The highlight of the early morning sessions was a presentation by Nobel Laureate and renowned climate change expert Dr. Michael Mann, who provided a historical perspective on climate change and how it could ultimately affect water levels and the environment as a whole if left unchecked.
Mann also discussed how the biggest obstacle to reversing climate change is often human rather than environmental, whether it's the resistance of the masses to change their everyday practices, or scientists who'd rather swim upstream for the sake of notoriety than deal with the science at hand.
"We can't downplay the importance of what has been an extremely well-organized, well-funded disinformation effort that has been financed by fossil-fuel industry groups, front groups who advocate for their interests to cloud the public discourse on this issue," Mann said. "Some of the attacks against the science are actually thinly veiled attacks against the scientists who are just like me out there doing research. They use words like 'hysteria' and 'fraud' and try to paint this picture of climate scientists as being part of some sort of conspiracy to take away their liberty to emit CO2 into the atmosphere. I don't think real people worry about that."
As for those real people, Mann said, finding solutions to climate change is often a matter of doing the things they know they should be doing every day to help the environment, but on a large-scale basis, which often takes some sort of outside influence.
"There are things we all know we ought to be doing," Mann said. "They're all the things we ought to be doing anyway because they're good for the environment, they're good for our health and they're good for our personal economies. But the sad fact is that we often need to be prodded. There are so many challenges in our lives, and it's easy to sort of shove these things aside as this long-term problem that's way off in the future. That's where it become essential that policy-makers help us establish incentives."
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