Climate experts — including professor Michael Mann of the recent “Climategate” controversy — expressed concerns about recent environmental change in a press conference Wednesday near Penn State U.
The conference presented a number of concerns regarding this summer’s heat waves across the globe and how future problems could negatively affect the planet .
“We want to alert the public that we are heading for a future they’re not going to be comfortable with,” said Ed Perry, the outreach coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation’s Global Warming Campaign.
Perry has presented across the state for the last three years and said he saw firsthand how people can be negatively affected by extreme weather.
Perry said his research shows that 50 percent of residents in both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia do not have air-conditioned homes and that people in the State College area sometimes fail to realize how the weather affects others.
“We’re in fantasy land with an easy climate to handle, as we leave our air-conditioned homes and drive our air-conditioned cars to our air-conditioned offices,” he said.
Perry said some people in lower financial classes who cannot afford luxuries like air conditioning are not so lucky.
“We don’t know what the future holds if we don’t take action against the climate now,” Perry said.
Mann, a meteorology professor, said there is a connection between global warming and recent climate change.
“The heat waves that have broken out are taking place within a globe that’s warmer than it has ever been,” he said. “There is a connection.”
While a direct connection between recent heat waves and climate change cannot be made with complete confidence, Mann said he believes humans’ actions in harming the environment are playing a role.
“We cannot ever look at one event to prove that global warming is present, but we’re tilting the odds of these events occurring more frequently,” he said.
Sylvia Neely, a history professor and speaker at the press conference, discussed a national group called Interfaith Power and Light.
The group, made up of people from different religious affiliations, tackles the issues surrounding climate change with a moral approach.
“This is a special response to how climate is being destroyed that includes the moral and ethical issues involved,” she said.
Neely discussed potential consequences that humans’ actions are having on both the Earth and its people.
“In the U.S., we omit more greenhouse gases per capita than any other country in the world, other than Australia,” she said.
Perry said this can create problems for people across the planet and urged action now.
“We still have time to get off dirty fossil fuels, and onto renewables,” Perry said.