Congratulations #PresidentBiden!
Now let's get to work.
We must reassert the climate leadership that was lost under Trump.
A lot of us stand ready to help!
Here's my full statement below.
Let's hit the ground running in January! 🙂 #NewClimateWar facebook.com/MichaelMannSci…
Congratulations to President Elect @JoeBiden!
And congratulations to US for having used the power of our vote to create an opportunity for meaningful progress on climate going forward (thread)
Biden's victory ushers in a new era of global cooperation, allowing us to begin to repair the damage that was done by Donald Trump over the past four years both to domestic climate efforts and to our reputation on the world stage.
But make no mistake. The sobering reality is that even if every country meets their commitments under the Paris agreement (and many, including the U.S. and EU are currently falling at least a bit short), that gets us
less than half way to where we need to be, i.e. on a path to limiting warming below 2C (let alone the more stringent 1.5C many are now calling for). So Paris is a good starting point, but we need to go well beyond Paris now to achieve the reductions that are necessary.
Biden has a clear mandate generally (he is only the 4th challenger in 100 years to defeat an incumbent president seeking a second elected term) and on climate change specifically (which he made central to his campaign).
He has put forward a bold climate plan with ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions and support for both regulatory and market-driven policy measures.
There is real opportunity for meaningful climate legislation
but it will require some degree of compromise with the likelihood of a roughly 50/50 split Senate and some conservative Democrats who are resistant to the more progressive versions of climate legislation that have been proposed.
Though my new book (“The #NewClimateWar”) went to press this summer, it anticipated where we’d likely be at this point:
“Given an even modestly favorable shift in political winds, one could envision [bold climate bill] passing House & moving on to the Senate w/ half-dozen or more moderate conservatives crossing the aisle, joining with Senate Democrats to pass the bill within the next year or two.”
#NewClimateWar (publicaffairsbooks.com/.../the.../978…)
In short, I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll see meaningful action here in the U.S. and a reassertion of global leadership on climate. But we'll have our work set out for us.
Short thread on what it was like to be a climate scientist a decade ago for some, courtesy of excerpts from "The Hockey Climate Wars" (amazon.com/Hockey-Stick-C…) 1. Being targeted for assault by national white supremacist groups for being part of a purported Jewish climate cabal.
2. Actionable death threats against you and your family. FBI testing your office for anthrax after receipt of a powder-containing envelope.
3. Investigations by Congressional Republican Committee Chairs aimed at intimidating you and discrediting you and your research.
), Pielke’s claims are based on (1) a dubious normalization procedure that divides damages by global domestic product (GDP), a quantity that increases dramatically over time and...
@skepticscience (2) use of a simple least squares trend which is problematic for data such as these with a skew distribution. These choices suppress damage trends
"It's not an uncommon view among scientists that we potentially compromise our objectivity if we choose to wade into policy matters or societal implications of our work. And it would be problematic if our views on policy somehow influenced the way we went about doing our science"
"But there is nothing inappropriate at all about drawing on our scientific knowledge to speak out about the very real implications of our research."
"If scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term self-interest..."
Much is being made of a graph depicting changes in methane concentrations at Barrow Alaska and a recent supposed spike over the last year.
Let's catch our breath for a moment and put this in proper scientific context. 1/n (thread)
The 2019 measurements are consistent with the trend over the past decade. Outliers (i.e. isolated data points that lie well above the average) are seen throughout the record. Do not over-interpret them.
2/n
We see in the above graph a slowdown during the 1990s. This is well studied and understood. It has to do with a temporary reduction in wetlands methane emissions during that time: sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/…
3/n
I’m troubled by some very misleading statements and claims made at this public-facing @NOAA website on “Global Warming and Hurricanes”: gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming…
(thread)
@NOAA Among the problems are indefensible claims about the supposed non-significance of trends in hurricane activity. This includes tropical cyclone and hurricane counts and the proportion of storms that reach the highest (cat 4 and 5) categories.
@NOAA These claims are based on fitting linear trends to the associated time series.
More than a decade ago, Kerry Emanuel and I showed (meteo.psu.edu/holocene/publi…) that this approach is problematic.
There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media. Here is our statement (facebook.com/MichaelMannSci…):
Here is a followup statement from my lawyer Roger McConchie regarding the Tim Ball defamation case responding to additional false claims by climate change deniers:
What does it say about Tim Ball's honesty (and that of the right-wingers trumpeting the latest court development) that they conveniently failed to note that Ball sought to dismiss the case based on his alleged health problems: