EPA chief: ‘True environmentalism is using natural resources that God has blessed us with’

Another day, another attempt by Trump officials to silence scientists.

Donald Trump and the head of America's
Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt.

The latest egregious example of censorship is the Environmental Protection Agency’s last-minute move to forbid three of their scientists from speaking on climate change at a long-planned conference focusing on the health of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay and Watershed, the New York Times reported Sunday. Of course, the health of a major coastal watershed can’t be preserved without understanding and planning for climate change.

“These efforts by the Trump administration to stifle scientific research inconvenient to its corporate masters threatens all of us,”  climatologist Michael Mann told Think Progress. 

“It must not be tolerated.”

Read the ThinkProgress by Joe Rome - “EPA chief: ‘True environmentalism is using natural resources that God has blessed us with’.”

Hurricane Harvey And The New Normal

This segment is part of our special coverage of Hurricane Harvey. Learn how Harvey could be a disaster for public health, and how developers are building with climate change in mind.

Professor Michael Mann.

“There’s never an ideal time to talk about how climate change is magnifying some of these natural disasters,” says Michael Mann, distinguished professor in the department of meteorology and geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. “But it is important to talk about it.”

As Harvey battered Houston last weekend and floods inundated Southeast Asia in the days following, many did indeed begin to talk about climate change. Mann and other climate scientists say that climate change has intensified these storms so much that we need a new set of guideposts. Predictions we could’ve made in the past are no longer accurate, and the rules that used to help us plan for events like Harvey no longer apply. We’re left with overwhelmed infrastructure and building codes that don’t take into account new conditions.

Listen to the interview on Science Friday - “Hurricane Harvey And The New Normal.”

The Madhouse Effect: climate denial in Australia v the US.

This latest article by David Schlosberg, University of Sydney, is part of an ongoing series from the Post-Truth Initiative, a Strategic Research Excellence Initiative at the University of Sydney. The series examines today’s post-truth problem in public discourse: the thriving economy of lies, bullshit and propaganda that threatens rational discourse and policy.

When Tony Abbott went too far in his advocacy for the coal
 industry, his government faced a public backlash.

Michael Mann is well known for his classic “hockey stick” work on global warming, for the attacks he has long endured from climate denialists, and for the good fight of communicating the environmental and political realities of climate change.

Mann’s work, including his recent book The Madhouse Effect, has helped me, as a dual US-Australian citizen, think about the similarities and differences between the US and Australia as we respond to what has been called the climate change denial machine.

Read the story - “The Madhouse Effect: climate denial in Australia v the US.”

US states and cities likely to achieve emission reductions despite exit from accord

President Trump has couched his decision to withdraw from the Paris accord as one that "protects the environment, our companies, our citizens and our country". 

Leading climate scientist and author Michael Mann suggests that retraining people employed in the coal sector would be a better path forward, as the private sector, cities and states of the US continue to reduce.

Listen Michael Mann on Radio National’s Saturday Extra - “US states and cities likely to achieve emission reductions despite exit from accord

Climate scientists face harassment, threats and fear of ‘McCathyist’ attacks

Michael E Mann, a climate scientist at Penn
 State University. ‘Michael has most certainly
 become a lightning rod,’ said MIT climate
scientist Kerry Emanuel. 

A little less than seven years ago, the climate scientist Michael Mann ambled into his office at Penn State University with a wedge of mail tucked under his arm. As he tore into one of the envelopes, which was hand-addressed to him, white powder tumbled from the folds of the letter. Mann recoiled from the grainy plume and rushed to the bathroom to scrub his hands.

 Fortunately for Mann, the FBI confirmed the powder was cornstarch rather than anthrax. It was perhaps the nadir of the vituperation hurled at Mann by often anonymous critics who accuse him and others of fabricating or exaggerating the dangers of climate change.

Read Oliver Milman’s story in The Guardian - “Climate scientists face harassment, threats and fear of ‘McCathyist’ attacks.”

Court ruling provides new way for climate scientists to fight intimidation

In a legal first, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday that a climate science researcher can proceed with defamation claims against writers who made false allegations about his scientific work.

Penn State University climate
change scientist Michael Mann.

The ruling by the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, found that a "reasonable jury" could find that two writers defamed Michael Mann — known for the famous "hockey stick" graph showing that modern climate change is unprecedented in human history — by making false claims about his work, and comparing him to a notorious child molester.

Read Andrew Freeman’s story in Mashable - “Court ruling provides new way for climate scientists to fight intimidation.”

Careening towards an environment never before experienced by humans

Climatologist from Penn State
University, Michael Mann.

The world is careening towards an environment never experienced before by humans, with the temperature of the air and oceans breaking records, sea levels reaching historic highs and carbon dioxide surpassing a key milestone, a major international report has found.

The “state of the climate” report, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with input from hundreds of scientists from 62 countries, confirmed there was a “toppling of several symbolic mileposts” in heat, sea level rise and extreme weather in 2015.

“The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle,” Michael Mann, a leading climatologist at Penn State, told the Guardian. “They are playing out before us, in real time. The 2015 numbers drive that home.”

Read Oliver Milman’s story in The Guardian - “Environmental records shattered as climate change 'plays out before us'.”

'Here we go again' - why we must silence the fake claims

Here we go again. Along with leading climate scientists, I recently argued there was a temporary slowdown in the rate of warming during the first decade of this century. For those who seem to miss the point, this means there was still an increase in temperature, but the rate of increase was slower.

The article (Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate2938) gently took issue with a conclusion reached by Tom Karl, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and his colleagues last summer (Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa5632), that no such slowdown had occurred.

Climate change deniers are nothing if not predictable. Give them an inch and they take a mile. They seized on this to manufacture yet another fake controversy. Conservative news outlets claimed the two studies showed a fundamental schism within the scientific community and called into question the veracity of human-caused climate change.

Read Michael Mann’s piece in the New Scientist - “Why we need to stop fake claims that global warming paused.”

What we are seeing today in SA is a repeat of the 'worst in a century' conditions

-      Robert McLean

Conditions considered as bad as those that drove the 1983 “Ash Wednesday” bushfires in South Australia and Victoria return as I sit here to write.

Today it is extreme temperatures, high and shifting winds and a country-side left parched after the nearest hottest year on record that has destroyed homes and disrupted the lives of thousands.

Firefighters today said the cause was not their prime concern rather it was protecting lives and property.

In 1983 the cause was faulty power lines, arson, and negligence after years of extreme drought.

Firefighters and equipment from three states, South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales was being used to combat what is happening in South Australia.

Within twelve hours in 1983, more than 180 fires fanned by winds of up to 110 km/h caused widespread destruction across the states of Victoria and South Australia.

“Years of severe drought and extreme weather combined to create one of Australia's worst fire days in a century,” it was then reported.

Michael Mann with his famous book, "The
Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars".

Interestingly those fires became the deadliest bushfire in Australian history, until the Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 and so in 1983 we had the “worst in a century” until that was bettered (I use that advisedly) just five years ago and now conditions considered “as bad as Ash Wednesday” are back.

Surely we have the intelligence and the courage to admit that what we are seeing confirms the reality of climate change and so demands that we, as responsible people with an immediate liability (for ourselves) and a broader and deeper intergenerational concern, must act, changing our behaviour in how we use energy and consume.

In the midst of this Michael Mann, the fellow responsible for the famous “hockey stick” graphic that clearly illustrated the advance of climate change has written on Scientific American.

Mann’s story, headed: “Earth Will Cross the Climate DangerThreshold by 2036” says many reassuring claims about climate abound in the popular media, but, he says, they are misleading at best.
“Global warming continues unabated, and it remains an urgent problem.” Mann writes.

Michael Mann urges us to speak up!

Scientist Michael Mann argues that “If you see something, say something”.

Michael Mann.

Writing an opinion piece for the Sunday Review in the New York Times, Mann argues that although scientists may well be scientists, they are also citizens.

Reflecting on the Department of Homeland urgings to citizen s to report anything dangerous they witness: “If you see some, say something”.

Mann wrote that “We scientists are citizens, too, and, in climate change, we see clear and present danger.

“The public is beginning to see the danger, too – Midwestern farmers struggling with drought, more damaging wildfires out West, and withering record summer heat across the country – while wondering about possible linkages between rapid Artic warming and strange weather patterns, like the recent  outbreak of Artic air across much of the United States”, he writes.

'Elegant and important' paper warns of worse to come

A new paper described as “elegant and important” warns that the world is bound for temperature increases at the high end of past global warming estimates.

Penn State University climate scientist, Michael Mann, who wrote the book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines” praised the new report.

In its story headed: “Climate: Cloud mixing means extra global warming”, National Geographic explains that global warming will mix growing amounts of higher, drier air with ocean clouds over the course of the century, thinning out the clouds and reducing their cooling effect.