There’s no doubt among scientists about global warming, said science journalist Dan Grossman.

“On every one of these visits I was tracking down the truth about global warming,” he said. “In the science community there isn’t any controversy… this [global warming] is a reality.”

Grossman, a recipient of the Peabody award for broadcast journalism, travelled from “pole-to-pole” covering global warming-related events and interviewing scientists about the climate change phenomenon. He addressed a crowd of nearly 120 in Lanigan 105 Tuesday about the causes and impact of global warming.

Grossman started off his presentation by stating that global warming is a real occurrence that has been proven by the science community. Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Grossman said, people have been contributing more carbon dioxide which in turn has caused global warming.

“People are a major cause of the earth’s fever,” he said. “All the evidence shown proves that people are harming the planet.”

Grossman has interviewed scientists doing research all over the world on global warming. He has spent time in Antarctica and Greenland among other places.

Grossman presented a graph that showed dramatic rises in temperature from the 1850s onward. He attributed the rise in temperature to the large quantities of carbon dioxide that began entering the atmosphere beginning at the time.

“From the basic physics, just by looking at the gases being added and how they became trapped you can calculate how much warmer the earth is getting,” Grossman said. “There’s no reason to expect a [natural] warming right now.”

Global warming will cause sea levels to rise and more frequent heat waves.

“Global warming doesn’t create new phenomena. It just changes the probability of something happening,” Grossman said. “When there are droughts and famines you get a lot of unhappy people.”

In order to reverse the effects of global warming, carbon dioxide must be removed from the atmosphere and fuel use must be cutdown, he said.

“If you’re heading toward a cliff you put the breaks on, not the accelerator, Right now we’re hitting the accelerator,” Grossman said. “The prudent thing is to try to do something to put the breaks on and hope we slow down gently.”

The presentation was part of the Science Cafe series and was being live streamed through Oswego State’s website. Viewers were able to submit questions through a Facebook widget.

Grossman received his bachelors degree in physics and doctorate in political science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written articles for The New York Times and Rolling Stone.