On Monday afternoon, MSNBC host Chris Jansing used her eponymous show to hype recent extreme weather and promote the alarmist views of environmental activists Michael Mann and David Lipsky while also promoting their books.
Jansing began the segment by hyping an usually hot autumn day in Minnesota that led to the cancellation of the Twin Cities Marathon, with the MSNBC host trumpeting that a 92-degree temperature "shattered a record dating back more than 20 years" -- as if 20 years were a long period of time. She hyped recent flooding in New York without a whisper about the city's inadequate drainage network.
After recalling NASA satellite data showing changes in ocean water, Jansing turned to Lipsky and posed: "But what do you say about a state of emergency, whether it's here or Texas or the Plains or Hawaii that we were warned about decades ago?"
The environmental activist used the developments to declare that global warming alarmists were right decades ago in their predictions:
It's like the entire country has been tested in its ability to make decisions. We were warned in 1979 by the National Academy of the Sciences: If this continues, there is no reason to doubt that climate change will occur and no reason to believe that those changes will be negligible. Here we are. Roger Revelle -- first generation of the great tradition to which Professor Mann belongs -- he warned in 1956 in Time magazine that within about 50 years carbon dioxide could have a violent effect on the climate. Here we are.
It is noteworthy that data on the high temperature for each year in Minneapolis going back to the late 1800s suggest that high temperatures over the past decade have not been unprecedented.
Turning to her other guest, Jansing name-dropped his most recent book as she asked: "Your new book is called Our Fragile Moment. How fragile are we? Especially when it comes to aging infrastructure and overall, frankly, infrastructure that's not built to sustain the rain, the winds, the snow, the heat that we're now experiencing?"
After arguing that the infrastructure that was built over thousands of years in different times will not be sufficient to deal with a changing climate, Mann claimed that cutting the use of fossil fuels would put the environment right again:
Those events are getting more extreme, and they're starting to pass thresholds as we see with New York City where they're no longer just a nuisance, and they become catastrophic in their consequences if we continue to burn fossil fuels and go down this road. It's actually worse than a new normal. There was a mention of "new normal" earlier in the segment. It's an ever-moving baseline of greater warmth and more extreme weather events if we continue to burn fossil fuels. The good news here, the science tells us that if we stop burning fossil fuels and stop putting carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the surface of the planet stops warming up almost immediately. So there's a direct and immediate consequence of our efforts to act.
After the group discussed the role that lawsuits might have to play in forcing more regulations against fossil fuel use, Jansing brought up "young Republicans" and evangelicals who are more liberal on environmental issues:
There are now young Republicans who are organizing -- evangelical groups of young people organizing who are not buying into the denialism that you spent five years researching and writing about. What is it that changes people from maybe a household where there's denialism or a culture where they operate that's in denial? What does history tell us about it? Is it public pressure? Is it political pressure? Is it courts? How do you see change coming and what role young people are playing in it?
Lipsky talked up new polling suggesting that Americans are starting to take extreme weather more seriously and again claimed that the alarmists were correct in their predictions decades ago.
This one-sided discussion of the global warming issue was sponsored in part by Humana. Their contact information is linked.
Transcript follows:
MSNBC's Chris Jansing Reports
October 2, 2023
1:44 p.m. Eastern
CHRIS JANSING: Unprecedented heat in the middle of fall forced the cancellation of the annual Twin Cities Marathon, and the runners didn't find out until less than two hours before the race was set to start, meteorologists expected a high of 89 degrees, but it got even hotter, actually hitting 92, and that shattered a record dating back more than 20 years. And now New York's governor is calling these apocalyptic images the new normal. Streets turned to rivers, all 7,400 miles of New York City's pipes inundated with torrential rain. Subway cars and buses ground to a halt. Water poured through the walls of roofs of underground stops. Air travel paused as passengers waded through flooded terminals. These pictures are wild. Thousands of basements and ground-level apartments, entire livelihoods destroyed in mere minutes by rising waters.
And while the East Coast is having its rainiest fall season in 140 years, another alarming sign from above, courtesy of NASA's Aqua satellite. The color of the ocean is shifting from blue to green, signaling an abrupt change to the water's ecosystem. I want to bring in Dr. Michael Mann, a presidential distinguished professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania, and author of the new book, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis. Also back with me, David Lipsky, author of The Parrot and the Igloo: Climate and the Science of Denial. It is so great to have the two of you here together. David, you live in New York. It was a deluge. The governor declared a state of emergency. Parents got frantic calls to "come and get your kids out of school -- we can't have them here." But what do you say about a state of emergency, whether it's here or Texas or the Plains or Hawaii that we were warned about decades ago?
DAVID LIPSKY, AUTHOR OF THE PARROT AND THE IGLOO: It's like the entire country has been tested in its ability to make decisions. We were warned in 1979 by the National Academy of the Sciences: If this continues, there is no reason to doubt that climate change will occur and no reason to believe that those changes will be negligible. Here we are. Roger Revelle -- first generation of the great tradition to which Professor Mann belongs -- he warned in 1956 in Time magazine that within about 50 years carbon dioxide could have a violent effect on the climate. Here we are.
JANSING: Yeah, that was even before I was born, Michael Mann. Your new book is called Our Fragile Moment. How fragile are we? Especially when it comes to aging infrastructure and overall, frankly, infrastructure that's not built to sustain the rain, the winds, the snow, the heat that we're now experiencing?
MICHAEL MANN, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PROFESSOR: Yeah, you know, we built this massive global infrastructure over thousands of years during relatively stable climate, and there are eight billion plus people now who depend on that infrastructure, and it is threatened by the fact that we are now changing the climate -- that's what makes this moment so fragile. We're warming the planet at rates that have no precedent as far back as we look. And what that means is that we are losing the reliability of the infrastructure that helps sustain this very large population -- helps provide resilience in the face of extreme weather events.
Those events are getting more extreme, and they're starting to pass thresholds as we see with New York City where they're no longer just a nuisance, and they become catastrophic in their consequences if we continue to burn fossil fuels and go down this road. It's actually worse than a new normal. There was a mention of "new normal" earlier in the segment. It's an ever-moving baseline of greater warmth and more extreme weather events if we continue to burn fossil fuels. The good news here, the science tells us that if we stop burning fossil fuels and stop putting carbon pollution into the atmosphere, the surface of the planet stops warming up almost immediately. So there's a direct and immediate consequence of our efforts to act.
(...)
JANSING: There are now young Republicans who are organizing -- evangelical groups of young people organizing who are not buying into the denialism that you spent five years researching and writing about. What is it that changes people from maybe a household where there's denialism or a culture where they operate that's in denial? What does history tell us about it? Is it public pressure? Is it political pressure? Is it courts? How do you see change coming and what role young people are playing in it?
LIPSKY: It's putting your hand on the stove and drawing it back. Before -- I think the Pew people did the study in June -- only 54 percent of the country believed that climate change was a major threat. Now, there was a -- AP did a story I think last week, and 87 percent of Americans feel they've been touched at some point in the last five years by an extreme weather event. That's a huge jump. And that number itself was up by about 10 percent since July. That's the change. That's what climate scientists like Michael Mann had always said would be the change, which is: We're going to see this happening. I was watching the footage on the monitor, and that was like a thought balloon that was over every climate scientist's head since the late 1980s, which is: This is going to start happening -- let's try to avoid it -- let's try to use the head start we have. We didn't, but they always knew that once it started happening, we would then have action.
JANSING: The deniers knew that kind of like in the science of smoking -- which you write about in your book -- it would start to shift because you put your hand on the stove?
LIPSKY: No, that was the scientists believed that, but, along the same lines, what actually stopped -- what stopped people using tobacco were the courts.
JANSING: There you go.
LIPSKY: It wasn't actually -- yeah, it wasn't politics. The master settlement agreement was all these states settling with Philip Morris at all in November of 1998. And so this movement has something that climate scientists like Jim Hanson have always seen coming, too, which is, politics may get bottle necked as we see with people like Matt Gaetz getting in the way of things, but the courts tend to come through for us. And the weather -- every time we forget, the weather says, "Hey," taps us on the shoulder, "This is happening." I just found out that my waterproof boots are not waterproof after all. It took 10 years to learn that.
JANSING: Well, there you go. There are two books -- I've read them both -- they're terrific -- and I thank you both for being on.
