Above photo: Aerial stills from the New Zealand Defence Force, from CNN.
Sharmini Peries interviews Dr. Michael Mann on the most recent climate change science.
The Real News – Last week storms battered the Southwest in the United States and in Louisiana, which was the hardest hit state, three people lost their lives and thousands lost their homes and businesses. The Sabine River on the border of Louisiana and Texas hit the highest water level on record, surpassing the previous record set in 1999 by over 5 feet. Climate scientists are saying we are not only in a period of global warming, we are now entering a global climate change emergency. As NOAA recently confirmed, February surpassed all records in terms of temperatures. January 2016 also broke all-time records for above average temperatures, but the extent to which February broke temperature records alarmed many scientists, the month was more than 0.2°C warmer [than January]. Now many scientific studies have linked extreme weather events to climate change.
BIO: Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).
Dr. Mann was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report in 2001 and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA’s outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012 and was awarded the National Conservation Achievement Award for science by the National Wildlife Federation in 2013. He made Bloomberg News’ list of fifty most influential people in 2013. He is a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.
Dr. Mann is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books including Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming in 2008 and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines in 2012. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.