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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
VILLAGEApril/May
M
ICHAEL Mann is one of the world’s
leading climate scientists. He is
director of the Earth Systems
Science Centre in Penn State University and
has been a lead IPCC author since . His
‘hockey stick graph’ became the defining
symbol of man-made climate change – and
made him a special target of the fossil-fuel
lobby. He is author of ‘The Hockey Stick and
the Climate Wars’, an insider’s account of the
murky world of climate denialism. Mann was
implicated in the so-called ‘Climategate’
hacking affair in , but was exonerated
of all alleged wrongdoing by several inde-
pendent investigations.
JG: Mike, you’re best known for your work
on the Hockey Stick. Can you tell us about it,
why it’s so important, and why it gets you
into so much trouble?
MM: The Hockey Stick is this graph my
colleagues and I published a decade and a
half ago depicting how temperatures, spe-
cifically over the northern hemisphere, have
changed over the past , years. We used
information from tree rings, ice cores and
coral records, what we call climate proxy
data. We know the globe has warmed by
about one degree centigrade over the past
century but the question of how unusual is
that warming requires us to go back in time.
The record shows relatively warm condi-
tions around , years ago, a steady, slow
cooling trend into the s – and then an
abrupt warming over the past century. The
shape of that curve is like a hockey stick…
what it indicates is that the recent warm-
ing really is unprecedented as far back as
we can go. This curve became iconic in the
climate-change debate – it became a potent
symbol in the larger debate over human-
caused climate change, and it thus became an
object of attack by those looking to discredit
the case for concern over climate change.
Climate deniers felt if they could ‘take down’
the hockey stick, then somehow the case for
concern over human-caused climate change
would collapse. Of course, that’s silly because
there’s so much other evidence.
JG: Why do you think climate science has
become such a red-hot focus of controversy?
In other scientific areas, the controversies
are in the (peer-reviewed) journals. Why is
this one on the street?
MM: The fact is that any time you see the
findings of science come into conflict with
powerful vested interests, they’ve done
their best to try to discredit the science
and the scientists. Take tobacco, industry
documents actually contained the phrase
“doubt is our product”. They manufacture
doubt when it comes to scientific findings
that pose some potential threat (to their
profits). Fossil-fuel interests are pouring in
tens of millions of dollars here in the US to
discredit the science of climate change, and
to discredit arguments for renewables and
clean energy. The Koch brothers for instance
are funding both.
JG: If the more serious projections com-
ing from climate science (up to degrees
C warming by mid-century) are borne out,
there’s no future for anybody. Is it not a
puzzle that the so-called deniers somehow
believe that the impacts won’t affect them?
MM: Denial takes many forms. Those
who are orchestrating the disinformation
campaign at the top, one might imagine
are fairly cynical – it’s quite clear that the
fossil-fuel companies know their product
is damaging the planet. There may also
be some cognitive dissonance. Aside from
sociopathic and psychopathic individuals,
most people don’t want to believe they’re
doing something fundamentally wrong or
evil: they may want to believe those indi-
viduals who claim that it’s not going to be
as bad as the scientists are saying. In other
cases it’s almost ideological, it’s no longer a
matter of logically looking at the scientific
evidence, they see (opposition to) climate
change as just another part of their cultural
and ideological identity, like their stance on
gun control or healthcare. In the US, belief in
climate change is about as good a predictor
Mann enough
His ‘hockey stick graph’ became the defining
symbol of man-made climate change – and
made him a special target of the fossil-fuel
lobby. John Gibbons interviews Michael Mann
Michael Mann
ENVIRONMENT
INTERVIEW
Michael
Mann;
Hockey
Stick
graph
April/May VILLAGE
of party affiliation as anything in this coun-
try…part of the explanation is changes in our
(US) media environment; it’s now possible
to isolate yourself in a bubble of self-rein-
forcing sources of disinformation. A study
found that people who habitually watch Fox
News are actually less informed. The arti-
cle title was ‘Watching Fox News makes you
dumber!’. In US politics, you don’t need to
win the argument, you just need to divide
the public.
JG: Ireland doesn’t have the US-style ideo-
logical chasm, but instead we have a media
that is tremendously uninterested and
uninformed. Our leading climate scientist,
Prof John Sweeney had to actually boycott
a recent TV programme, on the grounds
that this type of ‘debate’ (giving oxygen to
known climate deniers) is feeding the prob-
lem – you’ve experienced this?
MM: Sometimes, if you don’t participate,
the fear is that people are only going to hear
from the voices of disinformation but if we
allow that sort of ‘false balance’ approach,
it does a disservice to the public. If you as a
scientist share the stage with an industry-
funded denier, you are implicitly telling the
audience that these are two equally credible
voices – and they’re not. I’m sympathetic to
the view that John Sweeney expressed about
the fallacy of false balance. It’s like an astron-
omer getting into a debate with the president
of the Flat Earth Society over the latest stel-
lar observations.
JG: Conventional scientists tend to ‘stay
out of the fight’ and can be critical of those
who do engage. What shaped your decision
to get into the fight?
MM: As a young scientist at the University
of Virginia, I very much shared the view-
point described, that somehow we scientists
have to preserve our scientific purity, yet if
you look back at a scientist like Einstein, he
played a very profound role in the political
discussion (on developing nuclear weapons).
This is a different sort of threat, a threat the
whole world is being subjected to by human-
caused climate change, but an even greater
existential threat to civilisation.
JG: You have a young daughter, as I do. is
this where climate science for you becomes
personal?
MM: Yes it does. To me, this is a matter of
intergenerational ethics, making sure we do
not make decisions today that guarantee the
fundamental degradation of this planet for
our children and grandchildren. At no time
before, in my view, have humans been in a
position to impact the entire planetary envi-
ronment including the composition of our
atmosphere. With great power comes great
responsibility, and we have a responsibility
to make sure that we don’t screw it up.
We can look to the past for some cautious
optimism. We were in a similar situation
rega rd in g ozone depletion and acid ra in. This
problem (global warming) is larger by many
magnitudes. Fossil fuels currently under-
lie the global economy – Exxon Mobil is the
wealthiest company that has ever existed.
With that wealth comes a great opportunity
to influence, some would say, to buy off, pol-
iticians; advertise misleadingly; and fund
front groups to poison the debate over cli-
mate change. Yet maybe we’re not that far
from the point where we will have the nec-
essary good faith debate about what to do
about this problem.
JG: The IPCC’s AR report seemed to
give some weight to the idea of there being
some kind of pause or slowdown in the rate
of warming. This was pounced on by those
wanted to portray that as a ‘stepping back’.
MM: There’s no pause in global warming.
Nothing that’s happened in the last years
fundamentally changes our understand-
ing of global warming. The IPCC did not
change their forecasts of projected warm-
ing. If anything, the IPCC is projecting even
more warming. Some of the impacts of cli-
mate change are unfolding faster than the
climate models say they should be unfolding
– disappearance of Arctic ice is outrunning
the model predictions, leading to even more
warming (albedo effect). Recent articles in
leading science journals are arguing that the
climate models that project more warming
may be the closest to reality. We’re already
losing more than a trillion dollars a year from
extreme climate-related events - around %
of our global productivity. It’s projected to
cost far more in the future, but there’s also
the threat to human health, to food security,
water security, national security. Tobacco
is a good analogy, where the science was in
decades earlier, and there was a huge cost in
human lives for not having acted earlier.
JG: Journalists have (largely) failed to
grasp climate change; is that largely because
science is so complex for non-scientists and
so easy to game?
MM: It’s much more difficult to inform
than to confuse. There’s asymmetrical war-
fare between us scientists and good-faith
communicators trying to inform the pub-
lic discourse, and those looking to pollute
it. Deniers don’t even have to be internally
consistent. And that assumes a level play-
ing field, which of course we don’t even have
here.
You often see the framing crafted to
prey on the hurt and the personally disaf-
fected. I was attacked on a pro-gun website
recently by an energy-funded writer arguing
that these evil climate scientists
want to somehow take away your
guns!
JG: What does your line, “If you
see something, say something”
mean?
MM: It’s a motto from our
Department of Homeland
Security, if you see something
strange or a threat, it’s your duty
to report it. We scientists are also
citizens and appreciate more than
anyone the particular threat of
human-caused climate change.
We have a responsibility to report
this threat that we see.
JG: Common sense tells us that
smoking cigarettes a day for
years is probably going to
harm our health; also that dump-
ing billion tons of CO into a
finite atmosphere must have an
effect. Do you think it’s up to
those who disagree to prove their
case?
MM: I like the way you frame the ques-
tion. It gets at the issue of what we call the
null hypothesis. We may have arrived at a
point where every meteorological event is
operating in a different environment. We’ve
fundamentally warmed the atmosphere. The
default expectation is that the atmosphere is
dierent to the way it was 100 years ago. •
The full version of this interview is on
ThinkOrSwim.ie.
If you as a
scientist share
the stage with
an industry-
funded
denier, you
are implicitly
telling the
audience that
these are two
equally credible
voices – and
they’re not
“
