that the federal government doesn't want you to see. For decades, Noah tracked the rising cost of climate disasters in the United States. Their billiond dollar disasters graph showed how often extreme weather events caused catastrophic damage. Then in 2025, funding for those updates was cut. And it wasn't an isolated decision. The Trump administration has been removing information about all sorts of inconvenient truths. But studying severe climate scenarios has actually been unpopular for a long time.

[00:00:59]>> Soon as you talked about any kind of extreme risk in climate change, you are a doomer. You are an alarmist.

[00:01:04]>> And this matters. In recent years, the most likely warming projections have come down thanks to the rapid pace of renewable energy adoption. But future progress is far from guaranteed.

[00:01:14]>> Most countries don't actually have the tools to even meet their climate targets and pledges.

[00:01:18]>> We've spent a lot of time on >> That's good though. That's good news.

[00:01:22]It's going down. It's going down. I'm in timber.

[00:01:26]>> The show looking at how progress is made. But given the current reality, we need to understand what happens at the upper ranges of warming projections. And it's not the warming alone that puts us at risk.

[00:01:38]>> A world of three.

[00:01:39]>> Yeah. It's going to be some type of like a tornado or something, right? degrees of warming in which you also have large levels of inequality, geopolitical strife and conflict, a lack of trust in public institutions and a huge amount of misinformation. That is a world which may actually result in catastrophe.

[00:01:58]>> Luke studies what caused past civilizations to collapse, how climate contributed, and what we can learn about the risk today. So, in this episode, we're going to learn how the world plausibly ends according to science.

[00:02:11]>> 80% isn't exactly a small chance. You're not going to walk into an airplane if there's an 80% chance of it crashing.

[00:02:19]>> You definitely wouldn't step on that plane because you watch Weathered. And if you want to support the show while looking great, check out our new cool mer field. Studying the worst case episodes and more. The link is in the description. In most highstakes fields, studying the worst case scenario is normal. In medicine, aviation, nuclear engineering, understanding everything that could go wrong isn't seen as pessimism, but rather basic risk management.

[00:02:46]>> Whenever we try to deal with any kind of risk management problem, we always think through the worst case scenarios. You don't engineer a car and then not test it in a high-speed crash. You always look >> I just recently learned that I think uh Rollsroyce or something like that is the only car that that doesn't crash test cuz they're so expensive.

[00:03:08]There's one car I don't know if it was Rolls-Royce some crazy car brand worst case scenario whenever you're doing good risk management that is particularly true in conditions of deep uncertainty.

[00:03:18]>> But when it comes to the most consequential system of all earth's climate we just don't like to talk about it. We've actually done text mining of IPCC reports to look at how frequently different temperature scenarios are used. And what we see is across all IPCC reports over the last couple decades, high-end warming scenarios are substantially underrepresented compared to low degree ones like 1.5 and 2° C.

[00:03:42]>> So let's talk about it. What is the worst case scenario and how do we avoid it?

[00:03:48]Under current policies, we are likely to have a temperature rise of somewhere between 2.6 to 2.9° C by the end of the century. But that's the very likely range. There's actually a much larger range.

[00:04:01]>> That around 3° estimate makes a couple big assumptions. first that the policies and promises made under the 2016 Paris climate agreement are broadly followed and that require I also remember I think it was in was it in London or Paris they were doing some type of huge climate thing on a river.

[00:04:25]I I can't remember where but I wonder if that how that ended if if it's cleared out. It was probably in London in England or was it I think it was in I don't know >> are broadly followed and that requires strong political will and global cooperation >> in the long term. We don't really know how the world's going to look geopolitically.

[00:04:49]>> So we can't rule out a world with worse climate policy. But there's another source of uncertainty that's out of our hands. Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much the Earth warms in response to an increase in carbon dioxide. And that alone could tip us into a very different world.

[00:05:06]>> Climate sensitivity could be far in excess of 3° because the planet basically just doesn't work in the way that we might have thought it does.

[00:05:15]>> We know it will be significantly warmer in the future. But the further we look out, the more difficult it gets to say exactly how much warmer. According to current policies, we're on track to reach approximately 670 parts per million of carbon dioxide by the end of the century.

[00:05:33]>> Even if we only have 560, there'd be an 18% chance that we go above 4.5°.

[00:05:40]We haven't seen temperatures that high in about 15 million years when sea levels were tens of meters higher than today. And at that level of warming, many of Earth's major climate systems would either cross their tipping points or be pushed into severe risk. So, not great.

[00:06:00]>> 80% isn't exactly a small.

[00:06:03]>> That's interesting though in the sense that it couldn't get up there without the humans as well. Like I I wonder how much of it is just natural climate change I guess and what's like uh as how much well obviously humans are affected a lot but you know just saying I didn't know that like I thought that it would just get get from lower to higher. I didn't know that it was had already been higher than um now if that makes sense.

[00:06:34]>> Chance you're not going to walk into an airplane if there's an 80% chance of it crashing.

[00:06:39]It would take the world a long time to reach that new far hotter state. But when you take into account the complexities of human behavior, the timeline can speed up dramatically.

[00:06:51]Because in addition to heating the planet, climate change destabilizes the systems we most depend on, both the natural systems and the human ones. And when those systems come under stress at the same time, history shows they can fail very quickly. Lori compares this system failure to a ship navigating a storm.

[00:07:12]>> When you're a crew on a ship trying your best to sail around a storm, one of the things that the forefront of your mind is protecting your crew's ability to navigate while also handling the worsting impacts of the storm. And that can go one of two ways. You can manage to allocate your resources and your attention and maintain morale so that you're still able to navigate while the worst of the storm rains down on you. We could go the other way where you become so overwhelmed that you fail to navigate and then you drift further into the storm and ultimately you're overwhelmed.

[00:07:42]>> This is what researchers call derailment risk and it's one of the fastest.

[00:07:47]>> She is so pretty by the way. Oh, the makeup is so impeccable.

[00:07:51]>> Ways climate change could push the world towards collapse.

[00:07:54]>> Chaos caused by climate extremes and worsening consequences of climate change could actually begin to get in the way of acting on climate change. And we've already seen what climateinduced derailment looks like in practice.

[00:08:08]>> Back in 2010, Russia was hit by a heat wave which decimated its crops of wheat.

[00:08:13]Because of that, Russia introduced a serial export ban. The price of staples, particular wheat, globally went up. That doubled food bank usage in the UK, but it also seemed to cause increased political strife in Egypt. And interestingly enough, the rise in food prices and the rise of the price of bread in Egypt corresponds pretty well with the Arab Spring and of course with huge political upheaval.

[00:08:39]>> Climate stress on its own didn't cause the Arab Spring, but it acted as an accelerant pushing fragile systems past their breaking point and causing the collapse of governments across the region. We can see similar cascading risks emerging here in the United States, too. After extreme rain and prolonged drought in Los Angeles, two fires burn 16,000 homes.

[00:09:02]>> Insurance is the critical thing that underpins all of capitalism. Basically, when you're in a situation where climate extremes are playing out worse than you thought, then basically the maths start to break down.

[00:09:14]>> The insurance industry, >> this looks very overwhelming than you thought. Then basically the maths start to break down. The insurance industry has so far weathered the storm by raising rates and dropping customers, but its future and availability in the region are unclear.

[00:09:30]>> If insurance is no longer available, then other financial services aren't available, right? Just think of houses.

[00:09:35]If you can't insure a house, you can't get a mortgage on a house.

[00:09:38]>> We don't know how many more natural disasters like this, our insurance and economic systems can withstand. But we can already see the derailment theory at play where climate disasters make us less able to take climate action.

[00:09:52]>> You have almost the biggest wakeup call that America has ever had on climate change. But then at the same time, you had the then president-elect of the United States saying that this wasn't to do with climate change. They basically said, "Look, climate change isn't causing these disasters. It's climate fanaticism that causes these disasters."

[00:10:10]Lori believes this derailment risk could easily cause us to spiral closer and closer into the storm of climate change.

[00:10:18]So all of this made me wonder how is this likely to play out and clearly our experts have been spending a lot of time thinking about this like a lot.

[00:10:29]>> Imagine it's the early 2030s and climate change has only got worse and the world is even less stable than it is today.

[00:10:37]And then suddenly extreme cold hits northwestern Europe. This is because a key bit of the Atlantic >> hits north.

[00:10:50]>> That's Finland.

[00:10:52]That's Helsinki.

[00:10:55]Ah, that's that's my that's my hometown.

[00:10:59]That my home city.

[00:11:03]>> Western Europe. This is because a key bit of the Atlantic circulations has collapsed. Something called the North Atlantic subpolar gy.

[00:11:11]>> The subpolar gy is an important part of the AOCH. It's an enormous circulation system that carries heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes and regulates global weather.

[00:11:21]>> What then happens is that part of the world becomes very unstable. That then leads to a set of big corrections of panics basically in financial markets because they didn't anticipate this wild card happening and it leads to a bit of a financial crisis across the Euro Atlantic area that spreads to the rest of the world causing lots of destabilization.

[00:11:40]>> And if the subpolar gy collapsed, it would very likely be a warning sign for the rest of the Aman. But by this point, the world is already derailed politically, economically, socially, and that makes responding to a new enormous threat far harder.

[00:11:56]>> Fast forward a number of years, and the full circulation then collapses. It doesn't just make Europe much colder, therefore messing up major food growing regions in Europe. It also disrupts the major monsoons globally including over India and Pakistan >> and increased tensions between India and Pakistan is something we really don't want.

[00:12:17]>> These two countries both nuclear armed they have a history of hostility between each other and they share a water resource. A water resource that is going to be drying up due to climate change.

[00:12:27]Any nuclear exchange, even a limited one, could trigger what scientists call nuclear winter. This occurs when nuclear explosions cause so many cities to burn that soot injected into the atmosphere blocks sunlight and triggers widespread crop failure and mass starvation. Even just a regional nuclear war could kill around 2 billion people, mostly through famine. And a larger full-scale nuclear war looks pretty much like the end of the world with over five billion deaths.

[00:13:01]And that's a conservative estimate.

[00:13:07]But yeah, please no.

[00:13:11]During the Cold War, we were able to avoid allout nuclear war once the cascading impacts it would have were actually studied.

[00:13:19]>> But it's very unlikely that there would be a nuclear war. very very unlikely >> and widely understood. Once we understood that a nuclear war would mean game over, the idea of nuclear deterrence became a priority. And in the same way, understanding the worst case scenario of climate change, which also looks a whole lot like the end of the world, could be the very thing that saves us. Because the more clearly we see the climate endgame, the better our chances of never reaching it. In our next episode of Weathered, we'll look at the solutions that can help prevent the worst case scenarios we've been talking about. And if you'd like to see extended interviews with our experts, Luke and Lorie, check them out on our Patreon page. Let us know what you think about this episode in the comments. And as always, we'll see you next time on Weathered.

[00:14:08]That was a very interesting video, though. I really enjoyed watching that, but uh it's a bit Yeah, it's a bit scary. Um, but thank you guys for joining me for this video. I really hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And um I feel like these are already things that I kind of knew. I know that if the climate change keeps getting worse, there's going to be more um weather changes and everything, which is already you can already see it and and you know tell um a little bit, but uh hopefully it'll not escalate. Um and yeah, please leave a like, subscribe if you haven't yet, and I'll see you guys in the next video.

[00:14:48]Bye.