The halftime of climate change
By targeting Michael Mann, climate change skeptics are looking for the wrong target.
On February 8 this year, after 12 years of lengthy litigation, the US Superior Court for the District of Columbia ruled that two climate skeptics could be held accountable for their defamation of climate scientist Mann – paying more than $1 million in damages. It is also the world's first defamation judgment against a climate change scientist.
A key study by Professor Mann in 1998 made it easy for ordinary people to understand what climate change was going on with a chart. As a result, he and his research have been among the fiercest targets of climate change skeptics.
I'm a fighter, and when I was in elementary school, I was brave enough to face bullies who were much older than me. I'm doing the same thing today. I believe in facing challenges no matter how big they are. Mann told The Paper.
Mann's 12-year lawsuit is not only a "legend" in the scientific community, but also a reflection of a global controversy that has lasted for decades. As early as the first World Climate Conference in 1979, scientists warned that increased carbon dioxide concentrations would lead to global warming, yet for more than 40 years, too much time has been spent stalled in debate and skepticism.
2023 is the hottest year on record, and with extreme weather and climate events around the world emerging in recent years, climate change denial has become increasingly untenable. This year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its sixth climate report, which clearly stated: "There is no doubt that human activity is warming the atmosphere, oceans and land. This has had and will continue to have a significant impact. At the COP28 climate conference at the end of last year, the world's 195 member states reached the "Dubai Consensus" in the oil powerhouse UAE - "phasing out fossil fuels in the energy system in a just, orderly and equitable manner", sending a signal to the world to say goodbye to the fossil fuel era.
On the eve of World Meteorological Day on March 23 this year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released the latest "State of the Global Climate" report, showing that the earth's greenhouse gas levels, surface temperature, ocean heat and acidification, sea level rise, Antarctic ocean ice sheet and glacier retreat and other records have been broken again, some records have even been greatly broken, and the corresponding changes are still accelerating.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres called it a "distress signal" from the planet and called on world leaders to take immediate action to build the last lifeline for people and the planet.
Science and politics are working to reach a consensus on climate change despite the backlash, but the smoke of the climate change debate has not yet fully dissipated.
In what is supposed to be rational scientific disinformation, there is a mixture of disinformation and lies, scientific research is distorted, the truth about the climate threat is obscured, and attacks on science have become broader and more sophisticated, even extending to malicious personal attacks on scientists.
The Mann case may be an important coordinate in the middle of the decades-old "climate war", and scientists now know that they can respond to the attack by suing for defamation through legal means.
On the other hand, the new challenges of the climate change debate are likely to be even greater. Climate change skeptics are changing tactics – what Mann calls the "new climate wars": including delaying inaction, divisiveness, shifting focus and promoting "doomsdayism" passivity.
The scientific consensus around the climate change debate is becoming clearer, but there is still a long way to go in the broader field.
The most controversial chart in science
On Earth Day in 1998, at the age of 33, Mann, then a young postdoc, and two colleagues published a paper in the world's top academic journal, Nature: They used nature's "temperature archives" of tree rings, corals, sediments and ice cores to estimate the global temperature record from then to 1400 AD. In a second paper the following year, they expand the data further and go back to 1000 AD.
This chart, considered a landmark in the field of climate change science, shows the change in the Earth's average temperature over the past 1,000 years. The graph shows that the Earth's temperature barely changed for nearly 900 years, until the 20th century when it suddenly accelerated, like an upside-down hockey stick, hence the name hockey-stick graph.
Because this chart shows the existence of climate change so clearly that even the average person with no scientific training can understand it. In 2001, the IPCC published an updated version of the chart from the MAN Study in its third report. The "hockey curve" quickly became widely known and became the "target of public criticism". A 2013 report in The Atlantic called it "the most controversial chart in science."
"The 'hockey curve' became an iconic symbol in the climate debate in the late '90s, when skepticism and attacks on climate science funded by the fossil fuel industry were escalating, and I was targeted by the study's lead author. Professor Mann told The Paper.
In 2004, two critics in Canada, an economist and an oil industry consultant, disputed the statistics and methods used in Mann's study. In response, Mann issued an amended-the-law statement, but did not alter the main conclusions of the study.
Over the next eight years, Mann and his colleagues became the subject of a series of investigations by the National Research Council, Republicans in Congress, Republican Attorney General of Virginia, and Pennsylvania State University.
The vast majority of investigations have shown that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with Mann's research, and there is no research misconduct on his part. A report by three independent statisticians commissioned by Republicans in the U.S. Congress criticized Mann's statistical methodology, but the analysis was widely questioned by experts and found to be plagiarism.
In 2009, Mann's research came into the spotlight again during an event called "Climategate". At that time, hackers broke into the computer servers of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Centre and leaked thousands of emails between scientists, including Dr. Mann. Skeptics claim that Mann manipulated the data to inflate the "hockey curve".
Subsequently, Penn State, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce, and others launched a more rigorous investigation into Mann's research. All investigations ultimately revealed that the content of the email exchange was taken out of context, that Mann had no wrongdoing, and that he was not held responsible.
Perhaps the most convincing evidence is that in the decades since it became a source of suspicion and debate, scientists around the world have plotted various versions of the "curve" using different data sources and statistical methods. There are more than 20 versions officially published after peer review alone, all of which support the conclusions of Mann's 1998 "Hockey Curve".
In 2012, attacks on Mann Research escalated to personal attacks on himself. A conservative media outlet and a right-wing research group published comments comparing Dr. Mann, then a professor at Penn State, to the school's former football coach who was convicted of sexually assaulting multiple children, claiming that Mann had made fraudulent charts.
Mann, who has been responding to various questions about his research through public channels for years, has chosen a different approach this time – legal action.
"It's one thing to criticize our work," he said, "and it's another thing to accuse me of fraud and compare me to a convicted child sexual molester." As a father of a 6-year-old girl, this was probably the worst thing I've ever experienced and I felt like I had to do something about it. Mann said in his testimony in court.
Because Mann was one of the world's best-known climate scientists by then, as a public figure, he faced a higher standard of defamation proof. After 12 years of litigation, the court found Rand Szynberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Institute for Competitive Enterprise, and Mark Stein, a contributor to National Review, guilty of defamation.
The verdict said: "The remarks of the two men are motivated by malicious revenge and deliberate harm, and have gone beyond the scope of freedom of speech." The jury awarded Mann $1 in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages.
"I hope this verdict sends the message that wrongly attacking climate scientists is not protected speech," Mann said in a statement. However, after the verdict was announced, both defendants said they still stuck to their previous views.
Half a century of "climate wars"
Although Dr. Mann was ultimately supported by justice, the best time to combat climate change may have been missed.
In November 1965, then-US President Lyndon Johnson got his hands on the first-ever government report warning of the dangers of burning large quantities of fossil fuels. Nearly 60 years later, the consequence is what we see today – the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 420 parts per million (parts per million), compared to pre-industrial levels of about 280 parts per million.
On June 23, 1988, James Hansen, the 47-year-old director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, warned the world of impending danger at a congressional hearing: NASA is 99 percent confident that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities have caused global warming and are changing our climate, and the likelihood of extreme weather is increasing.
However, the warnings made by these scientists have not been heeded in a timely and sufficient manner.
Jiang Xiaoyuan, chair professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said that the controversy over climate change mainly focuses on three interrelated issues: First, is the earth warming? Second, will global warming cause environmental disasters? Third, is this warming caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions?
"I don't think there is enough definite basis on either side to affirm or deny global warming. Because climate change itself is so complex, we don't have the tools to solve it exactly. So I don't think there is a purely objective climate science right now. Jiang Xiaoyuan said. "The global warming in recent years is likely to be due only to the fact that we are in a warming phase of a certain cycle of temperature fluctuations inherent to the earth. ”
However, climate scientists do not think so, and human-caused climate change has become the consensus of most scientists. Wei Ke, deputy director of the Monsoon System Research Center of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said, "The science of climate change is not only observation, but also a solid foundation in mathematics and physics. ”
As for the climate cycle, Weike believes that the key is "how long and how much changes occur, which determines the nature of the matter", and that both greenhouse gases and temperatures are increasing at a rate of orders of magnitude faster than the previous fastest.
In fact, the more than 200 arguments and "facts" made by climate skeptics over the years have been debunked by scientists over the years. However, these unscientific views are widely circulated in various media, eroding the public and the media's understanding of climate change.
Weike published it in September last yearThe End of the Thirty Years' Climate War"The public doesn't like to be conformist, the public likes entertainment, huge conspiracy stories, breaking news, alarmist predictions, etc., and that's what many climate change opponents excel at," the article said. For this reason, opponents like to package global warming as a shocking conspiracy, such as global warming is the complicity of scientists around the world, scientists with ulterior motives artificially modify the data, the greenhouse effect theory is tampered with, the peer review process of scientists is corrupt, and scientists try to hide the cooling of the global temperature series. Wei Ke said.
The deeper roots of climate skepticism and denial come from conflicts of interest. In his 2021 book, The New Climate Wars, Mann exposes the fact that fossil fuel company-funded researchers are trying to challenge the science of climate change in order to benefit the fossil industry.
One of the first critics of his research in 2004 was an oil consultant. The people who made defamatory remarks against him in 2012 were also from research institutes funded by petrochemical companies.
In his book, Mann focuses on the tactics that the fossil fuel industry has used to block climate action for decades: including spending millions of dollars to recruit "contrarian scientists" and lobbyists to participate in a massive public disinformation campaign, one of which is to "attack the accuracy of climate science and high-profile climate scientists."
In 2021, an international team of researchers used AI technology to classify 255,000 documents related to climate change-related claims from conservative think tank websites and popular blogs published over the past 20 years. The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, grouped these claims into five broad categories: global warming is not happening, human emissions of greenhouse gases are not causing global warming, climate impacts are not bad, climate solutions are not working, and climate movement/science is unreliable. Doubts about Mann's research are relegated to the category of unreliable climate science.
Although climate skeptics have not succeeded in refuting the findings of Mann and most scientists, they do sow a lot of doubt in the public mind.
In 2008, 71 percent of Americans admitted that climate change was happening, according to a survey by Yale University's Climate Change Communication Project and George Mason University. But from 2008 to 2010 (around the time of Climategate), the percentage of Americans who accepted climate change fell to 57 percent. It has since rebounded. A 2023 survey found that 72% of Americans admit that climate change is happening.
"In the United States, for example, among those who oppose climate change, in addition to some of the differences in scientific concepts, another more important reason is profit. Liu Yuanling, an assistant researcher at the Institute of American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, who has long been concerned about climate issues, told The Paper.
"The majority of the opposition to climate change in the United States is concentrated in Republican conservatives, and these people are concentrated in areas that are also home to many large fossil fuel conglomerates. In order to protect their interests, it is natural to oppose climate change. Liu Yuanling explained.
An even stronger case is the opposition of former Democratic Senator Joe Manchin to Democratic President Joe Biden's domestic plans to combat climate change. U.S. media reported that a key factor in Manchin's rebellion as a member of the party was his stake in the coal industry. Before serving as a senator, he founded a coal brokerage company in West Virginia, which he handed over to his son after he became a senator, but he remains a shareholder in the company.
For decades, fossil fuel interests have been the main force driving climate change skepticism and outright denial. However, as the true effects of climate change become increasingly apparent, outright denial of climate change is waning, and a more "moderate" and subtle tactic of opposition is already taking place.
New "climate wars"
Mann's defamation trial coincided with the release of a new report by the Center Against Digital Hate (CCDH) that mentions some new tactics for climate skeptics.
In addition to "refusing to acknowledge climate change and attacking climate science and scientists," the report says, skeptics are trying to undermine confidence in climate change solutions.
This strategy was also on full display during the 12-year trial of the Mann case. The outright denial of climate science has decreased over the course of the case, but the integrity of scientists has become a larger goal.
"The nature of climate change denial has changed," said Callum Hood, CCDH's director of research. A report by the organization analyzing YouTube videos found that personal attacks on scientists are now one of the most common types of content against climate change.
Mann isn't the only climate scientist under attack. Lauren Kurtz, executive director of the Legal Defense Fund for Climate Science, revealed that scientists have been the target of fake news accusations in recent years.
"Every year we help more and more scientists. In 2023, we helped more than 50 researchers in a record, and many more climate scientists contacted her organization claiming to have been censored during the Trump administration. She said.
Looking back at recent history, one example is the fierce attack of the famous American scientist Anthony Fauci by vaccine skeptics during the pandemic.
At the same time, it is rare for scientists to publicly fight back against climate deniers. The vast majority of scientists who have suffered similar attacks are often unwilling or unable to actively fight back out of concern for their professional development and personal safety. Mann's trial is one of the very few cases in which climate scientists in the United States and around the world have come forward to defend their research.
"Climate change deniers find them untenable, because we see the impact of climate change on the U.S., China and around the world every day," Mann told The Paper. As a result, fossil fuel interests and their adherents have turned to new tactics: delay, division, diversion, and even alarmism, and they are trying to keep us addicted to fossil fuels. ”
As an example, Rex Tillerson, the former CEO of oil giant ExxonMobil, is not a climate skeptic in the traditional sense, admitting that climate change is real. But the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to internal company documents, it is actively working to downplay the harmful effects of the climate crisis, while emphasizing technologies such as geoengineering, which offsets warming by emitting particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight. In fact, he thinks climate change is an engineering problem, so we can continue to burn fossil fuels. Mann said.
Other climate change opponents have led people to focus too much on individual actions and away from systemic solutions and policies.
"British Petroleum (BP) offers the world's first personal carbon footprint calculator. Why do they do it? Because they want us to focus on our carbon footprint, not theirs. The same tactic is evident in the gun lobby: 'guns don't kill, people kill', which is typically biased. Mann said.
This leads to the second strategy – splitting.
Mann agrees that personal lifestyle changes are necessary, but lifestyle changes alone will not help achieve the goal.
"Opponents are trying to convince us that individual actions are the solution and that we don't need systemic change. If they can make us argue with each other and blame each other about lifestyle choices, it will create great divisions and not be able to work towards a common goal. Mann said.
He went on to add, "We should all do everything we can to reduce our impact on the environment, but the most important thing individuals can do is to call for policies to decarbonise and reduce carbon emissions by 50% over the next decade, which is the only way we can do that." ”
Another new tactic of climate opponents is to hype up the so-called "apocalypse" and create a sense of despair and a belief that it is too late and that no solution will succeed. If they succeed in making you feel powerless, you're on the path of abandoning change, invisibly satisfying the needs of fossil fuel interests.
Whatever the form, the common goal of all these claims is to delay climate action. For the foreseeable future, these opposing voices will not dissipate easily.
After the sentencing in the defamation case, Mann said he would continue to return to climate science research. As for the future of the planet and humanity, Mann said it's not too late to stop the worst impacts of climate change. "As long as these obstacles are not scientific or technological, but political and interest-oriented, people can remain optimistic. ”
"I'm not going to shy away from my fights," said Mann, 58, "and a lot of scientists shy away from the spotlight and back off, but that's not in my nature." ”
