Debate on Climate Change, Environmental Effects

...According to Mann, the earth warms and cools naturally, however, based on solely natural models the earth should have cooled slightly in the last 100 years instead of warmed.
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Critics might argue that all of these results are based on models and that it is impossible to accurately model something as complex as climate. Mann countered this argument by pointing to models such as Hansen’s Three Predicted Global Warming Scenarios, which have predicted very accurately the amount of global warming we have experienced in the last 50 years.
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Since it is possible to already see such profound effects, it is reasonable to ask why no action has been taken. This is because the subject is highly politically charged. The first example Mann used to show this political masking was a memo written in 2002 by Frank Luntz, owner of the political consulting firm Luntz Global, which coached politicians in how to argue against climate change. Mann’s next example was of an event called “Climategate,” when private emails of scientists researching climate change were stolen and released to the public. Oddly enough, the following political attention was not focused on the theft but on the supposed fraud that the scientists discussed in the emails. Sarah Palin, former Governor of Alaska, wrote an opinion article in The Washington Post declaring that the scientists were deliberately hiding a decline in global temperature. This was not true, according to Mann. What the scientists had been discussing was how to shift people’s attention away from tree ring data that was wrong after 1960 so that it did not confuse people.
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The political debate and battle for acceptance of the reality of climate change is ongoing. This is a shame, according to Mann, because the scientific community accepted the reality of climate change two decades ago. The debate now should be how to fix the problem. If we stay on this track, says Mann, “[the] coral reefs will be gone within 40 to 50 years” and crops in the tropics will suffer significantly. If we want to avoid this, we have to bring our CO2 emissions to a peak within the next decade and below the levels of those in the 1990s by the mid-2000s. This cannot be accomplished by individuals reducing their carbon footprint; we need to put a cost on emissions.

“I don’t want a world where my daughter can only show her children polar bears in zoos and that is what we are heading towards,” Mann says

Twitter / @MichaelEMann: Nice writeup in student pa ...

Nice writeup in student paper of my talk at St Mary's college last week [links to article above]