Michael E. Mann, author of the forthcoming The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, was recently on Up With Chris Hayes to discuss climate warming and its deniers.

Michael E. Mann suggests that what we are facing is not so much the politicization of science but the scientization of politics. More precisely, science is being used to advance political causes. Mann also discusses how certain groups, particularly oil companies, have effectively shifted the terms of the debate regarding climate change. Climate deniers have played a role in making the media view human-caused climate change as a subject of debate when in fact the science is definitive.

What’s at stake according to Mann is that public and political discourse has been hijacked by climate deniers when what is needed is a sustained discussion on how to combat climate change.