When it comes to doing battle with disinformation around climate issues, Professor Michael Mann is a seasoned campaigner.
In the late 1990s, when Mann was a postdoc, he and his colleagues developed what came to be known worldwide as the “hockey stick” graph, which famously and controversially plotted global temperature data from the previous 1000 years. Representing mean temperatures based on climate proxy records such as readings from sedimentary layers in lakes, ice cores and tree rings, it revealed a slow cooling trend that suddenly lurched violently upwards, just like a hockey stick, as temperatures warmed rapidly in the 20th century.
A frenzied response from climate-change deniers followed. But for Mann, who is now Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, that had a silver lining. “I was thrown into the fray,” he told The Brilliant. “I had to defend myself and my research from these attacks. That was my entry ramp into the larger public discourse, and I realised that the best defence is a good offence.”
Mann says the hockey stick response taught him there was a bigger role for him to play beyond research; to fight back against attacks on science. “I’m a pugilist at heart, and I relish fighting the good fight,” he says.
Since then, he has been a frequent contributor to the public discourse on climate, in print, on screens and now, increasingly, on social media.
In 2005, Mann and colleagues founded RealClimate.org, a website aimed at defusing misinformation. He still supports the site’s ambitions but, for him, its potential is not what it was.
The role that used to be played by blogs, and the longer attention span that they demanded, has been replaced by social media and online commentaries,” Mann explains. “They are just too slow a medium to keep up with the fast pace of the information world today. Twitter is my preferred medium: I like the fact that it’s proactive and fast-paced and you can keep up with the news cycle in a way that other approaches can’t.”
The rise of social media has done much to boost scientists’ ability to participate in broader discussions. “In the past, the journalist interviewed the scientist, and they would take it from there,” Mann says. “Now, the scientist is much more involved in the ongoing process of dissemination, in part because you have these on-ramps to the information world, like Twitter. You no longer have the obstacles that used to exist to direct engagement in the conversation.
“There is a growing cadre of scientists who are willing to write more content and are doing a better job of it. Scientists are rewarded now for outreach and communication.”
Research institutes have become keener to educate scientists in how to communicate their work. Mann himself never received formal training but learned by experience and by watching others; famous American cosmologist and astrophysicist Carl Sagan was an early inspiration. What’s crucial, Mann says, is authenticity.
“I’m not the best writer in the world. I’m not the best public speaker,” he admits. “But I’m a researcher who can do those things. It’s very rewarding to be able to do research, contextualise it and integrate it into a larger commentary.
“The better you are on camera, the more effective a communicator you are, and the more invitations you’re going to have to come back. If you do good television, if you do good copy, you’re going to get more and more interest.
“The more you do, the better you get. But I’m always reminding myself that I’m wearing two different hats. I’m not just any scientist promoting his latest study. There’s an expectation that I play a broader role.”
Mann doesn’t believe communication is an essential skill for all scientists. “Some scientists are best served by staying in the lab and doing the research and publishing,” he says. “My feeling is that we have to resist any prescriptive approach in what we expect of individual scientists when it comes to outreach and communication.
“But what we do have to do is provide resources and support for those scientists who have any interest in outreach. There’s a lot of content that researchers could be producing within the framework of their academic institution – they could take ownership not just of the basic research, but also the framing of that research.”
Mann’s new book, The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, will be published in January, next year. In it, he describes the 30-year campaign by fossil fuel companies to deflect blame and responsibility from themselves, and delay action on climate change.
He wrote a large part of the book while on sabbatical at the University of NSW, in Sydney. While there he was as profoundly moved as any Australian by seeing the impact of climate change unfolding in real time during last summer’s catastrophic bushfires. Australians embraced Mann and the feeling was mutual: while there, he was a regular interviewee on climate issues, including on ABC TV’s Q+A and Channel Nine’s 60 Minutes.
“It felt like the Australian people were saying ‘We’re not going to take it anymore, and we want a meaningful conversation about this’,” Mann says of the aftermath of the bushfires. It has since become untenable for fossil fuel interests to outright deny climate change. “The evidence has just become too obvious to the person on the street.”
That doesn’t mean, however, that the war has been won.
As we get away from hard denial of the physical evidence, the new tactic we’re seeing deployed by fossil fuel interests has been to deflect attention from the need for systemic change, to promote false solutions: ‘The solution isn’t renewable energy, it’s natural gas’. In my view the solution to a problem created by fossil fuels can’t be the burning of fossil fuels.
“There’s also doomism and despair – a highly effective strategy for deflating the energy among climate activists.” Mann says. The concept of ‘doomism’ reflects a perspective that it’s pointlessly already too late to take action to reduce runaway climate change.
The “inactivists” don’t care about the path we take to inaction. They just care about the destination and whatever leads us there, whether it’s despair and hopelessness, or false prophets and false solutions, or deflection away from the need for systemic change.
“I think there is a tendency, when it comes to journalistic coverage, towards what I call climate porn.” Mann says. “It’s like dystopian fiction; it elicits a visceral response and it sells well, which creates even more demand. We get so much coverage of the bad things that are happening and doomist portrayals of the future that are contingent upon an assumption of scenarios that could occur if we fail to do anything. But too often that distinction is blurred.”
However, Mann reassuringly adds, there is also room for a good deal of optimism. “Despite all those challenges, we’re seeing huge shifts in public opinion,” he says. “The youth climate movement has re-centred the conversation on basic issues of intergenerational ethics. And the movement on social justice and racial justice is another tipping point for change in the public consciousness.
“Ironically, the coronavirus pandemic may actually be helping to open up this larger conversation that we’ve needed to have about our lifestyle and our sustainability on this planet, and the vulnerability of eight billion people on a finite planet with less food, less water and less space because of climate change.
We will get through the pandemic,” Mann says with confidence. “And when we do, I believe that we will be in a better position to address the larger crisis that looms – the climate crisis.”
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Article by Iain Scott
Photo credit: Photo supplied
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