 My name is Michael Mann. I'm Distinguished Professor of Meteorology and Director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, and I'm a climate scientist. I study the science of climate variability and climate change. Yeah, so back in the late 90s when we published these climate reconstructions, we used proxy data. These are things like tree rings and ice cores and corals and sediments, various natural archives, physical or chemical or biological archives that tell us something about climate conditions in the distant past. Farther back then we have reliable instrumental measurements. We really only have widespread thermometer measurements around the globe for a little over a century, but we can extend these records further back in time by using these so-called proxy data. And so back in the late 1990s my co-authors and I sought to reconstruct the surface temperature record back in time, hundreds of years back in time, using these proxy data. Now what actually drove the research was our interest in the underlying patterns of past temperature variation. What was the history of El Nino in the past and its large-scale influence on the climate? What was the pattern around the world of the response to some of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past thousand years? These were actually the questions that drove that research and primarily an interest in natural climate variability, using these long-term records to reconstruct the history of natural climate variability in the distant past. But when we published the results we began to realize that they had implications not just for natural climate variability, but for this now very contentious and even back then contentious issue of human-caused climate change. These reconstructions of temperatures in the past allowed us to put the modern warming in a long-term context. And what the work showed was that the recent warming, the warming spike of the past century, really has no precedent as far back as we were able to go a thousand years in our publication in 1999. More recent studies have actually pushed that conclusion back even further. There's tentative evidence that the warming spike we're seeing now is unprecedented over at least the last nearly 12,000 years and maybe longer. But at the time this was really the first study to definitively conclude that the recent warming really is unusual in a long-term context. It wasn't the first study to conclude that we were seeing the impacts of human-caused climate change. There was work in the mid-1990s based on pattern matching between climate models and climate observations, showing that the patterns matched only when you accounted for the human influence of increasing greenhouse gases. That was sort of the primary basis for the consensus that emerged in the mid-1990s that human-caused climate change was here. It was detectable. But our work that led to the so-called hockey stick, a curve that showed that this modern warming spike was unprecedented over the past thousand years, I think was a more visual depiction of how unusual the changes we're seeing right now in the climate really are. Now if you look at that curve, what it shows is that the modern warming spike is unprecedented as far back as we could go a thousand years in our 1990s studies. But there were some temperature changes along the way. And there was a period of about a thousand years ago where temperatures over the northern hemisphere were relatively warm. And then temperatures cool as you slowly descend into what's sometimes called the little ice age of sort of the 1300s through the 1800s. And so you have this long-term cooling from the medieval climate period into the little ice age of the 17th, 18th, 19th century, followed by this abrupt spike which takes you outside of the range of any of that previous variation. Now when it comes to the medieval period, it used to be widely claimed that global temperatures were warmer than they are today. The evidence that we have now does not bear that out. But what it shows is that there are some regions where temperatures were quite a bit warmer. The pattern of warming and cooling around the globe isn't uniform. There is a lot of sort of redistribution of heat around the globe associated with changing ocean currents, associated with changing atmospheric wind patterns. And so when you look back in time, there's a very complex regionally diverse pattern of temperature changes. And what we find is that in certain regions in the North Atlantic and parts of Greenland, during the height of this sort of medieval climate period, may have been almost as warm as conditions today, if not even warmer, within the uncertainties perhaps even warmer. But most of the globe was substantially cooler. And when you average over the globe or over the Northern Hemisphere, what you find was that temperatures then are not nearly as high as they are today because what's different is the sort of coherent pattern of the warming. The warming period we're seeing now isn't just a patchwork of warming in some regions interspersed with cooling in others. Essentially, the entire globe is warming up in unison and we don't see that in the past record. If the medieval period turned out to be significantly warmer than the science seems to be telling us that it is, it could be one of two different things. It could mean that the climate is much more sensitive to the relatively small driving factors that existed before the human influence, relatively small variations in the output of the sun, volcanic eruptions that cool the planet for several years, if they're large explosive eruptions. They're very small but steady changes over the past thousand years in the orbital geometry of the earth relative to the sun. That changes very prominently on tens of thousands of year time scales but it changes a little bit over a thousand year time scale. So there are a number of these different factors, these natural factors that we know have been driving the climate for at least a thousand years prior to the industrial revolution and the interval of human domination on climate. It could mean that the climate is much more sensitive to these natural factors and if that's true it would imply that the climate is actually more sensitive to CO2 concentrations than we currently think it is. So ironically, when it comes to contrarians, climate change deniers who will a, wrongly claim that the medieval period was warmer than today because the science seems to definitively say otherwise now but even granting them that if that were true and they say, and because that's true it means that the warming today could be natural too. Well in fact we have a pretty good idea of what the natural driving factors were during the medieval period, volcanoes, changes in solar output, small changes, long term changes in earth orbital, the geometry of the earth's orbit around the sun. If the climate really were far more sensitive to these natural factors it would imply that it's more sensitive to CO2 increases. It would imply just the opposite of what the skeptics or contrarians or deniers of climate want you to think. It would potentially imply that climate change is a worse problem than the models currently say it is. Now it could also mean that there's a lot more internal natural variability. There's natural variability that we call external because it's driven by specific factors like changes in solar output or volcanic eruptions but there's also natural variability of the climate that's just a result of the chaotic internal oscillatory behavior of the climate. We see it on year-to-year time scales in the form of the El Nino phenomenon. It's just a natural oscillation. On day-to-day time scales it's what we call weather. It's just a natural oscillation. It's not driven by anything specifically. And so the climate is like that on longer time scales as well. There is some internal variability. The climate sort of sloshes around on its own because of changing ocean currents and changing wind patterns and we've done quite a bit of work on that and what we've found is that in fact the internal variability of the climate based on all of the model simulations of what that variability is based on analysis of the data that are available the internal variability of the climate is not nearly large enough to produce anything close to the warming that we have seen this last century and internal variability would probably not be a good candidate if you were trying to explain anomalous warmth a thousand years ago. Of course the fact is that we don't think the warmth at the global scale a thousand years ago was anomalous. We're fairly confident now that it was not as warm then averaging over the globe or averaging over the northern hemisphere as temperatures are today and we do see the fingerprint of human influence in the warming we see today. So it's always been somewhat ironic to me that our work, our 1998 work and our follow-up work the only thing that people really focused on was this one single time series the so-called hockey stick the average temperature over the entire northern hemisphere and as I've always said to me that was the most it was the least interesting aspect of the reconstructions because it averages over a lot of interesting regional detail what actually drove the work in the first place was an effort to understand what the patterns of temperature around the world were in the past what were the patterns of past El Nino events and what influence did they have on climate around the world what was the pattern of the response of the climate to some of the very large volcanic eruptions much larger than anything that's documented in the modern historical record what did the climate response to the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 what did that look like and what can it tell us about the dynamics of the climate and how they respond to something like a major volcanic eruption those were the sorts of questions that I thought were most interesting and that we were able to address with these reconstructions the least scientifically interesting thing was this single time series the hockey stick curve but of course that's what got all of the public attention because of its implications for human caused climate change and because it was a simple digestible curve you would think that if this debate were really driven by facts and logic you wouldn't have people still continuing to try to claim that the hockey stick curve is broken or discredited you hear various allegations of that sort if you go to climate change denier blogs that live sort of an alternative universe that's free of the actual scientific facts when it comes to climate change in reality the study after study has not only reaffirmed our key conclusion about the unusual nature of the recent warming more recent work has strengthened and extended those conclusions the most recent report of the IPCC concluded that the recent warming is unprecedented not just in a thousand years as we concluded a decade and a half ago but at least 1300 years and maybe even longer but we can only go back about 1300 years with reasonable confidence given the available data I sometimes refer to what exists now when it comes to these paleoclimate reconstructions as not a hockey stick but a hockey league because there are dozens of these reconstructions and they don't all agree on all of the details what was the coldest part of the Little Ice Age and what was the precise pattern of the medieval climate period different studies come to different conclusions because they use different kinds of data different methods to take those data and form a climate reconstruction but the one thing they all agree on is that the recent warming has no precedent as far back as we can go and in fact if you look at the most prominent and comprehensive study of this sort that was published about a year and a half ago it was a study published by the so-called Pages 2K Project this is a team of nearly 80 scientists around the world using the most comprehensive data set of paleoclimate proxy records ever assembled for this sort of work and they did their own reconstruction and it turns out when you lay it on top of the original hockey stick the two curves are almost indistinguishable so a decade and a half later using far more sophisticated methods than the methods we used using far more comprehensive and widespread proxy data than the data we used a decade and a half ago that work comes to remarkably similar conclusions and that's how science works science advances you don't stay frozen 15 years ago the hockey stick doesn't remain our best estimate of temperature changes over the past thousand years if it did that would be a sad commentary on the lack of progress in our field necessarily the field has moved forward has produced even more comprehensive reconstructions has reduced the uncertainties has brought more sophisticated methods to the table to perform these sorts of reconstructions and there's been a lot of really interesting work now comparing those reconstructions with model simulations to see what these paleoclimate reconstructions can tell us about our future we can use them in a way to validate the models to test the extent to which the models have the right level of what we call sensitivity to the driving factors and to the extent we can convince ourselves that they do it gives us more confidence that they have the right sensitivity when it comes to the impact of increasing CO2 concentrations due to human activity we used a fairly simple regression approach in our original work and linear regression is a perfectly sound and appropriate statistical technique but it has some limitations and there are more sophisticated methods statistical approaches that can actually alleviate some of the weaknesses present in ordinary linear regression and so much of that additional work some of the criticisms of our work had to do with again the legitimate criticisms of our work had to do with potential weaknesses in that method and possible improvements on that methodology and we have taken part ourselves in publishing more sophisticated methodologies interestingly enough even using the most sophisticated methodologies and the most widespread paleoclimate proxy data the Pages 2K team that published this most comprehensive reconstruction of temperatures over the past thousand years ago a year and a half ago in the journal Nature Geoscience their curve lies almost precisely on top of our original curve so one might speculate that even though we didn't use the most sophisticated methods that one might use for this sort of problem the basic result appears to have been pretty robust now there have also been some papers that have sort of what I would say slipped through the peer review process they were published in dubious journals like the journal Energy and Environment which is edited by somebody who claims that her editorial decision making is driven by her political ideology so she published a paper by some non-scientists from Canada one of whom was pretty closely allied with energy interests, special interests and they made a number of really false claims about our work all of which have now been discredited in fact in the peer reviewed literature in the real peer reviewed literature journals like the AGU journals and Nature and Science the hockey stick graph has become a lightning rod with climate change deniers because it's iconic it's been featured prominently in the summary for policy makers of the third assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change it has become a symbol of climate change and so the critics and the industry funded attack dogs look for iconic images things that they can try to bring down and then claim that the entire fabric of the underlying science has somehow been undermined so there's this tendency for example to try to say well you know our entire understanding of climate change our reason for accepting the existence of climate change is all based on a single 15 year old study by Mike Mann when in fact you could get rid of the hockey stick or the dozens of independent reconstructions that come to the same conclusion as the hockey stick you could throw all of that aside and there would still be many independent lines of evidence that tell us that the globe is warming the climate is changing it's duty human activity and it's a problem if we don't do something about it but if you can take one single image and try to convince the public that our entire scientific understanding hinges upon that one image then it becomes very easy to set up the straw man where you undermine you attack the hockey stick often by attacking the scientists themselves myself and my colleagues I'm trying to undermine their credibility trying to question their integrity and so it gets quite nasty and it's all part of a cynical effort to set up this straw man depiction of the science where it somehow depends completely on one 15 year old study it's sort of like those who attack the science of evolution proponents of intelligent design they like to call it Darwinism they like to call evolution Darwinism because then it makes it about one person one person whom you can try to vilify and attack and pretend that the entire basis for the science has collapsed because you were able to somehow undermine the public's faith in that one individual but typically the attacks are not really about the science the attack on the science is a proxy for what is really an effort to discredit science that may prove inconvenient for certain special interests people who for example feel that there's no role for regulation regulation is a bad thing well you know if you accept what the science has to say about human caused climate change then there will need to be regulation we will need to be doing something about our escalating carbon emissions and there are people who don't like that there are powerful special interests who don't like that and so in trying to prevent the sort of prospect for regulation of carbon emissions they try to discredit the case for concern they try to discredit the science they try to kill the messenger often it takes the form of an attack on individual scientists there's part of the strategy of ad hominem attack when you can't win the legitimate argument and make no mistake about it the critics can't win the legitimate argument because the science is overwhelming there's an overwhelming consensus of the world scientists that global warming is happening climate change is happening and it will get much worse and much more costly if we do nothing about it that's not just my view that's not just the view of random scientists that you might run into at a scientific conference it's the view of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences it's the view of every national academy of every industrial nation it's the view of every scientific society in the U.S. that has weighed in on the matter of climate change so faced with that overwhelming consensus overwhelming scientific evidence those who are looking to forestall legislation, policies to deal with climate change have decided their only hope is to somehow convince the public that despite that overwhelming scientific consensus there's still too much uncertainty to act of course there's further irony to that in the sense that if you talk to economists that the uncertainty climate change impacts they will tell you that uncertainty is actually a reason to act sooner because uncertainty can break in both directions and increasingly it looks like the uncertainties are resolving themselves in the direction of the problem being even worse than we initially thought one of the tactics that you see in sort of climate change denialism is an effort to spin and misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific studies often studies that say one thing for example show that some aspect of climate change is even worse than we thought will somehow be spun by climate change deniers as if it doesn't provide evidence for concern they will often gang up on authors they will bully editors to try to get them to retract articles that are a threat to their case their case being that climate change isn't real it's not something to worry about so if you're a prominent scientist if you participate in the public discourse as I've often said you better develop a thick skin because you will be attacked personally you will be attacked often in very mean and nasty ways because you are a threat you and your science and your message are a threat to some very powerful special interests and so what they do is they hire a cadre of sort of attack dogs and those attack dogs are able to sort of fan the flames of irrationality and hatred among a much larger sort of base a much larger group of individuals who are out there and believe what they're being told that climate scientists are in it for the money that this is all part of a campaign to instill a one world government to take away your freedom and liberty there are people who fall for that people who have difficulties or facing challenges in their lives and sometimes they're looking for a scapegoat and there are more than enough professional attack dogs who are out there trying to convince them that their enemy is these climate scientists who are showing that climate change is a problem so in this effort to discredit climate science in the lead up to the 2009 Copenhagen summit where various emails including emails that were mine or were written to me were stolen and then combed through to try to find words and phrases that if you took them out of context could sound a little questionable could be used to try to make it sound like climate scientists were engaged in something inappropriate and so that's what climate change deniers did they combed through thousands of emails looking for even just one little short phrase that they could use to try to attack climate scientists and one phrase that they seized upon was an email to me and some other scientists from my colleague Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia where he referred to a trick that he used in this graph that he was preparing and as all scientists and mathematicians know a trick is a term that's used to describe a clever solution to a problem and here's the trick to solving that problem or this is a trick of the trade we even use it that way in some of our sort of popular lingo as well and what he was referring to was just a clever way to compare these paleoclimate temperature reconstructions that go back a thousand years with the modern warming shown in the instrumental record because the paleoclimate data actually don't come up to the present because many of them, many of these corals and tree rings were obtained back in the 1970s or the 1980s and so they don't come up to the present so if you want a complete depiction of what's happening you wouldn't stop at 1980 you would also show what we know happened since 1980 because we do have thermometer records since 1980 and so that's what he was doing finding a way to show both pieces of information together so that you got the whole picture this was for the cover of a government report it was for non-experts so he wanted to simplify this as much as possible so that to an uninformed reader it would convey in a simple way what we know about long-term temperature changes and so he was just referring to something that was completely legitimate and in fact the journal Nature even commented on this after the stolen emails and after professional industry-funded climate change deniers were busy using this to try to malign the entire science of climate going into the Copenhagen Climate Summit as all that was going on the journal arguably the most distinguished scientific journal in the world the journal Nature with a very austere, very conservative editorial board weighed in quite definitively and passionately about how climate change deniers were intentionally misrepresenting scientists by implying that the use of the word trick was in any way nefarious it was very clear by the context that what they were talking about was something that was completely appropriate but that's sort of what you have when you're left without a legitimate argument for your case which is where we have what we have in the case of climate change denial today all you've got to turn to apparently is innuendo and obfuscation and misdirection and this was just another example of that what the critics also tried to do is to take two different phrases from the same email that appear at opposite ends of a very long sentence and splice them together so you actually heard people there were people out there claiming that the email talked about using a trick to hide the decline using Mike's trick to hide the decline the email doesn't say anything of this sort the hide the decline is referring to something else later in the sentence what Phil Jones was talking about was that one particular climate reconstruction that was shown in his comparison that had been performed by Keith Briffa and colleagues at the University of East Anglia they had used density the density of the rings of trees so you can use tree ring growth thicknesses tell you something about climate but it turns out that if you look at the density of the wood that grows in any particular year that also tells you something about temperature and so they had performed a reconstruction of temperatures using exclusively these tree ring density measurements and for various reasons that have been explored for now nearly two decades these particular measurements track temperatures very well until about 1960 and then they began to diverge the thermometer measurements tell us very clearly that the globe warmed substantially since then but the tree ring data stopped the tree ring densities that they used stopped sort of reflecting that warming and at the time in fact before that email ever was written they had published a year earlier a paper in the journal Nature talking about this problem it was hardly something that was hidden or nefarious they were well aware of this problem and they stated very clearly in that paper in 1998 that because of this problem you should not use the post 1960 data to depict temperature changes and so what Phil Jones was talking about that email was he was hiding all he meant was not misleading the readers of this report by showing them this very misleading post 1960 tree ring density data because they wrongly convey what was actually happening with temperatures and we have thermometer measurements that tell us what actually happened with temperatures so he was literally saying for this simple graphic that's supposed to convey to this lay audience what we know about temperatures over the past thousand years let's not show this bad data that will confuse them and mislead them but somehow that was parlayed once again into something nefarious something inappropriate by very cynical bad faith actors who were using this misdirection and confusion really as a distraction to make sure that there were no meaningful negotiations and dealing with climate change at the upcoming Copenhagen summit in 2009 so you really need to distinguish in science between the legitimate give and take legitimate criticism which is a critical thing in science it's part of the self correcting machinery that sort of keeps science on a path towards a better understanding towards scientific truth and so we rely on real skepticism and that takes the form in the peer-reviewed literature you publish a paper it's got to be reviewed it goes to several experts typically anonymously in the field who will determine whether or not you've made your case and if they determine you have it gets published but it doesn't stop there because some other scientists may see that paper they may disagree with the conclusions they may disagree with the method that was used or the data was used and they may publish a response a follow-up work and you may publish a reply to that trying to put the work you had done in that additional context and so that's sort of the legitimate give and take that occurs in science it occurs in the peer-reviewed scientific literature it occurs at scientific meetings like the one that we're at where scientists present their findings and then members of the audience can ask them questions about that work, about their work and you have to distinguish between that that legitimate give and take and it can sometimes be contentious it can be very contentious my good friend and sadly no longer with us colleague Steve Schneider once characterized science as a full contact sport and that's not a bad description sometimes our detractors will tell you well this is just a love fest all we're trying to do is reaffirm each other's work demonstrating that global warming is real because that's what brings all the grant money coming in nothing could be farther from the truth the way you get ahead in science is by distinguishing yourself from everyone else by finding something new by showing that everyone else was wrong that's how you really make a name for yourself in science the incentives are precisely the opposite of what our detractors would claim so let's distinguish between that that's all good and it's really important and what I would call bad faith sort of attacks on science which you know have a different nature to them typically they're not published in the peer reviewed literature they're published on blogs and they're not published by scientists with expertise in the field they're published by typically you know often people with an axe to grind people who have an ideological view that the regulation of carbon emissions is a bad thing and so we have to disprove the scientific reason for it and we do that by going after scientists typically in those sorts of attacks rather than the reasoned argumentation that you would see in a peer reviewed publication or in a scientific lecture you'll be subject to rhetorical approaches to you know confusing the audience to mudding the waters rather than the sort of the scientific work being specifically criticized typically you'll find the criticism to be ad hominem you know this is a bad person he or she is a mean person we can't trust this person and so in the case of the hockey stick we have seen both there have been legitimate sort of critiques that we've responded to we have critiqued our own work and the field has moved well beyond where it was and so we have been active participants in the effort to move beyond our original work and to even in some cases clarify the caveats and weaknesses in some of our original work as we move forward and as other scientists move forward and that's how science moves forward and you know we're now in a stronger position with the most recent IPCC report the IPCC expressed even greater confidence now in many different studies many of them even more comprehensive that the recent warming that we are seeing really is unprecedented as far back not just a thousand years probably 1300 years at least and maybe even further so that's all sort of legitimate you know progress scientific progress give and take and it's involved criticism and criticisms we've replied to criticisms we've made of other scientists and replies and that all has helped the science move forward and it's a good thing but you know the bad faith attacks by people driven by ideology by politicians in the pay of fossil fuel interests by industry funded front groups and their attack dogs the attacks like you know of that sort aimed at discrediting me as a person or discrediting my co-authors or questioning the integrity of me my colleagues or even the entire climate science community there's no place for that in legitimate scientific discourse and you know sadly I have had to deal with that as well yes in my book the hockey stick and the climate wars I coined a term the serengeti strategy and it harkens back to an experience that I had when I was working on the third assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change back in the late 1990s and I was at a conference towards the latter stages of the writing of the report in Arusha Tanzania where we went on safari once we were done with the scientific work we were there to do we took a half day safari into the serengeti plane in one of those you know buggies that allows you to really you know drive through the wilderness and get up close and personal with you know magnificent animals like lions and zebras and giraffes hyenas and one of the scenes that I saw on that day was this sort of wall of zebras standing back to back and forming an almost continual wall of stripes and our tour guide explained that what they were doing was creating this seamless sort of continuous pattern that is unidentifiable as a zebra and it's a way of protecting yourself against attack you stay with the pack you blend into the pack the zebras you know those zebras are safe the lions won't see them and they won't pursue them it's going to be those zebras who stray from the pack who find themselves out alone who are going to be vulnerable to attack by the lions and so I used that analogy in my book to describe the phenomenon whereby professional climate change deniers industry funded attack dogs and the facilitators will look for individual scientists who have been separated by the pack who have published a very prominent study and are getting a lot of focus and attention and they'll go after them and they'll try to bring them down just like the lions try to bring that zebra down to intimidate them to try to send a message to stop doing what you're doing stop trying to communicate your research and the implications of your research to the public because it's a threat to the fossil fuel interests and it's to send a message to other would-be science communicators that if you do this you too. It's an insidious strategy that is used in the larger campaign to deny climate change I personally have been subject to all sorts of attacks from nasty letters and emails not just calling me bad names but making thinly veiled threats against my safety, against my life making thinly veiled threats to my family I have received letters in the mail that in one case contained a white powder that I had to actually report to the FBI they had to come to my office and investigate this and send this off to a lab to make sure that it wasn't anthrax or some very dangerous substance that my entire department would have been subject to because of this I have been called every name in the book I have had industry funded front groups try to pressure my university to fire me I have had very powerful politicians senators and committee chairs in the House of Representatives lead what leading newspapers like the Washington Post and the New York Times called a witch hunt aimed directly at me demanding all of my personal emails so that they could comb through them and try to find something to attack me with to discredit me with I had run in with the attorney general the previous attorney general of Virginia who was what is sometimes called a tea party Republican extremely conservative Republican who was driven by a fairly radical ideology he tried to use a civil subpoena which is something that is available to the attorney general to deal with Medicare fraud and he argued that it was perfectly appropriate for him to use this to demand all of my personal emails from the time that I was at the University of Virginia because I was working on the science of climate change and he considered that to be fraudulent well it was shot down by the courts first the lower court he appealed it to the state supreme court which rejected the case with prejudice meaning they really never want to see an attorney general come to them with something like this again but you know so in each of these cases in the end I've prevailed in these battles but it takes a lot of time and effort and legal support and I think that's the intent I think the intent is to distract me to keep me busy dealing with other issues and challenges so that I'm not able to do the science that I love doing so that I'm not able to be out there communicating the science and its implications to the public fortunately I've found a way to do those things well still sort of dealing with these additional challenges that I face at the center of this campaign to discredit me as a means of discrediting the science of climate change a very cynical campaign I might add in my case the strategy the deployment of the Serengeti strategy against me by climate change deniers using tactics like trying to pressure my university to fire me for various imagined indiscretions invented indiscretions that is part and parcel to a fairly widespread and coordinated effort by special interests, industry special interests and the various attack dogs and front groups that they fund who are out there harassing any climate scientist now who speaks up, who plays a prominent role in the larger discourse over climate change they'll find themselves subject to Freedom of Information Act requests to complaints to their universities they will in one case I have had a fossil fuel industry front group take out an advertisement in our school newspaper attacking me so they're really willing to stoop to the lowest and dirtiest of tactics in their Machiavellian effort to try to cast doubt and confusion in the public mindset over the issue of human caused climate change fortunately I've a lot of support over the years in response to the attacks I've been subject to various public policy and science organizations have often come to my defense have provided me pro bono legal representation when I've been subject to subpoenas from congresspeople from senators I've been fortunate in that my case has been so high profile that people have come out of the woodwork to help and that's been really important to me help from the outside community help from members of the scientific community from members of my own university the support that I get from people who just follow this and send me emails and letters thanking me for fighting back against this disinformation effort so I've received a lot of support and again my case is pretty high profile what I'm concerned about more concerned about is the fact that there are now many younger scientists out there who are doing research on climate change and when they publish a paper that gets a lot of attention they're finding themselves subject to these orchestrated attacks in many cases they're just graduate students they have absolutely no experience in dealing with this sort of issue and unfortunately you can't always trust that your university legal counsel will be there to represent you in many cases universities will take the path of least resistance and they will give in to these attacks and sometimes throw students and faculty under the bus so if you find yourself in that situation it's critical that you find independent support independent legal counsel independent advice fortunately because of the history of concerted attacks against climate scientists over the last decade or so there are many groups and organizations that have come into being that are out there to help scientists deal with these challenges the union of concerned scientists does a lot of work helping younger scientists cope with the challenges that they find themselves subject to in controversial areas societally controversial areas of science like climate change there are groups now like the climate science legal defense fund which are there to provide legal support to scientists who find themselves subject to freedom of information act requests they don't know what their rights are they can't necessarily trust that their university won't just do the easy thing and turn over all their emails it's really critical that they have independent counsel available to advise them and now there exists that infrastructure because you know the scientific community I think recognizes collectively that it's under attack and it's rising to the occasion it's now fighting back in the form of creating infrastructure for scientists who find themselves attacked and challenged in this way training young scientists to be better communicators your best defense against these attacks is to be an effective communicator yourself and I think it's critical even aside from the attacks on scientists it's critical that we be effective communicators because the work that we're doing does have implications for society and there is a role for us to play in trying to communicate those implications to society but it's even more important in this hostile environment that we find ourselves in where often there isn't somebody who's necessarily there to immediately defend you when you find yourself attacked on some prominent anti-science blog what do you do? The best thing to do is to correct the record in objective terms as calmly as you can to rebut the various accusations and allegations but then to also turn to others who can help fight back against the attack with you if you're in this battle as I said to communicate climate change in the face of this hostile headwind that we face of a very concerted and well organized disinformation effort you better develop a thick skin and you better be in it for the long haul because this is not a battle that's going to end soon the stakes are too great for the polluting industries they're going to do everything they can to prevent prospects for putting a price on emissions they're going to do everything they can to discredit the growing renewable energy market and electric vehicles groups like Alec which are it's a front group funded by a number of corporate interests but primarily associated with the Koch brothers they are in every state doing everything they can to sabotage any legislation that might incentivize clean energy that might incentivize things like electric vehicles they are out there doing everything they can to confuse the public about climate change so like I said you have to be in it for the long haul and you have to recognize that this is a long term battle and there are a number of issues along the way and don't become discouraged when that happens recognize that in the long run truth will win out I'm convinced of that we've seen that happen in other areas where science has found itself on a collision course with powerful special interests be it acid rain or the threat of pharmaceutical products untested pharmaceutical products ozone depletion chemical contaminants in our environment on down the list in every case where the findings of science have conflicted with the interests of powerful corporate interests, powerful special interests those interests have fought back using the massive resources available to them to discredit the science, to attack the scientists to muddy the waters to try to confuse the public to pressure policy makers to not to enact policies that might deal with the problem so we're in it for the long haul recognize that we're going to lose some skirmishes along the way but I'm firmly convinced that we will win the war because we have one unassailable resource on our side scientific truth and there's nothing they can do about that I was always fascinated with the world of science and problem solving since I was a little kid I was fascinated about natural phenomena like hurricanes and tornadoes earthquakes living things nature and so through high school I sort of developed an interest in solving problems through computer programming writing computer programs I got interested in physics, ended up majoring in physics at UC Berkeley then double majored in applied math and had prepared to go off into the area of theoretical physics and actually was all but dissertation in theoretical physics at Yale University when I sort of had a crisis of scientific real identity and I sort of realized that my heart wasn't quite in it when it came to the work that I was doing in physics and I saw in the catalog the Yale applied science catalog that there was a scientist literally just down the hill in the Klein Geology Lab who was using physics and math to model the Earth's climate system and that struck me as a really fascinating classical physics problem I went to talk with him to see if I might be able to do some research with him for the summer that ended up working out and I decided to actually do my PhD with him and so I sort of migrated from the field of physics into this very interesting problem which includes physics but includes chemistry and biology and other disciplines the endeavor of modeling and understanding Earth's climate system I'm always amused by this claim that is made that scientists are in it for the money when in fact it's actually the folks who are attacking scientists who are being paid quite a bit of money from special interests, from fossil fuel interests in an effort to discredit the science because of its implications for policy but what you could do if you really wanted to make a lot of money is double major in applied math and physics and go off into theoretical physics and then eventually of course into the science of climate scientists don't go into science for the money they can make a whole lot more money sort of taking advantage of their knowledge and talents in other areas you can go to Wall Street and use a lot of the math for becoming a physicist there's a huge sort of a huge number of opportunities in the world of banking and frankly if you are a prominent climate scientist then if you really wanted to make a lot of money what you would do would be to turn around and start attacking your fellow scientists because you'd be paid a lot of money by special interests if I were to for example disown the hockey stick graph I'm sure I could get paid millions of dollars to do that I have no interest in that I wouldn't be able to sleep at night as a scientist you have to follow your heart you have to do what you know is right you have to follow your scientific curiosity wherever it leads you and sometimes it leads you into a contentious issue like human caused climate change which is the case with my story I sort of underwent this random walk starting out in applied math and physics eventually going into climate science pursuing issues in the field of paleo climatology that ultimately led to the publication of this graph the hockey stick this iconic graph which became sort of a lightning rod in the climate change debate so I sort of found myself there involuntarily accidentally in the center of this raging societal debate over human caused climate change despite what you might have heard this is not new in controversial science we've known about the greenhouse effect for nearly two centuries Joseph Fourier a scientist who's well known for the mathematical technique known as the Fourier series he is the same scientist who produced the law of heat conduction he's the guy behind the law that governs how heat moves through substances he understood that there was a greenhouse effect okay it's two century old science basic chemistry and physics that we've known for centuries now nearly centuries the fact that the earth is warming is undisputable we have dozens of lines of evidence that tell us that the fact that that warming can't be explained by natural causes again we have very widespread evidence the fact that this will be a problem that continued warming and climate change will be a problem again is widely accepted even the US military recognizes that this is a problem we have to act on now if we allow climate change to continue the globe to get warmer sea levels to continue to rise at unprecedented rates we will see a fundamental threat to our way of living last question in your book you talk about a tic-tac-toe program back in Italy in your career have you released a card for that program? that was back in high school so that code has long disappeared thanks a lot have you seen somebody say anything about that? no in your book you talk about a did you need to release the code for that? well it's proprietary