Jayde Lovell sits down with climate scientist Dr. Michael E. Mann, co-recipient of the 2019 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement (often referred to as the 'Nobel for the Environment'.
Lovell: G’Day. Well, as you know, climate change is one of the biggest threats facing the world today, and to talk about some of the recent political developments in climate change. I have with me a titan of the climate change defense movement, Dr. Michael Mann. Thank you so much for joining us.
Mann: Thank you. I thank you, It's good to be with you.
Lovell: Now, you were originally famous for producing a really important piece of science that's become known as the Hockey Stick Graph back in 1998. Can you tell us briefly what that is?
Mann: Yeah, well, we only have about a century of widespread thermometer measurements around the world, and we know the globe has warmed up quite a bit over that century. But to understand how unusual that warming might be, we have to turn to other indirect measures of the climate that go farther back in time from natural archives like tree rings and corals and ice cores. And what we did literally two decades ago, was to pull all those information together so that we could reconstruct how temperatures had varied over the past thousand years, and that revealed a graph that's come to be known as the hockey stick, where the blade, if you will, of the hockey stick, the warming of the past century is seen to be unprecedented over the past thousand years.
Lovell: So 20 years ago you were able to show the world in this clear graph that this warming that we're experiencing currently is absolutely unprecedented in history, and that made you a lot of enemies. Can you tell me about some of the attacks that you've had to endure as a climate change scientist?
Mann: Sure. So once the Hockey Stick became this icon in the climate change debate, I was suddenly subject to all these efforts to discredit me personally as a way of discrediting this graph, and I was subject to subpoenas, Congressional subpoenas. I received what appeared to be a dangerous substance in the mail, a white powder that had to be examined by the FBI. I have had demands for me to be fired. I have had threats against my life, threats against my family. I've been hauled before Congressional committees. Put in the hot seat by politicians trying to discredit me, often politicians funded by the fossil fuel industry. So they've tried everything pretty much in the book to try to discredit me.
Lovell: Just because you happen to be talking about a type of science that they don't agree with?
Mann: Because the implications of our work are inconvenient for special interests who currently profit from fossil fuels. Climate change, the reality and threat of climate change, tell us we have to move away from fossil fuels towards renewable energy. That is inconvenient for some powerful special interest.
Lovell: Now, I wanted to talk to you, and I wanted to record this conversation because there's a piece of news that hasn't become was public as I wish it had. It's that a statement was recently made at the most recent climate summit, COP24, put out by four nations, all agreeing on one piece of mistruth. We've termed them the Axis of Evil, but can you tell me about what was the statement and who made it?
Mann: So the intergovernmental panel on climate change, about a month ago, released this new report demonstrating just how damaging warming of more than a degree and a half Celsius would be to the planet, and painting a pretty bleak picture in terms of what we need to do. Basically, we only have about a decade to bring our carbon emissions down dramatically if we're going to avoid warming the planet beyond that dangerous limit. So at the official UN Conference of the Parties, called COP24, where all of the nations of the world come together to build sort of policies to deal with climate change under the auspices of the United Nations, all of the countries agreed to embrace this report, basically as motivation for a ratcheting up of our commitment to bring down carbon emissions.
Lovell: To accept its findings and-
Mann: To embrace its findings. And only four countries refused to do that.
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Produced by Jayde Lovell and Bec Susan Gill. ScIQ is a partner of the The Young Turks Network.
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