>> today on "earth focus," the impact and politics of climate change. climate scientist michael mann speaks with correspondent miles benson. coming upup on "earth focus." >> we will have years like this more often than n not. and we've had that f for the last 5 years. >> and there just aren't enough sandbags to go around. still not enough sandbags to o go around. >> i haven't seen a winter like this in a really long time. or even maybe never.. >> we've been seeing sosome seve weatather. expect to see more.

it's coming. hurricanes, floods, drouough, , raging wildfdfires, snowstorms, and tornadoes. is this purely nature, or are tthere manmamade, therefore controllable, factors at worork? a warmer, moister environment can intensify storms, creating heavier precipitation. and this scientists say is why human activities may account, at least in part, for the rise in extreme weather we'rere experiencing. >> the debate is setettled. climate change is a fact. and when our children''s children lookok uin the eye a and ask ife didid all we could to leave them a safer, more stable world with new sources of energy, i want us to be able t to say yes, we did. [applause] >> as the obobama admininistratn renews itits commitment to ac

the debate over climate change remains polarized. climat scientist michael mann is a central figure in that debate. he was one of the scientists behind the development of the controversial hockey stick chart, which showed how temperature in the late twentieth century was exceptionally warm compared to the previous 900 years. this triggered a tax on dr. mann and the science behind his work, all documented in his book "the hockey stick and the climate wars." michael mann, you write that in mid 1990s, scientisists were abe to begin to connenect the d dotn climate chchange. could d you elaborate? >> we underrstood the basic science of the greenhouse effect nearly two centuries ago. joseph

fourier, the same e guy who discovered the law of heat conduction, understood that there was this greenhouse effect. so o we've known for soe time that the greenhouse effect exists and that we're increasing it through fossil fuel burning. by the mid 1990s, we had reached a level of formal certainly about that that we had not before reached. we could actually attach a number to it. in the second assessment report of the ipcc published in 1995, the ipcc concluded that there was now a discernible human influence on the climate. now, ththere's an interesting ststory there. the language woud have beeeen stronger than just discscernible, but the d delegas of c certain participating natis like saudi arabia demanded that the language be watered down and discernible ended up being sort of a lowest common denominator. it was the one thing that everybody could agree on, the governments and the scientists. but we were able

to say that we've seen the fingerprint now of human influence in a formal way. we could actually detect that human finngerprint in ththe patterns f climate change that we had measured. >> given the seriousness of the issue, can you explain why there has been so little action by pololicymakers? >> well, unfortunately, m my of our politicians are beholden to fossil fuel interests. i mean, let's make no mistake here. we're talkingng about taking g n the most powerful indndustry tht evever existed on the face of ththe earth, t the fossil l fuel indndustry. they've chosen to fight back using hundreds of millions of dollars, for example, in the u.s. to fund what, without exaggeration, is the greatest disinformation campapaign ever run. in fact,t, there was a memo that was

publhed in 2002--actually, it was leaked. itit was a leaked mo from a republican pollster named frank luntz. and he was advising his clients, essentially fossil fuel interests, that back in 2002, there was this closing window. the public was now becoming cononvinced by thehe scientific community that human caused climate change is real. anand if they were toecomome convinced about this, they would demand policy actions be implemented, actction be taken. but whatat luntz said wawas that there's still a window of opportunity left, according to his polling, according to the focus groups that he had done, to confuse the public, to cloud their understanding of the issue, to try to make it seem as if the science i is stil fiercely contested. and what he said was as long as the public thinks that scientists don't agree, that there isn't a scientific consensus, they can be convinced that it might be

too costly to take action. and so that's exactly what the forces of climate change denial have chosen to do ever since. theyey've doubled down, if you will, in this campaign of disinformatation. >> i want to do my part on global warming. all yes on 23 says is... > the effort through televisn advertisising, throuough the cultivation of s so-called expes who attack the science, talking hheads, the cuultivation of talking heads who o appear on tk radio, who appearar on cable televisi, they've creaeated this very elaborate network of think tanks and advdvocates to create confusion in the publilic mindset aboutut this issusue of human caused climate change. >> so what we're seeing here is a drastic change in climate, aren't we? >> well, climate has always been changing, but this is nothing to do with man. >> i have made a case, a very

solid, , science-based case, against anththropogenic globalal warming. >> and me ththinks someone is playing fast and loose with this whole subject. >> yes, they arare. i meaean, basically global warming causes less snow except when global warming causes more snow. it causes less cold except when it causes more cold. >> if we're going to o nalize producers of carbon monoxide, then we all--every time we exhale, we'e're breaking the e . >> it's gettingng warmer, you know, in n jupiter, a and they't have any y suvs drivingng aroun jupiter. >> they said there were gonna be more tornadoes, more hurricanes, no ice in the arctic, increasingly hot weather. you have to stand up and point out that every year now for 15 years, they've been wrong. >> the dreaded polar vortex. do you know what the polar vortex-- have you ever heard of it? well, they just created it for this week. >> all they need to do is to convince e the public that

the science is uncertain. and that's why you'll find some of their advocates who will deny that climimate change exists, dy the science altogether, but others who o will--who are somewhat more surreptitious in their attack will concede some of the scientific evidence, bubt will say that there's too much uncertaiainty, that the impactss might be sububsttially smallller than what the scientists who study impact say. so there are theese various lines of attack from denynying clclimate change outright to simply contesting that it's a problem. the only commonality being the argument that we donon't need to t transn away from our reliance on fossil fuels, an argument, that's of course, that's very convenient to the fossil fuel interests who are fundining all of this disinformation. >> you talk aboutut the

scientization of politicscs. wht exactly does that mean? >> one of the other things that they've done is to co-opt politicians, like james inhofe, senior senator of oklahoma who has declared climate change to be the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the american people while it continues to ravage his state because indeed oklahoma has been at the front lines of the impacts of climate change on the u.s. the record drought, the record heat that they've seen in recent years. but, you know, other politicians like joe barton, who was the chair of the house energy and commerce committee, a large number of politicians, sadly many of them on one side of the partisan divide, republicans in particular, whose campaigns have been financed heavily by fossil fuel interests and who are now doing little more than acting as advocates foror fossil fuel interests. whn it comes to the question of, you

know, passing legislation to deal with climate change, that's really the scientization of politics that i i was talking about. this idea thahat the underlying scientificic evidence is just a a politicaal footbtball to be contested as ay other political issue would be cocontested. and there are polititicians w whose job it iso contest that evidence. when in fact, you know, that's not the way s science is. there ar't two equally valid sides. there's a reason that the flat earth society no longer prevails in our public discourse, because they were wrong. the earth isn't flat. we accept that. gravity does exist. there are propositions in science. and, you know, i'll tell you, if there was a vested interested, if there was a huge industry that woululd stantoto profit greatly if the theory of gravity

wewere wrong, yoyou would see ththe theory of gravity being contested in our u.s. senate. >> talk about the hockey stick and why it became such an icon in the climatate debate. >> well, it's this curve that my co-authors and i p published now 15 years ago. we attempted to estimate the temperature of the earth back in time. now, there's only about a centutury f widespread thermometer measurements a around the world. so we can only y documentnt from instrumental measurements, thermometers, how the globe has warmed over the past century to century and a half. and we know it's warmed about a degree celsius, about a degree and a half fahrenheit. what the instrumental record d can't tell us is how unusual is a warming like that over ththat period of time. cocould it be tt that sort of warming happens naturally over a century time scale? to try to address that andnd related questions a aboutw

the climate had changed in the past, my co-authorors and i attempted to make use of what we call proxy climate records-- nattural archives like tree rins or corals or ice cores or lake sediments that tell us something about how the climate changed in the past. and often these records are available not just 100 years, but 1,000 years or even further back in time. and so we took all of the information that was available at the t time fromom records ofs sortrt, so-called proxy recocor, toto estimate how the temperatue of the earth, specifically the northern hemisphere where we had the most data, how the temperature of the northern hemisphere had changed over the past 1,000 years. and what we found was--although the estimates are uncertain, as yoyou can imagine bececause we'e not working with thermometers, we're working with these very imperfect natural thermometers like tree rings and ice cores. so there's this band of

uncertainty. but even when you look at the band of the uncertainty back in time, you see that the recent warming is outside of f the range that e see over the past 1,000 years. there's no evidence that a warming of this magnitude happens nataturally, at least as far back as w we uld go. it led to a chart, which depicts temperatures starting out fairly warm 1,000 years ago, getting colder as you descend into the depths of the little ice age, and then, of course, the rapid warming of the past century, the spike at the end. it was the shape of this long term cooling followed by this rapid spike that sort of resembles a particular sports implement, a hockey stick. and it got named the hockey stick. the curve was featured in the summary for policymakers of the third assessment report of the ipcc, the 2001 report. and it quickly became an icon in

the climate chanange debate. >> are the severe weather patterns we're seeing today related to climate change? >> we e are seeing t the loadinf the weather dice is the way i'd describe it. . you can't lolookt any one heat wave and say, you know, climate change caused that particular heat wave with any great degree of certainty because there's a lot of sort of natural variability in the weather, the vagaries of the weather. you can get unusuallyly hot days just from chance alone. you can geget unusually cold days from chance alone. one of the things you can do is tally those rolls. so these are random rolls of the weather dice. and the question is, are we loading those dice so that 6s are coming up more often? well, it turns out 6s, by some memeasure, are w coming up twice as often as they ought to. and what i mean by that is if you look, for example, at the u.s., you look at the rate in which we are breaking records for all-time warmth and you tally over all of

the locations across the country, all of the days of the years for all of the, you know, hundred or so years where we have good data, and you look at how often we are breaking all-time records for warmth vs. all-time records for cold, ok. in an unchanging climate, in ththe absence of human caused climate change, t that raratio shoould be one to one. you shoud break cold records as often as you break warm records. what we're seeing is we're now, if you look a at the past few year, for example, seeing warm records, all-time heat records, broken at 3 times the rate cold records are being broken. 3 times the rate you would expect from chance alone. that's actuallyly like rolling 6s6s the timmes as often as you would expepect. so rather than rollilg a 6 one in 6 times as you would expepect fromom a fair die, 6s e coming up half the time, so every other roll is a a 6. >> is climate c change happening faster than we expecected? >> the current trajectory that

we're on leads to the conclusion that within a matter of a couple of decades we may see ice-free coconditions in the arcticic at the end of the summer. this is something that the climate models predict shouldn't happen for another 60 years, till the endnd of the 21st centutury. and indeed nature seems to be on a course that's faster, that's momore dramatic than whatt the climate e models p predict.e are alalready obseserving and measuring a decrease in the amountt of ice in the greenland ice sheet and the west antarctic ice sheet. now, the climate models have predicted that we shouldn't see that for many decades to come. and a key distinction here is if it's a land ice sheet, a land-based ice sheet, then when it melts it actually contributes to global sea level rise. that's not the case for sea ice, but it is the case for the continental ice sheets. and

so the fact that we're already measuring losses of ice from these major continental ice sheets means that they're contributing to sea level rise faster, once again, than climate scientists projected them to. >> can we say how soon it's gonna start causing problems for people who live nearr the seashore? >> therere's a credible body of work now that suggests that t if we continue with business as usual fossil fuel emissions, tthen by thehe end of this cent, we could see as mucuch as two meters, 6 feet of global sea level rise. now, that would bee catastrophic for many coastal regions. fofor the u.s. east cot and gulf coast, island nations around the world, some of which would literally be submerged by that amount of sea level rise. the ipcc makes a far more conservative statement. they state an upper bound of about a meter, about 3 feet. and ''s o once again an e exampe of where the ipcc arguably has been overly conservative. some, as myself, have argued that

partly that's just due to the culture of science. scientists tend to be reticent. we don't like to make strong conclusions that we have to withdraw at somome later time. d there's also a component, i believe, due t to the pressure,, the outside pressure, the critics, the very well fundeded and well organized effort to literally y discredit the sciene of climate change, sometimes by attempting to discredit the scientists themselves. i myself have been a victim of that. and in the face of all that pressure and those attacks, i thi t to some eent t the ipcc has actually w withdrawn a bit d they've been more guguarded, moe conservative, more reticent in what they're willing to o concle than thehey really shoululd be n the evidedence. arguably, youou know, if it is indeed the ipcc's role to advise governments on the potential for dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate, which is what

the ipcc was originally charged with as their mission, arguably, you shouldld not sort of downply thee higher r end scenarios if they're credible, even if they're lolow probability outcomeses. mitigating climate chahange, dog something about ouour carbonon emissions is a a planetar ininsurance popolicy. and in gug the terms s of that ininsurance policy,y, we need to be fococusg on some of those potentitial, me exextreme catatastrophic o outc. if the ipcc c systematicically downplays those outcomes, then it doesn't serve that larger process of societal risk assessment as it should. >> if the changes are becoming so visiblble, why isn't t the pc more readily accepting climate change e as reality? >> unfortunatately, one of the lessons of sort of the battles overer environmnmenl

protection in the u.s. this century is that unfortunately a problem often has to reach crisis proportions before policymamakers are willing to a, often because there are vested ininterests whoo are lobbying heavily for actions not to be taken. and this was the cacase, for example, with acid rain where, you know, we committed to far worse environmental impacts of acid rain than we should have because the coal industry, whose emissions were causing acid rain, fought back fiercely against any policy action to deal with it. ozone depletion. once again, it totook us decades to act. we knew that the problem exiisted back, you know, inn the early 191970s. it took until the, you know, the montreal protocol in 1984 for us to actually take policy actions to prohibit the production of these

substances, chlorofluorocarbons, that were destroying the ozone layer. and perhaps the best example was that, you know, eenvironmental pollution of our l lakes and rivevers. the cuyahoga river i n ohio, it took that river catching on fire. it took a river catching on fire for the u.s. public to say wait a second, we have a proboblem he we need to do something about.t. so some of us, you know, think that we may unfortunately need to have that cuyayahoga river moment in the e climate change debate before we will act. sosomething so undedeniable that even the e most well funded, well organized disinformation campaign cannot convince the public not to believe what they're seeing with their own two eyes. >> when you talk to other scientists and urge them to get into the fight, do they explain

their reluctance? >> what i perceive is that this problem m is statarting to solve itself f naturally through sortf generational change. many of the younger scientists that i talk to, you know, graduate students today, young post docs, they grew up in a different environment. they witnessed the attacks on science. to many of them, it upset them. it upset them that scientists were being attacked for simply speaking truth to power.r. and it sort of energizd thehem. and they come in wantntg to do o sething abouout this. i have the sense that there's a much greater enthusiasm for public o outreach and communication among the younger scientists that are coming into this field and it may have been an inadvertent byproduct of the attacks against the science. i ththink it's actually led to

sort of a new breed of scientists s who comes in wantig to do science, 'cause, you know, that's what we really all lovove doingng is science, but recognizing that therere's also a roleleor speakining out, for communicating the sciencnce. >> if we can continue our upward trajectory in fossil fuel burning, , what will l the plant look like at the end of the century? >> qualitatively speaking, if you look at impapacts on human health, water availability, the human water resources, food resources, land, the global economy, pretty much every sector of our lives, of human civilization, what you see is a business as usual fossil fuel burning scenario by the end of the century gives us hihighly negative impacts across the boards in all those categories. i forgogot to mentin biodiversity. a potentially large scale extinction of

spepecies. some of these we can quantify economically, or we can try to. some of them we can't even qualify how important they are. what is the value of the earth? well, i it's infinite because if we destroy the earth's environment, there is no plan "b." there is no planet "b" that we can go to. how do you put a cost, you know, on the health of the environment? arguably you can't even do so. and in fact, it's that principle, that it's an infinite cost, when we start talking about those sorts of scenarios that leads some people to conclude that the precautionary principle applies here, that the potential imimpact of what we're doing is so potentially harmrmful to us, to other livivg things, to the planet that it's almost obvious that we need

to mitigate this problem, that we need to take actionsns now to avert t those catastrorophic futureses, potential futures. >> many people believe that truth will prevail over time. but do we have enough time left? >> so there's an urgency to this problem now unlike any time in the past. and there is still time e to avert catastrophe. ththat's ththe good news. thehed news is there isn't a whole lot of time. and what it means is we don't have another 5 or 10 years to debate e in our u.s. congress whether or not climate e change exists. we e have to be debating right now what we're gonna do ababout it. >> michael mann, thank you very much.

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