After many months of chatting back and forth via email, we were both finally able to work out our schedules so that I could talk with Dr. Michael E. Mann live on air today on the KPFK/Pacifica Radio BradCast!
Mann, for those who don’t know, is the creator of the famous (or infamous, depending on whether you’re sponsored and/or duped by the fossil fuel industry or not), “Hockey Stick Graph”, which is likely the most controversial graph in history and certainly among the most consequential, as he agreed during our conversation today.
The “Hockey Stick Graph”, showing stable and even declining temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere over the past thousand years, until they suddenly spike upwards over the last hundred (similar in shape to a hockey stick), thrust the physicist and climatologist Mann into a world of global warming and climate change controversy that he told me he could never have imagined. Following its publication over the past decade, while the recipient of many awards and honors, he has also received death threats, had his professional emails stolen (in the pretend “ClimateGate” scandal), and has been the focus of an unprecedented smear campaign by science denialists, including attacks by sitting U.S. Congressmen and (unsuccessful) subpoenas of his private documents and email by woeful Rightwing denialists and tools like (the happily outgoing) Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.
Environmental activist and author Bill McKibben, who describes Mann as “a hero”, has correctly noted that “very few people have sounded more important alarms about our climate future, and very few people have paid a higher price for doing so.”
Mann’s latest book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines
, now in paperback with a new foreword by Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, tells the whole story and much more. (Tell Big Fossil Fuel to go to hell by buying a copy!)
My conversation with Mann today ranged from all of that, to the parallel denier tactics employed by both Big Tobacco and Big Fossil Fuel, to whether or not scientists should enter the political realm, to why it is that so many TV weathermen seem to be denialists (though the vast majority actually aren’t.)
In the back end of the show, I covered the new uprising by Florida election officials against FL Sec. of State Ken Detzner, new Pope news(!) and much more. Enjoy the show!…
Brad,
Great interview! Speaking of the OTHER Michael Mann you mentioned at the start of the show, it’s such a shame that right-wingers treat scientists as “Public Enemies” because they discuss “Heat,” and it’s also a shame that we can’t get “Ali” to knock them out. By the way, they ever find the “Thief” who broke into the University of East Anglia, and who held those e-mails in “The Keep” before releasing them? Didn’t they have a “Manhunter” look for that thief? Can’t we find “The Insider” who knows about that theft? What do we have to put up for “Collateral”? Is that insider one of “The Last of the Mohicans?” 😉
All great points, D.R.! 🙂 I probably should have used the Miami Vice theme as the out music for the interview, instead of the one I did use. 🙂
Because….Vice, Vice, baby…
Dear Brad,
There has been several British investigations regarding the “thief” or “thieves” that stole those East Anglia emails. The police have largely stopped looking and as you know there were more than one releases of these to derail climate conferences.
All panel reviews of these emails (which were cherry picked, edited and strung together to look bad), cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing (bad manners yes) and the science real and true.