Michael Mann's TEDx Talk on Climate Change

 
In this TEDx Talk, Michael E. Mann talked about the ongoing and future scenarios regarding climate change, our lack of actions to deal with the problem, and how politics might have manipulated our views on the subject.
He first discusses about the slow but steady change in climate trends over the past millennium, and how natural and human factors would affect our predicted climate trends. Mann states that if we followed the opinions of critics who believe that climate changes were partly or entirely due to natural factors, then the globe should have cooled in recent decades, contrary to the average annual global temperatures that were actually observed; and only by including those human factors would we have our prediction of the earth warming up, on par with the observed temperatures.
He then gives more than one reason why little to no action has been made to deal with climate change: because major players who profit greatly to our current addiction to fossil fuels and they don't want to see things change in that regard, and also, some might consider man-made global warming to be nothing more than an elaborate hoax (as stated by Senator James Inhofe, (R) Oklahoma).
Mann also provides some information about the "hockey stick graph", the reconstruction in which he introduced into the field of climatology, and which also got some flack by politicians who deny the reality of human-caused climate change. It shows the variation in average annual temperature over the past millennium or so; the graph remains steady up to the 1800s, and then jets up past that point, thus giving the graph its "hockey stick" moniker.
Mann also states that we've been subject to a politization of science. He prefers to call it the "scientization of politics", which he defines as the use of attacks against science and scientists in an effort to advance a political agenda. As an example, he provides detail about the "climategate" scandal in 2009, in which criminals broke into a UK university server and stole thousands of emails between scientists, and publicized selected emails to make it sound like scientists were manipulating climate data and showing that global warming was just a scientific conspiracy.
Mann ultimately concludes his presentation by saying that climate change is a problem with ethics, not with politics or economics; the choices we make today determine our children and grandchildren's futures, and there's still time to make the right choices.