'Wrong on both counts' - David Spratt

David Spratt.

It's taken a hundred years of human-caused greenhouse emissions to push the global temperature up almost one degree Celsius (1C°), so another degree is still some time away. Right?  And there seems to have been a "pause" in warming over the last two decades, so getting to 2C° is going to take a good while, and we may have more time that we thought. Yes?

Wrong on both counts. 

The world could be 2C° warmer in as little as two decades, according to the leading US climate scientist and "hockey stick" author, Dr Michael E. Mann. Writing in Scientific American in March 2014 (with the maths explained here), Mann says that new calculations "indicate that if the world continues to burn fossil fuels at the current rate, global warming will rise to 2C° by 2036" and to avoid that threshold "nations will have to keep carbon dioxide levels below 405 parts per million", a level we have just about reached already.  Mann says the notion of a warming "pause" is false.

Read the David Spratt story on Climate Code Red  - “Two degrees of warming closer than you may think.”

Thom Hartmann takes us through an hour with Michael Mann to understand more about climate change

T

hom Hartman’s “The Big Picture” goes over the basics of what global warming is, what's causing it, and how we can stop it with climate scientist Michael Mann.

Dr Michael Mann.

Mann, the author of "The Hockey Stick: Dispatches from the Front Lines” and

 “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change,” discusses the complexities of climate change.

Dr Michael E. Mann is a Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at America’s Penn State University and has joint appointments with the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI).

He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).

He talks about the “State of earth’s climate” with Hartmann, an American radio host, author, former psychotherapist, entrepreneur, and progressive political commentator.