Factually! with Adam Conover - Why It’s Not Too Late to Fight Climate Change, Weather Science, and Overcoming Denialism with Michael Mann

Episode Date: October 23, 2019

Eminent climatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann joins Adam to explain the science behind climate change, how to fight denialism, and much more! This episode is brought to you by The Next Big Idea podcast, Kiwi Co (www.kiwico.com/FACTUALLY), and Acuity (www.acuityscheduling.com/factually). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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And a couple weeks back I went to the climate march. It was really, really wonderful. Here in LA, there are thousands and thousands of people who are skipping out on school and leaving work and marching to demand that our leaders fight climate change. Finally do something to fight climate change. And I went with a group of friends and we all made last minute signs because we figured out we were going to go at the last minute. You know, I tore up a cardboard box and grabbed a Sharpie recycling, you know, Hey, don't call me a hero. And I thought about what I wanted to write. And what I went with is what I think is the most important message we need to spread about climate change. I wrote on my little scrap of cardboard, it's not too late. And then I went to the March. I had a great time holding my sign up in the air and waving it around at other people who agreed with me and, you know, a news helicopter or two.

And I took a photo for Instagram. And after a few hours, I left feeling like I did my piece or at least a piece, you know, a little piece is better than no piece, right? But the next day I opened up Instagram and while I was confronted by a lot of supportive comments, there were also a distressingly large number of people, well, actualing me, which is, you know, it's my lot in life, right? Based on the business I'm in. But a bunch of people were leaving comments that said things like, Adam, how can you say it's not too late when you said it was too late to stop climate change on your own show, Adam Ruins Everything. Now, on our TV show, we have done more than one episode about climate change, but we never said that. We actually said the opposite. But somehow,

these folks took away the conclusion that we're all screwed and we might as well burn all the oil while we can. Well, look, let me set the record straight. It is not, not, not too late to do something about climate change. And in fact, it is incumbent upon all of us to do that something. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have a clear-eyed view of what the problem is. Because the fact is, climate change isn't some crisis that's way off in the future that hopefully we can avert. That's the big misconception. The truth about climate change is that it has already happened, and it is continuing to happen right now, and it is getting worse. I could give you a whole litany of statistics. You know, I could tell you about

how Florida cities are already flooding on a near daily basis, but let's use a closer-to-home example that you might not have heard of. Let's talk about New Jersey. According to a recent report in the Washington Post, the Garden State's average yearly temperature has risen over three and a half degrees Fahrenheit since just 1895. And that increase has already transformed life in the state. A century ago, Lake Hoppatagong had winter ice two feet thick. The lake hosted winter carnivals with thousands of ice skaters and skate sailing races, where as many as 21 vessels would race along a three-mile course on the ice. Well, those days are now over. That ice, which used to be over two feet thick,

can now no longer even support ice fishing tournaments. A couple people standing on the ice would break right through, fall right into the drink. The fact is, winters in New Jersey are now noticeably warmer than just those experienced by our grandparents, and it is changing life in the state. So, climate change is here. It is happening to us right now, and I know that might make you unhappy to hear about. Makes me unhappy too. But critically, that does not mean it is too late. It means that we know there is a big problem, and we have to do everything we can to fix it

right now to stop it from getting worse. Like think about when your toilet overflows, right? Do you say, oh, well, it's too late to stop the floor from getting wet. So I guess I'll just let it leak forever. No, you don't. You call the fucking plumber because holy shit, this is bad right now. And it's going to get even worse if you don't do something immediately. And here's the critical point. Climate change is not an apocalypse that we either avert or don't. It's a vast array of possible futures that could be shitty or less shitty, just like the bathroom floor, in countless tiny ways, depending on what we do. The point is,

climate change is not a binary. It is a gradient of possible futures. And the choices we make today, right now, in the moment you are listening to this, will determine where on that gradient we fall. And that can be frightening. That's a lot of responsibility, I know. But it's also an enormous opportunity because it means there is no limit to the number of changes we can make today that'll result in a better tomorrow. It won't be a perfect tomorrow where everything's exactly as brisk and chilly as what grandma faced. You know, we're not all going to be ice skating on Lake Hopitikong again anytime soon.

But it'll be better than the world we could have lived in. We are not powerless. To the contrary, every single thing we do makes a difference. That is real power. Well, to talk more to us about climate change, and especially to get into the science underpinning it, our guest today is Michael Mann. I'm so, so, so excited to have him on the show.

He is one of the most prominent scientists working on climate change. His work on the hockey stick graph in 1999 was a watershed moment in climate science. And gosh, it's just thrilling to have him. He's a professor at Penn State, and he's not only one of the foremost climate scientists in the world, he's also one of the foremost communicators on this topic over the last few decades. Without further ado, please welcome Michael Mann. Hey, Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you, Adam. Great to be with you. It's a thrill to have you. How long have you been studying research in climate change?

Oh, well, I guess I switched into this field. I was working on my PhD in physics back in 1989, 1990, 1991, and then switched fields. I realized that there was an opportunity to use math and physics to work on a really interesting problem, which was understanding how Earth's climate works. That would be about 91. Never looked back. So that's, you know, more than we're coming on three decades soon enough. It's hard to believe, but yeah. Wow. And so you obviously, I'm sure, have an incredible depth of knowledge about the topic. What do you find the most common misconceptions that people have are about climate change? Oh, that's a great question. And there are a lot of misconceptions out there, and some of them are honest ones. Some of them are sort of fed by,

you know, the forces of denial and inaction who try to create doubt and uncertainty. you know, the forces of denial and inaction who try to create doubt and uncertainty. Let's talk about the average person. I know that we're going to get into all the, you know, we're going to get into denialism because that's obviously an interesting topic. But, you know, I do believe the majority of people are approaching this in good faith. And so from folks who are new to the topic, what are the biggest misunderstandings? Yeah, so absolutely. You know, the difference between weather and climate, it's a very misunderstood matter. And, you know, it can lead to some fallacies, misconceptions about climate change in general. For example, the fact

that we cannot predict the details of the weather, you know, what sort of day we're going to have here, where I am in central Pennsylvania, or out where you are in California, the specifics of the weather, say, you know, 10 days out. And that has to do with something that's known as chaos. It was one of the great developments actually in physics back in the early 1960s, the discovery that certain systems are so sensitive to the smallest perturbation that even the mythical, the proverbial flapping of the wings of a butterfly can change the weather on the West Coast, you know, 10 days out. can change the weather on the West Coast, you know, 10 days out. That means that there is always going to be a predictability limit on how far out we can predict, you know, the precise weather on any particular day. That has nothing to do with our ability to predict the climate. And if you want a simple example, the fact is that I can't tell you whether or not you're going to need your umbrella 10 days from now.

But I can tell you that three months from now, it's going to be a whole lot colder here in State College, Pennsylvania. And nine months from now, it's going to be a whole lot warmer again. We call those the seasons. The seasons, the variations in temperature with the seasons. That's climate. And it's extremely predictable, despite the fact that we can't predict the exact weather that far out. Well, I know that I also know that weather prediction has gotten massively better over the last few decades. Michael Lewis wrote about this in his awesome book, The Fifth Risk. But there I understand the distinction that you're drawing. Like, for instance, when we're

looking at the hurricane predictions, there's that cone of uncertainty as the, you know, we don't know exactly which way the hurricane is going to go, but we know it's going to be in one of these directions. But we do know, for instance, that hurricanes are becoming more powerful. Generally, we know these more general climate-driven facts about hurricanes, right? Yeah, no, absolutely. And that cone of uncertainty often relates to this same phenomenon of chaos. It has a little bit less to do with the physics of the hurricane and much more to do with the fact that once the hurricane or a tropical storm makes it to higher latitudes, it gets embedded in what we call mid-latitude weather systems, the cold fronts and warm fronts that move through across the United States. Those frontal systems are part of what are known as

mid-latitude cyclones. And that, you know, that behavior is fundamentally chaotic. Now, we have seen a vast improvement in the quality of weather forecasts, both in the extra-tropical regions, like where I live, and also to some extent with hurricanes. We're better now at predicting their tracks, better at predicting the likely changes in intensity, which has always been a challenging problem. But there is a predictability limit of probably between 10 and 14 days so that no matter how good we get, no matter how much data we're able to pull in and literally insert into the weather models. years is the fact that we have so much more widespread data and we have methods for taking actual real-time observations, feeding them into the models to try to decrease the uncertainty in the model physics. But you can only go so far with that. There is still a predictability limit

that is theoretical in nature. It's been calculated. It has to do with a fancy physics concept known as a Lyapunov exponent. And because of that, it means that 14 days out, we'll never be able to tell you whether or not you need your umbrella on that particular day. Unless you're in California in the summer where you almost certainly won't need it. But we are able to know things about how the climate has changed and how it is going to change because that's a much larger system, right? So how do we know that? How do we know the climate is changing? Just give us the basics here. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, it's not rocket science, as I like to say.

Literally, all of the measurements that we have been making give us a consistent picture of a planet that's warmed up a little over a degree Celsius. So, you know, that's the better part of two degrees Fahrenheit over the last century and a half. We have seen rising sea levels in association with that. The warming of the oceans causes it to expand. The melting of ice causes water to run off into the oceans. That adds to sea level rise. We've seen an expansion of drought patterns in the subtropical regions. We have seen more extreme rainfall events, worse flooding events, more fierce super storms, hurricanes,

worse wildfire on the West Coast as a consequence of worse drought and higher temperatures. Every season is fire season now in Southern California. Yeah, there's a perpetual fire season now in California. And no matter how you measure it, whether it's the deadliest, the most expansive, the fastest spreading, by every measure you can imagine, California has seen the worst wildfires on record over the past few years, during which they have seen unprecedented drought, punctuated by, you know, a wet winter last year. But overall, if you look at the larger pattern, drier, hotter, again, not rocket science. You make it drier, you make it hotter, you're going to get worse wildfires. And if you step back, and don't just look at California, look at the entire western U.S.

There's been a near tripling in the extent of wildfire over the past several decades. And while some of that can be attributed to fire suppression activities and human settlement patterns, there are other complicating factors. But when scientists look at everything that might be involved, they say that at least half of that increase is due to climate change. Right. That's always the problem is connecting. When I read the news, you know, we see these things that sound like they're part of climate change. Knowing how connected that is, is always a little bit tricky. I see headlines about how, you know, a glacier that's disappeared in Iceland or I believe Sweden that, you know, glaciers that have existed for a long time, they have long historical records of them, just are simply not there anymore.

In the U.S., we have glaciers retreat. I know that in, say, southern Florida, there's much more flooding than there used to be. It's simply a problem for the cities, what to do with all of this water, right? And we certainly, it seems anecdotally that there have been more and stronger hurricanes. How do we know that that's connected to climate change, though, and we're not just collecting anecdotal evidence here? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's a classic example of how what you like to see is theory come together with observation. And I was trained as a physicist, and I was trained as a physicist to understand that both are equally important.

The theorists, you know, think that they're the most important. The experimentalists think they're the most important and they go at it. And that's the dynamic that is, you know, that really is the hallmark of how science is supposed to work. Data, observations, experiments coming together with basic theory to hopefully build a consistent framework for understanding an issue like gravity or climate change. And I make the comparison because the evidence for human-caused climate change is about as strong as the evidence for gravity. And I always find that. Absolutely. There are still uncertainties when it comes to the theory of gravity.

We've never measured a graviton. So if you're a skeptic, a contrarian, you say, how can, you know, I mean, there are still big gaps. We only indirectly within the last couple of years observed a gravitational wave and the universe should be filled with them. Right. So there are still uncertainties in, youties in our understanding of the theory of gravity, but that doesn't make it safe to jump off a cliff, right? Got it. And yet there are those who would have us jump off the metaphorical cliff of climate inaction

based on similar levels of uncertainty. And here's the thing. Empirically, there are studies now that show that for each degree Celsius warming of the ocean surface, we're measuring an increase of about 7% in the maximum sustained winds of the strongest hurricanes. Wow. Now, that might not sound that big, right? 7% increase in the winds until you realize that the destructive potential of a storm,

what we call the power dissipation, how much damage it can do in terms of the wind damage of structures, goes as the third power of the wind speed. So that seven percent increase in wind speed translates to a 23 percent increase in the destructive potential of those storms. And that's for a 1 degree Celsius warming. Well, we've warmed the global oceans about 1 degree Celsius. And so, on average, every storm is going to be about 23% more destructive. We can't say that, you know, with any given storm, there are the vagaries of weather. There are all sorts of things that can interfere with its development.

But when we step back and we look at the big picture, we can clearly see that relationship. And if we look at what's happened over the last few years, we've had the strongest hurricane ever measured. That was Hurricane Patricia a few years ago in the North Pacific. The strongest storm ever measured in the southern hemisphere, it had its strongest hurricane ever measured. That was Winston that made landfall in Fiji. And in the Pacific, we've seen the strongest storm ever in the Pacific. And now with Irma and again tied with it, Dorian this year, the strongest storms ever observed in the open Atlantic. And by the way, with this current storm in the Atlantic, Lorenzo, which is now actually threatening Europe. And there's an interesting story there. Yeah, they're dealing with a major tropical storm, almost a hurricane. And we expect Europe to be

dealing with more of these in the future. And that relates to another possible impact that climate change is having. It's not something we normally think about, that Europe gets hurricanes. No. That's a new thing for us. Yeah. And ironically, it might work a little to our benefit. Some of those storms that would have made landfall along the U.S. East Coast may instead now drift out to Europe and make landfall there. And it has to do with some really interesting physics again.

The warmer those ocean temperatures get, what's happening is the warm water is extending further and further east in the Atlantic. That means the waters that are warm enough to form a hurricane extend further east, so those storms strengthen and develop into hurricanes earlier as they're making their way from off the, you know, African coast as they're heading towards the Caribbean and North America. They're going to strengthen, form and strengthen earlier. And the stronger those storms get, it turns out a subtle effect of the Coriolis force that has to do with the beta effect. And I won't go into details about what that is. But the stronger the storm, the more quickly the Coriolis force is going to cause it to veer poleward, to veer north in the northern hemisphere. So the storms are going to drift northward earlier.

They're going to get embedded in those strong westerly mid-latitude winds earlier, and they're going to be taken off towards Europe. And there is a basic theoretical sort of framework that tells us, that I just described, I just summarized, that says that should happen. And we have, at the very least, some anecdotal examples that that is happening. Lorenzo might be one of them. Yep. So, this is an example, as you said, with hurricanes getting stronger, where we have a theory for why it should be happening, and we have empirical evidence that it is happening. And those things combined, that's how science is made, right? That's when we can really start to get confident

about our conclusions. What more can science ask for? When observation aligns with theory, that's the thing that a scientist dreams about. Well, and something that really strikes me about climate science is that my understanding is, I think you know it better than I do, that climate science is not recent, that climate change as a field goes back a couple centuries almost in terms of how, you know, when scientists started talking about it and when we how, you know, when scientists started talking about it and when we started, you know, accreting this evidence, correct? Absolutely. You know, we've worked out more and more details along the way, but the basic science here, the science of the greenhouse effect goes all the way

back to Joseph Fourier in the early 1800s, who lived so long ago, we don't have photos of him. We just have hand-drawn portraits. Wow. You know, and sometimes when I'll show sort of the scientists who contributed to our understanding of climate change, there'll be photos of all the modern folks, and then you'll see this hand-drawn portrait of poor Joseph Fourier who recognized in the early 1800s that there must be a greenhouse effect.

Now, Fourier was sort of one of those Renaissance scientists who contributed in so many different fields. He gave us the Fourier series and Fourier's theorem in mathematics. He gave us the law of heat conduction, how heat spreads through an object. It's called Fourier's law. Fourier sort of gave us that. Foundational stuff, yeah. Absolutely foundational stuff. And he understood that the surface of the earth was warmer than it should be

given the amount of sunlight coming in from the sun and that there must be something like a greenhouse effect, although he didn't call it that. And he didn't have enough knowledge to know what it was. He just knew that somehow something in the atmosphere was making the surface warmer than it ought to be. And it took until the mid-1800s with the work of Tyndall and Eunice Foote, a woman who actually, to some extent, sort of discovered some of this even before Tyndall,

who gets a lot of the credit a few years before him. They started to make measurements of the effect, that there was a warming influence of these gases. And then by the time we get to Arrhenius, Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist whose name might be familiar to you if you studied chemistry because he gave us the definition of an acid. of an acid. And Arrhenius also was the first scientist to make quantitative estimates of the warming effect of increasing carbon dioxide concentrations. He came in a little high, but he more or less got it right. Amazing, given what he was working with, that he got the basics right. And that's, you know, a hundred and, you know, better part of 130 years ago. So there's another comparison of this to gravity in that this is a longstanding scientific phenomena that has been studied, that our understanding has been refined, and we've

been adding new details to it. But this is not new information that the climate is warming in this way. Yeah, no, the basics here, the greenhouse effect, like I said, that goes back to Fourier in the early 1800s. That goes back further than the theory of evolution, which I like to sometimes remind my friends in the field of evolutionary biology who also deal with attacks against the science of evolution, for example. Our science actually goes back farther than theirs does. Sorry, guys. Well, let's talk about the science that you've done. In the intro, I mentioned the hockey stick graph, which is, I think, what you're most famous for. Would you tell us briefly what that was? And

then maybe that'll also help us get started talking about the denialism of it, because I know that that was a flashpoint and that you found yourself in an unusual situation for a scientist. No, that's right. Back in the late 1990s, my colleagues and I decided to try to reconstruct how temperatures had varied in the distant past. We only have about 150 years of relatively widespread thermometer measurements around the world. So the sort of historical record of global temperatures only goes back, you know, between a century and a century and a half. And while we know that the planet has warmed up a little more than a degree Celsius, better part of two degrees Fahrenheit over that

timeframe, what the historical record alone can't tell us is, you know, how unusual is that? a degree Celsius, better part of two degrees Fahrenheit over that time frame. What the historical record alone can't tell us is, you know, how unusual is that? Is that just a coincidence? Do things like this happen all the time? Or might it have something to do, of course, with human caused climate change and the increasing concentration of greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution? So we decided to use so-called proxy records, climate proxy records. These are natural archives like tree rings and corals and ice cores and lake sediments that tell us something about how the climate changed in more distant times. And we can sort of try to fill in the puzzle using records of this sort around the world. We can try

to sort of piece together this picture of how the climate changed in the more distant past. And back in the late 1990s, we published the first real quantitative estimate of large-scale temperatures in past centuries using these paleoclimate proxy data and calculating the uncertainties so that we could, you know, estimate not just how temperatures appear to have varied in the past, but how confident we are with what sort of the uncertainty envelope is in our estimates. And taking into account even the fairly substantial uncertainty envelope as you go back in time, because after all, these aren't precise thermometers. They're very imperfect thermometers, tree rings, corals, ice cores. There's a fair amount of uncertainty there. But

taking into account the uncertainty, we were still able to conclude that the recent warming really was unprecedented as far back as we could go. And if you look at the pattern, temperatures start out relatively warm a thousand years ago. It's sometimes called the medieval warm period. And parts of the planet were fairly warm, but other parts appear to actually have been cold. And so any warmth back then was fairly heterogeneous. Some places, like parts of Europe, might have been warm, but it looks like the tropical Pacific was pretty cold. You average it all together, temperatures were fairly moderate. And then over the ensuing, you know, six, seven, eight decades, centuries rather, you descend into the depths of what's known as the Little Ice Age, where temperatures on average get colder.

get colder. And so you can imagine there's this sort of sloping down in temperature over time from the relatively warm conditions a thousand years ago into sort of the 17, 18, 19 hundreds, where you reach sort of fairly cold temperatures. Then you hit the industrial revolution, the mid 19th century, and temperatures spike up over the next century and a half. And that spike spike up over the next century and a half. And that spike rises well outside of the uncertainty margin of the record. In other words, there is no precedent for the abrupt warming that we saw into the 20th century. And this is called the hockey stick graph because that little bit of, you know, warming and then cooling the little lysage that you're talking about is still, when you're looking at the graph, relatively even. And then the warming that's happened recently is like a spike upward. So it looks like a hockey stick rested on its back, right?

Exactly. You can think of that slow cooling from the medieval period into the little ice age, that gentle downward sloping temperature graph, you know, portion of the temperature graph is sort of like the handle of a hockey stick. And then the abrupt warming that happens over the time frame of the final century and a half that shoots up, that's like the blade. And so if you stand back and look at the pattern, it looks like a hockey stick and the name stuck. And it became a symbol. It became an icon in the climate change debate. It was featured in the summary for policymakers of the next report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel.

It's 20 years later and this is still a very famous graph. Right. Well, that's right. It celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. It's 20 years ago now that we published that graph. Right. Well, that's right. It celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. It's 20 years ago now that we published that graph. And it became this icon, again, a symbol in the climate change debate. But that also made it a lightning rod for the critics, as you've alluded to, who realize that, hey, if we can take this iconic graph and discredit it, maybe by trying to discredit the main author,

then we can claim that the entire weight of evidence for human-caused climate change has come crashing down like a house of cards, when as we all know, that's not how science works. There are so many independent pieces of information and lines of evidence that come together to tell us that climate change is real and it's human-caused. And even if the hockey stick never existed or the dozens of additional hockey stick graphs that have been published and which have reaffirmed our findings over the past 20 years, even if that entire body of evidence was gone, even if we didn't have any of that, we have so many independent lines of evidence that give us a consistent story, tell a consistent story of a planet that's warming up and a climate that is changing

much as we expect it to based on theoretical considerations as we continue to elevate these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by fossil fuel burning and other activities. Well, I want to hear more about this campaign against science and how it was waged, but we got to take a quick break. We'll be right back with more Michael Mann. So Michael, you were telling me about the hockey stick craft and about how the forces, the anti-science forces wanted to use this as an opportunity to discredit the science. Who were these forces and what means did they use to try to do so?

Yeah, so I learned quite a bit. You know, when you're at the center of a concerted effort to discredit you and your science, you sort of are curious about who these people are and where they're coming from. And it turns out there are whole books that have been written on this. My good friend and colleague Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway have written a wonderful book, Merchants of Doubt, that talks about the campaign to deny climate change and how it's really rooted in other past industry-funded campaigns to discredit science that might be inconvenient to their financial bottom line.

Like the tobacco industry, for instance? Absolutely. Most famously, the tobacco industry. Their own internal documents back in the 1950s showed that they knew their product was deadly and addictive, and they spent millions of dollars in the ensuing decades trying to discredit other independent scientists who, in fact, were simply finding the same thing that their own scientists had found and that they had hidden. And the same is true of the fossil fuel industry, right? I seem to remember reading about how Exxon scientists were aware of climate change very early on, but that it you know, it was obviously stifled internally. Yeah, catastrophic. That was the word used by ExxonMobil's own scientists in an internal

document from the 1970s that was buried and eventually resurfaced. Their own scientists said that the impacts of continued fossil fuel burning could have, quote, catastrophic and irreversible impacts on our climate. It's the same story because it's the same playbook. And Naomi and Eric call this the tobacco strategy, the strategy to discredit, to hire your own independent scientists who become attack dogs, attacking their own fellow scientists. You create front groups, organizations with impressive sounding names like the Cooler Heads Coalition or Friends of Science or the Heartland Institute or the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the George Marshall Institute. These are all names of front groups

and organizations that were funded by the fossil fuel industry and the tobacco industry and other industries to discredit any science that might be inconvenient to their financial bottom line. That has to raise your eyebrow, though, like when you have science or purported science that claims to be discrediting climate science coming from a group like the Competitive Enterprise Institute that is funded by the fossil fuel industry. I mean, that's not how proper science is done, right? That's right. And I think, you know, you've really put your finger on it here, which is that as a scientist, that is not a world that you're trained to operate in. Those are not the rules of world that you're trained to operate in.

Those are not the rules of engagement that you're taught. The rules of engagement in science involve honest inquiry and debate and true skepticism. Skepticism is a good thing in science. It was what Carl Sagan described as the self-correcting machinery of science. But what's happened is that machinery has been hijacked by special interests. And so, what, you know, we might think of as skepticism is turned into a sort of one-sided skepticism where mainstream science is attacked based on the flimsiest of arguments that don't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny but might sound convincing to an unknowing public, to an unknowing audience. And those are the tactics of the forces of anti-science.

And scientists are not trained well to operate in that sphere. through trial by fire, really, how to defend my work and to defend myself against dishonest attacks in a way that was still faithful to my principles as a scientist, but nonetheless effective in fighting back against the forces of misinformation and disinformation. It's a challenge because it's an asymmetric battle. As scientists, we have to uphold certain principles of honesty and objective, you know, critical thinking. And we do our best to be upfront about caveats and uncertainties. And the other side has no such interests. They're willing to present a very one-sided picture and to use very misleading, if not downright dishonest arguments in an effort not to inform, but to deceive. the consensus among climate scientists or scientists in any field is based on the preponderance of the evidence and all these different studies that come out.

And so when there's a contradictory study or there's some uncertainty or there's an area, well, we're not entirely sure about X, Y, Z. Or if you've got a group of scientists who are saying, well, we're not as sure as the rest of you, that sort of gets folded into the consensus and you have a rational discussion at a conference, right, about like, how much do we know? And then everybody sort of gets on the same page. And, you know, that's the sort of academic, scholarly, scientific way of working. And so, yeah, that sort of dissent or those contradictory results get folded in. But this is a strategy of, well, any bit of contradictory evidence I'm going to latch on to and say, no, this proves my point that I'm going to take to the press that all of this is bullshit, which is not how science works. And it's even worse than that, Adam, because, in fact, the evidence may not at all be contradictory,

but they want you to think it is. They might cherry pick a record from one location that was cold one year to try to invalidate all of global warming, which is based on measurements from around the planet over many years. That's a standard denier tactic, cherry picking, misrepresenting the data. cherry-picking, misrepresenting the data, sort of only looking at a very specific time interval where they chop off segments in time that are inconvenient to their argument, that show the warming that they don't want you to see. Right. You can manipulate a graph to make it look like,

you can make a line that goes up if you are willing to chop a graph up. And that's, and they've become very expert at all of these sort of deceptive tactics. Whereas again, you know, scientists, we believe in, you know, objective scientific discourse, and we are upfront about uncertainties. We often emphasize them. We are upfront about uncertainties.

We often emphasize them. We are engaged, as you allude to, in often very fractious arguments and debates. A good friend of mine, no longer with us, but one of the great climate scientists and one of the great science communicators of all time, Stephen Schneider, his final book was called Science as a Contact Sport. And science can be very confrontational and that's a good thing as long as it's honest confrontation, as long as you are holding each other responsible

for making the strongest possible argument for defending your claims with solid evidence and solid reasoning. That's the self-correcting machinery that, you know, that Carl Sagan spoke so eloquently about. And Sagan also famously said that, you know, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And you know what is the most extraordinary claim you could possibly make? That despite the overwhelming observational evidence and its consistency with basic theory, that somehow scientists, the entire world community of scientists has gotten it wrong on global warming and climate change. And what is the argument that the critics use to make that claim?

And what is the argument that the critics use to make that claim? Again, they have no legitimate arguments whatsoever, just cherry-picking of random data points and misrepresentation. That's hardly the extraordinary evidence that would be required for the extraordinary conclusion that somehow all the scientists have gotten it wrong. You know, 200 years of basic physics and chemistry is wrong. And by the way, how do we explain why Venus is a, you know, a hothouse planet and Mars is a frozen planet? Because without our understanding of the greenhouse effect, which is at the center of climate change, we wouldn't be able to explain that. And by the way, the Air Force wouldn't be able to design effective heat-seeking missiles. Right. This science is put in practice right now.

Absolutely. You need to understand the heat-absorbing nature of the atmosphere, the greenhouse absorption, if you are to design a heat-seeking missile. And the Air Force understood that. if you are to design a heat-seeking missile. And the Air Force understood that. They built the absorption spectra of carbon dioxide is built into the very algorithms behind those. Yeah, and we know that the military is, you know,

taking the effects of climate change into account in their planning for the next few decades, that they, you know, they can't afford to deny reality in front of their faces. They have to actually take it into account. But it strikes me that the problem that you're talking about is one of sort of intellectual standards, right? That like in everyone in the scientific community, part of what makes it work is that everybody

holds each other to the same standard of, you know, rational argument and good faith. And, you know, when someone is being a kook or being a wingnut, right, and not adhering to those standards, everyone else in science knows to sort of, okay, we're going to not listen to this person quite as much. They can publish and stuff, but, you know, we're not going to, you know, this is a fringe viewpoint, right? And we know the difference and we know how to take that into account, right? The problem is the public at large is not part of that same scientific community and they don, go to the more biased parts of our news apparatus and get the message out there. And because then they're operating according to the tools – according to the rules of the media, not of science. If I can – that's me rephrasing sort of the point that you made. No, absolutely. Just to comment on that, because a listener could well be forgiven for thinking that we're not talking about climate change, but our modern American

political discourse. You could easily appropriate that very same model to describe, you know, our larger political discourse today. And I would argue that those two things are not unrelated, that the bad faith nature of our climate discourse today is a manifestation of a larger problem, which is the loss of good faith in our public discourse writ large. Yeah. And it's so, you know, one of the things I love about science and the scientific community is that it is still a place where good faith thrives in the community itself, that, itself. That you have people having these good faith disagreements and coming to real conclusions and having difficult conversations. The problem is once we get under the public sphere.

So as a scientist, you're someone who has stepped into the public sphere and started being vocal and having to learn those tools of media combat. How have you approached that? Well, I study from the best. I watch you all the time. Oh, that's too kind. And very much enjoyed being on your show last year. I very much enjoyed being on your show last year. And, you know, and what I, you know, and I'm not entirely just joking here because I have found that there's this amazing community of science communicators out there.

And you are one of them, Adam. My good friend Bill Nye is another. Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are many and increasingly more diverse men and women of all creeds and ethnicities, there's increasingly a very diverse community of science voices out there, scientists who recognize that it isn't enough for the scientific community to just do the science. Because in today's world, there are larger forces, and many of them have ill motives and have tried to hijack our political discourse, including our scientific discourse, for their own motives, for their own personal agendas or corporate agendas. And if we scientists don't speak up, if we don't participate in this larger discussion, then we leave behind a vacuum. And of course, that is the taxpayers to study things like climate change.

We owe it to them to report what we're finding and to try to make sure that the larger policy discussion is informed by an objective assessment of what the science has to say and what the risks really are. And I don't think scientists should have to apologize for being advocates for an informed policy discourse. And that's the case that I made then and I continue to make. And fortunately, there are now a lot of scientists, I think, who have embraced that view and are out there on the front lines trying to inform this discussion about what is arguably the greatest challenge we face as a civilization after all. Well, let me pose to you a few arguments that I've heard, anti-climate change or denialist arguments, or there's the softer form of denialism that says, well, maybe it's happening, but we shouldn't worry about it. And so let me pose some of those arguments to you. And I'd love to hear your responses to them, because some of them I think I know the answers to, but some of them I don't.

So when folks say, for instance, hey, there's been a lot of warming and cooling over time. There was the little ice age that you mentioned. You know, so this sort of warming, we, you know, the hockey stick graph, hey, that's just natural. The climate goes up and down. The earth adapts. So we shouldn't worry about it. What do you say to that? You've convinced me.

Maybe we should talk about another topic here. I think we're done with climate change. Oh, wow. I'm too persuasive. Oh, my gosh. You know, you see this argument in various forms, this idea that, you know, because climate can change naturally and has changed naturally in the past, it can't possibly be due to human activity today. It would sort of be like the arsonist arguing in court that he should be found innocent

because even though he started that wildfire, wildfires happen naturally, right? So why should I get blamed for this one wildfire? It's sort of like that. It's a ridiculous argument at its face. And it collapses, you know, as all these arguments do, as you know, under any degree of scrutiny. In this case, if you actually look at the natural factors, for example, that are relevant right now, let's look at the historical period during which the planet has warmed up a degree Celsius. And, you know, the critics would say, how do we know that that isn't natural? Well, we can actually look at those natural factors.

We have good measurements of solar activity back in time from sunspot measurements that go back to the time of Galileo. Galileo was actually making these hand-drawn diagrams of sunspots. And so it goes back to the early 1600s. And then we've got modern satellite data as well. So we've got a pretty good handle on how the sun has changed over time. We've got an excellent handle on volcanic eruptions, explosive volcanic eruptions, candle on volcanic eruptions, explosive volcanic eruptions, which put particulates called aerosols up into the lower stratosphere where they can reside for several years before they fall out and they reflect some of the sunlight back to space. And so they cool the planet a little bit. Those are the two main natural factors that are operating on this time scale,

this historical time scale. And so we've got estimates of both those factors. We can put them into the models. And here's the funny thing. When you put just those natural factors into the models, the models say the past half century should have actually cooled. Because the natural factors were temporarily acting in the cooling direction. But yet we warmed. But we warmed. And so when people ask how much of the warming are we responsible for, I say with a straight face, and I can back it up with an actual section from the most recent IPCC report, that we are responsible for more than 100% of the warming that we've seen.

Because the greenhouse warming from increased accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was actually offsetting what would have been a slight cooling trend if it were just the natural factors alone that were at work. Wow. I had no idea about that. That's incredible. Well, let's do another one. What about the argument that, hey, well, we, you know, okay, maybe we are affecting the climate, but humanity has adapted to climate changes in the past, so we'll be fine in the future. It's just another thing we have to adapt to. That's much more the softer form of denialism. Right. And I'm glad you're drawing that distinction because it's important. We are,

in fact, my next book is going to be about the sort of what I call the new climate war. As the impacts of climate change become obvious to the person on the street, so that it just isn't credible anymore for the forces of inaction to claim that nothing's happening. Right. You live in Florida and you see the flooding, your feet are wet. You're like, hold on a second, this is new. Yeah. Or you live in the East Coast and you're dealing with mid-July temperatures in early October, which is what we've been doing for the past few days. Right. And people understand that something is afoot, that something's happening. It just isn't credible to deny it. And so what the forces of inaction are doing is moving on to sort of this kinder, gentler

form of denial, the soft denial that you allude to, sort of appearing to at least grant the scientific evidence that something's happening, but to downplay the impact or to argue that the solution is just technology will somehow save us, that we don't really need to do anything about our ongoing carbon emissions because we'll come up with elaborate schemes to reflect sunlight back to space using mirrors, or we'll be able to fill the oceans with iron that will cause the algae to suck the CO2 out of the, all of the, you know, completely unprecedented, uncontrolled, untested planetary manipulation strategies, toying with this system that we don't understand completely. The chapter in my last book about this so-called geoengineering was

geoengineering or what could possibly go wrong if we are to engage in these massive, unprecedented, you know, additional manipulations of the Earth system. We could create even worse problems than we started with. And so, the only real solution is to solve the problem at its source. But so, as you say, you know, you do have these sort of softer forms of denialism, which take the form of, well, you know, we'll adapt. And if you think that I'm exaggerating, you know, Senator Marco Rubio had an op-ed in USA Today a couple weeks ago or several weeks ago, which I actually replied to in an op-ed I wrote with a colleague of mine, where he basically was arguing that Florida will just have to adapt to climate change, to sea level rise, to inundation from rising

seas along with more destructive storms with flooding potential. That dude's from Florida. Well, he is, right. And so he doesn't have the luxury of denying that it's happening. So yeah, it's happening, but we'll adapt. We just have to allow the market to innovate and find ways to help us adapt to, here's the problem. That's messed up to, here's the problem, you know.

That's messed up to say to your own constituents, like, you'll get used to it. That was more or less our response, was that it's deeply misleading because while it is true, we are going to have to adapt. There are certain changes that are already baked in that we can't stop. A certain amount of additional global warming and sea level rise that's already baked in, that we can't stop. A certain amount of additional global warming and sea level rise that's already baked in. We're going to have to, you know, slowly retreat from our coastlines and build coastal defenses. But that alone, adaptation alone will not buy us the sort of the resilience that we need in the face of the changes that will come if we don't act. In other words, if we don't do something about the source of the problem, the impacts will be so great that they will vastly exceed our adaptive capacity as a civilization

and the adaptive capacity of pretty much all other living things. And a lot of those adaptations that people are talking about could be bad, you know, things. And a lot of those adaptations that people are talking about could be bad, you know, like retreating from the coasts, which is something that people are already having to do, and we will have to continue to do to some extent, is bad, right? Or like water rationing, for instance, is another way we could adapt. But we don't want to ration water. That's a bad outcome. Right. And, you know, we could all be we could all like live in heavily fortified bunkers to protect us from super storms coming by every year. But it would be better to not do that. No, absolutely.

We call this maladaptation. And by the way, I think you put your finger on another really important issue here, which is the social justice aspect of the problem. Because, you know, who are the people who are going to be living in the bunkers? Yeah. Those are going to be the people with the resources, while everybody else is left, you know, the poorest are going to be left to fend for themselves. Well, and there's so many, you know,

I've seen projections of areas in, you know, for instance, where I live in Southern California is one of the areas that's projected to, I believe, have the biggest impacts from climate change in terms of the temperature rising and water problems and et cetera. Whereas I believe, for instance, the Pacific Northwest will get off a little bit easier. And, you know, maybe, you know, I've saved enough money from, you know, being on TV for four years that, hey, when that really hits, I can go hop a flight and rent an apartment up there. But there's going to be so many people

in Southern California or elsewhere in the Southwest who are not able to do so. And A, those folks will suffer and I should give a shit about that and want to protect them from suffering and not just worry about myself. But B, if there's millions of people in America

who can't live where they were living before anymore, that's bad for everybody because those people are going to start – we're going to have masses of indigent Americans. We're going to have a refugee crisis in America. Right. And by the way, I expect an invitation to that cabin in Montana that you're building, Adam, when the day comes. No, I mean that's absolutely right. And in fact, it's even worse than that, because the Pacific Northwest, they're going to get worse drought, and they're going to get worse weather extremes. And so even regions that you might think get off, because the overall tendency might be seemingly in the right direction, the storms that are no longer giving California rainfall are bringing it instead further north up into the Pacific Northwest or up into Canada.

But the fact is we will see, you know, those average conditions punctuated by increasingly devastating weather extremes. And this is important because for a long time, scientists were saying, oh, well, you know, the higher latitudes, the northern U.S. and in Europe, as it gets warmer and the growing seasons get longer, the summers get longer, we'll have more productive agriculture. And so that will offset, you know, the decreased agricultural productivity in the tropical regions that will basically get too hot for – Yeah, we'll just plant elsewhere. Sure. Right. And it turns out that we've learned – and this is sort of one of the recurring lessons here. When we see how things actually play out, they're often not the way we envisioned them.

There are surprises in store in the greenhouse. And one of the surprises has been that we're seeing these devastating wildfires and heat waves and droughts and floods that even in those regions that you might have thought might be more productive agriculturally, we're seeing major losses to agricultural productivity because of devastating extreme weather events that destroy crops. And so, as we learn more about how this is actually evolving, we're finding that in some cases it's worse than the scenarios that we had initially gamed out. And that's likely true when it comes to issues like agriculture. So what are we talking about? We're talking about seven and a half billion and growing people competing on this finite planet for less food, less water and less space. And now if that is not a recipe for a dystopian Hollywood-like future, I don't know what is. Those are possible futures. The good news is also a possible future is one where we prevent that, where we act now. Yeah. And I want to talk about, because I touched on

this in my intro, that it's not a choice between, and this gets to the last big misconception I'd love to talk about, that people say, oh, it's too late to stop climate and this gets to the last big misconception I'd love to talk about, that people say, oh, it's too late to stop climate change. Well, the damage is done. We can't do anything about it. Might as well drive our Humvees and eat red meat three times a day

and change nothing until we all die because we're all going to die one day and climate change is just going to kill us like anything else, etc. Or, hey, the apocalypse is coming. I can't do anything about it. Might as well live it up is the attitude. And it's not a binary like that, right?

When we talk about, hey, climate refugees within our own borders, well, we could have less or more of those and we should tend towards less. And no matter how bad things have gotten, we can always make choices today that will result in the world of the future being not as bad as it could be, or perhaps even better than it is today. Is that the case? Yeah, no, absolutely. And there are a lot of interesting things wrapped up in that question. And by the way, I didn't know it was three times a day. I've been eating red meat 10 times a day. That's why I've been feeling a little.

A lot of beef jerky snacks. Yeah, I've been feeling a little under the weather. No, you know, actually, I no longer eat meat. And it has more to do with sort of in sympathy with my daughter who's decided to be pescatarian. And I feel good about it. It makes me feel good. I feel like, you know, it's also decreasing my carbon footprint.

I feel healthier. There are lots of reasons to do a lot of these individual, you know, these actions that we can take. And that's a whole nother conversation because while we should all take the individual actions we can to decrease our carbon footprint,

we shouldn't allow the forces of denial to convince us that that is the solution. Oh, yeah. It's all on us. I hit this all the time. And I just want to say for the record, because I say every time that I can, if all of us just became vegans and cut back on plastic bags and used paper straws and drove brand new electric cars all the time, that would not solve climate change. The individual actions that we're taking, if we all just get on board with, you know, making the green choice at

the supermarket, that's not going to do the trick. The problem is systemic and it's how our society is organized. And it's about the choices that these large corporate and governmental actors are making that we need to influence them to change. You agree, presumably. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, we should all do those individual things. There's so many reasons to do them.

And there's so much low hanging fruit, you know, makes us healthier, saves us money and decreases our environmental footprint. But those individual actions alone, we know are not going to give us the reductions in carbon emissions we need. We need policies, right? We need policies that incentivize those more carbon-friendly actions, that incentivize people moving away from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We can't change our energy infrastructure as individuals. We need the energy industry to do that. And for them to do that, there's going to need to be a financial economic incentive for them to do that. I love what Emma Maris said on

our podcast a few months ago that, you know, hey, maybe don't stress out so much about what you eat. And instead, look, go eat whatever you like for an evening, put whatever you need on the kids table, and then go to a city council meeting and advocate for your local government to make a greener choice that will, you know, have a much larger impact than you stressing out about what you purchase. So yeah, no, absolutely. And I would say, again, let's try to do both. Let's try to do everything we can individually to decrease our footprint. But let's also make sure we hold our policymakers accountable. We vote. Yes, we hold our policymakers accountable. We vote. We make our voices heard. We strike, protest, whatever is necessary to demand action from those who are

actually in a position to change the larger systemic structure that provides a means of shifting us collectively away from our reliance on fossil fuels to renewable energy, and that favors greater energy efficiency, and all those things that we need to do collectively to solve this problem. But your original question, though, was dealing with this sort of doomist framing that one of the things that we see more and more of is this idea that it's too late to do anything. And some of that, and this is sort of my thesis, part of the thesis that I will prove in this next book, is that the forces of denial and inaction are actually fanning the flames of that. Because they understand that doomism, that getting people, you know, to give

up, to lose hope, is another way of getting them on this path of inaction. against taking action now, nearly as many people provide as the reason that it's too late to do anything as provide the reason it's not a real problem. And so, this is becoming problematic, and what it's doing is taking people who are actually part of the climate, you know, action. Trevor Bur. Coalition. Yeah, the sort of community of climate advocates and activists, a subset of that community is now being convinced that it's too late to do anything. They are, in essence, being weaponized by the forces of denial and inaction in a very pernicious way. of denial and inaction in a very pernicious way. Because again, the forces of inaction don't care why you get onto the path of inaction, they just want you on that path. And so, what you see is

also online efforts to sow division. You see bots being used to sow discord and division within the climate movement to get people to argue about their hamburgers, their cheeseburgers, and their flights to see their grandma. Dividing the community. Divide and conquer as a way of, again, sort of dampening the call for action on climate. So, people have to be aware of this sort of new climate war. The devious ways that the forces of inaction are now trying to prevent us from taking action by convincing us it's too late or that it's all on us. It doesn't require systemic change. It's just a matter of our individual choices. Be aware that there are those who are trying to, you know, game the larger conversation in this way that in a way that is disabling and that suppresses enthusiasm among sort of climate activists for actually doing something. among sort of climate activists for actually doing something.

Well, so tell us, what is the, thank you for that vision of the forces that we're up against. I've never heard it put quite in those terms. But what is the truth about our ability to affect the climate of the future? What do we know? What does the science tell us about the changes that we can make today and what effect it'll have on our future? Yeah, thanks for asking that question. This is really important because, you know, if it were indeed true that we were doomed, then I would be a hypocrite for claiming otherwise. But the reason I can say that it's unhelpful, that doomist framing is unhelpful, is that it's wrong scientifically. And I'm familiar enough with the numbers and the projections to be able to state conclusively that we still have

time to prevent the worst impacts of climate change from playing out. Now, there's been a lot made of this 12-year number that by 2030, we need to bring our carbon emissions down by a factor of two if we're to avert sort of catastrophic climate change. And there is a strong grain of truth to that in the sense that any scenario that keeps warming below about 2 degrees Celsius or rather even less, 1.5 degrees Celsius, where we start to see the loss of the world's coral reefs and inundation of our coastlines and ever more destructive extreme weather events, there are good reasons to try to keep the warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. And if we're to do that, then based on just where we are now, if you just do the math, it's unforgiving. We need to bring our carbon emissions down by a factor of two by 2030. That's a big job. That's tough. Yeah, I mean, right now the good news is we appear to be peaking those emissions.

The numbers this year are going to go down a little bit. That's the first time in a while. Really? That's wonderful. Yeah, so we appear to have hit little bit. That's the first time in a while. Really? That's wonderful. Yes, we appear to have hit the plateau. That's the good news. The bad news is we may be at the plateau, but we've got a black double diamond slope that we've got to go down now. If we had acted 30 years ago when we already knew we had a problem, it would be a bunny slope, one that I can even do. Now it's only a slope that my wife and daughter can do, a black double diamond slope.

You've got to bring those carbon emissions down far more rapidly. That's what decades of inaction and denial have bought us. And it's going to be tough to do that. And it's going to require major market incentives. And it's going to require politicians who are willing to do what's right for us rather than what might be beneficial to the fossil fuel interests who line their pockets. And that's why it's so important for people to vote, to use their voice in every way imaginable, to be out there demonstrating and marching and striking,

but to make sure that you show up and vote and that we elect politicians who will act on our behalf rather than on the behalf of polluting interests. Amen. But it is the case that if we make those changes, we will improve the future for ourselves and for our children. Yeah, and one last point.

I'm glad you asked that because we might miss the one and a half degree Celsius, you know, sort of threshold, that target. But this isn't a cliff that we go off. It's much more like a downsloping dangerous highway. And if we miss the one and a half degree Celsius exit, we sure want to get off at the two degree exit. If we miss that, we sure still want to get off at the two and a half degree exit. We don't want to get to four or five degrees

Celsius. So, it's much more a matter of every step we take, every bit of action that we take makes things better. Yeah. And so we have to decarbonize our economy as rapidly as we possibly can. And if we don't do it, it's a matter of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, that every step we make is positive movement and therefore is worth doing. And so maximum effort will be rewarded with maximum results. Absolutely. Well put, Adam. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk to us about this, Michael. I really appreciate you being here. Very much a pleasure. I look forward to coming back. Thank you so much. Well, thank you again to Michael Mann for coming on the show. His book, which covers climate

denial and the real science about climate change, is called The Madhouse Effect. Get it in stores now. And that is it for us this week on Factually. I want to thank Michael Mann for coming on. I want to thank our researcher, Sam Roudman, our producer, Dana Wickens, and Andrew WK for our awesome theme song, I Don't Know Anything. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm at Adam Conover. You can sign up for my mailing list at adamconover.net. And hey, until next time, stay curious. Thanks for listening.

That was a HeadGum Podcast.