Friday, October 02, 2020
A Second
Trump Term Would Be 'Game Over' for the Climate, Says Top Scientist
Michael Mann, one of the world’s most eminent climate experts,
says Earth’s future 'is in the hands of American citizens.'
commondreams.org/views/2020/10/02/second-trump-term-would-be-game-over-climate-says-top-scientist
This article
is published as part of Covering Climate Now, a collaboration of 400-plus news
outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story. The Guardian is the lead
partner of CCN.
Michael
Mann, one of the most eminent climate scientists in the world, believes
averting climate catastrophe on a global scale would be "essentially
impossible" if Donald Trump is
re-elected.
A professor
at Penn State University, Mann, 54, has published hundreds of peer-reviewed
scientific papers, testified numerous times before Congress and appeared
frequently in the news media. He is also active on Twitter, where earlier this
year he declared:
"A second Trump term is game over for the climate—really!", a
statement he reaffirmed in an interview with the Guardian and Covering Climate
Now.
"If we
are going to avert ever more catastrophic climate change impacts, we need to
limit warming below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three
degrees Fahrenheit," Mann said. "Another four years of what we've
seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the
polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration
… would make that essentially impossible."
None of
Mann's 200-plus scientific papers is more famous than the so-called
"hockey stick study", which Nature published on
Earth Day of 1998. With two co-authors, Mann demonstrated that global
temperature had been trending downward for the previous one thousand years.
Graphed, this line was the long handle of the hockey stick, which surged
abruptly upwards in about 1950—represented by the blade of the stick—to make
the 1990s the warmest decade in "at least the last millennium."
In 1999,
Mann became an assistant professor at the University of Virginia, where he was
targeted by the climate denier crowd, an experience detailed in his 2012 book
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. He received death threats, he says, and
had emails stolen. Virginia's former attorney general Ken Cuccinelli, a hard-right
Republican, subpoenaed
documents related to Mann's research funding in an effort to
prove fraud. A Washington Post editorial blasted Cuccinelli for "mis[using]
state funds in his own personal war against climate science." In 2014,
affirming a lower court's decision, the supreme court of Virginia ruled against
Cuccinelli, who now serves as a top official in Trump's Department of Homeland
Security.
Mann denies
that it's a partisan statement to say that four more years of Trump would mean
"game over" for the climate.
"It is
a political statement, because it speaks to the need to enact policies to deal
with climate change," he says. "But it isn't partisan to say that we
should act on this crisis."
It's also a
scientific statement, Mann adds. Two years ago this month, scientists with the
United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a landmark
study, Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees,
which found that humanity had to cut heat-trapping emissions roughly by half by
2030 to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown. Headlines warned we had "12
years to save the planet." Those 12 years are now 10.
Except more than
two years have been lost, because in that time, the Trump administration has
prevented the world's biggest economy from making "the dramatic reductions
that were necessary to keep us on that path" of halving emissions by 2030,
Mann says. "So now the incline is steeper. It's no longer 5% [reductions]
a year for the next 10 years. It's more like seven and a half percent."
(As a comparison, 7% is how much global carbon emissions are projected to
fall in 2020 due to the Covid-19 economic lockdowns that shrank
driving, flying and other carbon-intensive activities.)
The numbers
get unrealistically challenging if Trump gains another four years as president.
"Four
more years of relative inaction, of flat emissions, means that four years from
now that number might be closer to 15% [emissions reductions] a year,"
Mann says. "And that may be, although not physically impossible,
societally impossible. The rate at which we shift away from a fossil-fuel-driven
infrastructure, it just may not be economically possible or socially viable to
do it that [fast]."
'Our destiny is determined by our behavior'
Fortunately,
there is encouraging news about climate science as well. It was long thought
that Earth's climate system carried a substantial lag effect, mainly because
carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere, trapping heat, for many decades after
being emitted. Even if all CO2 emissions were halted overnight, global
temperatures would keep rising and heat waves, droughts, storms and other
impacts would keep intensifying "for about 25 to 30 years", Sir David
King, the former chief science advisor to the British government, said in
2006.
Mann says
research over the last decade has overturned this interpretation.
Using new,
more elaborate computer models equipped with an interactive carbon cycle,
"what we now understand is that if you stop emitting carbon right now …
the oceans start to take up carbon more rapidly," Mann says. Such ocean
storage of CO2 "mostly" offsets the warming effect of the CO2 that
still remains in the atmosphere. Thus, the actual lag between halting CO2
emissions and halting temperature rise is not 25 to 30 years, he explains, but
"more like three to five years."
This is
"a dramatic change in our understanding" of the climate system that
gives humans "more agency," says Mann. Rather than being locked into
decades of inexorably rising temperatures, humans can turn down the heat almost
immediately by slashing emissions promptly. "Our destiny is determined by
our behavior," says Mann, a fact he finds "empowering."
This
reprieve will not necessarily spare polar ice sheets or evade tipping points
that cannot be recrossed, the scientist cautions, and earth is already
experiencing "much more extreme weather … than we expected 10 years
ago." Greenland and Arctic ice is already melting after the current
temperature rise of 1C, or 2.7F, above preindustrial levels, and it will continue
melting even without further warming. The resulting possibility of
"massive sea level rise" is one example of why Mann says that
humanity is "walking out on to a minefield" of tipping points:
"The more we warm the planet, the more of those unwelcome surprises we
might encounter."
In the face
of this urgency, Mann broadly supports implementing a Green New Deal. This he
defines as a vast government effort that deploys both regulations—for example,
no more coal plants—and market mechanisms like carbon pricing to transition
away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. In the coming weeks, he
adds, there is no more
important way for US citizens to exercise agency than to
vote—vote for candidates who support such a transition, such as Joe Biden, and
against Donald Trump and other Republicans who obstruct it.
"The
future of this planet is now in the hands of American citizens," he says.
"It's up to us. The way we end this national and global nightmare is by
coming out and voting for optimism over pessimism, for hope and justice and
progress over fear and malice and superstition. This is a Tolkienesque battle
between good and evil, and Sauron needs to be defeated on election day here in
the United States."
Mark Hertsgaard is
the environmental correspondent and investigative editor at large at The
Nation and a co-founder of Covering Climate Now. He has
covered climate change since 1989, reporting from 25 countries and much of the
US in his books Earth Odyssey: Around the World In Search of Our
Environmental Future and HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty
Years on Earth, as well as for various outlets. Follow him on his
website: markhertsgaard.com and
on Twitter: @markhertsgaard
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"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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