On the one hand you could think that once the holocaust became public knowledge it opened a lot of people's eyes to the horrors of racism, but personally I feel like we were moving away from that mentality already.

Instead you have to consider a couple of things. 3% of the global human population was killed in WWII. The population at the time was about 2.3 billion, that's nearly 100 million people. Could you imagine the population we'd have now if most of those people had started families? The resources they would be consuming?

Then we have German industry. That's not possible under the Treaty of Versailles. Even a few more years under it and the German political and economic landscape would have been very different, which would have had global effects. Remember, this is Germany, which is referred to as "the world's first major renewable energy economy."

Then there's the resources WWII consumed. The sheer number of fossil fuels and materials being used to churn out tanks, planes, guns and everything else was unprecedented. And so we're the emissions. There are some people who say that we can't have another war on the scale of WWII because there aren't enough resources to fuel it! Which can then easily lead in to the idea that the reason we're so focused on renewable energy right now is, because of WWII, we're running out of fossil fuels sooner than if it had never occurred!

Put that all together, a smaller population, Germany being the leading economy in renewable energy and the fact that we have less fossil fuels to burn, and you could pretty easily assume that without WWII, climate change would have been much worse than it is now, with less renewable alternative.

And I haven't even gone into how it shaped Japan, which helped shaped electronics and technology, which in turn shaped the technology currently being used to study environmental changes!