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michael mann
'Very Fabric of Life' at Risk Without Urgent Action to End Fossil Fuel Era
"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt."
Oct 08, 2024
As Hurricane Milton barreled toward Florida's Gulf Coast, demonstrating the dangers of global warming, international scientists on Tuesday published a terrifying annual analysis that highlights the need to swiftly phase out planet-heating fossil fuels.
"Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public," the coalition wrote in BioScience. "As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them."
"We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis," warned the 14 experts from Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Their latest edition, "The 2024 State of the Climate Report: Perilous Times on Planet Earth," shows that 25 of the 35 "planetary vital signs" the team uses to track the climate emergency are at record extremes. They include U.S.-heat related mortality, fossil fuel subsidies, coal and oil consumption, carbon dioxide equivalent emissions, per capita meat consumption, global tree cover loss due to fires, ocean acidity and heat content change, glacier thickness change, and ice mass change in Antarctica and Greenland.
"Ecological overshoot, taking more than the Earth can safely give, has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives."
The report emphasizes that "human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10%."
"For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change," the publication notes. "For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies."
"Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the three hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024, and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7°C peak warming by 2100," the article adds. "Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering."
Oregon State University professor William Ripple, who led the team with Christopher Wolf of Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates, said in a Tuesday statement that "ecological overshoot, taking more than the Earth can safely give, has pushed the planet into climatic conditions more threatening than anything witnessed even by our prehistoric relatives."
"We're already in the midst of abrupt climate upheaval," Ripple stressed. "For example, Hurricane Helene caused more than 200 deaths in the southeastern United States and massive flooding in a North Carolina mountain area thought to be a safe haven from climate change."
"Since the publication of our 2023 report, multiple climate-related disasters have taken place, including a series of heatwaves across Asia that killed more than a thousand people and led to temperatures reaching 122°F in parts of India," he continued. "Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions. That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse."
To avoid that dark future, the article argues, "we need bold, transformative change: drastically reducing overconsumption and waste, especially by the affluent, stabilizing and gradually reducing the human population through empowering education and rights for girls and women, reforming food production systems to support more plant-based eating, and adopting an ecological and post-growth economics framework that ensures social justice."
The assessment—whose authors include Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania, Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University, and Stefan Rahmstorf and Johan Rockström of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research—comes just over a month away from the next United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP29, which is scheduled for November 11-22 in Azerbaijan.
Pointing to previous summits, Wolf said Tuesday that "despite six reports from the International Panel on Climate Change, hundreds of other reports, tens of thousands of scientific papers, and 28 annual meetings of the U.N.'s Conference of the Parties, the world has made very little headway on climate change."
"Humanity's future depends on creativity, moral fiber, and perseverance," he warned. "If future generations are to inherit the world they deserve, decisive action is needed, and fast."
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Climate Experts Rebuke Musk Over 'Dumbest' Interview With Trump
"Why is Musk doing this?" asked 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben. "My only conjecture is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
Aug 14, 2024
Elon Musk thinks he knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of a major international newspaper, but on Wednesday, experts on the planetary emergency offered the billionaire businessman a reality check.
Responding to a Guardian article critical of Monday's glitch- and lie-laden interview of former U.S. President Donald Trump on Musk's X social media platform, Musk proclaimed that "my little fingernail knows more about climate issues than the entire staff of The Guardian."
Bill McKibben, who co-founded the climate action group 350.org, is quoted in that article calling the Musk-Trump interview "the dumbest climate conversation of all time."
Responding to Musk's diss, McKibben said Wednesday on X that he would "be pleased to debate you (or your little fingernail) at any point about why we don't, in fact, have a century to spare in solving this crisis."
Climate scientist Michael Mann, who calls Musk a "climate denier" in the Guardian piece, also weighed in, telling Musk on X that "if you've got a beef, take it up with me."
Some X users noted that once upon a time, Musk—who is the CEO of electric carmaker Tesla—acknowledged the urgency of the climate crisis. In 2018, he said: "Why not go renewable now and avoid [the] increasing risk of climate catastrophe? Betting that science is wrong and oil companies are right, is the dumbest experiment in history, by far."
In an opinion piece published Tuesday by Common Dreams, McKibben noted that after Musk—who endorsed Trump and created a pro-Trump super political action committee—the former president's biggest funder may be fracking billionaire Harold Hamm.
"He took Trump up on his offer that for a billion dollars he'd give the oil industry whatever it wanted, and he's been working the phones ever since," McKibben wrote of Hamm.
Trump returned the favor by calling Hamm "so boring to be with... because all he wants to talk about is oil and gas."
During his first White House run, Trump infamously called climate change "a Chinese hoax." He staffed his administration with climate deniers and rolled back previous administrations' climate policies under the "drill, baby, drill" mantra popularized by former Alaska governor and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
"Why is Musk doing this?" McKibben asked. "Who knows? After all, the success of Tesla has been mostly driven by government subsidy that grows out of the effort to slow the growth of carbon in the atmosphere."
"My only conjecture," McKibben added, "is that he hopes the world will become barren enough that we simply have to pony up for his big trip to Mars."
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Scientists Won't Classify Anthropocene as 'Epoch' Yet, But Say Human Impact Undeniable
The Anthropocene is classified as a geological "event" at this point—as are mass extinctions and rapid expansions of biodiversity.
Mar 05, 2024
The idea underpinning scientists' push to recognize the current time period as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene dates back more than 100 years, but on Tuesday, a committee of experts voted down the proposal to officially declare a new age defined by human beings' impact on the Earth.
The panel, organized by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), was tasked with weighing whether the Holocene—the epoch that began at the close of the last ice age, more than 11,000 years ago—has ended, and if so, when precisely the Anthropocene began.
Another group, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), had previously posed that an Anthropocene—an epoch during which "the scale and character of human activities have become so great as to compete with natural geological and geophysical forces," as British geologist Robert Lionel Sherlock argued in 1922—began in the mid-20th century.
Around that period, the U.S. and other countries began testing nuclear weapons while fossil fuel production began ramping up significantly, intensifying planetary heating, ocean acidification, and other climate impacts.
AWG presented geological evidence compiled at Crawford Lake in Canada, where radioactive isotopes dating back to the 1950s are embedded in the lake bed, to argue in favor of an Anthropocene that began decades ago.
Several members of the IUGS committee found that the time period proposed began too recently and "failed to capture the earlier impact of humans during, say, the development of farming or the onset of the Industrial Revolution," as Yale Environment 360 noted.
AWG members Simon Turner of University College London and Colin Waters of the University of Leicester told New Scientist Tuesday that the voting result was "very disappointing given the huge contribution by AWG to develop our case."
"All these lines of evidence indicate that the Anthropocene, though currently brief, is—we emphasize—of sufficient scale and importance to be represented on the Geological Time Scale," they said.
The academics who opposed recognizing a new geological epoch in the 12-4 vote are among the scientists who "prefer to describe the Anthropocene as an 'event,' not an 'epoch,'" The New York Times reported.
Geological "events" don't appear on the official Geological Time Scale, "yet many of the planet's most significant happenings are called events, including mass extinctions, rapid expansions of biodiversity, and the filling of Earth's skies with oxygen 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago," according to the Times.
Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at University of Pennsylvania, called the disagreement over the terminology "a tempest in a teapot" that won't stop scientists from identifying the current time period as one in which humans are significantly and negatively impacting the planet.
While the scientific community is not yet labeling the current time period as a new epoch, committee member Jan Piotrowski of Aarhus University in Denmark told the Times, "Our impact is here to stay and to be recognizable in the future in the geological record."
"There is absolutely no question about this," Piotrowski said.
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