PROFESSOR: These Are The Charts That Explain Climate Change

http://www.businessinsider.com/professor-these-are-the-charts-that-explain-climate-change-2014-4#!IaTuO



Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State, dropped by Madison, Wis. last week, and we quizzed him about the state of the climate. Mann's post-doctoral work (1) thesis introduced the "hockey stick," a graph showing the accelerated pace of warming, based on records of temperature over previous centuries.

Mann's provocative graph became a core of the effort by former vice-president Al Gore to raise the alarm over global warming. It also became, among global warming deniers, a target of attack. Mann was caught up in the manufactured crisis called "Climategate," and scourged by some media, leading to a flurry of legal actions from both sides.

We wanted to know what Mann had learned, and how he thinks about the science of global warming today. Here's an edited transcript of our conversation:

***SNIP

It's a straw-man argument that has been used in a very cynical way, to make it seem like our entire understanding of climate change rests on a house of cards; if you pull out the hockey stick, it collapses. Even if the stick did not exist, even if no paleoclimate data existed, we'd know that human-caused climate change is real, that greenhouse-gas releases pose a threat.




Despite all the emphasis given to alternative energy, fossil fuels are the preponderant energy source, followed by hydroelectricity, nuclear and wind.

Read more: http://whyfiles.org/2014/global-warming-crisis-one-experts-view/#ixzz30kUv8Fnl