Top Environmental Scientist Says Second Donald Trump Term Would Be Catastrophic For The Climate
Michael Mann, a respected environmental scientist and professor at Penn State University, has claimed that a second Donald Trump presidential term will be catastrophic for the climate on a worldwide scale.
In an interview with The Guardian, Mann said that another four years of Trump in office would make it impossible to avert more detrimental impacts pertaining to the issue.
According to the scientist, global warming needs to be limited “below a degree and a half Celsius, a little less than three degrees Fahrenheit.”
However, the president hasn’t been taking action to combat the problem.
Mann said Trump is focused on getting rid of protections that were put in place by the previous administration. As The Inquisitr previously documented, the president signed an executive order back in June to remove the environmental review process for major projects.
Earlier this year, Mann declared Trump’s actions will lead to a “game over” scenario that will be impossible to come back from. These claims were reaffirmed in his latest interview.
“Another four years of what we’ve seen under Trump, which is to outsource environmental and energy policy to the polluters and dismantle protections put in place by the previous administration … would make that essentially impossible.”
Mann said his statements aren’t based on his own partisan politics. While he did acknowledge that it’s a political issue, he said it’s a crisis that needs to be acted on due to the facts.
As the report highlighted, scientists with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published Global Warming of 1.5 Degrees in 2018. The study found humanity had to cut heat-trapping emissions by half by 2030 to prevent catastrophic damage to the environment. However, Trump and his administration have yet to make the necessary changes to prevent those emissions.
As The Guardian article noted, Mann has published 200-plus scientific papers and is most known for co-authoring the “hockey stick study,” which Nature published on Earth Day of 1998. In the paper, he noted that global temperature had been trending downward for the previous 1,000 years.
Mann’s views have made him a target of deniers throughout the years. In his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, he opened up about his experiences and recalled how he’d received death threats for his findings and viewpoints.
Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s former attorney general and a right-wing Republican, even subpoenaed documents related to Mann’s research funding, claiming the scientist was committing fraud. Cuccinelli is currently a member of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.
