Where does climate science go from here? The Copenhagen talks were a dud. Stolen e-mail correspondence has embarrassed some leading climatologists. If the science is settled and the threat is urgent, why has global warming become a soap opera? To find out, DISCOVER sought two different, important views, from Penn State’s Michael Mann and Georgia Tech’s Judith Curry. What was your reaction to the scandal over stolen e-mail? I sympathize a bit with the guys who got caught out in the e-mail hack. I know what it’s like to be under that kind of attack, and it’s not pleasant. We were attacked pretty soundly in the media [for a 2005 paper showing that the frequency of intense hurricanes has almost doubled in the past 30 years]. We had firsthand experience dealing with climate skeptics, amplified by advocacy groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a lot of the think tanks that were allegedly funded by ExxonMobil and other firms. Six months later, though, we had sorted things out and were talking to scientists on the other side of the debate. We ended up making pretty good progress on the hurricane story as a result. Compare that with the “hockey stick” story, where there’s been a war for six years running.
The hockey stick—Michael Mann’s widely cited graph of average temperatures in North America over the past 1,000 years—was attacked by two prominent critics, Steven McIntyre, a former mineral company executive, and Ross McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph in Canada. Where does that dispute stand? One would have hoped it would have an outcome similar to the hurricane story, but the hockey stick thing was exacerbated by Michael Mann’s behavior, trying to keep the data and all the information away from McIntyre, McKitrick, and other people who are skeptical of what they were doing. So we’ve just seen this blow up and blow up and blow up, and it culminated in the East Anglia hack and the e-mails that discredited those guys quite a bit. This made us reflect on the bigger issues of how scientists should be interacting with the media and how we should be dealing with skeptical arguments. I think the way that Mann and Phil Jones [the former director of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia, who resigned over the scandal] and those guys were going about it was wrong, not just in terms of ethics. It also backfired.
What motivated you to speak out? When this hit, I was probably more ready than many others to respond because I’d been thinking about these issues for a number of years.
Do you find it hard to get people to talk about climate change without being evangelical? I put myself in the middle, and I’m taking fire from both sides. Neither side is happy with what I’m doing. Obviously, people like Michael Mann are offended by what I’m saying [about the shortcomings of climate science], and I have received an e-mail from one of the people involved in the East Anglia e-mails who’s not happy with what I’m doing. The so-called skeptics think I’m just trying to cover myself. But I’m not personally involved in any of this, other than that I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and there are certain things I felt compelled to say.
