So I just called my state senator’s Harrisburg office – Stewart Greenleaf – and got his chief of staff on the phone. When I mentioned that Chris Abruzzo is unqualified for heading the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection over his climate denial remarks and the fact that he hasn’t read any fact based scientific journals on the issue, he told me that those attacks on Abruzzo were “misguided” and “misleading.” Call your state senators and tell them NO on Abruzzo.
Michael Mann, climate scientist wrote this about the Abruzzo nomination on his facebook page:
It greatly concerns me to hear comments like this, as they reflect an apparent profound ignorance of the actual state of scientific understanding. I have to wonder precisely what “scientific studies” Mr. Abruzzo is referring to, because the most authoritative actual peer-reviewed study on the matter, published just last year, demonstrated that 97% of published peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change agree with the scientific consensus that (a) climate change is real, (b) it is caused by us, and c) represents a threat to us, our economy, and our environment if we do nothing about it.
That study is available here: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/2/024024/article
Just yesterday, two authoritative studies by leading scientists in the field (including scientists from Penn State University) were published demonstrating that climate change may be an even worse threat to us now than we previously thought. You can find some discussion of that in this AP article from yesterday:
http://abcnews.go.com/…/federal-study-warns-sudden…
It is the consensus of the world’s scientists, as determined by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academies of all of the major industrial nations, and leading scientific societies in the U.S. including the American Physical Society, the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and 30+ others, that (a) global warming and climate change is real, (b) it is caused primarily by fossil fuel burning and associated increases in greenhouse gas concentrations, and c) it presents perhaps the greatest threat to civilization and our planet in the decades ahead if we do nothing about it. The most authoritative economic study to date indicates that climate-change impacts are already costing us more than a trillion dollars worldwide in GDP, far more than it would costs to do something about the problem.
Here at Penn State University, we have many of the world’s leading scientists studying the basic science, impacts, and economics of climate change. I would certainly welcome Mr. Abruzzo to come and visit us here in State College to engage in an open and free-ranging discussion about the science, impacts, and economics of climate change.
