TRANSCRIPT: Climatologist Michael Mann re recent events "that we didn't see coming" interviewed on Thom Hartmann Program this AM

'They can't deny it's happening, because it's obvious now to the person on the street.'

UPenn climatologist Michael Mann was a guest on The Thom Hartmann Program this AM, with so much important information coming out that I quickly slowed down my video speed and transcribed their conversation, here.

HARTMANN:  Fort Lauderdale just got twenty five inches of rain in less than seven hours.  This is I believe unprecedented.  We're seeing wild tornadoes, ripping up the Midwest and the South.  There is that- it appears that the historically bad weather tornado wise that used to be in Kansas is now in Alabama and Georgia and Tennessee and Kentucky.  What's going on here? 

MANN:  Yeah- this is just another example of something that we've been talking a lot about in recent years.  We're seeing these far more extreme flooding events, and it's one of the most basic relationships in atmospheric science, that tells us as you increase the warmth of the oceans, you increase the moisture in the air by about seven percent degree celcius of warming.  That's a minimum.  In fact there are studies that suggest it can be larger than that.  For example because storms become more powerful and they in-train more moisture into them.  So it's not just that the atmosphere is moist or has more moisture in it, as you warm it up, but also because you have these more intense storms. 

So we're seeing that, whether it's Pakistan, or California, or now Southern Florida, we're seeing these devastating extreme weather events, in particular these flooding events that have been made far more potent by the warming of the planet due to our ongoing carbon emissions. 

HARTMANN:  So how much worse can they get and how quickly is that going to happen in your opinion?

MANN:  Yeah so that last point, our ongoing carbon emissions, as our carbon emissions if they cease, the surface of the planet, the surface of the oceans stops warming up .   The intensification of these storms, these increased flooding, stabilizes.

So that's one of the most important findings in climate science over the last decade.  We now understand that we have a carbon budget.  That if we can keep the total emissions below some level, we can keep warming below some level as well.  And in particular if we want to keep warming below three degrees Fahrenheit, where we'll start to see the worst consequences of climate change, we need to lower carbon emissions by fifty percent this decade, by sixty percent by 2035 (twenty thirty five) and down to zero or net zero by the middle of this century. 

That's an uphill task.  But it's doable. 

The obstacles aren’t physics, they're not technology.  They're politics at this point.  

'They can't deny it's happening.  Because it's obvious now to the person on the street.'

HARTMANN:  And it's not even really just purely politics.  We have an industry that's a trillion dollar industry that buys politicians, and buys media all over the world. 

MANN:  As I said it's an uphill battle.  But we have science and reason on our side and increasingly the voice of young people.  And that's changing the conversation, the new climate movement.  So I still have some optimism, in large part because of young folks that we will meet this moment.

HARTMANN:  We're having two hundred mile an hour tornadoes in the Midwest and in the Southern states.  This is the new normal, is it not?  Massive flooding in Fort Lauderdale and Florida?  The insane violence of these storms, is this the new normal?

MANN:  Well it's the new reality.  But it's worse than a new normal, right.  The new normal makes it sound like okay well this is what we have to deal with now.  And if we can just adapt to the changes that have happened, we'll be okay. 

But it's worse than that.  If we stop the warming, then things will stop getting worse.  And we are still within the realm of our adaptive capacity.  If we don’t rein in our carbon emissions, if we continue with business as usual, all of this gets worse.  The flooding gets worse, the hurricanes become more extreme, more intense.  You get larger coastal flooding, larger storms surges on top of sea level rise from melting ice. 

Just this week there was a story you might have seen:

The Gulf Coast is actually seeing faster sea leel rise than much of the rest of the country, much of the rest of the world in fact.  And that has to do with a little bit of a surprise and something that we didn't really see coming. 

'Something that we didn't see coming'

It has to do with the way that ocean currents are changing.  The loop current that's sort of part of the atmospheric circulation pattern, we sometimes call the ocean conveyor.  There's sort of a loop of it that goes through the Gulf of Mexico and that loop current is warming up.  That's adding to the expansion of the sea water.  It's also creating an East-West sort of slope in the sea surface and that has to do with complicated oceanographic physics I'm not going to get into here. 

But it means the Gulf Coast is seeing a faster rate of sea level rise than many other regions.  And it's one of the surprises learned since the greenhouse.  And these aren’t pleasant surprises.

HARTMANN:  For many years you were the target of fossil fuel supported trolls, has that changed?

MANN:  I wear that as a badge of honor.  If they hadn’t come after me and my colleagues two decades ago when we published The Hockey Stick curve, I probably wouldn't be out talking about this with the public and trying to communicate the nature of the crisis to the larger public and contributing to the public discourse about the greatest challenge we face as a civilization.  So I feel privileged to be in that position. And I thank my detractors for helping me get into that position. 

'Climate change inactivists'

The battle has moved on.  It's what I call the new climate war.  It was the topic of my last book, the title of which is The New Climate War.  And it describes the evolution of the tactics, the climate change inactivists- you know, fossil fuel interests, those who do their bidding, “conservative” politicians and media outlets-

They can't deny it's happening.  Because it's obvious now to the person on the street.  We can see the impacts of climate change playing out.  So fossil fuel interests have turned to various other tactics, stalling tactics, delay.  Deflection, division.  Even doom mongering.  If they can convince us it's too late to do anything, it potentially leads us down a path of inaction. 

So we have to recognize these new tactics that are being used because they are the primary obstacle.  They are really the only obstacle now that stands between us and meaningful climate action.  

***

HARTMANN (introducing Mann):  On the phone is our old buddy Michael Mann, the distinguished professor and director of the center for science sustainability at University of Pennsylvania.  Author of numerous books, most recently The New Climate War, Michael Mann, with two N-s, his website his twitter is Michael E Mann, Dr. Mann, welcome back to the program.

@MichaelEMann michaelmann.net 

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