Michael Mann Fought Climate Denial. Now He’s Fighting Climate Doom

https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/summer-2020/michael-mann-on-climate-denial-and-doom

Source: By Bryan Schatz, California Magazine. 

Excerpt: The climatologist is taking on both the fossil fuel lobby and those who think the climate fight is futile. ONE AUGUST AFTERNOON IN 2010, Michael Mann was opening mail in his office at Penn State University when a dusting of white powder emerged from an envelope. ...Death threats weren’t exactly the kind of thing Mann ’89 had imagined as an undergrad at Cal, when he was first thinking about a life in academia. But his career as a climate scientist had attracted some very powerful and determined enemies. Over the years, he’d gotten used to verbal attacks and idle threats, but this was on a different level. He began to worry about his family’s safety. In the end, the powder proved to be cornstarch, but police gave Mann a hotline number just in case. He and his wife put it on the refrigerator. Mann’s troubles started a decade earlier. It was 1998 and the young scientist, then a postdoc at UMass Amherst, co-authored a study with the innocuous title, “Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries.” [https://www.nature.com/articles/33859] Published in the journal Nature that April, the paper aimed to reconstruct Earth’s temperatures going back six centuries. ...Mann and his collaborators relied on “proxy records”.... To climatologist Jerry D. Mahlman, the graph of the data looked like an upturned hockey stick—the long period of relatively stable temperatures formed the shaft, the last century’s spike was the blade. The image stuck, and it has been known ever since as the “hockey stick graph,” .... When Mann received the powder-filled envelope, he was in the thick of another hyped-up scandal dubbed “Climategate,” in which contrarians heisted more than 1,000 emails from Mann and other prominent climate scientists, took them out of context, and claimed they revealed an unparalleled level of scientific wrongdoing. (They didn’t.) ...MANN WAS FURTHER VINDICATED in October 2007 when he was one of hundreds of scientists who shared in the Nobel Peace Prize, along with former Vice President Al Gore. Mann was one of two scientists the IPCC singled out for their personal sacrifices....