Michael E. Mann is a noted climate scientist and Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University. From his December 2018 Q&A with the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment Director Chris Field:People had been wondering for a long time if it is warmer now than it used to be and you’re really the person who figured that out. What was the process and aftermath of coming up with a statistically robust record of Earth’s temperature going back 1,000 years?--Marshal Zeringue
Mann: What drove us to make these forays into reconstructing past climates with proxy data was an interest in natural climate variability. But when we assembled those data and we formed this reconstruction of past temperatures, we did the least scientifically interesting thing you could do, which was to average over them to get a single number for the average temperature for each year.
When we plotted that out we realized that the study maybe does have some implications for human-caused climate change. What we found was that the recent warming spike of the past century has no counterpart as far back as we could go a thousand years. It was published in 1998 which was the warmest year on record for the instrumental data that we have. What we were able to conclude was that not only was 1998 the warmest year on record for the past century, it was probably one of the few if not the warmest years as far back as we could go a thousand years. The warming trend that we've seen has no precedent as far back as we could go.
How did this discovery affect your professional life?
Mann: I suddenly found myself, a Berkeley physics and applied math major, in the very center of the most contentious political debate that we've possibly ever had as a society, the debate over human caused climate change and what to do about it. It isn't the path that I charted out. I envisioned a career where I would be in an office at my computer solving problems, crunching numbers. That's what I love doing. But when the hockey stick became this icon in the climate change debate, that was no longer an option. Whether I liked it or not, as the principal author, I became this public figure and I had to decide what I was going to do with that. Ultimately, I did decide to embrace that and use that as an opportunity to inform this conversation over what is potentially the greatest challenge we face as a civilization. I have no regrets. I can't imagine...[read on]