Scientist Michael Mann on 'Low-Probability But Catastrophic' Climate Scenarios

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Scientist Michael Mann on 'Low-Probability But Catastrophic' Climate Scenarios
> Date: July 11, 2017 at 2:16:14 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Scientist Michael Mann on ‘Low-Probability But Catastrophic’ Climate Scenarios
> By David Wallace-Wells
> Jul 11 2017
> <http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/07/scientist-michael-mann-on-climate-scenarios.html>
>
> This week, to accompany our cover story on worst-case climate scenarios, we’re publishing a series of extended 
> interviews with climatologists on the subject — most of them from the “godfather generation” of scientists who first 
> raised the alarm about global warming several decades ago. 
>
> Michael Mann is a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University, known primarily for his 1999 “hockey stick graph” 
> of global mean temperatures (which shoots up quite dramatically in the 20th century). He has also been steadily 
> involved in the United Nations’ periodic IPCC state-of-the-planet reports, and with Lee Kump has even adapted those 
> reports into a popular, accessible book summarizing the findings. The book, which was updated to reflect the most 
> recent reports, is called Dire Predictions.
>
> Shortly after this week’s cover story was published, Mann took to Facebook to voice some criticism of it — primarily 
> about its framing, which he described as counterproductively “doomist.” Personally, I don’t think we’re doomed, just 
> facing down a very big challenge. But I own up to the alarmism in the story, which I describe as an effort to survey 
> the worst-case-scenario climate landscape. We have suffered from a terrible failure of imagination when it comes to 
> climate change, I argue, and that is in part because most of us do not understand the real risks and horrors that 
> warming can bring, especially with unabated carbon emissions. For the sake of clarity: I do not believe that the 
> planet will become uninhabitable in 2100. As I write in the story, our complacency will surely be shaken before we 
> get there. But I do believe that it is important to contemplate the possibility that parts of the tropics and equator 
> will become cripplingly hot, for instance, or that our agriculture will suffer huge losses, so that we may be 
> motivated to take action before we get to those eventualities. And I do believe that, absent a significant change in 
> human behavior across the globe, they are plausible eventualities.
>
> Mann also took issue with a few particular points of science. He stressed that the danger of the carbon frozen in the 
> arctic permafrost was not a “game-changing arctic methane time bomb” and, separately, he suggested that the recent 
> upward revision to a particular satellite data set on warming was less significant than I made it out to be. My 
> purpose in raising the permafrost issue was to illustrate how uncertain much of our current modeling can be, not to 
> suggest a sudden methane release would be the major cause of devastating warming: I based none of the warming 
> scenarios described in the piece on a dramatic methane release effect but rather on the high end of the IPCC’s 
> business-as-usual estimate, which gave a roughly 5 percent chance of our hitting eight degrees of warming by 2100. 
> Regarding the data set, I grant that the upward revision may have been less meaningful to the scientists close to the 
> data, who understood it as a revision toward expectations, than it was to journalists covering the development from 
> afar, who focused on the fact of the revision itself.
>
> I have an enormous respect for Mann, and for his perspective on climate change — he has been an invaluable force both 
> as a scientist and as an advocate. That is one reason why I called him up, during my research, to talk to him about 
> what he thought about the low-probability, high-horror possibilities of climate change. Given his criticisms of my 
> story, we’ve decided to run this transcript unedited.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>




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