The Science of Climate Change

The Science of Climate Change: 5 Questions for Climatologist Michael E. Mann

Michael E. Mann is the director of the Earth System Science Center and a professor in the Department of Meteorology at Penn State University. He best known for his work in climate modeling, the reconstruction of ancient climates, and the development of the oft-cited “hockey-stick” graph, which depicts the average temperatures of the Northern Hemisphere over the past 1,000 years.

Accused of scientific misconduct in connection with the unauthorized release of private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, U.K., in late 2009, Mann was investigated by Penn State officials. He was subsequently cleared of all charges in early July 2010. With this in mind, Britannica science editor John P. Rafferty asked Mann about his recent experiences at the center of the global warming issue and the current state of global warming research following the hack of the CRU e-mail system.

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Britannica: Global warming research is an inexact science that sometimes relies on incomplete data to make predictions. In which areas are climatologists most confident? In which is there the most uncertainty?

Mann: Well, global warming is no more or less inexact a science than any modern field of science that involves the behavior of complex systems and that requires multidisciplinary expertise and teams of scientists with complementary expertise to advance our understanding. It is no different from, say, the field of physics in that regard. As with physics, there are basic findings that are centuries old and which remain indisputable. With physics that includes, say, Newton’s laws of classical mechanics. In climate science, that includes the atmospheric greenhouse effect something that early 19th-century scientists like Fourier already knew about. In the absence of any additional knowledge, we know from the atmospheric greenhouse effect alone that increasing CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere will lead to a warming of Earth’s surface. No credible scientist would challenge that conclusion. And like physics, the science is less certain at its frontiers. In physics, we still don’t have a theory that unifies all of the fundamental forces, though many of them have been unified (e.g., electricity, magnetism, and the ‘weak’ nuclear force). In climate science, we still cannot predict with certainty how the El Niño phenomenon will change as we continue to increase greenhouse concentrations, but theoretical climate models nonetheless do a far better job of producing realistic looking El Niño events like those we see in the real world. Because of uncertainties (e.g., how El Niño will change), it is more challenging to make detailed regional projections of how future climates will change. But if we continue with our current trajectory of fossil fuel burning, we know with reasonable confidence that Earth will continue to warm, probably close to 5 °F warming by 2100. We know that the Arctic ice cap will disappear at least seasonally, glaciers and ice sheets will continue to retreat, sea level will continue to rise, probably between 0.5 and 1 meter, that hurricanes will become stronger, drought more widespread, and extreme weather, including flooding events and record-breaking heat waves, increasingly more common.

Britannica: Public opinion polls in the United States reveal growing skepticism as to whether global warming is real and traced to human causes. Is there a consensus among scientists on this issue?

Mann: The scientific consensus regarding the reality of human-caused climate change, and its potential threat, has never been stronger. The U.S. National Academy of Sciences earlier this spring issued a press briefing entitled “Strong Evidence on Climate Change Underscores Need for Actions to Reduce Emissions and Begin Adapting to Impacts” following its most comprehensive review yet of climate science (see here).

Britannica: In 1998 you first presented the famous “hockey stick” graph, which shows the change in average temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere across the last 1,000 years and depicts a dramatic increase in average temperatures throughout the 20th century. How valuable is this graph some 12 years on from its creation? Should it be improved with the additional knowledge gained since 1998, or is it still a useful tool in its current form?

Mann: Given that the study was the first of its kind, and is now well over a decade old, it would be remarkable if paleoclimate scientists, including my collaborators and me, didn’t continue to refine and improve on these seminal early efforts. It is worth considering, in that context, how our key original conclusions have held up.
Our original decade-old findings have in fact been reaffirmed by more than a dozen independent teams of scientists. Our findings were reviewed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2006, which concluded:

“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes the additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and documentation of the spatial coherence of recent warming and also the pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators.”

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its most recent (2007) assessment concluded that recent Northern Hemisphere warmth is not only likely unprecedented over the past 1,000 years, as we concluded in our original work, but that in fact this conclusion likely holds farther back (at least 1,300 years, and possibly further, although evidence is more scarce).

Meanwhile, we have continued to seek to advance the frontiers of the science. Over the past two years, my co-authors and I have published a number of papers in the leading scientific journals (Nature, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), refining estimates of past temperature trends using more-sophisticated statistical methods that we have rigorously tested using synthetic data sets, and making use of considerably updated and expanded networks of climate ‘proxy’ data. We have compared the spatial patterns of past temperature changes to results from climate model simulations to demonstrate the role of natural phenomena such as El Niño in understanding past climate changes. We have also examined the relationship between past climate changes and changes in phenomena such as Atlantic hurricanes as recovered from coastal sedimentary deposits. These studies use relationships in the past to better understand how future human-caused climate change may impact such phenomena.

Britannica: In November 2009, thousands of private e-mails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of Britain’s East Anglia University were made public. Their unauthorized release emboldened skeptics of climate change science, who claimed that it proved that researchers had misrepresented and falsified data, though a subsequent inquiry largely cleared the scientists of wrongdoing, saying that they had acted with integrity and not manipulated the data. Do you think that this will reduce the public’s willingness to trust current and future scientific explanations of global warming and climate change?

Mann: While the attacks against climate science may have energized climate change deniers, and those who derive their information from talk radio and other outlets of climate change disinformation, polling by Jon Krosnik of Stanford suggests that the public has grown more convinced and more concerned about the reality of human-caused climate change in recent months. Undoubtedly, the dramatic heat and extreme weather events of this past summer has probably recaptured the public’s awareness of the changes that are taking place, and has served as a stark reminder of the what looms in our future if we refuse to take action to mitigate climate change. The ordeal has nonetheless emboldened the climate change denial industry, including some members of the U.S. Congress, who are disingenuously exploiting the manufactured e-mail scandal to thwart efforts to pass meaningful climate change legislation.

Britannica: You personally faced charges of data tampering and deviating from the accepted practices of your field as a result of the release of the e-mails from CRU. Although you were fully exonerated, what effect did the investigation have on how you think climate science should be conducted?

Mann: I’ve been the subject of attacks by climate change deniers for more than a decade now, because of the prominent role that the “hockey stick” temperature reconstruction has played in the public discourse on climate change. This doesn’t mean that I’m numb to the outrageous attacks against me and other climate scientists. But I’m not surprised by anything anymore. There is nothing, it would seem, that the climate change denial industry isn’t willing to do in their attempts to thwart policy action to combat human-caused climate change. While the attacks have been tough to deal with at times, I’ve had a huge amount of support from my colleagues, other scientists, and ordinary citizens who have come out of the woodwork just to thank me for my contributions. And in large part because of a great group of students, post-docs, and collaborators, I’ve been able to keep my research program moving forward, even as I spend significants amounts of time engaged in public outreach to both combat climate change disinformation and help educate the public about the reality and potential risks of human-caused climate change. If there is a single most important lesson to be taken from the CRU e-mail hack incident, I think it is the one that was offered in an editorial in the premier science journal Nature back in March (”Climate of Fear,” Nature, 464, p. 141, 11 March 2010), “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”