Mann Scores a Goal with Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars

In his new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Dr. Michael E. Mann (pic at left from Scientific American) recounts a moment on the Great Wall of China just months before his daughter was born. He wonders about “what sort of world our new child and her generation would inherit.” It will be…No. It already is a world whose land and climate industrial humans have radically changed. The only truly moral response from any father must be to work for a world that mitigates human impacts on the climate so that his daughter and her children and her children’s children can live well and live happily. That means reducing our reliance on fossil fuel and creating new strategies – moral, behavioral, and technological – for living today and living tomorrow.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is a combination of personal storytelling, reflection, and science education that grants readers a tour of climate science. More importantly it shows us how our political process has been poisoned by shameless and corrupt interests. Reading Mann’s work is to get a sense of what it means to strive for thorough and important work as a “gee whiz” kid. But then we witness the “gee whiz” kid get schooled in the art of power politics and come out having outsmarted his opponents. For now anyway.

In 2009, I read story after story about hackers who’d stolen emails from the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and then released them. Journalists, eager for the next headline, ripped chunks from the climate change disinformation narrative. Thus was born “Climategate,” a shameful continuation of attacks on climate scientists by ideologues and fossil-fuel-funded institutes. Among the primary targets were "Penn State geosciences professor Dr. Michael Mann, co-winner [with many others] of the Nobel Prize in 2007 for his work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the hockey stick" graph.

Getting from Here to There

Do you ever feel like sustainability-minded folks are just singing the Talking Heads song, "Road to Nowhere"? I do. Derrick Jensen maybe says it best in an article at Orion: "The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re f***ed." We hear it all the time. But as Jensen also says, we can step out of this defeat and actually do something. In doing, there is hope.

Today's show is all about hope in action. Our three guests are journeying to change our collective journey. First, Jon Brockopp will join us to talk about his pending bike ride to Washington, D.C. - 200 miles in 4 days. Along with two other men, he will be stopping at congregations, colleges and CSAs along the way to spread the word about Pennsylvania Interfaith Power and Light and our moral responsibility to respond to climate change.

Then we will be joined by Eileen Flanagan who is part of the Earth Quaker Action Team, who is part of the Green Walk for Jobs and Justice. They are walking 200 miles across Pennsylvania from Philadelphia to the PNC Bank headquarters in Pittsburgh to call on PNC to end its financing of mountain top removal of coal. George Lakey of EQAT says, "We can green our money." How?

Finally, Jason Bell will come on the show. Jason has initiatiated the Tour de Frack, "an action oriented way to explore rural communities and the effects unconventional gas drilling from the saddle of your bike." It is a two week bike tour from July 14-July 28, 2012 from Butler, Pennsylvania to Washington DC along the Great Allegheny Passage and C&O towpath.

Given my own ride last year from Pine Grove Mills to Harrisburg to accomplish a similar goal, I had to have these people on the show. They are people putting the rubber to the road. Step by step and pedal stroke by pedal stroke they are walking or riding on a road to a better future. As Michael Bagdes-Canning of Tour de Frack says, "We have a democracy problem." One way to better our democracy is to help the conversation and call on others to be accountable and do the right thing.

In honor of all three of our guests today, I leave you with a Wendell Berry poem Badges-Canning quotes in this video.

"The Peace of Wild Things"

When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at
the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light.
For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry

There is great hope in such people.

As always, listen in on your local dial at 90.7 fm or stream us online. Call in with questions or comments: (814) 865-9477. You can also join us on Facebook and get involved with a conversation about this show and other sustainabilty topics.

What are people's and nations' responsibilities for climate change?

The press has primarily focused on climate change as a scientific or economic issue. On one hand, we are informed, sometimes quite poorly, about issues of scientific certainty. How do we really know that climate change is real and induced by industrial human activities? On the other, we hear from powerful members of the business community and their allies that responding to climate change will tank the economy. How can you assure us that the American or global economy won't tank if we move from greenhouse gas intense technologies?

Those questions either gloss over or ignore another, and perhaps more fundamental, aspect of climate change. Given that people from Bangladesh to sub-Saharan Africa to the Yukon are being negatively affected by a changing climate, who should help them? Who should pay? Who is responsible? Climate change, more than any other issue in history except perhaps nuclear proliferation, calls into question our global moral duties and responsibilities? Ultimately, this comes down to morality and ethics. What is the right thing to do?

For example, Inuit people are losing their ability to move on their native land because the permafrost is melting. They have not caused this situation and the only explanation available and has been available for some time now is that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wealthy developed nations are the driver. The U.S., Europe, and increasingly the "tiger" economies of Asia have created more than their fair share of greenhouse gas emissions historically with the U.S. taking the lion's share at over 20% of total GHG emissions. Our emissions are tied, now quite directly, to melting permafrost and glaciers in the Arctic. Our flights, cars, agriculture, and industry have caused their difficulties. Should we pay for them? Why? What should we pay them? What is just?

On today's show, our guests include members of a recent panel on Climate Change, Climate Justice from Penn State's Rock Ethics Institute who attended the UNFCC Copenhagen Climate Talks in late 2009. Drs. Don Brown, Petra Tschekert, and Nancy Tuana will provide us insights from Copenhagen, what our moral responsibilities are, and what we as a country, a state, a campus, and as individual people can do to act most responsibly on climate change. For some initial insights, visit ClimateEthics.org.

We will also be briefly speaking to students who have helped organize Penn State's first Student Sustainability Summit going off next Wednesday night at 7 pm in Penn State University Park's HUB Heritage Hall. After the break, we will speak to some of the activists working on the Beyond Coal Campaign at Penn State who are trying to get Penn State to move off of coal.