Michael E. Mann: A scientist in the crosshairs of climate-change denial

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Until late last year, Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann was most widely known for helping create the so-called “hockey stick” temperature graph, which showed the sharp (compared to the slow cooling of the previous nine centuries) 1.5 degrees F rise in Earth’s temperatures over the past 100 years. The results were met with some skepticism by climate-change deniers, but in 2006, a National Academy of Sciences report endorsed the soundness of the “hockey stick” graph, saying that the last 50 years of the twentieth century were clearly the hottest of the past 1,000 years. Mann found greater fame in November 2009, when climate-change denial groups won global headlines, claiming that private email conversations between Mann and other climate scientists—stolen by unidentified hackers from England’s University of East Anglia—showed data manipulation, ethical lapses, and attempts to squelch opposing views.

By any objective reading, Mann’s credibility—and that of the science— withstood the onslaught. Scientific bodies including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Association, and the American Geophysical Union—as well as two panels at Penn State—said the emails were misconstrued and pronounced Mann’s conduct ethical and the attacks baseless. But the broad media coverage inevitably contributed to the public’s foggy understanding of climate science, which predicts dangerous climate change if human emissions of greenhouse gases are not sharply curtailed in the next few decades. By Mann’s own reckoning, the recent controversies may even have contributed to the Senate’s abandonment this summer of so-called cap-and-trade legislation on carbon emissions. Mann talked to the BAS about the current state of climate-change science—and the embattled state of science communication.

BAS: The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report projected an additional temperature rise of between 2 degrees F and a truly catastrophic 10 degrees F this century, depending on emissions trajectories. How has our understanding of climate change been refined since 2007? Huge swaths of the northern hemisphere experienced—and hundreds of millions of people felt—record heat in 2010.

MANN:In many respects, the most recent IPCC report understates the rate at which the climate is changing. Since the publication of the report, we’ve been able to establish that both Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice—previously the evidence had been uncertain for both cases—and that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating. Recent estimates suggest the possibility of as much as 1.5 meters of sea level rise by 2100, rather than the upper bound of about 0.6 meters projected in the IPCC report. The IPCC number did not include any contribution from the actual breakup of ice sheets, as the new estimate does. The IPCC number only counted melting of mountain glaciers plus thermal expansion of ocean water. While ice sheet breakup has been widely observed, the dynamics of the process were not understood well enough to be rendered into computer models that produce long-range predictions. The new number includes contributions from all three sources of sea level rise.

Also, the summer melting of sea ice in the Arctic is nearly 30 years ahead of schedule relative to IPCC projections, and we are on course for an ice-free Arctic summer in a matter of decades. The 2000s were the warmest decade on record, and 2010 is on course to be the warmest year in history, and we’re on the heels of the warmest summer on record for large parts of the United States.

BAS: The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2009 State of the Climate report said 10 out of 10 key climate indicators reaffirm that the planet is warming and that the obvious culprit is human-caused emissions. Was this something new?

MANN: We’ve known now for more than a decade and a half that there is a very consistent story told by surface, sub-surface, ocean, atmospheric, and ice observations that Earth’s surface is warming, and in a way that is only consistent with human-caused increases in greenhouse gas concentrations. What was novel here, I think, is how the scientific findings were packaged in a way that makes it clearer to the public that the reality of human-caused climate change doesn’t hinge on any single piece of evidence but, rather, there are multiple independent pillars of evidence that tell a very consistent and persuasive story.

BAS: Despite all this, the email matter took hold, won broad global media coverage, and led even some members of Congress to make accusations against you and the validity of climate science. Why did this matter ever get so much attention in the first place?

MANN: Unfortunately, there are powerful special interests in the fossil fuel industry for whom the prospect of climate change policy—a price on carbon emissions—would be extremely costly. They have invested millions of dollars in well-honed disinformation campaigns to convince the public and policy makers that human-caused climate change is either a hoax, or not nearly the threat that the scientific community has established it to be. In many respects, it comes straight from the same playbook used by the tobacco industry to cast doubt on the health threat of tobacco smoking. Indeed, many of the same players are involved.

The criminal theft, release, and misrepresentation of private emails from the University of East Anglia immediately prior to the Copenhagen Climate Summit last December was part of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign against the climate science community timed to thwart any binding international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Climate-change denial outfits collaborated closely with conservative media outlets to manufacture a fake scandal that would distract the public and policy makers at this crucial juncture. Historians will look back at this as a low point of intellectual dishonesty in the corporate-funded, climate-change denial campaign.

BAS: Answer the climate deniers directly: They accused you of suppressing opposing views. What papers did Climate Research publish that you found objectionable enough to at one point suggest, in emails, that your colleagues should stop submitting to that journal? What was the content of these papers?

MANN: This all relates to a deeply flawed paper written by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas and published by Climate Research in 2003 claiming that recent warming is not unusual. I did, in fact, have concerns about the paper and the process that led to its publication. As the Wall Street Journal reported (Regalado, 2003) this fossil fuel industry-funded study was heavily criticized by a large number of other scientists. The journal’s editor-in-chief, Hans von Storch, found that the paper “was flawed” and “shouldn’t have been published.” Other editors at the journal felt (Monastersky, 2003) that the editor who had handled the Soon and Baliunas paper had been gaming the system to allow through substandard papers simply because they expressed a contrarian viewpoint regarding climate change. Ultimately, both von Storch and half the editorial board quit in protest over the apparent corruption of the peer review process at the journal. So it’s fairly clear that my concern over the paper was more than justified.

BAS: What are we to make of Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli’s demands for documents involving climate research grants from your time at UVA?

MANN: At this point, this is largely a matter between the University of Virginia, and the activist attorney general. Numerous scientific and public interest groups denounced [Cuccinelli’s] inquisition as a transparent attempt to chill scientific findings that he finds inconvenient for political reasons. The Washington Post has called him out as what they call a modern-day McCarthyist in three different editorials ( Washington Post, 2010a, 2010b, 2010c). Fortunately, a judge recently threw out his legal challenge finding that he had provided absolutely no support at all for his claims.

BAS: What’s all of this been like for you personally?

MANN: I’ve been the subject of attacks by climate-change deniers for more than a decade now, because of the prominent role that the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has played in the public discourse on climate change. This doesn’t mean that I’m numb to the outrageous attacks against me and other climate scientists. But I’m not surprised by anything anymore. There is nothing, it would seem, that that the climate-change denial industry isn’t willing to do in their attempts to thwart policy action to combat human-caused climate change. While the attacks have been tough to deal with at times, I’ve had a huge amount of support from my colleagues, other scientists, and ordinary citizens who have come out of the woodwork just to thank me for my contributions.

BAS: What about support from the White House? Has President Obama done enough to communicate the reality of climate change and the need for urgent policy action?

MANN: Certainly the president did make climate change a significant issue in the campaign and appointed excellent people—John Holdren to head the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Jane Lubchenco as administrator of NOAA, Steve Chu as energy secretary—to positions relevant to climate science policy. These appointees understand the reality of climate change and the importance of confronting it. But it’s disappointing that the issue hasn’t been more in the forefront of the discussion by the administration.

BAS: Was it disappointing that the president didn’t step up to defend you and the credibility of climate science, weighing in personally as he did, say, on the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his Cambridge home, and the consequent “beer summit” on race relations? The White House called that a “teachable moment.”

MANN: I’m not going to second-guess the administration. The president and the administration—I can understand their inclination to not want to get into the mud with climate-change deniers. That having been said, the administration could have been more out in front on this issue. But I recognize that administration officials need to weigh all factors in deciding how to move forward on issues like climate change.

BAS: Somebody has got to do it, no?

MANN: Edward Markey [US Rep, D-Ma] has held several hearings on the science of climate change and the dishonest attacks against the science. He’s gone out of his way to try to help communicate the reality of the science and the specious nature of the attacks. But I would fault many in the media for being far more interested in covering the manufactured scandal known as “Climategate” and not doing nearly enough to report on the subsequent exonerations of the much-maligned scientists involved, who have been absolved of any wrongdoing after multiple investigations. That has not been covered nearly to the extent that the original false allegations were covered. That’s unfair. So, yes, I do fault numerous media outlets for their bias towards reporting on fake scandals and not doing the necessary follow-up work to dispel the specious allegations they helped promote.

BAS: A year ago the National Research Council suggested there was a great need to improve scientific communication on climate change suggesting, among other things, that “leadership might come through executive orders [and] existing units such as the Office of Science and Technology Policy,” which is, of course, led by Holdren. Has this leadership been forthcoming?

MANN: There are many, myself included, who are disappointed that more progress hasn’t been made on this front. This is a complicated matter, however, and there is more than enough blame to go around. Leadership ought to be coming from both sides of the aisle in American politics. It’s unfortunate that climate change seems to have become a partisan political issue. There was a time when leading politicians from both parties were advocating serious policy action to deal with climate change. The melting ice sheets, after all, have no political agenda. Climate change doesn’t affect Democrats and Republicans differently. It’s time we put the politics behind us, and confront this as a non-partisan issue.

BAS: Yet, this summer, the Senate failed to act on a House bill that would have established a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions, at least a start toward dealing with the problem in the United States, which is the largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases. What’s your personal view on the disconnect between what the science tells us and the policy inaction?

MANN: This simply speaks to the success of the “merchants of doubt,” to borrow the title of Naomi Oreskes’ and Erik Conway’s new book. Similar points are made in Eric Pooley’s The Climate War and Jim Hoggan and Richard Littlemore’s Climate Cover-Up. The millions of dollars spent by the fossil fuel industry and their front groups to confuse the public about the basic scientific underpinnings of human-caused climate change have delayed any policy actions by at least a decade, perhaps more. The potential opportunity cost of that delay to humanity is impossible to estimate, but it is certainly staggering.

BAS: So how can accurate climate science be communicated without these kinds of distractions gaining traction?

MANN: For one thing, it requires greater responsibility by our media. They shouldn’t simply act as stenographers for carefully choreographed smear campaigns. They have to help sort reality from fiction for the public. Scientists, in turn, need greater support for outreach and communication, and we need greater infrastructure to provide the necessary degree of interaction between scientists and science communicators. I actually think that one silver lining of the recent concerted attacks against climate science is that it has awakened the scientific community to the need for a better outreach and communication apparatus. I expect we’ll see that develop over the next several years.

BAS: Does the public find climate science difficult to swallow? What is the state of public skepticism and confusion on the topic, do you think?

MANN: While the attacks against climate science may have energized climate-change deniers, and those who derive their information from talk radio and the conservative media, polling suggests that the public has grown more convinced and more concerned about the reality of human-caused climate change in recent months. Undoubtedly, the dramatic heat this summer has probably re-captured the public’s awareness of the changes that are taking place.

Stanford pollster John Krosnik suggests that the stolen emails and fake “Climategate” scandal had little impact on the public perception of climate change. The fact that public concern about climate change is currently as high as or higher than it was before that incident suggests that there was no lasting impact on the public’s understanding. That has not stopped leading climate-change deniers in the US Congress, however, from trying their best to use the manufactured scandal to thwart efforts to pass meaningful climate-change legislation. Policy figures may have believed that the contrarians had changed public opinion, and deniers in Congress may have been emboldened by the attacks, even if public opinion has been little influenced by them. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one.

BAS: Is the policy stalemate ever going to end, absent a real climate catastrophe?

MANN:I am cautiously optimistic. I believe it’s not too late to take the steps that are necessary to mitigate truly dangerous future climate change. There is still time to take action to stabilize greenhouse gases to a point where they don’t become a dangerous threat to humanity. I’d like to think we’d take the necessary steps over the next decade to begin the transition towards clean and renewable energy and steer away from a carbon-based energy economy.

BAS: But the dangers have been clear for years, emissions keep going up, much of 2010 saw record heat in many regions, and the Senate went home empty handed. What’s the basis for your optimism?

MANN: There are various episodes in our not-so-distant past when we were threatened by global environmental catastrophe and took action. One can point to, for example, the Montreal Protocol, which addressed the problem of stratospheric ozone depletion, as a success story and a model for the possibility of dealing with climate change. Of course there are differences: In the case of ozone depletion, a smaller number of major industrial nations were involved, and there were reasonable alternatives to CFCs [chlorofluorocarbons] readily available to industry. It’s not like fossil fuels, which are central to today’s global energy economy. It’s a far greater challenge to remake the way we derive and use energy, and to change all of the practices in our daily lives that contribute to rising greenhouse gas emissions. So certainly, it’s a bigger challenge than anything that has come before. But I believe that we will meet that challenge in time.