Tag: Michael Mann

Climate Change Denial Shifts Tactics – 2 articles

ABC News: As extreme weather increases, climate misinformation adapts. As the impact of climate change becomes more apparent, misinformation about it is shifting to focus more and more on extreme weather. “It just isn’t credible to deny climate change or the impacts it’s having. People see it with their own two eyes,” said Penn State University climate scientist Michael Mann. “So there’s a shift in tactics. Now it’s softer forms of denial, and efforts to diminish the impacts of climate change.” That evolution is evident online. Media intelligence firm Zignal Labs analyzed millions of social media posts, news stories and other online content and found that overall, conversations about climate change in the past 12 months peaked during high-profile natural disasters, including the Texas storm and the California wildfires. Overall, online mentions of natural disasters and their relationship to climate change also increased by 27%, Zignal found.

EuroNews: Climate Misinformation Shifts Focus From Denial To extreme Weather Events. Despite years of warnings from scientists that a warming planet would result in dangerous weather conditions, researchers say there’s been a shift in climate misinformation from denying climate change to focusing on extreme weather events.

Climate scientist Michael Mann: Deniers are shifting tactics

E&E News: Climate scientist Michael Mann: Deniers are shifting tactics.

In 1998, Michael Mann published a landmark paper that showed rapid global warming due to human activity.

Now, more than 20 years after the so-called hockey stick graph, the Pennsylvania State University climate scientist is out with a controversial new book.

Published earlier this month, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet” contends that the fossil fuel industry and its allies have shifted their strategies for delaying climate action.

Instead of attacking the credibility of the science, these interests are now blaming warming on individuals while arguing it’s too late to prevent catastrophic impacts, according to the book.

Climate scientist Michael Mann: U.S. is in position to be a leader on climate change

NPR: Climate scientist Michael Mann: U.S. is in position to be a leader on climate change. New book calls for ‘fight to take back our planet.’

Well-known climate scientist and Penn State professor Michael Mann argues in a new book that there are many tools for addressing climate change and transitioning to green energy.

Mann’s book, “The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet,” comes as the country’s climate policy is expected to change with the Biden administration.

Mann said he thinks the U.S. is in a position to re-establish its global leadership on this issue, and that Joe Biden has indicated he will do that as president.

‘Window of opportunity’ remains to tackle climate crisis as U.S. exits Paris deal: expert

CBC discusses a ‘Window of opportunity’ remains to tackle climate crisis as U.S. exits Paris deal: expert. Donald Trump announced plans to withdraw from climate treaty in 2017.

As Americans await the results of Tuesday’s federal election, experts say the U.S. needs a president that will not only bring the country back into the Paris climate agreement, but step up the country’s commitments to address climate change.

“Everything is at stake here,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist and distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University.

“But there’s still a window of opportunity. There’s still time to do what’s necessary to reduce carbon emissions so that we don’t cross that threshold into catastrophic climate change.”

On Wednesday, the United States officially withdrew from the Paris Agreement, a pact between 197 countries to fight climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Countries are aiming to keep global temperature increases below 1.5 C this century.

When Trump’s EPA Needed a Climate Scientist, They Called on John Christy

Inside Climate News discusses When Trump’s EPA Needed a Climate Scientist, They Called on John Christy. A contrarian and outsider in the climate community, he provided the credentials that bolstered the administration’s roll back of environmental protections.

In 2004, scientists at the University of Washington published evidence that Christy and Spencer’s readings of what was purported to be the lower atmosphere—the troposphere—were being polluted by the cooler upper atmosphere, the stratosphere. The following year, the same team in Washington showed that Christy and Spencer’s temperature plots were biased by the satellites’ east-west drift.

A team from NASA, the University of California, Berkeley, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently published a study showing that global sea-surface temperatures were well in line with climate models.  But Christy, Spencer and others who rely on their work often display a chart that plots their satellite readings against those of the climate models that show no such agreement. It has become iconic among those who challenge climate science.

Although the chart itself has not been published, it is based on a 2007, peer-reviewed paper, of which Christy was a co-author. That paper, too, became a lightning rod for criticism. Other researchers said that if Christy had included the full range of uncertainty in both his own data and in the climate models, the projections and observations would have been shown to overlap. And in a paper published in 2008, a team of scientists from 12 institutions found that Christy and his colleagues did not account for the effect on their temperature readings of natural non-climate factors like El Niños and La Niñas.

Earlier this year, Christy provided input to the Science Advisory Board as it considered the Trump rollback of fuel economy standards and the withdrawal of California’s authority to set its own standard, which was tougher than the federal regulation. The weakening of passenger vehicle standards is expected to have the largest greenhouse gas impact of any of Trump’s anti-climate moves, resulting in the release of more than one gigaton of additional carbon into the Earth’s atmosphere by 2035—the equivalent of one current year’s worth of transportation emissions from the European Union.

Climate scientists on Earth’s two futures.

CBS News discusses Climate scientists on Earth’s two futures. The worst effects of climate change don’t have to happen, scientists say. But humans’ actions in the near future will determine if they do. For more than three decades, climate scientists have accurately forecast how carbon emissions would cause a global rise in temperatures. Now they’re looking ahead at the decades to come.

When it comes to predicting the future, scientists do not see just one possible outcome. Rather, they say the actions humans take in the near-term will have a major effect on how Earth changes for generations beyond.

“We need to change our course in the next few years because it’s still possible, I think, to avoid the worst outcomes,” Former NASA scientist James Hansen told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley.

Michael Mann, a geophysicist whose work has shown today’s elevated rate of warming began with the industrial revolution, sees this bit of good news through the climate models scientists work from today. Current projections create a more comprehensive look at how the climate responds to carbon dioxide, including how the ocean and plants can absorb some of the carbon humans have released into the atmosphere.

Report: Last decade was Earth’s hottest on record as climate crisis accelerates

The Guardian discusses why the last decade was Earth’s hottest on record as climate crisis accelerates.

  • 2019 was second or third hottest year ever recorded
  • Average global temperature up 0.39C in 10 years

The past decade was the hottest ever recorded globally, with 2019 either the second or third warmest year on record, as the climate crisis accelerated temperatures upwards worldwide, scientists have confirmed.

Every decade since 1980 has been warmer than the preceding decade, with the period between 2010 and 2019 the hottest yet since worldwide temperature records began in the 19th century. The increase in average global temperature is rapidly gathering pace, with the last decade up to 0.39C warmer than the long-term average, compared with a 0.07C average increase per decade stretching back to 1880.

The past six years, 2014 to 2019, have been the warmest since global records began, a period that has included enormous heatwaves in the US, Europe and India, freakishly hot temperatures in the Arctic, and deadly wildfires from Australia to California to Greece.

The report, compiled by 520 scientists from more than 60 countries and published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, outlines the myriad ways that rising temperatures are altering the planet and human life, including:

CLIMATE CHANGE IS BURNING DOWN CALIFORNIA. IT’S TIME WE STOPPED ADDING FUEL TO THE FIRE

This Michael Mann opinion piece, published in Newsweek, discusses California’s wildfires.

Climate change was long regarded as a distant threat, one happening in far off places and future times. That is unfortunately no longer the case. Climate change is here, and it’s burning through California.

I spent five years in the San Francisco Bay Area getting my undergraduate degrees in applied math and physics from UC-Berkeley. To see my campus threatened by the fires is heartbreaking. I can’t even imagine how bad it is for those who have spent their entire lives, not just a beloved portion of it, in the East Bay. My thoughts are with those struggling to survive this fire, and are choking through the clouds of smoke it casts across the state.

Studies: Is global warming causing hurricanes to stall? (Yes)

This Inside Climate News article discusses whether global warming is causing hurricanes like Dorian to stall. Hurricanes Harvey and Florence also stalled, leading to extreme rainfall. Research shows it’s a global trend. Recent research shows that more North Atlantic hurricanes have been stalling as Dorian did, leading to more extreme rainfall. Their average forward speed has also decreased by 17 percent—from 11.5 mph, to 9.6 mph—from 1944 to 2017, according to a study published in June by federal scientists at NASA and NOAA.

This PBS article discusses whether climate change is making hurricanes stall. Over the last seven decades, hurricane stalling, which causes a storm to release massive amounts of rain on small areas, has become more common, research published in June in the journal Nature shows. But it is currently unclear if the trend is due to climate change or natural variation.

This  and  article in The Guardian discusses the linkage between global warming and intensifying hurricanes. As oceans warm up, hurricanes get more intense. A recent study has shown that this is getting more common because of climate change, and indeed the past few years have seen many similar examples of this effect in action. Dorian was the fourth category 5 storm in just the last four years.

Michael Mann: 2 Articles – Trump’s climate denial is ridiculous and climate change is behind extreme weather events.

This Newsweek article discusses how and why Trump’s climate denial gets more ridiculous by the day. Once upon a time, Donald Trump accepted the scientific reality that human activity, primarily burning fossil fuels, causes climate change. He signed on to an ad calling on President Obama to take action on climate change. That was 2009. In the decade since, Trump’s Fox News fixation has led him down a steep path of dangerous denial, culminating in his quoting of an industry PR flack who appeared on Fox and Friends to make some profoundly ridiculous claims.

Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a co-founder of Greenpeace, claimed that the “climate crisis” is “Fake Science” and that “carbon dioxide is the main building block of all life.”

A Washington Post opinion article by Dr. Mann shows why climate change caused this summer’s extreme weather. It’s not rocket science. A warmer ocean evaporates more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse flooding from coastal storms (think Hurricanes Harvey and Florence). Warmer soils evaporate more moisture into the atmosphere — so you get worse droughts (think California or Syria). Global warming shifts the extreme upper tail of the “bell curve” toward higher temperatures, so you get more frequent and intense heat waves (think summer 2018 just about anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere). Combine heat and drought, and you get worse wildfires (again, think California).