Mike Mann on CBS this morning, July 24.
Nutshell version:
– Climate models got the last 50 years of warming nearly exactly.
– What they may have missed is the intensity of some of the resulting extreme events, such as we are seeing this summer.
– These extremes are coming from an emergent behavior of the jet stream, which was not foreseen, which is magnifying the power of drought, heat, and rain events.
– If we bring our emissions to net zero, planet wide, the warming will begin to slow and stop “very quickly”.
– The need for action is urgent.
Below, climate models of the last 50 years, compared to actual measured global temperatures, in bold black.
Sorry, but at this point “bring our emissions down” is too vague a message for the general public. When the talking heads ask what can be done, I think it would help if a few explicit issues were brought up: ban the construction of new FF pipelines, control the methane release in West Texas (and actually say “west Texas”), keep the [
We Love Fossil Fuels] fund from bribing politicians, etc.Mann is so fluent in hitting the points he needs to make in this format (which doesn’t leave much time). It’s easy to think of him as a ‘talking head’, and certainly it’s his ‘celebrity-status’ that rightwing media targets in its criticisms, having nothing more substantive to target. So when he pauses in this interview to note that the mathematics developed for quantum mechanics is being used to help understand the jet stream, its actually a bit of a shock to remember that he’s actually a working scientist, and the world of interviews, articles, and books is a side job.