The #Media Malpractice on #ClimateChange! (Full Interview w/Guest: Dr. Michael Mann)

[00:00:00] Tom Hartman: And greetings, my friends, patriots, lovers of democracy, truth and justice, believers in peace, freedom in the American way. Tom Hartman here with you. And I am so pleased. It is Friday. Normally we do anything goes Friday. We're not going to do that in our first hour. We're going to do the first 50 minutes of our first hour. We're going to do Ask a Meteorologist, not a Meteorologist, a Climate Scientist. Michael Mann is with us and a distinguished professor of meteorology, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, the author of Dire Predictions, Understanding Climate Change, which is just now out in second edition, and has a new book coming out with Tom Tolles, the brilliant cartoonist that you can pre-order at the usual suspect sources, Amazon and whatnot, called The Madhouse Effect. His website is michaelmann, with two Ns, just like my name, michaelmann.net. And you can tweet him at michaelemann, M-A-N-N. So, Dr. Mann, welcome. [00:01:02] Michael Mann: It's great to literally be with you. Yeah, yeah. Physically in the studio. [00:01:06] Tom Hartman: It's so nice. And what we'll do, just for those of you who are watching and might have a question for Dr. Mann, is we're going to talk for five or six minutes about, you know, just what's going on in the world and this kind of thing, and then we will open the phone lines up to your calls, you know, assuming that any of you have questions for us. Chris is standing by to answer the phones, and I hear them ringing already. So, Dr. Mann, what is the current state of the art of knowledge about, I mean, for example, I've been seeing this spiral graphic that's gone kind of viral, and it sure the heck looks to me like we've gone from a linear transition, you know, one, two, three, four, five, to something that's approaching a log transition, you know, ten, a hundred, a thousand, or whatever, you know, in biology, they call it amplification. Are we at that, are we there? Are we moving there? Because that's the point of not necessarily no return, that might be an exaggeration, but, well, I don't want to put words in your mouth. [00:02:11] Michael Mann: Yeah, no, you're referring to the viral spiral, as I call it. Exactly. It's just a wonderful graphic that a colleague of mine from the UK, Ed Hawkins, who's not a professional graphic artist, he's a climate scientist, but he came up with this particular way of illustrating the changes in global temperature over the past century, and it was very engaging. I think it was a new way of looking at a data set that many people have seen a million times, the global temperature graph. Sometimes when you look at the same data, but you look at it in a different way, and this is true as a scientist, it makes you think about it differently. And so it was a very effective way of showing, you know, as the temperatures spiral out over time, how quickly, how close we are to this two degrees Celsius, three and a half degree Fahrenheit boundary. Danger point. What many scientists have concluded constitutes dangerous and potentially irreversible climate change. In fact, we are so close to that boundary that we are beginning to exceed it on the monthly timescale, which is to say if we see a very warm month like we've seen this year, we've seen some very warm months globally, in particular because of the El Nino, a very large El Nino on top of global warming. And so temperatures have started to exceed that boundary. They're not permanently outside it. The spiral hasn't permanently gone outside that two degree circle, but it's getting perilously close. [00:03:43] Tom Hartman: And that's worldwide. If we look at the Arctic, it's a whole different story. It's a far worse story. [00:03:47] Michael Mann: That's right. And in fact, if you were to look at a spiral for temperatures in the Arctic, what you would see is that temperatures are spiraling outward across, across those boundaries, across the two degree boundary, even faster because of the amplifying effect of melting ice, melting snow. So you get even more heating of the Arctic Ocean. You get more warming. It's what we call a positive feedback, but it's not a good thing. It's a bad thing. Right. It's a vicious cycle. [00:04:13] Tom Hartman: One of the things I did on my, on the TV show last night as, as my op-ed at the end of the day, you know, we talked about the, the, the flooding of the Seine in France, the river, the, the Paris is underwater. They're, they've closed the Louvre because they're, they're having to protect the arc. They're moving the books up stairs now. Yeah, everything, everything that's, you know, yeah. And, and people are dying there. People are dying here. We have these floods in Texas. The atmosphere right now has somewhat, somewhere in excess, my understanding is, of about 5% more water than it did in, let's say, the year I was born, 1951. And, and given that, if it holds more water vapor, when it rains, more water comes out of the sky. And so these mega storms, these, you know, these horrible, you know, Texas and France getting, you know, three weeks with the rain in one or two days is an absolutely predictable result. And my rant was the media in the United States is committing near criminal malpractice by not associating or even mentioning climate change in the context of these wild weather events. And I'm convinced that they don't want to offend their advertisers, whether it's Koch Industries or whether it's Exxon Mobil or whatever. Or, you know, I don't know. I mean, you know, I got a half a dozen conspiracy theories on that. It might just be plain old stupidity. What are your thoughts on this? [00:05:45] Michael Mann: There's a lot to chew on there. And, you know, we were mentioning the Louvre, of course, the paintings, the famous paintings that are moving those upstairs right now. And what they're seeing in Paris, what we saw earlier, just last month in Texas, we are seeing a remarkable increase in the frequency of these very intense rainfall events, these very intense flooding events. In fact, the blizzard that we saw, the historic blizzard in Washington, D.C. earlier this winter, that blizzard, it was so much snow because ocean temperatures were as warm as they were. You sometimes hear from the critics, you know, people like James Inhofe, who will introduce a snowball on the Senate floor as a putative disproof of global warming. Not only is it silly, the opposite of that is likely the case, which is to say that we expect bigger snowfall events in the middle of the winter as temperatures get, you know, as temperatures warm, as ocean temperatures warm up. And that's what we're seeing, whether it's blizzards on the east coast of the U.S., flooding events in Texas or in Paris. And as you said, it's not that complicated. The underlying physics is pretty basic. For each degree Fahrenheit warming of the globe, we expect a roughly 3% increase in the amount of moisture in the atmosphere. It's a fundamental physical relationship. So each degree Celsius? Each degree Celsius, more like 5%. [00:07:12] Tom Hartman: So you're talking Fahrenheit. Yeah. So we're at 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit right now, so that's in the neighborhood of 4 or 5%. [00:07:18] Michael Mann: In the neighborhood of 4 or 5% more moisture in the atmosphere already. And that means you can get, when it does rain, it literally is more likely to pour. You're more likely to see floods. You're more likely to see blizzards along the east coast of the U.S., where those very warm ocean temperatures come into contact with cold air. You get these massive blizzards as well. [00:07:38] Tom Hartman: Right. We have about a minute and a half here before we hit a break, and we're going to start taking some phone calls. At what point do you feel that we have hit something that resembles a point of no return? [00:07:53] Michael Mann: Well, the sad truth is we've probably already hit certain points of no return. We're probably already committed to the melting of a large amount of the West Antarctic ice sheet, enough to give us, eventually, 10 to 14 feet of sea level rise. If we're lucky, that happens very slowly, over many centuries. There are other tipping points that lie out there. They're like mines in a minefield. And the problem is, the farther we go out into that minefield, the more we warm the planet, the more likely we are to encounter those. [00:08:23] Tom Hartman: Any sense of how far away we might be from a, you know, I ran out of a methane, you know, about a methane tipping point, whether it's permafrost or Arctic, the six trillion tons or a billion or whatever it is of it? [00:08:37] Michael Mann: Yeah, well, we know it happened in the past when the Earth was roughly as warm as we're making it now. So that is one of those tipping points that almost certainly lies out there. And just how close we are to it, we're not sure. The only safe strategy, of course, is to not walk out into the minefield. Right. We need to stop using fossil fuels. [00:08:55] Tom Hartman: And, you know, several countries now, Germany and I think it was Finland or Denmark, virtually 100% renewable energy a couple times this year. The U.K.? The U.K. Just a couple weeks ago, burned no coal for several days in a row. For the first time since the 19th century. That's right. It's amazing. Dr. Michael Mann is with us. We'll be back with your calls for Dr. Mann right after this. This is the Tom Hartman Program. We're talking with Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology, director of Earth Science Systems Center at Penn State University. We'll be back with your calls for The Inventor of the Hockey Stick. And welcome back. Dr. Mann is here with us, and Randy watching Free Speech TV in Ottawa, Iowa. Randy, you are on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:09:51] Speaker 3: Hi, Tom and Dr. Mann. I'm pulling up some information. It seems that the first victims of climate change and rising waters are located off the Louisiana coast and it's Native Americans. And it was in the New York Times called Resettling the First American Climate Refugees. [00:10:12] Tom Hartman: Oh, yeah. That was like two or three months ago, as I recall, wasn't it? [00:10:16] Speaker 3: Right. That's $48 million is appropriate for that. When we're looking at how the level of water is rising and how that plays into the ocean warming down in the South Pacific, where do you think the next, I would imagine the next place would be Louisiana or Florida that would need taxpayer funding to accommodate or move resettled Americans. Is there any projections or is there a line of thought on how the dominoes will fall? [00:11:01] Tom Hartman: Great question, Randy. Thank you very much for that. And thanks for watching Free Speech on DirecTV. [00:11:06] Michael Mann: Yeah, great question indeed. And, you know, one of the things, you know, we come upon aspects of climate science that are uncertain. And the critics love to say, oh, see, there's uncertainty, so we shouldn't do anything. The reality is that the uncertainties often end up working against us. And with respect to the issue of sea level rise, what we're finding is that things are happening faster. The ice sheets are losing ice even earlier than we expected them to. They're contributing to sea level rise earlier than we expected to. And what you're seeing is a steady upward revision in our estimates of how much sea level rise we could see by the end of the century. In fact, if you look at the last report of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they were talking about an upper bound of a little over a meter, a little more than three feet of sea level rise by the end of the century. Well, there's a study that came out just a month ago, one of the co-authors was a colleague of mine from Penn State University. And what they showed was that there are processes right now whereby the West Antarctic ice sheet is losing ice far more rapidly. There are processes that weren't included in the models that in nature, that in reality, are causing that ice sheet to lose ice more rapidly. And that led them to estimate that we could see as much as two meters, more than six feet of sea level rise by the end of this century. Now, we've already seen, as the caller alludes to, the devastating impact of just less than one foot of sea level rise. It's the variable tip of the iceberg that we've seen thus far. But already we're seeing low-line island nations facing increased erosion threats to their coastlines from a combination of sea level rise and stronger hurricanes. It's a double whammy. That's what New York City faced with Hurricane Sandy. Again, it was a double whammy. You've got a foot of sea level rise. You had the largest and strongest storm of its type to make landfall on the New Jersey coast and the U.S. East Coast. And if you just take into account the one foot of sea level rise alone, Lloyd's of London estimates that that did several billion dollars of additional damage, 25 square miles of additional flooding from one foot of sea level rise. And not one single fossil fuel company is helping to pay for that externality. Well, no, that's right. And that's why we really need to, it needs to be incorporated into the economy through some sort of price on carbon, a price signal of some sort. Absolutely. Very well said. [00:13:30] Tom Hartman: Dr. Michael Mann is with us. We will be right back. Welcome back. Tom Harbin here with you and Dr. Michael Mann. The fellow who invented the hockey stick that Al Gore turned into, you know, a second career. I mean that in a positive way, but, and, and, and boy, have you been at the tip of the proverbial spear? You've had, you've had all kinds of crap thrown at you, lawsuits and everything else. And, but you're, you're, you're like the energizer bunny. You're genuinely one of my heroes. Oh, that's kind of you. Thank you. Let's, let's see what other calls we have here. Cora, listening on KVOT in Taos, New Mexico, you were on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:14:12] Speaker 4: Yes, Dr. Mann. When the steam levels rise, could that produce extra pressure on fault lines or the tectonic plates? [00:14:21] Michael Mann: Interesting question. Thanks, Cora. Yeah, you know, there are, there's some evidence, actually, there were a series of articles in the peer-reviewed literature a couple decades ago when I was first a graduate student that argued that undersea volcanoes, because of the, the change in pressure that they exert could actually impact, you know, the, the, the climate system. And, um, there are all sorts of, uh, potential surprises, um, when it comes to the science of climate change. [00:14:55] Tom Hartman: I was thinking all those tons of ice on, on Greenland sliding into the sea would, would lighten that continent. I don't know where it is relative to tectonic plates, but. [00:15:06] Michael Mann: Yeah, I mean, it's, there are all sorts of interesting, um, you know, subtleties about, even when you lose an ice sheet, um, well, the ice sheet has a lot of mass, um, and it's exerting a large gravitational pull on the ocean. So it turns out when we lose the West Antarctic ice sheet, we lose the gravitational pull of the ocean that's pulling it towards Antarctica. Um, that means that you actually get a drop in sea level along the West Antarctic, uh, coastline. Which means it's going up somewhere else. Which means it's going up in the Northern Hemisphere. So you get added sea level rise here just because of the loss of that gravitational pull. And that's something that wasn't, uh, truly appreciated until really the last few years where some scientists have started to do the calculations and it makes a significant difference. That's, that's remarkable. So, so to the caller, um, you know, we always have to think outside the box, uh, because the problem is we're tampering with this system that we don't understand perfectly. And what that means is that we could be in store for, uh, some surprises and then they wouldn't be welcome surprises. Yeah. Yeah. [00:16:09] Tom Hartman: Uh, yeah. Uh, let's see here. Dr. Uh, Mary in, uh, Canby, Minnesota. Hey Mary, you're on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:16:20] Speaker 5: Hi, I have a question. Uh, since we seem to have a media and political blackout on the effects of global warming here in our country, I'd like to know what other countries around the globe are thinking. Are they, are they denying the science or are they, are they trying to embrace it and, and make changes? [00:16:38] Tom Hartman: Yeah, in France right now, as they report on the, on this God awful weather, are they mentioning climate change in the context of it? Thank you, Barry, for the call. [00:16:45] Michael Mann: Yeah. In fact, uh, you know, the, uh, Le Monde has some wonderful environmental reporters. Le Monde, the biggest newspaper in France. The biggest newspaper in France. Um, so, uh, the French media, uh, in, in my view has done a pretty good job of covering this issue. I was just in, uh, Iceland, um, for a few days at a, uh, uh, uh, uh, climate conference, um, and I had a chance to talk to, uh, some of, uh, the, you know, leading journalists in Iceland, um, uh, interviewed with several of their stations, their, uh, news stations. And they are, they, they are very much, um, you know, uh, they are very engaged in this issue. They understand the threat of climate change. They live in an area that depends critically on, you know, the Gulf Stream, uh, for their warm and mild, uh, you know, weather. And if that were to collapse, then that would have a huge impact on them. That's one possible, uh, result of, uh, global warming. So, um, you know, in Europe, uh, in Asia, most of the world, uh, with a few exceptions, um, does not face the challenge we face here in the U.S. Where there is this fake debate about whether, you know, the, the, the, the problem even exists. And we have a Congress, literally the only, you know, civilized nation in the world, um, that has, uh, a, one of the two, you know, the leading, uh, political parties in denial of the reality of climate change. [00:18:09] Tom Hartman: The Republican Party is, is quite literally the only political party in the developed world that denies climate change. [00:18:16] Michael Mann: That's right. Yeah, you, you, you, yeah. [00:18:18] Tom Hartman: That's it. And, and, and I, I put that right at the feet of the Supreme Court that said that, you know, it's perfectly legal to buy off a politician and, and, you know, you've got a bunch of people who just stood up there with their hand out. Um, uh, we have just a minute until we're going to hit the break at the bottom of the hour. So let me ask, ask you a question. Um, of all the various things that you're looking at, there's a million variables here, probably literally. What are the ones that you're paying most attention to and that you think that we should be? [00:18:46] Michael Mann: Yeah, well, sea level, uh, the, what's going on with ice, because that's going to determine how much sea level rise we see. And that's going to determine the threat to our coastlines, along with changing characteristics of storms. Um, one of the things that has intrigued me is some of the recent evidence that's come to light, um, that really starts to connect the dots with respect to the extreme weather we've seen in recent years and climate change. Uh, there's now some evidence that there's some pretty fundamental atmospheric physics that explains why this is happening. It's real. And it, it has to do with something known as planetary wave resonance. It's a trick, uh, it's a technical, uh, sort of matter, but it's very convincing. Basically what it says is global warming is causing the jet stream to lock into a sort of meander more slowly than it used to. [00:19:34] Tom Hartman: Oh, because the temperature gradient isn't as great as it used to be, so it's not as rigid as it used to be. [00:19:38] Michael Mann: Right. Just like a river that's traveling on nearly flat, uh, level ground tends to meander, uh, so does the jet stream when you have these reduced temperature gradients, which are resulting from climate change. [00:19:50] Speaker 6: Well, well, thus bizarre weather all spring, Dr. Mike, you're listening to the Tom Hartman program called 202-536-2370. [00:20:00] Tom Hartman: Dr. Michael Mann is with us, uh, his website, michaelmann.net. You can tweet him at Michael E. Mann, M-A-N-N, and, uh, we'll be back with more of your calls for Dr. Mike. Welcome back. Tom Hartman here with you, live with Dr. Michael Mann, distinguished professor of meteorology and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, uh, ESSC.PSU.edu. He's the author of the book, Dire Predictions, Understanding Climate Change, and he has a new book out, which you can pre-order, uh, in, uh, Amazon and, uh, every place else, I guess. It's called The Madhouse Effect with Tom Toles, the, uh, brilliant artist and cartoonist, and that should be a lot of fun. And, of course, his website, michaelmann, uh, M-A-N-N.net, and you can tweet him at Michael E. Mann, M-A-N-N, and please, when you tweet, say hi, you know, for me. Because, uh, so, uh, let's be, we're picking up phone calls, right? Okay. James in Tacoma, Washington. You are on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:21:05] Speaker 7: Was that James? [00:21:07] Tom Hartman: That's James. That's you, sir. [00:21:09] Speaker 7: Oh, yes. Okay. Hey, um, I was, first off, uh, I was wanting to know if Mr. Mann was spelled with two N's or one. Two. Two. Okay, I got it. All right. Um, I was wondering if he was aware of, uh, uh, Dr. Katie Spellman in University of Alaska, Fairbanks. She's a PhD in ecology. [00:21:33] Michael Mann: Do you know about her? Um, the name sounds, uh, familiar. Can you tell us a little bit more about, uh, what she's done? [00:21:39] Speaker 7: Katie, it's Katie Bellano Spellman. She's my, uh, publisher, editor, and, um, her and her husband do research on ecology out of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her husband is her field representative, uh, research representative, and they have all kinds of stories they can tell you about what's going on up there. They, she's been in on the oil thing, and that's generally what her and I talk about is the, uh, what the oil has done to the state of Alaska, which is a double-edged sword, as we know. And, um, anyway, there's just, if you go to that website, you can find out a lot of stuff. [00:22:18] Tom Hartman: Okay. [00:22:19] Speaker 7: About what's going on up there. [00:22:20] Tom Hartman: James, thanks for the tip. Well, are you hearing any interesting stories out of Alaska? [00:22:24] Michael Mann: Well, you know, there's, um, you know, the, the, uh, caller, uh, I think is alluding to the fact that there is a lot of, um, sort of environmental research. There's a lot of environmental impacts, uh, work, uh, uh, in that area. There's a long-term environmental research station, an LTER, there, uh, these sorts of stations all around the country, uh, where scientists are very carefully measuring the changes that are happening in ecosystems, changes in, uh, the vegetation changes in animal species, uh, and this is a laboratory where we are watching climate change play out in real time. And nowhere is that more true than up in Alaska, where they are seeing accelerated warming because of, again, that, uh, accelerating effect of melting ice. And so they are seeing things now, in a sense, what Alaska is seeing now is sort of a glimpse of the future that, uh, you know, we all, uh, uh, may have to deal with, um, where they are already seeing, uh, substantial negative, uh, effects on biota, on, on animal species. The loss of sea ice environment is a threat to walruses and polar bears, and so it's this, you know, we are playing this experiment with the one planet that we have, and nowhere is that, uh, are the results of that experiment more frightening than what we see up in Alaska. [00:23:40] Tom Hartman: Yeah, and Siberia, and Siberia, and then that entire, all the whole, all the, all the peat and everything there, it's, uh, amazing stuff. Uh, Mike in Munster, Indiana, listening to WCPT out of Chicago, Mike, you're on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:23:54] Speaker 8: Yeah, hi. I have a question about, um, uh, the little ice age that happened in Europe in the 1600s, how that compares to the change that would happen back then, how it compares to today. And, um, my best, basic gist is, is this, could this be a natural fluctuation output in the sun or something, and, you know, do we really understand all the complexities of the climate, and, you know, um, can you, could you explain, basically, the little ice age, you know, um. [00:24:29] Tom Hartman: Sure, okay, Mike, thanks for the call. [00:24:31] Michael Mann: Yeah, thanks, thanks, uh, it's a, it's a great question, um, and in fact, uh, the, the caller has asked the right person, because I, uh, have spent, uh, much of my career actually studying, uh, the fluctuations in the climate of the last thousand years, uh, the so-called little ice age, the medieval, uh, warm period is sometimes, uh, referred to, and, uh, not just studying those, uh, intervals, but trying to understand what, uh, was behind them. And we now have a pretty solid understanding of what was driving the changes that we saw in the Little Ice Age. Uh, there were, uh, a larger number of, uh, large volcanic eruptions, like the Mount, uh, Tambora eruption of 1815 that led to the year without a summer of 1816. Uh, so there were more volcanoes during that time period, uh, the sun dimmed a little, a small fraction of a percent, but enough to actually lower global temperatures by a tenth of a degree, a couple tenths of a degree. Uh, you put that all together and, uh, you can understand why the Little Ice Age was relatively cold. These natural factors were acting to cool the climate. Um, the medieval warm period was a period, uh, uh, with a more, uh, moderate, a more mild, uh, climate overall, because there weren't many of those eruptions. Uh, and solar output was a little bit higher, uh, but what we know is that the warming we've seen of the past century takes us outside of the range of any of those changes in the past. Moreover, we can use our understanding of how the climate responded to those natural factors, like the sun and volcanoes, to get a better estimate of how sensitive the climate is to greenhouse gases we are putting into the atmosphere. Scientists use that information to try to better assess how sensitive the climate system is to the impact that we are having. And when you study the Little Ice Age and the medieval warm period and the ice ages that happened before that, and the longer term changes, um, uh, on geological time scales back to the age of the dinosaurs, when you take all that information, it supports the conclusion that the globe, uh, is fairly sensitive to increases in growth. So, um, the climate, the greenhouse gases, the greenhouse gases, the greenhouse gases, that the climate sensitivity, how much warming do we get if we double greenhouse gas concentrations, which we're on course to do in just a matter of decades, um, more than five degrees Fahrenheit, most likely. Takes us back to the Pleistocene. It's a change for humans. It's a change for humans. Exactly. By the end of the century, if we can continue with business as usual, burning of fossil fuels, we will see a warming that is larger than any change that we can document in many, many thousands of years. Yeah. [00:27:08] Tom Hartman: Wouldn't it be million, almost many millions of years? It is potentially millions of years. Yeah. That's, that's, that's astonishing stuff. Um, let's see here. Anna in Tucson, Arizona, you're on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:27:20] Speaker 5: Hi, my name's Anna. [00:27:21] Tom Hartman: Yes, you're on the air, Anna. [00:27:23] Speaker 5: Hi, thank you. Um, Dr. Mann, my question is, um, a general question on carbon sequestration. So, what I'm, what I'm worried about is that there's been, you know, techniques to improve carbon sequestration so we can continue to burn fossil fuels. And given the fact that we continue to increase, um, carbon dioxide per per million in our atmosphere, what's your opinion on how carbon sequestration can help mitigate this problem? Um, given the fact that we know that the oceans are a huge carbon sink and are being acidified, how do we proportion what gets, where the carbon gets sequestered? [00:28:07] Tom Hartman: Hmm. And what's the state of the art of, of, of that technology if it's even viable? [00:28:12] Michael Mann: Yeah, I'll tell you. Thank you, Anna. Yeah, it's a great question. Um, and you know, we are adding, uh, 10 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels. Wow. Uh, the good news is that, um, we've seen that peak, um, in recent years and, and maybe we're starting to see a downturn even as the economy grows. Planet wide? Uh, the, the numbers from last year showed a slight decrease, suggesting that maybe we're starting to turn the corner. [00:28:37] Tom Hartman: Chinese are cutting back on, on coal and jacking up solar and wind like there's no tomorrow. Absolutely. [00:28:43] Michael Mann: I mean, they are decommissioning coal-fired power plants. Um, they're ahead of schedule, uh, with respect to the commitment they made in this bilateral agreement with the U.S. Um, last year. So, and as we know, Europe and many other countries are really ramping up their use of, uh, renewable energy. And it's really starting to show up in the global numbers. So that's the good news. The bad, the bad news is that, um, with 10 billion tons of carbon added to the atmosphere, uh, every year. Uh, in my view, there is literally no obvious way that we can sequester a significant amount of that below the, the surface of the earth. Uh, to me, it's a bit of a pipe dream. It's a possible, it's possible that carbon sequestration could make a dent in the problem. But there's no way that we are going to be able to take a substantial chunk out of that 10 billion, uh, tons of carbon we put into the atmosphere if we continue on that course. Um, in my view, the only truly viable way to stabilize warming below dangerous levels is to stop, uh, massive burning of fossil fuels to, to literally pivot to green, green energy. Stop putting the carbon in in the first place. [00:29:52] Tom Hartman: Um, uh, yeah, I know some folks over at the, um, um, um, drawing a blank on the name, the, uh, uh, anyhow, it's a, it's a, it, Rodale is very involved in this thing. And what they're suggesting is that if we were to, that one of the most effective forms of carbon sequestration is biological. Now, obviously this is short term, not necessarily long term, unless it gets turned into, we go back to having eight feet of topsoil instead of three inches of topsoil in the central United States. But what about that, is that, you know, uh, restoring our lands? [00:30:22] Michael Mann: Uh, yes, that, I mean, and, and there are policies, land use, uh, policies that can help us mitigate, um, you know, our, our, our carbon emissions. Again, um, it's sort of in the margins. It's not going to take a significant chunk out of the carbon we're burning. Um, so we do, we knew, do need to stop burning that carbon. We do need to, to move to other forms of energy, renewable energy. Um, but each of these things can help at least a, a little bit. And it's worth pursuing. It's worth researching. Um, some of the schemes that have been proposed are a little scary. For example, some scientists have said, well, we can dump iron into the oceans. That'll fertilize the oceans, which are limited nutrient wise by iron. The algae will take more of the carbon out of the atmosphere. As we study those, um, uh, those things further, we find out there could be lots of unintended consequences. Right. Right. And consequences. Same thing with, uh, you know, let's spray aluminum or, or titanium in the air, put it in jet fuel, uh, unintended consequences. [00:31:18] Tom Hartman: Yeah. Yeah. Be very careful. The, the, the bottom line is we need to stop the carbon. And the best way to stop the carbon is by putting a price on it, right? That's right. Yeah. We'll be right back. Dr. Mann is with us. Dr. Michael Mann. Stick around. [00:31:31] Speaker 6: You're listening to Tom Hartman. Visit TomHartman.com for audio and video archives. [00:31:37] Tom Hartman: Dr. Michael Mann. Thanks so much for being with us, uh, today. Michael Mann.net, uh, at Twitter at Michael E. Mann. Thanks, Tom. It was great to talk with you. And welcome back. Dr. Mann is still with us for just five minutes here to take quick, quick questions from our, um, our, uh, Free Speech TV viewers. Cliff, watching Free Speech TV in Canyon Country, California. You are on the air with Dr. Mann. [00:32:11] Speaker 9: Uh, good afternoon, gentlemen. Uh, since there's this fracking boom going on around the planet, not just here in the U.S., I wanted to ask the doctor, what effect does he feel this is contributing to the global warming? And if they could ban fracking, um, would that substantially help the situation? [00:32:32] Tom Hartman: Or alternatively, you know, the fossil fuel industry says if you ban fracking, you'd make it worse because everybody would go back to coal. Yeah. Which I don't buy, but anyhow, thanks, Cliff, for the question. [00:32:42] Michael Mann: There's a false equivalent. Yeah. There's a false choice in, in, in that framing. And it's a great question, Cliff. Um, and the reality of it is that scientists have actually done the math on this. Um, uh, there's a team of scientists that have looked at what do we need to keep in the ground? If we're going to avoid that catastrophic more than two degrees Celsius, three and a half degree Fahrenheit warming of the planet, how much of the, the carbon do we have to keep in the ground? And it turns out you have to keep about 80% of the coal, uh, in the ground. So we, we have to- That is still there, you mean? [00:33:12] Tom Hartman: Yeah. [00:33:13] Michael Mann: That we know about. And these are in proven reserves that are still on the balance sheets of fossil fuel, uh, companies. We've got to leave 80% of the coal in the ground. We've just about all the coal, um, something like 70% of the petroleum and at least 50% of the natural gas. Um, so to those who argue that natural gas, that fracking could be the bridge to a fossil fuel, uh, future. Um, because nominally, uh, you get less carbon pollution from, uh, natural gas than you get, say, from coal. Uh, but the fact is if we're going to avoid dangerous warming of the planet, we've got to leave most, most of the, uh, the natural gas down there as well. It's not the solution to the problem. It's part of the problem. [00:33:49] Tom Hartman: Well, given the weather that we're experiencing, aren't we already in dangerous warming of the planet? But you're talking in terms of like, you know, mass death, mass extinction. [00:33:58] Michael Mann: That's absolutely right. I mean, danger is a, you know, it's a subjective term. Relative term. It's a relative term. And to low, for people facing inundation and low-lying island nations right now, for the people of California dealing with that drought, for people in New York that had to deal with the aftermath of, of Hurricane Sandy, um, we're already experiencing dangerous climate change. Clearly. Uh, Rick, Washington, Free Speech TV and McHenry, Maryland. [00:34:21] Tom Hartman: Rick, a quick question, please. [00:34:23] Speaker 10: Hi guys. Yeah, uh, really, uh, reason I call, we've broken, uh, the monthly record for heat and worldwide in the last twelve months. Each month has, uh, broken the record. Mm-hmm. And that, that leads me to, to my real point. Scientists have for twenty years minimized, terribly minimized the, uh, the effects of global warming, warming. [00:34:47] Tom Hartman: Uh, Rick, real, real quick, please. We've got forty seconds. [00:34:50] Speaker 10: Oh, sorry about that. Uh, the militarization of, uh, our countries is a good example. The Pentagon knows. We're past the point of no return. Yeah. [00:34:59] Tom Hartman: That's all. Thank you. Are we past the point of no return? [00:35:02] Michael Mann: So, there are many tipping points, um, and some of them we've probably crossed. The, the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, that's a bad thing that we've probably already baked into the equation now. Uh, but there are other... Ice-free Arctic. Ice-free Arctic we could still avoid. Uh, many of the worst, you know, scenarios that we can envision, we can still avoid. Uh, again, we keep warming below the dangerous two degrees Celsius, three and a half degree Fahrenheit, uh, level. The fact is, though, that if we are going to keep warming below that threshold, we have to rapidly decelerate our burning of fossil fuels. We have to start now. Remarkable. Dr. Mann, thank you so much. Thank you. It was a pleasure, Tom. [00:35:40] Tom Hartman: Thank you, Tom from the studio. We really appreciate it. We'll be back. Thank you, uh, but Dr. Mannwall. So, check it out. To watch more clips from our programs, hit the "Watch more videos" button over here. And please be sure to hit the "Handy-dandy" "Subscribe" button. So, always be up to date. Tag, you're it.