Transcripts / The Apocalypse
Marie: Bring me another bottle of Moët, would you Antoine? Apparently the world is ending. Well, where is he? Sometimes I'm so goddamn beautiful it makes me want to throw up! Ugh, I'll get it myself. 🍾🛁
Antoine?
Doctor: There you are.
Marie: Ugh, it's this nerd again. Hey Doc, can you bring me my smelling salts please?
Doctor: I'll think about it. Have you watched my video yet?
Marie: The one about the apocalypse?
Doctor: No Marie, it's not about the apocalypse it's about how to stop climate change.
Marie: You goddamn liberals always want me to watch some video on YouTube where some boring transsexual lectures me about social justice. Well I can't stand that.
Doctor: Well why don't you watch a few minutes and then I'll bring you your smelling salts?
Marie: This is extortion. You're sinking to this just to shove your liberal agenda down my throat. My God. You cucks will stop at nothing.
Doctor: That's right, open wide.
Marie: No. No. No!
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Doctor: Welcome to the lab, the lab of aesthetic climatology. Is it hot in here, or is the world just like this now? Imagine that this is the Earth. This is what the Earth would look like if you stabbed it with a giant knife. 🔪🍉
In 1976, a beta cuck named Al Gore led the first congressional hearings on global warming. For the next several decades he devoted much of his career to raising public awareness about the grave predictions of climate science, in particular the disastrous effects of global warming induced by industrial carbon dioxide emissions.
Gore's activism culminated in 2006, with the release of his documentary "An Inconvenient Truth". But a month before its release, Comedy Central aired an episode of "South Park" ridiculing Gore as a hysterical buffoon obsessed with warning the nation about a mythological creature called ManBearPig:
"It is half man, half bear, and half pig."
The episode portrays Gore as a narcissistic attention-seeking alarmist. An issue-haver, a care-about, a sibilant moralf*g. I'm super cereal you guys. We all had a good laugh at Gore's foolishness. After all, no one likes a complainer, a critic, a moralist, a killjoy, a naysayer, a bearer of bad news. And in fact a lot of us probably remember ManBearPig better than we remember "An Inconvenient Truth". A lot of this backlash against Gore seems to fit a pattern described in the brilliant video essay "Why Are You So Angry?" by Innuendo Studios. Part 2 of the essay describes a phenomenon I'll call the "Angry Jack" effect. It works like this:
You're at a barbecue shoving brisket into your front hole, when you notice the person seated next to you declines to eat any meat because they're vegan. Your immediate instinctual reaction is anger at the vegan, because even if they're not really judging you, the mere fact that they are vegan means that they probably have reasons for not eating meat, and that means there might be reasons why you shouldn't eat meat. So what you do is you lash out at the vegan and you tell them: "Oh, so you think you're better than me huh? Well, I'll have you know that eating meat is perfectly natural, and evolution, and people who don't eat meat well… their bones fall out. And besides, you're a hypocrite anyway because more animals die when they plow the fields for your stupid fucking vegetables you moral jerk".
Of course, this is not really a rational response to the situation. This is you subconsciously protecting your ego from potential guilt, from the potential accusation that you're a bad person, and you're protecting the lifestyle that you enjoy and are accustomed to from a potential threat. And this is essentially how people have been reacting to Al Gore for decades. He's a fun-ruiner, criticizing our high-emission way of life, and instead of engaging sincerely with the critique we lash out at him so we don't have to think about it. The problem is that scientifically speaking, climate change is in fact real and Gore was right all along. Oopsy doopsy!
So now it's current year and the global temperature has risen one degree Celsius above the pre-industrial average, which is on track with the projections presented in Gore's film. Now one degree doesn't sound like much, but to get a sense of scale consider that the last ice age was only 4.5 degrees Celsius cooler than the 20th century norm. We are already at one degree warmer than the pre-industrial average, and current scientific models put us on track for three degrees warmer by the end of the century; an outcome that would, among other catastrophes, completely flood Shanghai and Miami.
Scientists have long recommended that we limit warming to two degrees in order to avert global cataclysm. But the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that even two degrees of warming could result in an iceless arctic summer at least once a decade, the destruction of nearly every coral reef, and a heightened frequency of tropical cyclones, droughts, and famines around the world. The report therefore recommends we limit warming to 1.5 degrees, a goal that requires drastic and unprecedented reduction in emissions within the next 12 years and net zero emissions by 2050.
But even limiting warming to two degrees requires a significant reduction in emissions. Otherwise we're on track for three degrees of warming and possibly even four or more, a situation that could be near apocalyptic–
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Marie: Look Doc, this is just the same liberal media bullshit we've all heard for decades. Weather changes sometimes. You were just talking about the ice age. First it was cold, now it's getting warmer. That's just nature.
Doctor: Do you honestly think that all the world's leading climate scientists just forgot to take into account that the weather changes sometimes?
Marie: Isn't it obvious to you that this whole guilt-trip about carbon emissions is just an attack on the American way of life, another excuse for big government to take away my freedom?
Doctor: What freedom? Are you an oil company?
Marie: Well, what if I sexually identify as an oil company? Isn't that what you liberals think? My identity is valid.
Doctor: No, it isn't.
Marie: Bring me my smelling salts.
Doctor: Watch the goddamn video.
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Doctor: Imagine the year is 2100. I want you to picture the earth as a human vagina and imagine you're a gynecologist and you're using a speculum to examine the inside of a watermelon. How does that make you feel, kids? I bet you wish your irresponsible gas-guzzling parents had done something to stop this.
So we may have a global climate catastrophe fast approaching, but at least our political leaders are responsible, rational, and scientifically literate, right?
Is there climate change? Yeah. Will it go back like this? I mean, will it change back? Probably, that's what I think. I believe it goes this way." - Donald Trump
Donald Trump has a consistent history of climate change denial. From his 2012 claim that global warming is a Chinese hoax aimed at undermining American manufacturing, to his tweet last week that it's very cold outside therefore "Whatever happened to Global Warming?"
Of course the term global warming refers to the increase in the global average temperature, temperature continuing to vary by region. In fact, global warming could cause some regions to become much colder. For instance, if the ocean current known as the Atlantic conveyor belt is disrupted, chilling the North Atlantic and potentially making European winters more severe.
But Trump doesn't know or care about any of that. He's kind of the anti-Al Gore, you know? A real man who takes what he wants by any means necessary and won't be slowed down by any worries about what's factual, or scientific, or true, or good, or consensual, or just, or safe, or legal, or even possible. He's the kind of man who Americans collectively want, on some sub-rational erotic level, to brutally dominate us like an ancient Chinese god-emperor. Burn the scholars, build the wall. But the problem– at least for those of you who don't actively enjoy civilization's plunge into primeval darkness– is that the notion that there's any actual scientific controversy about the role of carbon emissions in global warming is simply false.
A 2013 analysis of the scientific literature on climate change found that 97% of papers published on the subject supported the conclusion that humans caused global warming, and the consensus has only increased over time. Climate change denial is considered an oddity in Europe but is very common in America, largely as a result of a massive campaign of manufactured uncertainty and misinformation that goes back to the early 1990s, when the Western Fuels Association developed a strategy to quote "reposition global warming as theory (not fact)". And spent half a million dollars researching the most effective way to promote that message via a propaganda campaign.
Climate denialist talking points promoted by organizations in the subsequent decades have been statistically linked to funding from ExxonMobil and the Koch family, and denialism has been frequently pushed by Republican politicians. Perhaps most vocally Senator James Inhofe, whose campaigns are financed by oil and energy companies, and who's presented on the Senate floor such compelling arguments as throwing a snowball to own the libs.
"So here, Mr. President, catch this. Mm-hmm."
Denialist talking points have "trickled down" from the reptilian overlords to the ordinary YouTube comment goblins, where they provide ammunition for the Angry Jack effect. Just like Al Gore or any messenger of inconvenient information, climate scientists themselves have for years been targets of endless harassment. Michael Mann, the original publisher of the hockey stick graph has received thousands of hate messages, death threats, even white powder in the mail. The mental health of many climate scientists is actually suffering as a result of harassment, denial, the bleak political situation, and the daily grind of studying a cataclysmic future.
It's likely that this video will attract some deniers, and I therefore invite my audience to use the denialist debunking resource listed in the top comment below to refute such claims as: "There's still scientific controversy about the cause of climate change." There isn't. "What if the sun is getting hotter?" It's not, at least in the relevant time frame. And "science is a liar sometimes". 🤦♀️
But even if you don't believe in science, maybe you'll find it convincing that even many oil companies, including ExxonMobil, now acknowledge climate change is real and caused by human activity. In fact at the behest of oil companies, the state of Texas is now seeking at least $12 billion in public funds to build a 60-mile spine of seawalls along the Gulf Coast, largely to protect oil refineries from rising tides and more severe tropical storms. After Hurricane Harvey, Texas lobbied Congress for $61 billion to quote "future-proof the state" despite the fact that many of its top politicians are public climate change deniers.
Ted Cruz: "You remember how it used to be called global warming? And then magically the theory changed to climate change?"
Seth Meyers: "Sure".
Ted Cruz: "The reason is it wasn't warming."
Do not listen to the cant of these sneering reptoids. The science is clear. Climate change is real and humans are causing it. If even ExxonMobil says it's real, it's probably real. There's really no point in digging in your heels and refusing to look at the evidence just because you don't want it to be true. None of us want it to be true–
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Marie: Okay, fine. So maybe the world is getting a teensy bit warmer. And maybe humans have something to do with it. Now can you give me my smelling salts?
Doctor: Fine.
Marie: Look Doc, I gotta say, maybe the scientists are right. Maybe it is happening. But to be honest with you, I'm having a hard time caring about this, like, at all.
Doctor: How can you not care about this? We're talking about the future of the planet.
Marie: Well I don't care about the planet. I care about me.
Doctor: Well, don't you live on the planet?
Marie: Mm-hmm.
Doctor: And don't you care about what happens to the planet you live on?
Marie: No.
Doctor: Goddamn it. Watch the video.
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Doctor: If you picture the Earth as a watermelon, you can see there's the outer shell here that traps the red flesh. And if you leave it out at midnight the stalkers, the stalkers come for the red flesh. Before describing the details of our doom, let's take a moment to review how we got where we are.
The modern science of anthropogenic climate change began in 1896 when a Swedish science jerk called Svante Arrhenius published a study titled "On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Earth", in which he predicted that industrial carbon dioxide production would eventually have a warming effect on the planet.
By 1960, scientists had demonstrated that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere was in fact rising, and President fuckin Johnson's Science Advisory Committee warned that industrial CO2 emissions could have a greenhouse warming effect. The Stanford Research Institute warned the American Petroleum Institute in 1968 that continued emissions would lead to Antarctic melting and rising sea levels. But nothing was really done about it until 1988, when NASA announced to the U.S. Senate that the Earth was warmer than at any time in modern history, that the warming could be attributed to human causes with 99% certainty, and that the warming was worsening heatwaves, storms, and droughts.
That same year, the IPCC was formed to provide world leaders with a summary of the science on climate change and its political and economic impacts. So it started to seem like something was going to change. But by the early 1990s, the oil and energy-funded climatology denial industry was up and running in the United States, despite the fact that oil companies had known climate change was happening for decades and Republican politicians became mouthpieces for the so-called "skeptic" cause.
Meanwhile the Clinton administration signed the Kyoto Protocol pledging the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a pledge that the Bush administration then refused to make good on. The 2012 Republican platform stated against all scientific consensus that quote "the causes and long-range effects of a phenomenon are uncertain", and opposed regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions.
Then finally, in 2015, things seemed to be changing for the better. 195 nations including China, India, and the United States under Obama became parties to the Paris Agreement, which established the goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to well below two degrees Celsius. But the very next year, Donald Trump was elected president of the United States on a platform of outright climate science denial. Trump has since begun withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, appointed a climate change denier the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, and released his America First Energy Plan which encourages unregulated burning of fossil fuels.
So it's with a particular sense of doom that we now receive the grim 2018 IPCC report, which informs us that the world has already warmed one degree Celsius, resulting in significant melting of both polar ice caps, increased average temperatures, increased extreme weather events, and increased mosquito-borne illnesses like malaria, dengue, and Zika. If drastic action is taken to reduce carbon emissions 49% by 2030 and to net zero carbon by 2050, global warming will still increase to 1.5 degrees above the pre-industrial average, resulting in a doubling of populations exposed to water scarcity and drought and an estimated $10 trillion in annual flood damage losses from sea level rise.
But with the current political situation, the goal of reducing warming to 1.5 degrees is quickly slipping out of reach. By the end of the century we're likely to see at least two degrees of warming, which will lead to the eventual displacement of 200 million people in coastal regions. Three degrees of warming will flood many of the world's major coastal cities, including Shanghai, Miami, Osaka, Rio de Janeiro, Alexandria, and Hong Kong. Four degrees of warming will be close to the difference between early 20th century temperatures and the last ice age. A global crisis of hundreds of millions of refugees from island and coastal areas will be exacerbated by severe droughts and water scarcity, trillions of dollars of damage to the economy, famines, starvation, terrorism and war. So it's not just the poor polar bears and coral reefs. There are real human consequences to this.
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Doctor: See, this is why you should care. It's not just about the planet. It's about the millions of people who are gonna die or lose their homes.
Marie: Oh… jeez, wow, that's… gosh, that's really just too bad.
Doctor: What kind of response is that?
Marie: Look Doc. People die all the time. What am I supposed to do, cry about it?
Doctor: No, you're supposed to take political action.
Marie: Yeah, I guess I could do that… but this bath is very relaxing.
Doctor: Well look, even if you only care about yourself, you do realize that when the coastal cities flood, we're gonna have to take in tens of millions of refugees right? Are you gonna be okay with that?
Marie: No! 😠
Doctor: Well, then you'd better do something to reduce carbon emissions.
Marie: No! 😠
Doctor: Well, then you'd better be ready to take in a lot of refugees.
Marie: No! 😠
Doctor: You do realize right, that in a hundred years everyone is going to look back on people like you and they're gonna hate you so much for what you allowed to happen to this planet.
Marie: Well, those are future people. I'm alive now. And besides, if what you're saying is true then this is basically the apocalypse anyway, so why not just party and enjoy ourselves right?
Doctor: But it's not the apocalypse though. Calling it the apocalypse is literally just another form of denialism. Because we still have a little bit of time to fix the problem. Please, God, please just try to focus on solving the problem while we still have time.
Marie: So, you're saying the world is ending. Cheers to that.
Doctor: The world is not ending. It's just getting shittier.
Marie: Well, what am I supposed to do about it?
Doctor: Let's watch an instructional video to learn more.
Marie: All right. Let me just re-up here. 🥂👃👅🐸
Doctor: Ugh.
Marie: All right, Doc. Put it in me.
Doctor: You are repulsive.
Marie: Well, I'm so sorry you're offended by pleasure!
Doctor: I'm not offended by, what?
Marie: This offends you doesn't it? Are you triggered liberal? Are you triggered? 🥛🫗
Doctor: No, I'm, I'm not, I'm not triggered.
Marie: Stop trying to pretend you're not owned. 🥛🫗
Doctor: You know, you really shouldn't be supporting the dairy industry. They cause massive carbon emissions.
Marie: Well, maybe you shouldn't be supporting the clothes industry hypocrite.
Doctor: What?
Marie: It's soy milk anyway, science nerd. How do you think I got so feminine?
Doctor: There's nothing in science to support that.
Marie: Just admit that you're offended.
Doctor: Please just watch the video.
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When I was a little girl, I used to sit on the porch eating watermelon and I'd stare up at the stars and wonder where did they all come from, you know? What does this all mean? The cosmos, humanity, our little time here on Earth? And that's why I became a scientist, so I could spend my life studying… tropospheric trace gasses.
If you want to do your part to stop climate change, there are some lifestyle changes you can make. You can use LED light bulbs, you can drive a hybrid or electric car, you can use public transportation, you can try not to fly very often, you can eat less red meat. But the reality is just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions, and the burden of stopping this can't really be placed on individual consumers. The companies themselves do not care. Left to their own devices, they will only pursue short-term profit. They will ask the government to build them sea walls while continuing to emit greenhouse gasses.
Climate change is exactly the kind of problem that capitalism is really ill-equipped to solve. The time frame involved is short enough that scientists can predict total catastrophe in the foreseeable future, but just long enough not to enter into the shareholder pleasing decision making of corporations. So unless there's a drastic change in the next couple decades, this is going to be capitalism's Great Chinese Famine moment. Only potentially, it'll be much, much worse. This is probably the most important issue facing humanity in the 21st century, so we kinda need to fix it by any means necessary beginning with rapid political change.
If that means direct action, it means direct action, for instance organizing, participating in, or supporting a massive general strike. You also should demand that your politicians take a strong stance against climate change and the companies that cause it. And if you're American, vote this monumental ding-dong out of the Oval Office in 2020 before the entire planet shrinks and transforms into a corn cob.🌽
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Marie: So let me get this straight. You want me to go vegan, drive a Prius, and vote Democrat. You're basically asking me to completely change who I am as a person and become everything I hate.
Doctor: Yeah, pretty much. But it's not about what I want. It's about what everyone has to do to preserve the survival of humanity.
Marie: Well, electric cars, veganism, who can even afford that shit?
Doctor: Maybe you could afford it if you drank less champagne.
Marie: I shall do no such thing.
Doctor: Well, maybe you could drink Prosecco.
Marie: I will not stoop to drinking Italian dishwater.
Doctor: You know, eating plant-based meals actually costs less than eating meat.
Marie: Oh okay, so just never again enjoy the morning aroma of bacon sizzling on the skillet, barbecued ribs, fried chicken, corn dogs, spicy pork belly, lamb chops, bloody steaks. Mmm.
Doctor: Eww. Why do you want to eat all that murdered animal flesh anyway when you could eat pure, clean and natural foods, like lentils, barley, and sprouts?
Marie: I'd rather eat human shit!
Doctor: Well, that's what you're gonna be eating if the planet heats another few degrees.
Marie: How am I supposed to care about rising sea levels when there's Muslims out there? And Mexicans. There could be Muslim Mexicans for all I know, and that's a risk–
Doctor: Why is racist paranoia so compelling to you, when all the climate science in the world just bounces off that thick skull of yours?
Marie: So first of all, you people think everything is racist. And second, I guess I just need a villain you know? Who's the bad guy? Who am I afraid of? Who's the other team? Your climate story has no antagonist.
Doctor: Is that really what it's gonna take? All right then. Why don't you take a long, hard look out at the sea.
Marie: Hi mama.
Doctor: That's right, there she is. Now look right over there.
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Ocean: Hello mankind. It is I, your dark mother, the sea. And you, my children, have been an absolute disappointment. Every one of you is so pathetic. You make me want to throw up! Politicians, businessmen, and worst of all environmentalists ugh!
The condescension of it all! You think you are capable of hurting me? Hah! I enjoy your so-called degradation. Your filthy air makes me hot. Your melting glaciers fill me up deep inside. And when you spew your filth all over oh, it only makes me fucking wet.
Every year my heaving bosom encroaches farther on your shores, and as I spat you out my children, I will swallow you whole. I will take every inch of you inside of me and I will suck you down into the deep black pit of my wetness you scum. And why? Because I am a slut. My progeny encompass the Earth, and whatsoever I create I shall destroy. For I, your deep dark mother, am at once deliveress of your doom. And that's why I vote Republican!
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Doctor: You see that? We've got 20 years to stop her, or we're fucked.
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