Steve Curwood interviews Michael Mann

[pscot]

for Living on Earth. Full transcript at the link

.that's the number (2 degrees Celsius) that scientists have sort of settled on as when we enter into the "red zone", that is the worst impacts of climate change. But if you talk to ranchers in Texas or Oklahoma who have suffered through the worst drought on record a few years ago or people in California that are dealing with the worst drought in at least a thousand years, if you talk to the residents of New Jersey and New York City who suffered through Super Storm Sandy, if you talk to folks in Louisiana who suffered record flooding earlier this year, people who lost their homes to wildfires, if you talk to people in Bangladesh who are dealing with flooding now, the people of Miami Beach who are dealing with so-called nuisance flooding, you don't have to wait for storm now to get flooding in the streets of Miami. You just have to wait for an especially high tide because of the effects of global sea level rise. Well, for all those people, catastrophic climate change has already arrived. Climate change is already having a devastating impact on their lives, so arguably we shouldn't allow any additional warming. But there's a certain amount of additional warming that we are already committed to. It's that locomotive, it's the Titanic... turning the Titanic to avoid the iceberg. We're likely to see another half a degree Celsius, nearly a degree Fahrenheit additional warming of the planet even if we stop burning carbon right now. So we're already unfortunately committed to some pretty dangerous and damaging impacts of climate change. It is just a matter of how bad we’re willing to let them get and most scientists who've looked at the impacts, the risks, the costs have said two degrees Celsius, three-and-a-half Fahrenheit is clearly too much.

[mackdaddy]

1. Very good Interview. Worth the time to listen to.

Much of it is on the politics of Climate Disruption which as he says in the interview has become front and center again after the results of this election.

Thanks for posting.

PS: He still ends with this "We can fix this" hope message at the end of the interview. I think we will probably blow though the 2C target in the next 18 months. We might do something about cutting fossil fuel burning after tens of millions of western deaths, but I would not bet on it.