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JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.  

The Nobel Prize-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, has just issued their much-anticipated report, Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. The conclusions, to say the least, are dire: not only are the effects of climate change already occurring on every continent; the world is ill-prepared for what is to come. The report is authored by more than 300 scientists, and it is part of a series of reports that are considered the most comprehensive assessments of climate change and its impact to date.

With us to help break down some of the key findings of the report is our guest, Dr. Michael Mann. He’s a distinguished professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, and he’s the author of the book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

Thank you for joining us, Michael.

DR. MICHAEL E. MANN, DIR. OF EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE CENTER, PENN STATE UNIV.: Thank you. It’s great to be with you.

DESVARIEUX: So, Michael, just start us off. What were some of the most significant findings, for you, in the report?

MANN: What I was struck by in this latest report was the extent to which the report really focuses on us. You know, it sometimes seems that climate change, at least the way it’s presented in some accounts, is some abstract problem, a far-off problem that, you know, maybe will impact polar bears decades from now, but, you know, it’s not a problem for us. And what this report makes very clear is that it is impacting us here and now. And in a sense, we have become the polar bear. We are seeing the impacts of climate change. Whether you are talking about meeting our food needs, water resource issues, land, human health, the health of our economy, the, you know, issues of national security and conflict, across the boards, in every continent of the world, climate change is already having an adverse impact on us. It’s having an adverse impact on us now. And we’ve only seen the tip of the proverbial iceberg, in the sense that, as the report describes, if we continue with business-as-usual fossil fuel emissions, decades down the road we will see far worse and potentially irreversible impacts on us and our environment.