Earth Day: Climate scientists battle the global-warming skeptics

[Dead_Parrot]

With all due respect to teams still skating in the Stanley Cup playoffs, the world's most important "hockey stick" on this 43rd Earth Day is wielded by Michael E. Mann and other climate scientists.

Mr. Mann, a Pennsylvania State University professor and director of the school's Earth Systems Science Center, produced a graph in 1998, later dubbed the "hockey stick," that showed global temperatures were level or declining for almost 1,000 years -- the long shaft of the stick -- before spiking sharply upward over the past century.

That upward-turned hockey stick "blade" tracked climbing global temperatures that coincided with the world's growing combustion of fossil fuels and the billowing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a so-called "greenhouse gas," that has climbed from 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to 392 parts per million today.

"That buildup of carbon dioxide is not natural and no matter how you cut it, the globe is warming and the climate is changing," said Mr. Mann, in an interview earlier this month at the University of Pittsburgh.

More: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/environment/scientists-concerns-about-global-warming-mark-earth-day-632514/

[opihimoimoi]

1. no one cares cause the feeling of hopelessness with regard to the solution.it requires global effort

[caraher]

2. "Mr. Mann?"

Do they have some kind of editorial policy against using proper titles for PhD scientists speaking in their area of expertise? Dr. Mann would be more appropriate...