 Okay moving straight ahead our next speaker is Michael Mann His talk is called the hockey stick and the climate wars. That's also coincidentally the name of his book So please check that out. He is a distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State He's one of Scientific Americans 50 leading visionaries in science and technology You can tweet him or follow him at Michael E man Please do that because he likes to have lots of followers and his haiku is is it hot in here? Hold on a sec. Let me check Yes, it's hot in here Please welcome Michael man. Well, thanks very much. It's a real pleasure to be here at the amazing meeting I've long been a fan of James Randy and the efforts of the James Randy Foundation and the topic here of skepticism Is in fact particularly salient in the context of what I'm going to talk about here today as we all know Skepticism in science is essential in fact the previous Speaker mentioned Carl Sagan's book the demon haunted world and in the demon haunted world Sagan described skepticism as the self-correcting machinery of science Unfortunately too often in certain areas of science like climate science the area of science that I work in we often encounter Critics who attempt to wear the mantle of the skeptic, but in fact are nothing of the sort they reject mainstream scientific findings based on the flimsiest and most disingenuous of Arguments that don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny. That's not skepticism It's pseudo skepticism or contrarianism or in its most severe form denial Now I'm going to talk about my own story It's told also in my book which is the story of a high school science nerd Someone who majored in applied math and physics as an undergraduate and started out Graduate school in physics and then eventually found myself in the science of climate and climate change and because of a graphic That my co-authors and I published about 15 years ago now the so-called hockey stick graph I suddenly found myself a reluctant and accidental public figure in the larger debate about human-caused climate change And so I'm going to talk about my experiences and some of the lessons that I think have learned along the way The first point I want to make though is that the basic science of climate change is not controversial. It's relatively straightforward The Greenhouse effect the fact that certain gases in the atmosphere like carbon dioxide have a warming influence on the surface of the earth It's been known for nearly two centuries Joseph Fourier Knew that there was an atmospheric greenhouse effect and mostly we've been refining our understanding of the Various aspects of the science since then but we've known about this for nearly two centuries And it's also indisputable that we are raising the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere this graph was prepared a few years ago and it's already way out of date because you have to draw Another tick mark on the vertical axis. We've just crossed four hundred parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere now Earlier this year. We think we probably have to go back about four million years to find CO2 concentrations that were that high in the past and so we're engaged in a relatively unprecedented and uncontrolled experiment with the earth So that's really all you need to know The greenhouse effect is basic physics and chemistry. We've known about for nearly two centuries We are clearly increasing the concentrations of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere What we wouldn't be able to explain as climate scientists would be if the earth were not warming up as a result of that And of course it is the thermometer measurements that we have Tell us that the earth is warmed up already a little less than a degree Celsius Now the critics will sometimes try to convince you that the earth isn't warming and in doing so They often use a sleight of hand that I think would even impress the amazing Randy They'll take that peak in 1998. You'll see there's that big peak just a little bit before 2000 Where global temperatures spiked that was due to an extremely large El Nino event a natural event and obviously if you take that Peak at 1998 you decide to start your trend line there and you draw it over to 2004-2005 you can say well look there hasn't been any warming since then And of course, that's a disingenuous argument It's based on cherry picking the starting date and and that's sort of part and parcel to The various sorts of arguments that climate change contrarians often use but the globe is warming You know, there's no question about that. We wouldn't be able to explain it if it weren't And if you don't like the thermometer measurements, the critics will often tell you they don't believe the various thermometer measurements that we use to Estimate global temperatures. I could show you dozens of independent lines of evidence That tell us that the earth is warming up and that the climate is changing in much the way we expect it to now Climate models You'll often hear the critics say well, you know, human-caused climate change is all based on these untested models Well, that's doubly wrong and I'll explain why it's doubly wrong in a minute, but it's not based on models I just showed you the evidence for human-caused climate change is based on Simple physical principles we've known for nearly two centuries Irrefutable measurements that the concentrations of these gases these greenhouse gases are increasing and that the earth is warming up in response to that We do use climate models to test hypotheses after all we only have one earth and arguably we are playing an experiment with that one earth right now But if we want to test various hypotheses various what ifs we need to use some formalization of our understanding of the way this system works Which involves modeling the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere in the oceans and the ice sheets and the way they all interact and These climate models now As we all know it was once famously said by Niels Bohr that predictions are hard especially about the future And back in 1988 Three years before the Seinfeld show went on the air many of you will recognize the Seinfeld restaurant What you may not know is in the upper floors of this building in the upper west side of Manhattan Sits the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. I did a sabbatical there I used to go to the Seinfeld restaurant every day for work. It was sort of fun and back in 1988 three years before the Seinfeld show went on the air Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies was running climate models that by today's standards were actually quite primitive And he was making predictions and this is the prediction. He made back in 1988 You can see the thermometer records leading up to 1988 You see the warming he ran his climate model three different times And he projected it forward under three different possible scenarios of future fossil fuel burning After all he didn't know what we were gonna choose to do would we greatly accelerate our burning of fossil fuels? Would we? Decrease our burning of fossil fuels or somewhere in between what turns in turns out. We actually did somewhere in between So that's the prediction that Hansen made given the Fossil fuel burning scenario we have actually followed since and this is what the observations Actually did in that two decade period since his prediction. I would argue. That's a pretty good prediction Now if you're a critic you might say well, okay If these models are so great then how come they couldn't predict this huge signal in 1991 92 93 you see there was this big cooling and how was it that Hansen couldn't predict such a big signal? Well, he didn't know back in 1988 that in 1991 Mount Pinatubo would erupt and put large amounts of reflecting Particles in the stratosphere that cool the global climate for several years What he did know is that it takes about six months to nine months for that aerosol cloud to spread around the earth and Begin to have a cooling influence so he had time to do another climate model experiment And he predicted more or less the cooling that was actually observed in the ensuing years well, so there's the record of temperatures over the past century and One of the things we can do with the climate models is test different hypotheses the critics will sometimes tell you Well, how do we know that that warming is due to human activity? Maybe it's due to natural causes Well, we can take the climate model and we can put the natural causes in like those volcanic eruptions I just talked about like the small but measurable changes in solar output And when we put those into the climate models, that's what they predict The globe actually should have cooled in recent decades if it were primarily the natural factors that were at work it's only when we put in the impact of humans on the planet particularly the burning of fossil fuels and the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations that we can explain the warming that we've seen Well speaking of predictions, what about the future? What does the future hold? Well in part it depends on us If we were to curtail fossil fuel burning abruptly turns out the globe would continue to warm for about a century Just because of the inertia of the climate system But in that scenario we would probably warm less than another degree Celsius And if you see where we started on this scale we started out about negative one So plus one on the vertical axis represents a two degree Celsius warming about four three and a half degrees warming relative to pre-industrial time Many scientists who study the impacts of climate change tell you it's that two degrees see warming Where we start to see some of the most severe and potentially irreversible effects of climate change So if we were to stop burning fossil fuels right now we in most likelihood We would most likely avoid crossing that two degrees see threshold on the other hand if we continue with business as usual if we follow the historical trajectory forward as India and China and other developing nations come online with their fossil fuel economies Then we will probably see something closer to that red curve by the end of the century somewhere between three to four degrees relative to two thousand so four to five degrees Celsius warming of the globe relative to pre-industrial time Seven to nine degrees Fahrenheit warming more warming than that over land because land warms faster than the ocean Twice as much warming in the Arctic if you care about Arctic sea ice and polar bears and in that rare environment We will see we are seeing even faster changes take place there in that scenario as I alluded to The impacts would be quite large and in the words of James Hansen We would be leaving our children and grandchildren of fundamentally different planet It will not be the planet that we grow up on polar bear So you might ask and it's really a rhetorical question Why no action if the science is as clear if the impacts Potential impacts are this clear if the threat is this great. Why has there been no action and To explain that to answer that question we have to leave the domain of science and on to the domain of policy and politics and There is a very large and powerful infrastructure You know we are a society that in the words of former President George W. Bush is addicted to fossil fuels And there's a huge energy infrastructure based on our reliance on fossil fuels and understandably There are interests that profit from that Addiction to fossil fuels and they don't really want to see things change And back in 2002 is a very interesting memo that was leaked by a Republican pollster Frank Lutz And he was advising his clients essentially fossil fuel Interests that there was a closing window of opportunity that the public was becoming convinced that there is a scientific Consensus about human-caused climate change and if they were to become convinced they would demand that action be taken But he said there is a narrow window of opportunity still left to insert doubt and confusion into the discourse to fund Advocates and front groups and organizations whose sole purpose is to try to cloud the public understanding of the science and its implications Now if that sounds familiar to you It may be because it's exactly what the tobacco industry did some decades ago And it's what has often happened when the findings of science have collided with powerful vested interests And it leads us into the domain of anti science And so we have powerful politicians like the senior senator James Inhofe of the hottest state ever as of two summers ago Oklahoma became the hottest state ever And that summer James Inhofe Who has declared climate change to be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? Was set to give the keynote lecture at the annual conference in Washington, DC of the Heartland Institute It's their climate change denial conference, and he was their keynote speaker Unfortunately, he had to cancel out at the last minute He'd been swimming in a lake back in his home state of Oklahoma And it was suffering an algal bloom in response to the unprecedented heat and drought That was taking place and so he had to cancel out the last minute Well, okay, so how did I find myself in the center of this circus? And it is because of a graph that my colleagues and I published 15 years ago that attempted to estimate The surface temperature of the northern hemisphere where we have the most data a thousand years back in time You can see what the instrumental record looks like It suggests that the recent warming is unprecedented as far back as we can go And it got a name because of its shape it got called the hockey stick It was featured prominently in the summary for policy makers of the 2001 report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change It's the one part of the report that policy makers and the lay public tend to read and it became an icon in the climate change debate And as happens to icons in the climate change debate, they get fiercely attacked And so ever since I have been dealing with all sorts of attacks against our work Some of them led by fairly powerful politicians And it doesn't matter that you know 15 years later. There's no longer a hockey Stick, there's a hockey league. There are dozens of reconstructions that have been done using independent approaches Different types of data and they all come to the conclusion that the recent warming is Unprecedented as far back as we can go even farther back now And it turns out that isn't even the principal line of evidence for human-caused climate change I laid out that evidence in the first few minutes of this talk and it didn't involve hockey sticks or Hockey leagues, but because that graph became an icon Those looking to discredit the case for human-caused climate change did everything they could to try to bring that icon down Well, just a few months ago turns out there was a new study published the most comprehensive analysis of this sort ever performed I think it was 72 authors from 30 something different countries Or 30 something different institutions from 20 something different countries Using all of the data that's now available in the public domain and they perform their own reconstruction of temperatures over the past thousand years and beyond and really in a stunning development what they found was Well, actually they got the same answer that we had gotten 15 years ago. You can see the two compared there Well, in fact a few months ago another group attempted to reconstruct temperatures even further back And they found the abrupt warming of the past century potentially to be without precedent as far back as the entire period since the last ice age Now what gets interesting is if you plot the projected warming over the next century under business as usual fossil fuel emissions on this scale That's what you get. That's what we're looking at So as I've already alluded to we've seen that the science has become a politicized that there are organized Efforts to attack the science to undermine the science often by trying to discredit the individual scientists like myself Some call this a politicization of science. I think it's something worse. I think it's the Scientization of politics which is to say Science being used as a political football In our political discourse and if you don't like the facts as found by the US National Academy of Sciences or all of the scientific societies in the US That deal with the science of climate change in American chemical society American physical society American Geophysical Union and on and on 30 plus different societies or the National Academies of all the major industrial nations which are all on record Climate change is real. It's caused by us and it represents a threat if we don't do something about it if you don't like those facts Heck, there's a whole cable network for you That is willing to present an alternative reality where the laws of physics don't quite work the way we thought they did And I think that's pernicious and it's damaging to the discourse now So let's flash forward a few years back in 2005 Joe Barton The chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee And I'm sure it's a total coincidence. He was the largest recipient of fossil fuel money in the entire US House of Representatives And he decided to Send me a letter actually wasn't a letter. It was a subpoena He subpoenaed all of my personal emails and those of my two senior hockey stick paper Co-authors from our entire careers based on the fact that he had read a criticism of our work in that bastion of scientific accuracy the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and Use this as a justification for an open-ended fishing expedition demanding all of our emails again from my entire career looking Presumably for something to discredit us with now. This was before Joe Barton had really become a household name Which he did five years later with his infamous apology to BP Nicely captured here by Tom tolls the Washington Post cartoonist But this did get some attention back when he came after us not the sort of attention I think he was expecting Barton's efforts were denounced by scientific groups like the triple AS the American Geophysical Union the journal nature all Blasted what they saw as a transparent effort to intimidate scientists whose findings might be inconvenient to certain special interests That fund the campaigns of folks like Joe Barton New York Times Washington Post even the Houston Chronicle all editorialized Again really calling this out as a witch hunt as a harassment And it might not surprise you that someone like Henry Waxman Democrat from California who led the effort to bring the tobacco industry to justice Decades ago would come out and defend us against Joe Barton the attack of Joe Barton But what you might find surprising was that the biggest hero turned out to be a fellow Republican It was Sherwood Bullard the chair of the House Science Committee an old-school pro science Republican who did not like at all what his fellow Republican Joe Barton was doing and Called him out in far harsher terms than even the Democrats stopping just short of really calling this modern-day McCarthyism And he wasn't the only prominent Republican those of you who live in Vegas might recognize This guy from the state to the south John McCain wrote an op-ed In the Chronicle of Higher Education where he said the message sent by the congressional committee to the three scientists Me and my two co-authors was not subtle publish politically unpalatable scientific results embrace yourself for political retribution blah blah blah blah blah It represents a kind of intimidation which threatens the relationship between science and public policy that behavior must not be tolerated It's almost unprecedented to see those sorts of words used by one fellow Republican against another in such a public setting And so it it's important to recognize that this issue was not a partisan political issue at least to some prominent Politicians some years ago, and it's really unfortunate that it has now become Almost a litmus test for one of the two major parties to deny the basic science of climate change and evolution for that matter now I haven't said anything yet So Some years later More recently back in 2009 in the lead up to the Copenhagen summit of December 2009, and I'm sure that was a total coincidence Suddenly there was this manufactured scandal and it appeared in sort of the right-wing media And eventually into the mainstream media it got labeled climate gate It was based on thousands of emails between various climate scientists including those between me and Colleagues of mine that had been stolen and individual words and phrases had been taken from those emails and used and Put up on the TV screens and used to try to make it sound like scientists were fudging the data Like scientists were engaged in some sort of impropriety the delegate from Saudi Arabia at Copenhagen said that these stolen emails demonstrated that climate change is Not real and it will fundamentally prevent any possibility of progress Here in Copenhagen something to that effect and Sarah Palin at the time wrote an op-ed where she sort of repeated a lot of the myths One of them involved the fact that a scientist had used the word trick in one of their emails It was an email that I received And clearly our detractors said Scientists were trying to play a trick on the public when you know this audience most of you are familiar with the lexicon of math And science we use tricks all the time to solve problems difficult problems It's a clever approach to solving a vexing problem But to our detractors it revealed that the entire science of climate change was just a trick to fool the public Well, I wrote my own op-ed in the Washington Post nine days later Where I pointed out many of the mistakes that Sarah Palin had made in her Op-ed and it seems to have actually had an impact even on Sarah Palin herself just a couple years ago She admitted that a lot of those emails obviously weren't meant for public consumption and that they could be misinterpreted of taken out of context Of course, she was talking about her own emails that had been revealed Released in response to a freedom of information act request from her time as governor of Alaska It didn't stop there James Inhofe who you'll all remember had a list put together a list It wasn't 57 climate scientists like the movie the Manchurian candidate But he did come up with 17 climate scientists who should be prosecuted For perpetrating the hoax of climate change as revealed by these stolen emails I'm proud to say I was one of those 17 Along with Susan Solomon the recipient of the National Medal of Science a few years back It didn't stop there Ken Cuccinelli that spring the newly minted Tea Party Attorney General of Virginia was now running for a For a governor of Virginia and I've been campaigning for his opponent In his first act as governor he oh I'm sorry. This is the wrong graphic His first act of governor was actually to try to censor the state seal of Virginia so that it no longer exposed a certain part of the Anatomy of the Roman goddess of vortice It was his second act as Attorney General to take a page from the Joe Barton playbook and use his authority as Attorney General to demand all of my personal emails from my time at the University of Virginia From 1998 to 2005 Using a civil subpoena that is reserved for ferreting out state waste and fraud and Since his argument held I was involved in the fraudulent science of climate change This was a perfectly appropriate application of the civil investigative demand Other people didn't see it that way the Union of Concerned Scientists AUP ACLU even the conservative group fire all came out Blasting what they saw as an effort once again to intimidate scientists whose findings might be inconvenient to the vested interests that fund Mr. Cuccinelli's campaigns and Whether you're a progressive or a conservative and in the case of fire. It's a conservative public interest group They saw it as a threat regardless of your politics the idea that an attorney general a rogue attorney general could go after any Scientists whose findings he didn't like that's chilling to to science and to academics regardless of what your politics might be And so there was a petition of 800 scientists and academics from the state of Virginia denouncing his attacks triple AS National Center for Atmospheric Research the American Mereological Society Nature once again all calling this out even the conservative Richmond Times dispatch which had endorsed mr. Cuccinelli's candidacy Use some of the harshest words to denounce his attack against us Washington Post published no less than five editorials Denouncing Cuccinelli's witch hunt as they called it and even Their award-winning cartoonist Tom tolls could not resist commenting on the matter I have to say this is my personal favorite It's Cuccinelli up in the judges chair with the UVA climate case And you I'll be wanting to see your emails too to pour mr. Galileo down there on the bottom I have to admit. I don't mind being compared to Galileo in that way so Cuccinelli's Sapina was quashed by the lower court really on a technicality In the 40-page filing that Cuccinelli had made to the court He had forgotten to provide evidence of any wrongdoing on my part The judge rejected it Wait Wait, we're not done. It was obviously appealed to the state Supreme Court Which rejected the case with prejudice Meaning they really don't want to see him ever come back to the court with something like that again But that wasn't the end of the battle as Republicans Remained poise to retake control of the US House of Representatives They very clearly telegraphed what they were going to do one of the first things they were going to do was use their authority To hold a whole new set of witch Show trials putting climate scientists like myself in the hot seat denouncing us attacking us discrediting us And I think they would have gone through with it if it were not for the fact that members of their own party once again Sherwood Bollert who may remember From earlier now Unfortunately retired He was going to face a challenge from a primary opponent funded by Largely by a pair of brothers from Kansas and so he decided Not to run for reelection But as a pillar of the Republican Party, he was still Making his views known and he wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post where he warned his fellow Republicans his party That if they chose to go down this road They would risk forever being the party of anti science and they better not go down that road And it turns out they didn't hold those show trials in the end And I like to think it was because of people like Sherwood Bollert members of their own party who reminded them that science should not be a political partisan issue and Sort of emphasizing that as this quote from Edmund Burke Which really should say all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men and women do nothing? And I think you can see that in my own story that there were politicians of conscience on both sides of the aisle That came forward when they saw Science scientists and and science itself under attack in this way Well, so what does that mean it gives me some optimism? I'm optimism that we will meet the challenge and what do we do need to do to meet the challenge. Well, you know There's a worthy debate to be had about how we go about Solving the climate change problem how we go about Stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations how we incentivize the shift away from fossil fuel burning that will be necessary To stabilize the climate and there is room at the table for conservative views and progressive views There are there's a group of conservative Republicans now That rather than rejecting the science are embracing the science and saying we can find a free market solution to dealing with this problem And I think that's great I think that's a worthy debate to be having what isn't a worthy debate to be having is whether or not the problem even exists And let me finally end on a somewhat personal note because climate change is often framed as a problem of science or economics cost-benefit analysis Or politics policy and politics, but not often enough in my view is it framed as what it truly is It's a problem of ethics and in particular to me intergenerational ethics now This is my daughter and she's walking underneath a polar bear and no I'm not torturing my daughter here At the Pittsburgh zoo they have a plexiglass tunnel where you can go underneath the polar bear feeding pool And if you happen to be involved in an NSF funded project to develop a climate change outreach program for zoos and aquarium You know the manager of the zoo you might be able to get them to throw the fish in the pool when your daughter is walking underneath Which is what's happening here But on a on a more serious note You know, I'd hate to think that my daughter would return to this zoo decades from now with her children maybe even her grandchildren and Point to you know these magnificent creatures and talk about how they used to exist in the wild But we literally melted their home And so now this is the only place they can be found and that's of course symptomatic from a much larger array a very damaging effects we'll see whether it's water food National security the economy if we continue on this course that we're on and so fundamentally It's a question about what sort of world do we want to leave behind for our children and grandchildren? Thank you very much Yes, indeed