[Music/Introduction]
Good afternoon.
[Pause]
[Bill Hopkins] Well this is wonderful. It's great to see such a fantastic turnout.
I know the weather's a little lousy and I know we're competing with the basketball tournament so thank you
for taking time out of your day to come see this very important lecture and our distinguished guest,
Dr. Michael Mann.
Before I get started, I do want to acknowledge some folks that made this event possible.
First of all, funding for this event was provided through the Fralin Life Science Institute and through the
Virginia Tech graduate school so we're very fortunate to have them supporting our efforts.
The Virginia Tech library is here today.
They're actually filming this event, so this will be available through the Virginia Tech library system so that
folks who couldn't make it out or were too stubborn because they had to watch the basketball game
can actually have access to this event in the future.
And I want to thank Gloria, Gloria Shawnholtz, so wherever she is, she's our center coordinator and
she's been working for weeks to put on this event and some of the associated activities and so we're
very fortunate to have Gloria working with us.
And then, finally, I want to thank the Lyric Theatre.
We're very fortunate in Blacksburg to have a community theater like this so just please join me in thanking
the Lyric as well as our sponsors.
[Applause]
My name is Bill Hopkins. I'm a professor in the department of Fish and Wildlife Conservation here at
Virginia Tech and I have the honor of working with 38 very innovative scientists, engineers,
and social scientists who recently came together to establish the new Global Change Center at Virginia Tech.
This center's mission is focused on trying to evaluate some of the most important environmental issues that
we face today: things like invasive species, pollution, emerging diseases, and, of course, climate change.
Importantly, these environmental issues and one of the reasons why we're very passionate about this center
is these are issues that affect all of us. They affect society.
They can affect our economy, our future way of life, our health, our accessibility to clean water, and
our national security.
The center has its own PhD program.
This is a major part of what we do, is training the next generation of scientists and our goal is to provide
these students with a broad interdisciplinary perspective on these important environmental challenges.
And as part of that, we're trying to help the students understand the role of science in society and trying
to help them become better communicators of science to the general public and to decision makers.
And so part of the reason that we have Dr. Michael Mann here today is because he is also very dedicated
to making accurate science accessible to the general public.
Now we're also very fortunate to have another distinguished guest here today, Sue Hassol,
who is an internationally recognized science communicator join Dr. Mann today and they put on
an all-day workshop for our students.
So, our PhD students in the center had Dr. Mann and Sue Hassol to themselves for the whole day and I sat in
for part of this event and it was fantastic, truly engaging for an entire day.
So before we move on to Dr. Mann, I just want to say a few things to introduce our colleague Sue Hassol.
Sue has been a friend of ours. She gave the keynote address last year at our spring retreat for the programs.
She is respected internationally for her contributions over the last 25 years as a science communicator,
analyst, and author.
She is the director of the nonprofit Climate Communication and she serves in a wide variety
of scholarly as well as advisory positions within agencies such as:
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Center for Atmospheric Research,
the World Meteorological Organization and the American Geophysical Union.
She was a senior science writer for all three of the United States National Climate Assessments and
she's assisted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with some of their assessment reports.
She's testified before Congress, she even wrote an HBO documentary which is cleverly titled
"Too Hot Not to Handle," and she's appeared on a variety of national television and radio shows including
shows like 20/20 and Frontline.
In recognition of her achievements internationally in science communication, she's won a lot of
different prestigious awards.
And most recently she was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
And so please join me in welcoming Sue Hassol.
[Applause]
[Pause]
[Sue Hassol] Good evening. It's my honor to be here to introduce Dr. Michael Mann: distinguished professor at
Penn State University, where he directs the Earth System Science Center.
He earned his PhD in geology and geophysics from Yale University.
He's published over 180 peer-reviewed and edited publications.
Scientific American called Dr. Mann one of the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology.
In 2012, he received the Hans Arthur Medal for his contributions to paleo climate research.
In 2013, he received the National Conservation Achievement Award for science from the
National Wildlife Federation and was named one of the 50 most influential people by Bloomberg News.
In 2014, Dr. Mann received the Friend of the Planet award from the National Center for Science Education.
He's published two popular books: "Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change"
and "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines."
From pushing the boundaries of climate science to tirelessly communicating about it to the media, public,
and policymakers, Dr. Mann truly is on the front lines of climate change in every sense.
While weathering coordinated personal and legal attacks on his work from contrarians, he's used his platform
to bring greater attention to the threat of climate change.
Dr. Mann's contributions to the popularization of climate science are unmatched.
His dozens of op-eds and commentaries, more than 30 public lectures per year, writing for websites including
The Huffington Post and Real Climate, quotes in the popular press that average one per day,
he's continually reaching a broad cross-section of audiences.
He also works with museums and zoos and aquaria, leaving no stone unturned in his efforts to reach people
with the urgency of the climate challenge.
He even appealed to his fellow climate scientists for greater public engagement.
In an op-ed in The New York Times in January of 2014, Dr. Mann used a slogan from the
Department of Homeland Security to urge his fellow scientists: "if you see something say something."
And there's one more thing I want you to know about him.
Knowing what we know, it's sometimes hard to remain positive, to keep our energy up for the ongoing battle
that we face, to beat back the merchants of doubt as well as the ignorance and apathy and despair
that can threaten our future.
Michael Mann manages to do all of this while remaining positive and energetic.
I'm honored to introduce a friend and a colleague who fights the good fight every day
and remains tireless, fearless, and joyful.
Please help me in welcoming Dr. Michael Mann.
[Applause]
[Pause]
[Michael Mann] Thank you for that incredibly kind introduction Susan and I want to thank the folks here at
the Global Change Center for a wonderful day.
Susan and I just had a fabulous time with the students here, the very impressive students in this program.
And frankly, after spending an entire day working with these students to improve their science communication
and after being built up the way that I was just built up by Susan, I'm a little worried about violating all of the
rules that we spoke of today so I'll do my best not to do that.
I'm gonna tell a story and it's my own story as a science nerd, a computer geek, whatever you want to call me.
Somebody who went into science because I loved working on solving difficult problems that tell us about
how the world works and it led me down a path where I ended up publishing a curve, the so-called
hockey stick curve that quickly rose to iconic status in the climate change debate.
It became a symbol in the climate change debate, and all of a sudden as a young post-doc,
I found myself in a world I never expected to be in, something I had never signed up for.
I was suddenly in the center of what is arguably the most contentious societal debate that we have yet had:
the debate over climate change and what to do about it.
And so what I'm going to try to do is to talk a little bit about the science, but to also talk about my story,
and some of the lessons that I've learned along the way, and how I have come to indeed embrace this role
that I didn't sign up for, but a role that I think is a blessing.
A role that has placed me in a position to inform what may be, you know, the greatest challenge that
human civilization has yet faced: the challenge to do something about human-caused climate change.
So, the first point I want to make is that despite what you may have heard or read,
the basic science is not controversial.
This isn't new, controversial science, it's straightforward physics and chemistry that we've known about
for two centuries.
Joseph Fourier, he's the same scientist who gave us the law of heat conduction,
he understood that certain gases in our atmosphere, like carbon dioxide, have a warming influence on the planet.
And mostly, we have simply been refining our understanding of the details over the past two centuries.
We also know that we are increasing the concentrations of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through
fossil fuel burning and other activities.
This is a graph that I put together a few years ago and it is now fundamentally out of date.
I need to update this because there's another vertical tick mark now, 400. We just passed 400 parts per million
CO2 in the atmosphere a couple years ago for the first time in what we think is probably millions of years.
Okay? So we are engaged in this unprecedented and uncontrolled experiment with the one planet that
we know is habitable to life, our planet Earth.
What I would not be able to explain to you as a scientist would be if the Earth were not warming up.
The greenhouse effect is basic fundamental physics and chemistry.
The measurements that tell us that we are increasing the concentrations of these greenhouse gases,
irrefutable evidence.
What we would not be able to explain would be if the earth were not warming up as a result of that,
but of course it is. It's warmed a little less than a degree Celsius thus far.
Now, the critics often like to point to this, the end of the graph, and say but if I start up here and I end down here
well there's a cooling trend, right? The globe has stopped warming?
How can there be global warming if the globe has stopped warming?
And, you know, that's cherry-picking, that's starting picking a particular year and then, you know,
trying to draw a trend line but, you know, that's all abstract and the best evidence that that's wrong is
the fact that the numbers for 2014 just came in a couple months ago and we now know that 2014 was
the warmest year on record on the globe.
So, let's update that graph. Global warming hasn't stopped. It continues at pace.
We continue to warm at a rate of somewhere between .1 and .2 degrees Celsius per decade.
That might sound small but that's, you know, a degree to two degrees Celsius over a century.
That's, you know, nearly four degrees, three degrees, four degrees, Fahrenheit over a century.
We continue to warm and if you don't believe those thermometer measurements, we can throw them all out.
Okay? If you don't like the ocean measurements that tell us the ocean is warming, you don't like
the land measurements that tell us the land is warming, you don't like the measurements in
the northern hemisphere that tell us it is warming or the measurements in North America that tell us
it's warming, we can throw out all those thermometers.
I could show you dozens of independent lines of evidence that would tell an eternally consistent story
of a planet that is warming up and a climate that is changing precisely as we expect it to as we continue
to increase the concentrations of these gases.
And that sort of evidence has led the very austere, the very conservative, Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which consists of thousands of scientists who contribute to these reports that come out
every five years that detail our understanding of climate change.
Many of you probably know scientists and you know that if you get three of us in a room, it'll be difficult
to get us to agree upon just about anything.
We're a fairly cantankerous lot. We're skeptics, and skepticism is a good thing in science.
So when you have thousands of scientists coming together and concluding that the warming of
the climate system is unequivocal. Scientists hate to use words like unequivocal. That's a real commitment.
We hate to commit to things that strongly. That tells you that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
[Pause]
Well, is that all invalidated by the fact that it was cold in Blacksburg last couple days?
We've had some cold weather. It gets cold in winter.
Well, if you talk to folks like Donald Trump apparently that means we have to throw out everything we ever
understood about radiative physics and fluid dynamics.
Is that really true?
Is what's happening, is the fact that there are cold temperatures, invalidating everything I just said?
Well, let's look. Everywhere I go now and I give this lecture, I look at what's happening
with unusual cold temperatures.
What's the trend over time? In Dublin it's down, Santa Cruz it's down, in Cleveland it's down,
in St. Louis it's down, where I live in State College it's down, and it's even down in Peoria.
[Pause]
It's down everywhere I go. I have not yet spoken in a location, I haven't found a location where
unusually cold temperatures are not on the decline and that unusually warm temperatures are not on the incline
exactly as we expect to happen as we continue to warm the planet.
[Pause]
Models. Okay, so some of you may have heard from the critics that, you know, our entire understanding of
the problem of climate change depends on these untrustworthy climate models.
And that statement is doubly wrong, because first of all the models are not untrustworthy and I'll talk about it
in a minute, but it's not based on the models.
I already explained to you the evidence for human-caused climate change in the first few minutes of this
talk and it was based on irrefutable physics and chemistry, irrefutable measurements of our changing the
composition of the atmosphere, and the fact that the climate is indeed responding exactly as we expect it to.
But we use climate models to test hypotheses.
After all, there's only one earth and, as I said before, we are engaged in an unprecedented and uncontrolled
experiment with the one earth that we have.
If we want to ask what if questions, what if we weren't increasing greenhouse gas concentrations?
What if we were doing this? What would happen to the climate?
Well all we have at our disposal is our understanding of the physics of this system, in the biology that governs
the global carbon cycle, and the chemistry that governs the behavior of greenhouse gases.
We take our scientific understanding of all of these components that comprise the climate system
and formalize that understanding in the form of a model, which is our best estimate, our best ability,
to formalize our understanding of the science.
And we can make experiments. We can do experiments.
In fact, you're probably wondering at this point what I'm showing you. What is that? Seinfeld restaurant.
What could the Seinfeld restaurant possibly have to do with climate change?
Well, on the upper floors of the Seinfeld restaurant sits the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
I did a sabbatical there about eight years ago so I got to go to the Seinfeld diner for work every day.
It was a lot of fun, actually, but back in 1988, three years before the Seinfeld show even went on the air,
Dr. James Hansen, who was the director at the time of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
made a prediction using climate models.
And, as we know, predictions are hard, especially about the future. And it's not Yogi Berra.
You're probably thinking that's Yogi Berra.
It was Niels Bohr, the physicist, predictions are hard especially about the future.
And he made a prediction about the future back in 1988.
You could see what the thermometer measurements showed in the decades leading up to that prediction and
he said, well, I'm gonna make a prediction about the future based on three different scenarios.
After all, he couldn't predict human behavior. How could you do that?
He couldn't. He couldn't predict what we were gonna do.
But what he could say is, well, here's my prediction for how global temperatures will change if we rapidly
decrease our emission of carbon into the atmosphere.
That's the purple. The green, that's what happens if we rapidly increase our burning of fossil fuels
even beyond the historical trajectory.
And the blue is what we would expect to happen if we fall somewhere in between those things.
And guess what? If you look at our fossil fuel emissions, if you follow the pathway that we have actually pursued
with our decisions and with our actions, we've pursued something roughly akin to that blue curve.
That is what the prediction is for the fossil fuel scenario that we have actually followed and that's what
the observations actually show happened over the next couple decades.
I would argue that's a pretty impressive prediction.
And I could bore you to tears discussing the hundreds of pages of model validation, exercises, and
various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but suffice it to say that there are some
very convincing simple experiments that tell us that there's reason to take these models quite seriously,
what they say.
Now, if you're a critic, you know, as I've said there are critics out there, believe it or not. There are some critics.
[Pause]
You might say, well look, look how much it cooled here and, you know, if your model, the blue curve is your
model, if your model is so great, how come it couldn't predict something as big as that cooling signal?
And it is true that James Hansen didn't know in 1988 that in 1991 Mount Pinatubo would erupt and put
large amounts of particulates into the stratosphere where they block out a certain amount of sunlight.
But what Hansen did know is that it would take about six to nine months for that particulate cloud to spread
around the globe and begin to have a cooling effect.
So he had enough time to do another model experiment and predict the cooling that would be expected to result
from that distribution of volcanic particulates and he predicted that the globe should cool by about a half a
degree Celsius for a few years, exactly what happened.
What might look like a flaw in the climate model prediction was actually an opportunity, an example,
for another successful prediction.
So there are reasons to take the models seriously and there are reasons to test hypotheses for them.
And again, if you're a critic, you might say well, okay. So the globe is warmed.
How do we know that it's due to human activity? Maybe it's those natural factors.
You just talked about the volcanic eruptions.
Well maybe it's the coming and going of those volcanic eruptions that's responsible for
the temperature changes.
Or the small but measurable changes in solar output.
We can measure them with satellites, we can extend them even further back with sunspot measurements
and other data.
Well, let's test that. Let's take the volcanoes and let's take the measured solar output changes and drive
the climate models with those two factors, those natural factors, and see what happens.
And that's what happens. So, in fact, the globe should have cooled over the latter half of the 20th century.
And that's because there were some large eruptions like that Pinatubo eruption, solar output was fairly flat or
even declining slightly, but we warmed in spite of those natural factors.
And it is indeed only when we put in the human impact, in particular of increased greenhouse gas
concentrations from fossil fuel-burning, that we are able to explain the warming that we've seen.
And so, that's the sort of evidence that has led, again, the quite austere, quite conservative, IPCC to conclude
that it is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming
since the mid 20th century.
Again, the IPCC scientists hate to use words like extremely likely. They hate to use words like dominant.
That's a real commitment and that's an amazingly strong conclusion to be reached by a consensus, a lowest
common denominator of something that hundreds and even a few thousand scientists can agree upon.
[Pause]
Well, even here, it turns out that the IPCC is being its characteristic conservative, reticent self because
it isn't true that human influence is just the dominant cause of the observed warming.
If you read the technical chapters upon which that statement is based, what you will learn is that
human influence is responsible for more than a hundred percent of the warming that has been observed.
[Pause]
And I already explained why that's true because natural factors were actually pushing us in the other direction
and we warmed in spite of them.
[Pause]
All right. So what about our future? What about our future as we move forward?
Well, the good news is that we hold the future in our own hands. It's up to us to a great extent.
If we were to rapidly decrease our burning of fossil fuels we could avoid warming the planet by more than
2 degrees Celsius, 3 and a half degrees Fahrenheit.
That's a level of warming that most scientists who study the impacts of climate change will tell you is when
we really start to venture into the most serious and potentially irreversible changes in climate.
We could avoid doing that. We have the technology. We have the ability to do that.
But if we continue with business as usual then we're talking about four to five degrees Celsius
warming of the planet by the end of the century.
That's 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
Twice that much, 14 to 18 degrees Fahrenheit warming of the Arctic because of the amplifying effect
of melting ice.
[Pause]
And if you look, here's 2 degrees Celsius warming of the planet.
This is a thermometer scale published by the IPCC that measures the detrimental impacts of climate change
across various sectors of our environment and society.
And what you see is that once you go beyond about two degrees C, you really start to venture into
the red zone across all sectors.
You're really starting to see bad things happen.
[Pause]
And this is a complicated graphic from an article I published in Scientific American,
and the bottom line of which, is we can still do it.
We can avoid warming the planet by more than two degrees Celsius.
It's still possible, but it's a window that's closing.
And if we pursue business as usual, we're up in here we're again talking four to five degrees Celsius,
seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit.
That's a different planet, okay? It's not the planet that I grew up on. I would be leaving my daughter
a different planet if that's what we pursue.
[Pause]
And I used to leave it with the polar bear stranded on the ice floe because it's the law if you give
a talk about climate change.
You have to show a polar bear stranded on an ice floe.
But I think in doing that, in making the polar bear the poster child of climate change, we have somewhat
accidentally we have somehow communicated to the public at times that this is a very distant exotic problem,
that may be climate change is a problem for polar bears up in the Arctic decades down the road.
But it's not impacting me. Why should I care?
Well everywhere I go now I talk about how climate change is impacting us negatively now where we live.
Because that's true wherever you go
This is a year and a half ago, I gave a talk in Central Texas in San Angelo and I felt I needed to talk about
the devastating impact of the 2011 Texas drought, which has been attributed to climate change.
Scientists have concluded that that drought, the magnitude of that drought, would not have been
observed if not for the effect of human-caused climate change.
And ranchers lost about 25 percent of their cattle. Texas, Oklahoma, agriculture across the state was devastated.
And I felt I needed an image. So you go to Google image. Do a search, 2011 Texas drought.
Something that looks pretty good comes back. You use it in your presentation.
I give my presentation and somebody in the audience says, wait a second, you know what lake that is?
That's our lake. That's Lake Fisher.
No. It's what we used to call Lake Fisher until it disappeared in the 2011 drought.
And we can take you to see it if you want after your lecture.
[Pause]
I gave a talk up in Maine where they understand.
It turns out the two icons of Maine are threatened by climate change: the moose and the lobster.
The lobster are migrating poleward farther into the North Atlantic as the seas warm up and become
too warm for them.
[Pause]
Moose are being impacted by warmer winters that allow parasites and pests to persist through the winter
that are a problem for moose.
I gave a talk in the UK some months ago where they just experienced the worst flooding on record
over a large part of the UK.
And the very conservative Meteorological Office, some of the most conservative climate scientists on the planet
are the scientists, trust me, at the UK Meteorological Office.
And they've said that flooding would not have happened without climate change.
Our models show that we just would not have seen that extent of flooding.
The atmosphere just wouldn't be warm enough to hold that much moisture and dump it all out at one time
if it were not for human-caused climate change.
[Pause]
You go to California. I was there a couple months ago.
You don't have to convince Californians about climate change anymore because they're seeing it.
They're seeing the devastating impact of the worst droughts in at least twelve hundred years.
In fact, on this Monday, my colleague Peter Glick and I have a commentary that'll be coming out in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which explains why this drought was indeed made worse.
It would not have happened.
A record drought of this sort would not have happened in the absence of human caused climate change.
And they're paying the price in California.
At this point they're saying they have about one year left before they have to start doing water rationing.
[Pause]
And last week I was in Florida.
Again you talk to folks in Miami, you don't have to explain that climate change is happening.
You might have to explain to their governor because he actually doesn't want people using that term,
[Pause]
but the person on the street you don't have to explain it to them because you know they've always gotten
this seasonal high tide called the King Tide.
It comes in every year, but it didn't used to flood the streets of Miami Beach every time it comes in.
And now it does because that's how sea-level rise is gonna impact us.
It isn't just gonna be you know a slow inundation.
It's going to be the extreme events are gonna be more extreme.
And Hurricane Sandy had a 13-foot coastal surge rather than 12-foot coastal surge
because of global sea level rise.
It's going to make the extreme events worse.
It's gonna give us the straw that breaks the camel's back when it comes to these sorts of events.
And in Virginia, there are a whole host of impacts that climate change is already having as well.
So at this point in the talk is where I ask the purely rhetorical question, why no action?
If the evidence is this clear, if the threat is this great, why is it that we have not seriously entertained
actions, the actions necessary to do something about this problem?
And of course I can't answer that question from the standpoint of science.
That brings us into the domain of policy and politics.
Back in 2002, Frank Luntz, an advisor to Republicans, was advising his clients in this case,
basically fossil fuel interests, that there was a closing window of opportunity.
The public was becoming convinced that there was a scientific consensus about
human-caused climate change.
And if they were to become convinced that there was a scientific consensus, they would demand
that policy action be taken.
But what he said, based on his focus groups and his polling, there still was a window of opportunity to
double down, to reinsert doubt and confusion into the public discourse over this issue, to fund
contrarian scientists who would be willing to challenge the conclusions of the scientific community to fund
front groups and organizations whose sole purpose was to try to discredit the case for concern
over human caused climate change.
Now, if that sounds a little familiar to you, like you know I've heard that tactic before, maybe because that's
exactly what the tobacco industry did decades ago.
It's the same playbook.
And this wonderful book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, "Merchants of Doubt" is now a movie
and I understand it may even be coming to the the Lyric Theatre at some point in the future.
But the movie is out.
It just premiered a week ago and it describes how the very same contrarian scientists who were hired by
the tobacco industry to try to discredit the linkage between their product and human health effects like
lung cancer the very same scientists are today working for fossil fuel interest to try discredit the relationship
between their product fossil fuel-burning and the health not of individual people the health of
the entire planet in this case. The stakes are actually quite a bit higher.
So we have senators like James Inhofe, affectionately now known as "Senator Snowball."
Some of you may have seen his stunt a week ago because there's snow in Washington DC in the winter,
global warming can't be happening. It gets cold in winter therefore there's no climate change.
[Pause]
Well, James Inhofe is perhaps one of the most strident climate change deniers in the US Senate or the US
Congress and he has described climate change as the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.
[Pause]
Now, it turns out, he was the choice for keynote speaker in 2011. Remember 2011, a terrible Texas drought?
But he was chosen to be the keynote speaker at the climate change conference of
the Heartland Institute that July.
Heartland Institute is a front group who was funded by tobacco interests in decades past to discredit the
science linking tobacco products to human health.
And today it is, of course, working for fossil fuel interests to try to discredit the reality
and threat of climate change.
And he was their choice for keynote speaker and he had gladly accepted but he he did have to cancel out
at the last minute, unfortunately.
He had gotten sick swimming in a lake back in Oklahoma that was suffering from an algal bloom as
a result of the unprecedented heat and drought that Oklahoma was experiencing at the time.
[Pause]
Well, I want to thank all of you for coming out. I know the NCAA tournament is going on right now and
I'm particularly anxious to know how my old school, UVA, is doing.
I understand they're playing right now. I'm not doing well in the tournament right now.
I'm in last place in the pool that I'm in. My brackets are not looking good.
But I'm doing really well in an alternative tournament that's occurring in parallel.
This is the climate change, fantasy climate change denier tournament and when this tournament started
I predicted that Jim Inhofe would go all the way.
Although there were a couple possible bracket busters here but I really felt that Inhofe was looking good.
And he's now in the finals. He's in the finals. He's up against Marco Rubio.
I'm crossing my fingers we will find out tomorrow. So, how did I find myself at the center of this circus run?
Because it feels like a circus at times, this ridiculous debate we are still having about whether climate change
is real, whether or not we should do something about it.
And, as you already know, it has to do with this graph that I published a decade and a half ago that has
come to be known as the hockey stick graph because of its shape and it shows that the recent warming appears
to be unprecedented as far back as we can go.
It became an icon in the climate change debate and, as you may know, what happens to icons in
the climate change debate, like the hockey stick, is that they get attacked.
And I found myself at the center of these attacks aimed often at discrediting me personally in a cynical effort
to discredit the hockey stick, which was supposedly the one pillar of evidence for the existence
of human-caused climate change.
Well, first of all, there's literally a whole hockey league.
There are many reconstructions that have been performed since then.
They all come to the same conclusion that the recent warming appears to be unprecedented over
an even longer time frame, actually, at least the past 1300 years maybe longer.
But you could throw out the whole hockey league, you could throw out all these Paleo climate data,
throw it all out. It's not necessary.
I explained to you in the first few minutes the basis for our understanding of human-caused climate change
and the threat that it represents.
Simple, basic irrefutable physics, chemistry, irrefutable measurements that will change the composition
of the planet and how it's warming up and climate is changing as a result.
But the hockey stick did become a symbol. It became a symbol of the climate change.
And so it continues to be attacked. And now, just a couple years ago, there was a
significant development in the science here.
A group, they call themselves the pages 2k group, it's a international group of nearly 80 scientists from I think
40 institutions, more than 20 different countries, using the most widespread data set ever used of
Paleoclimate data to reconstruct temperatures back in time.
And they published their article in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience, which unfortunately overthrew our
Oh wait, no, that's right sorry. Yeah they got the same answer that we had gotten a decade and a half ago.
[Pause]
And that's why the IPCC, they're not debating this anymore.
It is now looked at as very likely that the recent warming is unprecedented in recent centuries, likely the warmest
in at least the past fourteen hundred years.
The conclusions are actually stronger than they were, as you would expect. More data, more independent studies.
And even if we didn't have that evidence, we would still know that climate change is real,
it's caused by us, and it's a problem if we don't do something about it.
So the reason we're not doing something about it, or not nearly to the extent that we need to, some people
would say, is because of the politicization of science.
I disagree with that. I think what we're looking at is something different, something worse.
It's the science-tization of politics. And what I mean by that, science is now used as a political football.
It's just another way of waging politics and, you know, if you don't like the science as assessed by the IPCC or
the US National Academy of Sciences, which I would remind you was founded by a Republican president,
Abraham Lincoln, in the 19th century to advise Congress about matters of science
that have importance for policy.
If you don't like the conclusions of all of the scientific societies, nearly forty of them in the US, that deal in
any of the underlying stuff, the American Chemical Society, American Physical Society,
American Meteorological Society, American Geophysical Union, and on and on, all of which
are on record with statements.
There's a consensus: climate change real, caused by us, problem if we don't do something about it.
If you don't like the conclusions of the world scientific community, you know what?
There's a whole cable network for you and there are certain editorial pages that are perfectly happy
in presenting an alternative reality where the laws of physics no longer apply as we thought they did.
And there are people who now feel like, you know, the words of Daniel P. Moynihan, the Senator from New York,
who once said, "You're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts."
Well, increasingly in today's world, people sort of isolate themselves in bubbles that reinforce their own
misconceptions and they feel they are entitled to their own facts when it comes to matters like climate change.
That makes it really difficult to have the meaningful discussion that we need to have about
what to do about the problem.
Now, back in 2005, along these lines, I got a letter from Joe Barton. Well actually, it wasn't a letter.
It was actually a Congressional subpoena asking for all of my personal emails based on the fact that he had
read a criticism of my work in that most prestigious of scientific journals, the editorial pages of
the Wall Street Journal and he believed that this was cause for an open-ended fishing expedition
to look through all my personal emails, all of my documents from my entire scientific career,
every scribbling on the back of a napkin in a bar and all that information for my two senior co-authors whose
decades went back many decades, whose careers went back decades presumably in an effort to discredit us.
I should mention, I think it's a total coincidence that he was the largest recipient of fossil fuel money
in the US House of Representatives.
[Pause]
Well, the scientific community didn't take kindly to what they thought is a transparent effort to intimidate
scientists whose findings might be inconvenient to the special interests that fund Mr. Barton's campaigns.
The AAAS, American Association Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society,
American Geophysical Union, The Journal of Nature, basically the scientific community weighed in
unanimously that this is not okay.
[Pause]
Now, it might not surprise you that a, sort of, very progressive Southern California Democrat like
Henry Waxman, who had worked hard to bring the tobacco industry to justice for their hiding the impacts
of their product, the tobacco products, in past decades.
You might not be surprised that he would come out and support us against this attack by his colleague
on the other side of the aisle, Joe Barton.
What might surprise you, though, is the fact that the biggest hero in the story was a Republican.
It was an old-school, pro-science, pro-environment Republican, Sherwood Boehlert, who is the,
Barton was the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
He was a powerful committee chair,
but so was Sherwood Boehlert.
He was the chair of the House Science Committee and he condemned Barton's actions in among
the harshest terms of anyone, stopping just short of calling him out for engaging
in modern-day McCarthyism.
Now, he wasn't the only one. You might recognize this guy as well.
[Pause]
John McCain at the time wrote an op-ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education," where he said that
the message sent by the congressional committee to the three scientists was not subtle,
published politically unpalatable scientific results, and brace yourself for political retribution.
It represents a kind of intimidation which threatens the relationship between science and public policy.
That behavior must not be tolerated.
Now, students of modern American politics out in the audience may know that it's almost unprecedented
to see one prominent Republican call out another Republican in such harsh terms.
And what it means is that there are politicians of conscience on both sides of the aisle who know that
we have to get past this fake debate about whether climate change is real, past the witch hunts and
the show trials aimed at distracting the public, and on to the worthy discussion to be had
about what to do about the problem.
Well, it didn't stop there, though, it didn't.
Hey! Now wait a second, I haven't even said anything yet.
[Laughter]
So back a little bit later, 2009, many of you may remember this fake scandal called "Climategate."
All of a sudden, and again I think it's a total coincidence that it happened in the lead-up to
the Copenhagen summit, which was the first opportunity for meaningful international progress
in dealing with climate change in years.
I think it was a coincidence that all of a sudden, at the last minute, this scandal, fake scandal,
was drummed up, first in the conservative media and eventually even into the mainstream media
where thousands of emails had been stolen from a server in the UK, from a university in the UK
and they had been combed through and individual words and phrases were taken out of context
to try to make it sound like scientists had been fudging the data, to try to make it sound like climate change
was indeed this massive global conspiracy and hoax like James and Huff had claimed it was.
And, at the time, Sarah Palin wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where, among other things,
she claimed that the emails revealed that climate experts manipulated data
to hide the decline in global temperatures.
Now, that's very interesting because I actually was a recipient of the email she's referring to
and the email was written in early 1999.
It was on the heels of the warmest year we had ever seen.
1998 was the warmest year we had ever seen and was boosted by a big el niño event.
If anything, scientists at the time would be would have been talking, and we're talking about
is global warming unfolding faster than we expect?
It may be.
So there was no decline to be talking about.
It turns out what they were talking about was a graph that they were preparing for a government report
that detailed long-term temperature trends and one of the graphs was based on tree-ring information
that go back many centuries.
And these authors had actually published a paper in the journal Nature a year ago, in 1998,
talking about how these particular data become problematic after about 1960.
The trees stopped responding to temperature in the same way and so the data shouldn't be used after 1960.
They're not reliable. And so he was talking about getting rid of the bad data that would have misled readers
of that report if they had shown it.
And I pointed this out, and a number of other things that Sarah Palin had gotten wrong in her op-ed,
in my own op-ed that appeared in The Washington Post nine days later.
And it appears to have even had an impact on Sarah Palin herself, okay?
Because some time later she said, she admitted, that a lot of those emails obviously
weren't meant for public consumption.
Those are her words, and that they could be misinterpreted if taken out of context.
Those are her own words describing the release of her own personal emails in response to a
Freedom of Information Act request from her time as governor of Alaska.
Well, I didn't stop there.
If you thought I stopped there, no.
James Inhofe felt that these stolen emails were an adequate reason to investigate 17 climate scientists
who should be prosecuted for perpetrating the hoax of climate change as revealed by these stolen emails.
And I'm proud to say that I was among that list of 17, along with Presidential Medal of Science winner
Susan Solomon of MIT.
It didn't stop there, if you thought it stopped there.
You guys recognize this guy. You know who I'm talking about, the cooch to those of us in the know.
[Pause]
So, he was newly minted Attorney General of Virginia, typically described as a Tea Party Republican
and as his very first act as Attorney General of Virginia you may remember that
Oh, I'm sorry. That's right, yeah.
His first act as Attorney General, he wanted to change the state seal because it revealed part of the anatomy
of the Roman goddess Virtus.
He didn't think that was appropriate for it.
It was his second act as Attorney General, was to take a page from the Joe Barton playbook and use his
authority as Attorney General to issue a civil subpoena.
Is this sounding familiar enough?
A civil subpoena demanding all of my personal emails with 39 different climate scientists around the world
based on this law that allows the Attorney General to issue a civil investigative demand.
It was actually intended to ferret out Medicare waste and fraud, that's why it was introduced.
But his reasoning was that since, while at the University of Virginia, I had been working on the science of
climate change and clearly that's fraudulent science, this was a perfectly appropriate use
of the civil investigative demand.
Well, you know, others didn't necessarily think so.
The Union of Concerned Scientists immediately spoke out, as it did the AAUP, the ACLU.
That might not surprise you, they're typically thought of as progressive groups.
But the conservative group, FIRE, which typically advocates against what they view as, sort of,
political correctness in academia.
They understood that it didn't matter what your politics are.
It didn't matter if you're a conservative or, you know, a progressive.
The idea that an Attorney General could engage in an attack, a witch-hunt, against an academic whose ideas
he or she doesn't agree with, they represent, they recognize that that was a danger.
That was a bad thing regardless of what your politics were.
And there was a petition of 800 scientists from around the state of Virginia.
I'll be honest with you I didn't know there were 800 scientists in the state of Virginia, that blasted Cuccinelli
for what they saw as an attack against the scientific community.
The AAAS, the American Meteorological Society, the journal Nature, all once again came out and spoke out
against what they saw as a transparent effort by a politician to intimidate scientists whose findings might
be inconvenient to the interest he represents.
The conservative Richmond Times-Dispatch, that had actually endorsed his candidacy for Attorney General,
it turns out they didn't endorse his candidacy for governor, first time ever the Richmond Times-Dispatch
did not endorse the Republican candidate for governor, to my knowledge.
But, at the time, they had endorsed his candidacy for Attorney General, but they saw that, you know,
this was an abuse of power.
The Washington Post they couldn't get enough of this.
Wrote at least five editorials blasting what they characterized as Cuccinelli's witch-hunt against me
and the University of Virginia.
And their award-winning cartoonist Tom Towles couldn't resist commenting on the matter not once, but twice.
And this is my personal favorite, I have to say.
That's Cuccinelli up there in the judge's chair and that's Galileo down there. He wants to see his emails as well.
I don't mind being compared to Galileo. I'll admit it, I'll admit it.
Well, so Cuccinelli's civil investigative demand was quashed, as many of you will know, by a lower court
based on a technicality, as it turns out.
In his 40 page filing to the court, he had had forgotten to provide evidence of wrongdoing on my part,
so it was rejected by the lower court.
[Pause]
He appealed, of course, to the state Supreme Court which, several years ago, rejected the case
with prejudice, meaning they really don't want to ever see an Attorney General come to the court
with something like this again.
So that battle was won and this guy in the background here likes to think that he might have had
something to do, at least some small role, in the victory of Cuccinelli's opponent, Terry McAuliffe,
in the most recent gubernatorial race.
[Pause]
Ken Cuccinelli isn't governor.
The actual governor has put me on the Virginia Climate Advisory Board and Ken Cuccinelli is now running
an oyster farm on an island in the Chesapeake Bay that's slowly succumbing to sea level rise.
[Pause]
No, I'm really not making that up you Google this. You Google this.
Alright, so, you've seen, though, that there were heroes in perhaps unexpected places, and one of the
biggest heroes in all of this was Sherwood Boehlert, a true conservative Republican
who was pro-science, pro-environment.
[Pause]
And there are others, like Bob Inglis, very conservative, had a perfect conservative rating,
a congressman from South Carolina.
He made the mistake of speaking out about climate change and so he got primaried by a couple brothers
from Kansas and is no longer in that seat, but he is working now to advance conservative free-market
approaches to dealing with climate change and I think that's wonderful.
There is a very worthy debate to be had about how we go about solving this problem and
conservatives need to be at the table.
We need to consider, you know, approaches that are, you know, consistent with a wide range of ideological views.
That's a very worthy debate to be had: how we go about solving this problem.
What isn't a worthy debate to be had anymore is whether the problem exists. There is no magic bullet.
It's gonna be difficult, it's gonna be a challenge to wean ourselves from what former President George W. Bush
characterized as our addiction to fossil fuels and all of the ideas should be on the table.
Let's have that debate. Let's have the debate about how we solve that problem.
That's the debate we should be having in the US Congress right now rather than the debate over
whether climate change even exists.
We're better than that as a country.
Finally, let me leave this on a somewhat personal note.
This is my daughter Megan, who's nine and a half years old.
This is from a few years ago, the Pittsburgh Zoo, and that is a polar bear on top of her and I promise
we're not torturing our daughter here, what's going on is that she's walking underneath a plexiglass tunnel
that goes underneath the polar bear feeding pool.
And if you happen to be involved in an NSF-funded climate change outreach program for zoos and aquaria
and you know the manager of the zoo, you might be able to convince him to throw the fish in the pool
when your daughter's walking underneath the tunnel which is what's happening here.
But on a serious note, you know, I'd hate to think that my daughter, you know, might return decades from now
with her children, or maybe even grandchildren, and point to these magnificent creatures and talk about how
they used to exist in the wild but we melted their home.
And that, of course, is just one symptom of a much wider array of problems
that we are going to create for future generations.
We will leave behind a fundamentally degraded planet for our children and grandchildren
if we don't act on this problem now.
And I believe that, more than anything else, we often frame climate change as a problem of science,
or economics, or policy, or politics.
To me more than any of those things, it's a problem of ethics and our intergenerational ethical obligation
that we have to not leave behind a degraded planet for our children and grandchildren.
The good news is that there's time, there's still time to make sure that that is not our legacy.
There's still time to fix this problem and we can do it while growing the economy.
The good news is, for the first year on record, we actually had economic growth and no growth
in carbon emissions globally last year tells us that it's already working.
Efforts by some countries to do something about this problem are already showing up in the numbers and
it isn't enough for us to just keep emissions flatlining, we have to bring them down pretty dramatically if
we're going to avoid crossing into dangerous and irreversible climate change, but there's still time to do it.
And there's some good news. We're already starting to see progress. We just need to try even harder.
So I think I'll leave it there. I'll be happy to field questions. Thank you very much.
[Applause]
[Pause]
So we'd like to ask that you stand up and please speak loudly, now we're on okay good.
Please come up and speak into the microphone. We ask that you keep your questions to the point.
We don't have a lot of time so we'd like to have a number of people be able to engage Michael and ask questions.
[Pause]
Dr. Mann, my name is Rod Adams. I published "Atomic Insights." I want to know if you're gonna join
your colleagues James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Barry Brooke, in advocating for the use of nuclear energy
as one of the tools to combat climate change.
Thanks. Thanks for the question.
As I mentioned, as alluded to briefly in that collage of photos that I showed, one of those was
the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant.
And I believe that, you know, those options should be on the table. Let's have that conversation.
Now, as a scientist, I believe that my role isn't to try to prescribe the policy solutions, but to make sure
that the policy discussion is informed by a sober assessment of what the evidence is about the problem
and the risks that it represents.
And as long as we can start with those ground rules, as long as we have a policy debate that is premised
on the acceptance of what the science says, the risks are of not acting on this problem, there's a very worthy
and I hope we'll have a vigorous debate about the role of different mechanisms for pricing carbon,
the role that nuclear energy might play in the solution.
What about natural gas? Is that a viable bridge to an non-fossil fuel future?
I try not to weigh in on one side of, any one side of those questions, but rather that's the debate that I would like to
see taking place in our US Congress right now rather than a debate over whether climate change is even real.
Thank you.
[Pause]
Hi, I'm Steve Schaefer. I've done some science in my past.
One of the concerns I've heard is about the quality of the raw data.
Of course, there's scientists for publications depend on let's go back to what it what it was at the very beginning.
In particular, it came to my mind when I was driving by Charlotte, North Carolina a few years back.
I noticed that the temperature sensor on my car slowly rose by about five degrees as I entered Charlotte and it
was a spring day and I thought, well, I'm traveling south I might expect that, but then as I proceeded to Greenville,
South Carolina it went back down five degrees.
Of course what I'm referring to is the heat island effect, where a lot of these data stations are located.
The concern is complicated by the fact that I've heard that some of that raw data has been lost,
so that all we can see now is the adjusted data or use now as the adjusted data for our models
or for our evidence of climate change.
Okay. So thanks for the question I think you're alluding to the fact that there was one particular institute,
The Climatic Research Unit in the UK, and some years ago during a move they threw out old paper printouts.
Scientists don't work with paper printouts anymore.
Pretty much all of our data are digital and all those data were preserved digitally, but, you know, paper printouts,
those do get lost. They do get thrown out.
The raw data are all available, but you ask another question which is an important one, you know,
the urban heat island effect.
And, you know, what keeps climate scientists busy is thinking about all the things that could be wrong,
all of the possible problems.
The way you make a name for yourself as a scientist is by figuring out, not agreeing with everybody else.
You don't get papers in Nature and Science by saying, oh yeah, you know, the prevailing wisdom is right.
There's nothing new to learn here.
You make a name for yourself by figuring out something new, by finding a problem and explaining, you know,
and finding a solution to the problem.
And so, there would be a huge opportunity for somebody who could pick holes, who could in some way
invalidate the overall global temperature curve.
And so people try to, sort of, attack that data set from every possible angle and you know what?
The most severe thing you could do, if you're worried about urban heat island effects, what the heck?
Let's just throw out all of the urban stations.
We're not gonna have as much data, but we'll only use the rural stations and if you do that you know what?
You get the same answer.
Well, let's throw out all the land. Let's just look at the ocean.
I don't think there's any urbanization of the ocean taking place right now and the oceans show the same pattern
of warming and so, you know, we try to look at this.
We try to explore every possibility, every way we could be wrong. That's what a good scientist does.
A good scientist is a skeptic and the more extraordinary the claim is, Carl Sagan once famously said,
the more extraordinary the evidence better be.
And so that's what drives science forward: the fact that there's a real incentive for somebody
who can prove everyone wrong.
That's the greatest incentive in science. If you can do that, you will make a name for yourself.
You'll be publishing papers in the leading journals.
So no, we've attacked this problem from every possible angle and there's no way around it.
The globe is warming up much as the models predicted. Thanks for the question.
Hello. My name is Paul Angermeier. You summarized very nicely how the science
underpinning climate change is pretty irrefutable, straightforward.
And my question is, now that the science-tization genie is out of the bottle, are there really any significant
scientific questions that might be answered or addressed that could have a positive or negative effect
on moving policy in a way that's productive?
Thanks for that. That's a wonderful question because I think we do a disservice sometimes.
When we talk about the fact that, you know, that certain things are decided, that the earth is warming,
that we can only explain it from human activity, greenhouse gases, but we're still trying
to work out a lot of really important details as well.
We know enough to act.
We already know enough to conclude that the things are gonna get bad if we don't do something.
But what if you're a water manager here in Virginia and you want to know what sort of adaptive actions
you're gonna take in response to shifting precipitation patterns?
Well, it turns out, if you want to know what's going to happen to precipitation patterns in the southeastern US,
you'd like to know something about what's going to happen to the El Niño phenomenon,
which has an influence on those patterns.
And one of the problems is that if you actually look at the climate model's dirty little secret,
if you want to call it that, is that we still don't know the answer to that question.
What is going to happen to El Niño? Are we going to see more El Niños or fewer El Niños?
Are they gonna be bigger are they going to be smaller? We don't have the answers to that question.
It's an example, though, where uncertainty is not our friend.
What that uncertainty means is that we don't even quite know what to plan for.
And how do we take adaptive measures when we don't know what to plan for?
So when it comes to specifics like what's gonna happen to rainfall patterns?
How bad is California drought gonna get? Depends, in part, on the El Niño issue.
What's gonna happen to Atlantic hurricanes? That depends on El Niño. That's influenced by El Niño.
So there are a number of outstanding uncertainties.
The bottom line, though, is uncertainty is not a reason for inaction. It's not our friend.
If anything, it works against us.
It means that things could actually be worse in many respects than we think they are.
But would answers to any of those questions change the policy as directed by the Inhofe's and the Barton's
and the other folks who are driving the bus?
Sure, absolutely because if you take you think about that carefully, it's like hmm, you know, well those folks
are saying we can adapt to climate change.
As, you know, Susan and I were talking about before, the presidential science advisor has framed the problem,
I think, very effectively.
That the solution to how we're going to deal with climate change
is going to take the form of three possible solutions.
You know, mitigation, doing something about our escalating carbon emissions, adaptation, you know,
changing our way of doing things to try to reduce our vulnerability to the changes that are unfolding,
and suffering.
And it's up to us to decide how much of each we're going to do.
If you're putting all your marbles in the, you know, the adaptation bag, then you're relying on the notion
that we can indeed, you know, that with that we can reduce our vulnerability to the changes that are coming.
But how are we going to do that if we don't know exactly what's coming?
How are we going to do that if the changes are so great that they exceed any possible adaptive capacity that
we have as a society or that other living things have?
So, to the extent that there is uncertainty, and it really calls into question our ability to adapt
to some of the changes that might be in the pipeline.
Well, that leaves two options now. You've got suffering and you've got mitigation.
I'm gonna go with mitigation myself.
Thank you.
[Pause]
I agree with you that we need to do away with the fossil fuels and one way I think we can help is,
if you have the governor's ear, ask him and give him some advice to give back the $15,000 he received
from EQT, builder of the mountain valley pipeline and stop this fossil fuel boondoggle in its tracks.
[Applause]
I'm one of many, thanks for the comment.
I'm one of many that has a small part of the ear of the governor and through the work of
the Virginia Climate Commission these are important questions that we're asking and, you know,
there are a lot of stakeholders at the table as you might imagine and we have to find solutions that are gonna be
palatable to a broad group of stakeholders.
But these discussions are happening and have no, you know, you can be assured that all of the associated risks
are on the table. We're talking about that. I can't promise you what's gonna happen.
I don't have the ability to do that, but I can promise you that these concerns are being discussed
and they're being raised, so thank you.
[Pause]
So there are all sorts of deniers of various phenomena in the world, so I would love to hear your thoughts on
the differences in similarities of educating people about climate change as opposed to evolution
or even the Holocaust.
That's a good question. You know, you sometimes hear people say that denial in the context of climate change
is a reference to Holocaust denial, and it simply isn't.
It's a well-known term in psychology of just the rejection of evidence.
And so it's unfortunate that there is this meme out there that when we refer to climate change deniers
we're trying to draw an association with Holocaust deniers.
There's absolutely no evidence in any discussion I've ever had with any fellow scientists, if that that's the case,
that that's what we're getting at.
But you you raised another really interesting question:
What are the commonalities when you look at, for example, the rejection of evolution?
It's really a somewhat different group, different constituency.
There isn't an obvious vested interest in that particular debate. But there are, you know, very strongly held views.
Passionately held views by, you know, a large number of people.
And it is another example, like climate change denial, as we had a good discussion of this
at the workshop today.
When you dig just a little bit beneath the surface, what you often find is that it's not really about the science.
It's about the ideological underpinnings. If you believe that all regulation is bad and that's a view, you know,
that, you know, there are libertarians who are against all regulation.
If you think that dealing with climate change is gonna demand regulation of carbon emissions,
then the scientific evidence that we have a problem proves inconvenient because it forces you down
this road of confronting, you know, the fact that hey, we may need to regulate this thing
but I'm against regulation.
There's a, sort of, I think you sometimes see a cognitive dissonance there, that the only way around it is to
reject the evidence, to reject that the problem exists.
And I think that that so powerfully held beliefs in ideology, I think that you can see that in the climate
change case and you can see that, obviously, in the evolution versus intelligent design creationism debate.
Interestingly enough, a lot of the same sorts of tactics that were developed in the
evolution versus creationism debate are now being deployed in the climate change debate.
And there's a group called the National Center for Science Education that has fought efforts
to introduce the teaching of, you know, creationism into schools, public schools and they played a prominent role
in the Dover case in Pennsylvania a few years back.
In recent years, they decided to take on climate change as an additional issue because what they realized is a lot
of the same tactics, the anti-science tactics that had been deployed there were being deployed now
to confuse the discourse over climate change.
So there are definitely commonalities, but there are obvious differences as well.
Then, you know, we could have an interesting discussion about the debate over GMOs and, you know, vaccines.
In every one of these cases, there are commonalities, anti-science tends to have certain commonalities
regardless of where it comes from, but the specifics are often quite different.
And so we can learn a lot from studying the commonalities and the differences and
it's good to be thinking about these things and it's a great question.
[Pause]
I'm a student from Germany. I plan to attend a climate change conference in Paris later this year.
So what are you expectations regarding the new climate treaty and how do you see America
involved during the process?
Thanks. That's a great question. I'm optimistic. I'm very optimistic for a number of reasons.
You know, as I mentioned earlier, for the first year in modern history we saw a flat lining
of carbon emissions with economic growth, decoupling.
People said it couldn't be done. You can't have economic growth without growth in carbon emissions.
Well, we just saw it. And we had it. And it may very well be an indication that, you know, countries like Germany
and even, you know, states, the West Coast States, the New England states, that are engaging in efforts
to lower their carbon emissions.
We're already seeing, you know, a detectable influence so that gives me cause for optimism.
What also gives me cause for optimism is the fact that the two largest carbon emitters on the planet,
for the first time ever, China and the US came to an agreement last year, a historic agreement,
to meet a fairly stringent reductions in carbon emissions in the years ahead.
And some people have said, well, you know, how can?
That's pie-in-the-sky, how do we know that you know China's really gonna, you know, keep their word?
Well, if you look at what China is doing there's every indication that they're headed in that direction anyways.
They're investing a lot more in renewable energy, wind and solar, than we are right now.
They are already instituting carbon taxes at the regional level and they've committed to having
a national carbon tax within two years, so they're ahead of us by many measures.
And the fact that the US and China have come into an agreement, the two largest emitters,
to make substantive cuts in carbon emissions, I think that sends a critical signal to the rest of the world
as we go into the the UN summit later this year in Paris.
So I, for one, am fairly optimistic, but that doesn't mean that we rest on our laurels, that we relax,
that we become overconfident.
It just means we have to work all that much harder to make sure that we hold our policymakers
accountable, that we continue to move forward on this.
[Pause]
Thank you for coming Dr. Mann. I'm a president of Soil Science Association.
You know, something about geology, you know, something about soils.
We know that seasonal hot water tables are changing, we know that regulations affecting use of disposal
of stormwater or sewage are also on the change.
[Pause]
How does the public weigh the cost of regulating and impact when the regulator does not have to
disclose conflict of interest?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I think it's critical that in these discussions that certainly scientists should be
disclosing conflicts of interest when they publish scientific articles.
There was a recent controversy.
A scientist at the Smithsonian Center which is called the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics,
although it isn't actually part of Harvard, but it bares Harvard's imprimatur, its name.
And there was a scientist there, the name was Willie Soon, who was writing scientific papers, sort of,
trying to debunk the science of climate change.
And it turns out in some correspondence that were obtained about his funding, he was citing his
scientific papers as deliverables to fossil fuel interests.
The papers he was publishing in the scientific literature were listed, not as contributions to furthering our
scientific understanding, as deliverables to fossil fuel interests for the money they were providing him.
And there are very strict rules in science for disclosing those sorts of conflicts of interest.
It turns out he wasn't doing that and so that has led to somewhat of an uproar now over the issue of disclosure.
And I, my view, is that all scientists should be willing to disclose any conflicts of interest.
In Virginia, under the Administrative Process Act, Section 2 of the code, there's no requirement for
a public employee to disclose conflicts or for a subcontractor to a public board
and I think it's incredible that we haven't had this changed.
I agree with you. We should have total disclosure of those things and no scientist should be ashamed
of disclosing, you know, who's providing them funding.
I'm always happy to do that. I'm proud of who's providing me funding. Thank you.
[Applause]
Unfortunately, I have to cut us off because we actually have to be out of the Lyric, there's a film showing tonight.
There is going to be a very brief book signing in the lobby.
Michael's gonna meet with folks, but we do ask that you line up and he's not gonna be able to engage
in a whole lot of discussion because we've got to keep moving to get out of here.
Thanks everyone for coming out and please join me in thanking Michael Mann one more time.
[Applause]
[Outro music]