Have We Crossed the Climate Tipping Point?

Hi. I'm Wendy Zukerman, and you're listening to Science Versus Today on the show, did we just cross the tipping point? When it comes to climate change, how screwed are we? And to add a little comedy to this drama, I've invited my mate, Australian comic, Michael Hing, to the show. Hi, Michael. Hello, Wendy. When you say to bring some comedy to this, is this a hilarious topic? Or because I do feel like a lot of people listening to this will just broadly be bummed out. Yes. No. I mean, there are there are a lot of reasons to be bummed out. Let's just quickly go through a couple of them. For one, it has been weirdly, some might say freakishly hot recently. We've just been seeing, like, month after month of record breaking heat. And I know even for people, like, mildly following climate stuff, you'll be used to hearing record breaking heat. But it's just seriously, if you look at the graphs of this year and last year, the temperature of the globe, like, the average global temperature just jumped. Yeah. I have, seen some news stories about that. Yeah. And and temperatures were actually supposed to have dropped, but August numbers just came in, and it's still really hot. Yeah. There's no a decade ago, you would occasionally get these, like, hopeful climate stories Mhmm. Where I'd be like, oh my goodness. They've invented these new plastic balls they can put on the top of water or something, and that'll save us. So, like, hey, have you heard about all these seaweed pills we can give cows? And that'll and, like, those stories have really dried up in the last decade, haven't they? Like, all this stuff, we were like, let's let's let's really put our hopes It's, I know. Where where are they now? And if you'll bear with me for just one quick doomsday story. Of course. So, doctor Ed Dotteridge at the University of Tasmania in Australia studies Australia's sea ice, which is this layer of frozen ocean that surrounds Antarctica. Okay. And he told me that for ages, the sea ice would melt in summer and then refreeze in winter in this very predictable pattern. It was like a heartbeat. Well, every year, boom. Boom. Boom. And that heartbeat had been looking, like, a little less healthy, but then last year Everyone was just kind of gobsmacked. As a community, we were just standing there flabbergasted. What what happened? What just happened? The ice just didn't grow back. It just didn't grow back. Yeah. How much ice is missing? At the maximum, we were missing about 2,700,000 square kilometers of sea ice. So that's the size of Western Australia or Alaska and Texas combined. Woah. Like, huge, huge areas of ice, and that's terrifying. How what do you feel when you see this? As a human? I just wanna sit in a corner and cry. Yeah. It's bad. It's really bad. …