Editor’s note: In our April 7 issue, we published the first of two-part examinations of the climate change argument for urgency. That article, “Three Thinkers Who Challenge the Apocalyptic Tone of the Climate Change Discourse,” looked at those going against the grain about this environmental threat. In this issue, we conclude our examination by introducing four renowed scientists whose positions clearly indicate that informative discourse is the best defense against politicized agendas.
The term “climate change” was first used in a 1975 Science article by geochemist Walter Broeker, of Colombiua University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory. The article’s title “Climate Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?” marked a break with the conventional perspective on what had up to that point been referred to as “inadvertent climate modification.” Now, nearly forty years later, the scientific consensus is clear: human activities are causing the Earth’s climate to change at an unprecedented rate, with significant implications for the environment and human society. A 2016 peer-reviewed paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters went so far as to call it a “consensus on consensus.”
Dr. Michael Mann was a Postdoctoral candidate when he published in 1999 his famous work “the hockey stick” graph also known as MBH99 , A version of the MBH99 graph was featured prominently in the 2001 IPCC(The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Third Assessment Report (TAR), which also drew on Jones et al. 1998 and three other reconstructions to support the conclusion that, in the Northern Hemisphere, the 1990s was likely the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year during the past 1,000 years. Mann stated, “Climate change is the defining issue of our time. We must take urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a clean energy economy.” Dr. Mann’s work became controversial and he tells the full story of the hockey stick–and the myriad of unsuccessful attacks on it–in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines; The hockey stick was repeatedly attacked, and so was Mann himself. Congress got involved demanding his data and other information, including a computer code used in his research. Ultimately, the National Academy of Sciences weighed in and vindicated the hockey stick as good science.
Dr. Hansen is best known for his testimony on climate change to congressional committees in the 1980s that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1995 and was designated by Time Magazine in 2006 as one of the 100 most influential people on Earth Dr. James Hansen, a climate scientist and former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is one of the leading voices on climate change. He has been studying the Earth’s climate for over 40 years and was one of the first scientists to raise the alarm about the dangers of climate change. According to Hansen, “The Earth is already experiencing dangerous climate change, and we must act now to prevent it from getting worse.”
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe is the Chief Scientist for The Nature Conservancy and also a Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor and the Political Science Endowed Chair in Public Policy and Public Law in the Department of Political Science at Texas Tech University, where she is also an associate in the Public Health program of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She is the principal investigator for the Department of Interior’s South-Central Climate Adaptation Science Center and the National Science Foundation’s Global Infrastructure Climate Network. In 1997, she founded ATMOS Research, a research and consulting firm, where she worked for many years to bridge the gap between scientists and stakeholders to provide relevant, state-of-the-art information to a broad range of non-profit, industry and government clients on how climate change was affecting our lives. According to Hayhoe, “Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it’s a human issue. We need to communicate the impacts of climate change in a way that is relevant and meaningful to people’s livestock.”
Dr. Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, is known for his research on climate modeling and his work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He is the co-author, with Joshua Wolfe, of Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), which has a foreword by Jeffrey D. Sachs. The book combines images of the effects of climate change with scientific explanations According to Schmidt, “The evidence for human-caused climate change is overwhelming. We need to take immediate action to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and prevent the worst impacts of climate change.”
Leonardo DiCaprio, Hollywood actor, while accepting his Best Actor award for The Revenant in 2016, DiCaprio used his platform to address the issue close to his heart. He stated, “The Revenant was about man’s relationship to the natural world — the world that we collectively felt in 2015 as the hottest year in recorded history. Our production had to move to the southernmost tip of this planet just to be able to find snow. Climate change is real, it is happening right now, it is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. “We need to support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters or the big corporations, but who speak for all of humanity, for the Indigenous peoples of the world, for the billions and billions of underprivileged people who will be most affected by this, for our children’s children, and for those people out there whose voices have been drowned out by the politics of greed.”
Dr. James Hansen warns, “The future is in our hands. We can choose to take action and solve this problem, or we can continue to ignore it and suffer the consequences.”
