Thom Hartmann: The Coming Climate Shock

[thomhartmann]

Dr. Michael Mann, Earth System Science Center-Penn State University/ Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, joins Thom. Australia has been one of the largest CO2 emitters in the world for decades. But with a change in Australia's leadership - are we seeing another glimmer of hope for our planet's climate?

For more information on the stories we've covered visit our websites at thomhartmann.com - freespeech.org - and RT.com. You can also watch tonight's show on Hulu - at Hulu.com/THE BIG PICTURE and over at The Big Picture YouTube page. And - be sure to check us out on Facebook and Twitter!

[tclambert]

1. If I had to pick two guys to listen to about climate change, they would be

James Hansen and Michael Mann. Michael Mann in this interview gives a moderately alarmist view of coming climate change. He mentions that James Hansen recently expressed an even more alarmist view about climate change. The thing with Hansen, he makes bold predictions that make the larger climate change community uncomfortable, and he either turns out to have gotten it right, or it turns out even worse than he predicted.

The mainstream climate change community always seems stuck in the mindset of denying how bad and how fast the changes are happening. When they first started thinking about climate change, they thought in terms of thousands of years. When measurements showed it happening right before their eyes (in the 1980s), they started thinking "Maybe it can happen in centuries." By the 90s, they started scrambling to check paleoclimate records to see if climate change could happen even faster. Now they are staring at catastrophe happening in decades, and severe consequences happening right now.