Summary: Guest host Gaius Publius discusses climate change with Dr. Michael Mann. Gaius has written extensively on climate issues at AmericaBlog and Naked Capitalism. Gaius' write-up of Dr. Mann's Scientific American article, discussed in the interview, is here. The article itself is here. Gaius and Dr. Mann discussed the three most critical topics in climate activism today — Is two degrees warming too much? Is there any remaining "carbon budget" as the IPCC implies? How do we defeat the Big Money ogre standing in the way of our future? Dr. Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor and Director of the “Earth System Science Center” at Penn State University, and the lead author of a 1999 paper that included what later became famous as the "hockey stick graph," a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures for the past 1000 years. It shows a mainly flat line of temperature from the year 1000 through about 1900 — like the stem of a hockey stick — then an almost 90 degree uptick, like the blade of a hockey stick. The diagram caught the public imagination. Michael Mann has detailed his battle against right-wing retaliation for "catching the public's imagination," in his 2012 book "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines".
