oh i'm some are going to washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture despite clear evidence of climate change occurring in the number of climate change deniers in this country seems to be on the rise bankrolling this phony science behind the deniers and why is there a war on scientific freedom underway in america will discuss this tonight in my conversations with great minds dr michael mann also whistleblowers launched an assault on corporate america this week revealing the true nature of wall street's

elite so how do we keep the hucksters on wall street out and work to restore an american economy benefits the ninety nine percent of us and into its daily takes got from brown is back on top in the heated massachusetts senate race why is the mainstream media could mid to ignoring karl karl rove's role in brown's resurgence . for tonight's conversations with great minds i'm joined by dr dr michael mann dr mann is a physicist climatologist and professor is currently a member of the faculty at penn state university is the director of penn state's earth science so it's system science center so our command received his undergraduate degree in physics and applied mathematics from u.c. berkeley and both a master's in physics and a ph d. in geology and geophysics from yale university has received a number of honors in awards including selection by scientific american as one of

the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in two thousand and seven dr mann was a joint recipient of the nobel peace prize he's the author of over one hundred fifty peer reviewed publications as well as two books including his latest the hockey stick and the climate wars. dispatches from the frontlines like the man welcome thanks tom it's a pleasure to be here with you thanks for joining us and for writing this brilliant book. before we get into all the science about all of this i'm just curious about you what got you into climate science to begin with a long and circuitous route really to climate science say you know when i was a young child i was and i just loved science and i loved you know talking about time travel and tornadoes and hurricanes and the speed of light and just i was fascinated by anything that was vaguely scientific that had to do with you know trying to understand the natural world and i ended up in high school i was sort of

a computer geek you know when other kids were out you know having fun on saturday night i was actually with my computer nerd friends at school working on computers trying to solve problems and meeting some pizza that was my idea of fun saturday night and so that's you know i was always interested in side of that migrating to climate science so i decided to major in college in physics and i was interested in sort of solving problems in physics and using computers to solve difficult problems in physics i ended up majoring in physics and applied math and i went on to study theoretical physics at yale university i started out i was going to be a theoretical physicist so was in the late one nine hundred eighty s. and there were some things going on then they had cut funding for the so-called super super connecting super collider and so suddenly there wasn't nearly as much funding in physics anymore it was much more difficult to just work on any problem that you wanted to work on this with some of the trade and so you ended up getting

sort of funneled into increasingly specific and sort of smaller science in the big picture stuff that i had imagined working on and i realized at that time that at the same university just down the hill from the physics department. geology and geophysics there were people who were using math and physics to try to solve this amazing problem understanding the way earth's climate works and i got very excited about hey maybe i can use my math and physics and study earth's climate system that's how i got into this so at what point did scientists seriously who are looking at the climate and and noticing changes and wobbles and what. patterns and please tell us about those at what point do they start saying wait a minute maybe humans are involved in this process you know that's really what my ph d. research was about i wasn't actually studying climate change for my ph d.

i was focused on natural climate variability i was trying to understand long term oscillations natural oscillations in the climate in the impacts that they have and it was my interest in studying these long term oscillations that led me to try to make use of some of the long term records that we have we only have about one hundred years of instrumental monitor measurements that doesn't really tell us how unusual the the warming we see over the past century is in the long term context we need to turn to things like tree rings and corals and ice cores or proxy data and so was my interest in these long term oscillations that led me to study those types of data and what they could tell us about longer term changes in the climate and one of the tells well we were led sort of in this capably to this conclusion when we analyze the information in these data that there was something unusual about the warming of the past century that it really was without precedent as far back as we could go which was a thousand years and ultimately it led to this estimate this graphic we produced.

depicted how we think temperatures changed in the west. hockey stick here was sort of tilted hockey stick and sort of warm a thousand years ago the medieval air or relatively warm cooling as we get into the little ice age of the seventy's. one thousand nine hundred trees and then you see the blade of the hockey stick the abrupt warming of the past century which appears to be without precedent and the stick isn't on the cover your book but it's sort of there faintly in the background is it ok but. a but. you have taken so much flak for this hockey stick i mean it's like because you made it pictorial you made it visual you made it so somebody who hasn't completed high school can look at it and go. their separate mer you know it seems like they've in many ways almost singled you out you know when when the east anglia hacking happened and all

those emails among scientists those are for michael mann who are all off and now you have james inhofe saying that he if he gets one notch higher in his power in the u.s. senate he's going to come after you. a i'm curious your thoughts and responses to all that be academically intellectually be emotional you know how do you feel about this right well you know there are larger forces at work than you know i ever imagined i would be subject to and when i got interested in this problem i found myself sort of in the center of this raging controversy over climate change you know and i was really reluctant and really essentially an accidental public figure in this debate and. i think it is exactly what you say you don't and you don't need to understand the way a theoretical climate model works in the math and the physics behind a climate model to understand what a graphic the hockey stick is telling us that there is something unusual about the

recent warming people get that in a very basic level and because of that it became an icon in the climate change debate and i think it became a threat to those who have been looking to discredit the science of climate change often by as you allude to discrediting individual scientists like myself in the hope that they can make it seem like the science is a house of cards that all depends on one ten year old study by one scientist and that then is an argument for not having to deal with the challenge of the real challenge that we threaten that that threatens us that we have to deal with getting our emissions under control i've debated mark or i'll probably fifty times over the last nine years i mean it's these guys are just relentless committed true believers. so what are your personal response to the attacks but you know i think you you know you use the right term true believers those who

are attacking the science who are trying to discredit the science to them it's all about belief but in science it isn't about belief it doesn't matter what you believe it matters with the fact that to say what's the evidence that that tell you what does our understanding of the physics that controls the weather and controls the climate among the timescales and what does it tell us what can we you know the greenhouse effect you know some of our detractors would have you think this is controversial science but it's nearly two centuries old and we know about the greenhouse effect for nearly two centuries since that has been frankly yeah absolutely and moreover at least back to the early nineteenth century joseph or you know was an early scientist who understood that there was the fact that certain gases in the atmosphere like c o two which were producing through fossil fuel burning now. warm the surface of the earth and you know the u.s. military actually needed to understand that back in world war two to design

a heat seeking missile you had to understand the fact that c o two absorbs what we call infrared radiation heat in the atmosphere and if you don't understand that absorption property you can't even design a working so because the combustion process produces carbon dioxide if you've got a missile or a plane or anything it's burning fossil fuels and flying through the year it's got a higher level c o d the two immediately behind it and then the air around it and he's seeking missile is detecting that well it's more indirectly yeah and it's just the fact that there is c o two in the atmosphere and it it creates a fog if you're looking in the infrared part of the spectrum you see a fog and that fog is the absorption of radiation by c o two in general and all the c o two in the atmosphere and that's fascinating who are these people. who are. well first of all you. that's actually maybe a little a little bit larger topic for after the parade route sure i'm taking

a minute or two but i'm talking about the true believers and i mentioned mark moran over there so there's i mean he's he's kind of one of the frontline soldiers in this but but there are also the i guess who are these people the big time funders you know why and why the koch brothers put all this money into this why are the rise big oil found in the us we know exxon mobil played a big role in this why well you know i guess at some basic level. if we you know except the fact that our current addiction to fossil fuels on is having a very real cost to us a cost that sometimes hidden but it's the cost to our environment it's the threat to our future to the future a future that the earth that our children and grandchildren will inherit to be will see the most severe impacts of climate change they are the ones who will have to deal with the legacy of what we're doing today the fossil fuels that we're burning today and i think it's that recognition that if we accept that this is

a threat that we have to deal with and we have to transition to cold turkey a transition to get away from our reliance on fossil fuels it's understandable there are certain vested interests who are quite happy with the status quo they are profiting greatly from our addiction to fossil fuels and they don't really want to see that change and unfortunately rather than having that good faith to date that we could be having about policy about what to do about the problem they've decided to put all their resources into simply denying the problem and burying our head and burying our heads in the sand rather than recognizing the challenge that we need to deal with here yeah it's really quite remarkable a few years ago exxon mobil became the most profitable corporation in the history of earth i mean more profitable in the british east india company eighteenth century and then they gave lee raymond their accident c.e.o. a four hundred million dollar going away for a million dollars isn't as a as an exit bonus it's mine but we'll be back with more conversations the great

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stations and great minds with dr michael mann dr mann is a nobel prize winning physicist climatologist and professor he's also the author of over one hundred fifty peer reviewed papers as well as two books including his latest the hockey stick and the climate wars dispatches from the front lines so let's get back to it you're here in town right now because of this this this lawsuit this case uva versus cuccinelli what is it. well i'm talking about my book but i've also been talking quite a bit about this recent decision that you allude to so ken cuccinelli the attorney general of virginia. sort of taking a page out of the playbook that has been used against climate scientists now for well over a decade in an effort to try to discredit me and other scientists and climate science itself tried to sue the university of virginia. to turn over all of its

e-mails and private correspondence is from my time as a faculty member there with thirty nine other scientists around the world and it was pretty clear that what he was hoping to do was to do what climate change deniers have been trying to do to us for more than a decade try to find words and phrases that we've used and take them out of context and twist them to make it sound like you know the science has been rigged like you know climate change is the elaborate hoax that james inhofe claims it to be and so what they did was to what we did was to use what's called a civil investigative command basically a superior to demand from the university all of my e-mails based on this law that allows him to ferret out state fraud and he claims well you know the climate change is an elaborate hoax it's a fraud so therefore he could use this law to go after all of my emails and the

lower court found that in his forty page filing he hadn't provided any evidence whatsoever of any impropriety of any wrongdoing on my part and ultimately it went to the state supreme court and they rejected the case with prejudice meaning he can't come back and try to refile it and so it was a minor i'm sorry it was a minor victory in this long war prejudice they didn't just reject it they rejected it and slapped him upside the head that's one way of putting it's. not exist. i've had at least a dozen. people i consider to be conservatives here come regularly come on come on this program and tell me that scientists like you are doing this just to get rich and so i'm just curious how many millions of dollars have you made off the hockey stick it's funny i live a very modest life my wife my daughter and you know i'm a university professor i have

a typical university professor salary and what those who have tried to sort of paint climate scientists and all scientists as if it's a conspiracy we're just trying we're in it for the grant money. i there are very naive intentionally being somewhat misleading on what grant money actually does it doesn't go to your pocket grant money funds your research program you use it to func graduate students to work on research projects you fund publications so you can publish your findings in the peer reviewed literature summit you can attend conferences and present your research that's what grant funding does for you allows you to move the forefront of science forward and that's why the national science foundation and other science agencies fund scientists so we can help you know we depended for two centuries on science and technology to allow us to move forward in you know with our economy and with our standard of living and that's because the government supports science and technology and the at least so far well so far and

you know the idea that scientists are in it for the money when in fact if we really wanted to make money if i wanted to make money what i would do is become a climate change denier and i would disown my own work and the work of all my colleagues and i bet i could make a pretty penny for doing that all your speaking for you would go to fifty or one hundred thousand parts a rag but i wouldn't be able to live with myself at night. you know when i would be able to sleep at night knowing that i was being dishonest and unfortunately there are some who seem to be willing to misrepresent what we know to distort. the findings of science to smear honest scientists colleagues of mine who i knew were very good people good scientists but also very honest good people smeared simply because their findings represent a threat to some powerful vested interests i want to bring a graphic up here on the screen if we can if we could this is use of the hockey league quite the hype mistake but this is from the year one thousand basically when

arguably we first started using coal in europe but will significantly. and then and then we get to nine hundred what what happened here are these what are we looking at so as you say we're looking at a hockey league you know one of the tactics it's been used to try to discredit you know our work is to pretend that it exists in isolation but the hockey stick is this one study from ten years ago by me and the entire edifice of our understanding of climate change hinges on this one so it's always michael mann and crackpot guy i've heard of and you know it turns out that there's a whole body of evidence now there are more than a dozen independent estimates independent reconstructions and use different data in different techniques and they all come as you can see the same answer the recent warming appears to be without precedent as far back as we can go in some cases now more than a thousand years and you know this is

a robust finding this is not dependent on one scientist it's not dependent on one study so each one of these is different study it's a different study and you know they don't agree on all the details but what they do agree on is that the recent warming is with the president still has two hundred years and it does time of course with the industrial revolution and this alone doesn't prove that humans are responsible for that warming but we are able to take models of the climate system and we can subject them to natural factors like volcanic eruptions and changes in solar output and see what they predict and what we. we do that what we find is there are unable to explain the warming of the past century they can do a really good job describing what happened right up to that point in they fail to capture the warming of the past century and a half it's only when you put in the effect of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from fossil fuel emissions that we are able to explain that warming and you know you can even throw out all of these reconstructions there are dozens of independent lines of evidence that the globe is warming the climate is changing

in concert with that warming and we are primarily responsible for the changes that we're seeing and it's not the house of cards that our detractors would like to make some believe it is it's much more like a puzzle there's still a few pieces missing we don't have all the answers there are still some uncertainties and some of them you know have implications for policy some of them you know there are uncertainties in what exactly will happen with drought patterns in parts of the u.s. and if we if we're going to have a climate change we'd like to know exactly what's going to happen and so there are real uncertainties and they have policy implications but there is literally no legitimate question now every scientific body a major scientific probably in the u.s. and all of the industrial nations of the world have concluded that the globe is warming climate is changing we are the primary primary reason for that so. a lot of the deniers maintain any antis anti spin for you know how to make how do

they maintain the denial. and could it be the part of the appeal to it and probably i should ask this of a psychologist but you've been so in the middle of this could it be that a lot of people average people who don't have a scientific background just really are frightened by the idea that their grandchildren might grow up in a world that's hostile basically to human if you teach them to use james hansen's phrase. or not it that you're not the one that we're after two that we evolved in and so denial is just a comfortable thing it's. it's comforting i think that's part of it and i think you know you know often the first the next step after despair can be denial and i think that is part of it it would be much easier if we could convince ourselves that we're not leaving this legacy for our children grandchildren that we can continue to do what we're doing and everything will be fine you know it it might you know it might be pacifying to convince ourselves of that but we do have you know this you

know with this ethical obligation to our children and grandchildren and you know it doesn't matter if you're a democrat or republican you know i have good friends on both sides of the political spectrum and we all care about our children and grandchildren is there any science whatsoever that contradicts the hockey league we just saw that says well maybe it's not human effect maybe it's solar flares i've heard about a dozen times you know it's like say like i said it's it's it's it's not a house of cards that you take one away in the collapses it's like a puzzle and you're almost done right and you can see the picture and you don't have the complete puzzle but you can see the picture and there's no imaginable way at that point that you could rearrange the entire puzzle and still make sense of it so you know the rich are so there to just put this in an undisputable english right there is no disputing it is this is

a solved case humans are warming the climate. you know as you can is there a debate about how much or how fast and beyond the micro pieces but i mean that's right in that in the macro that's right so if you go to a scientific conference and you see what scientists are actually debating rather than what talking heads might be debating and in the public discourse and you look at the care reviewed scientific literature scientists are debating whether we're changing the climate whether the club is warmed by a degree and a half and it's likely to work much more in the future if we continue to elevate greenhouse gas concentrations we're not debating any of those things that's settled science we are debating some of the details you know how what will happen to rainfall patterns in the winter in the mid atlantic region of the u.s. well that depends on getting some subtle things right for example the only new phenomenon if you want to answer questions like that you have to know what happens to el nino and that turns out is still an unsolved problem. but that doesn't mean to do with global the macro issues are solved it's the micro issues it's what's

going to happen in western kansas what's going to happen in northern michigan what's going to happen in the in the chesapeake bay those kinds of things that's exactly right and even in the larger sense we know what's going to happen in those areas are going to get warmer that's right and you know heat waves will become more frequent and we'll see you know more intense weather events and you know there are a whole bunch of things that we know will happen but there are still some things that are uncertain and you know would it be great if rather than having this frankly unworthy debate about whether the problem is even real we could be talking about the real uncertainties that exist and how to deal with them and making smart policy it was. march fifteenth right now or sixteen whatever the middle middle of the middle of march. the way it was caesar and. yesterday was eighty seven degrees here in washington d.c. the cherry trees are blossoming two weeks earlier than one hundred hundred year or

so since the japanese gave them to us. something something is up is this climate change. sure is this weather so it's a little of both and that is that is the real answer to that and you know some scientists are quick to dismiss the connection between the two. but you know it isn't like we're just talking about random weather events in isolation you know weather is the random rolls of the die you know the dice and they can go up six as they can come up ones but when you look collectively at the rolls of the dice this winter and the rolls of the dice this past year what you see is that sixes are coming up a lot more often than they ought to in a fair die we are loading the dice and we're seeing it in various types of increasingly extreme weather not just heat waves and more intense flooding events and attention more powerful hurricanes there's still some debate about exactly what's happening with tornadoes and what climate change is doing there but there's likely some impact there to dr michael mann thanks so much for being with us today

. if you like to watch this or other conversations of great minds go to our web site of conversations with great minds dot com coming up after the break in light of the recent u.s. atrocities in afghanistan is the time we draw from it come from that country altogether and take a lesson from the marshall plan after world war two that and more coming up in tonight's big picture rumble.

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