Dr. Michael Mann on Climate Science Under Siege and Why It Matters Now
Dr. Michael Mann is Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He also serves as Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and Vice Provost for Climate Science Action and Policy.
Dr. Mann first entered the public consciousness in the late 1990s with his "hockey stick graph," a reconstruction of Earth’s climate history over the past 1,000 years. The graph became both a cornerstone of climate science and a lightning rod for controversy. Since then, he has published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, co-founded realclimate.org, and written five books—most recently, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.
Having spent nearly three decades fighting climate misinformation and defending the scientific record, Dr. Mann has witnessed multiple waves of public consciousness around climate change. In this episode, we hear his perspective on how public sentiment has evolved, where we stand today, and his views on what he sees as a coordinated campaign to block climate action.
Dr. Mann doesn’t pull punches. He names names, draws direct lines between fossil fuel interests and political actors, and isn’t shy about calling out what he views as bad-faith tactics across the political spectrum.
Episode recorded on May 21, 2025 (Published on Jul 22, 2025)
In this episode, we cover:
[1:51] DiCaprio based Don’t Look Up character on Michael
[4:26] Why Michael’s center combines science and media
[5:27] Communication is today’s biggest climate challenge
[7:27] The story and impact of the “hockey stick” graph
[13:17] How fossil fuel interests targeted his work and reputation
[15:32] Russia’s modern climate disinformation tactics
[17:22] Climate denial, delay, doom, distraction, and division
[20:26] Deflection: blame shifted to individual responsibility
[21:48] The progress we’ve made and the need to accelerate solutions
[25:17] Why China may lead in future emissions reductions
[29:16] Methane leaks make gas a major climate threat
[33:15] What exactly we’re trying to save on the planet
[38:22] How Project 2025 is erasing climate accountability
[40:46] Which climate science institutions are being dismantled
[45:09] What a livable 2050 future could still look like
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Cody Simms (00:00):
Today on Inevitable, our guest is Dr. Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves as Director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, and Vice Provost of Climate Science Action and Policy. Dr. Mann first entered the public consciousness in the late-1990s, with his quote, "Hockey stick graph," a reconstruction of Earth's climate history over the past 1,000 years, that became both a cornerstone of climate science and a lightning rod for controversy. Since then, he's published more than 200 peer-reviewed papers, co-founded realclimate.org, and written five books, most recently, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.
(00:52):
Having spent nearly three decades fighting climate misinformation and defending the scientific record, Dr. Mann has witnessed multiple waves of public consciousness around climate change. I was eager to hear his perspective on how public sentiment has evolved, where we stand today, and his views on what he sees as a coordinated campaign to block climate action. Dr. Mann doesn't pull punches. He names names, draws direct lines between fossil fuel interests and political actors, and isn't shy about calling out what he views as bad faith tactics across the political spectrum.
(01:29):
From MCJ, I'm Cody Sims, and this is Inevitable. Climate change is inevitable. It's already here, but so are the solutions shaping our future. Join us every week to learn from experts and entrepreneurs about the transition of energy and industry. Dr. Mann, welcome to the show.
Dr. Michael Mann (01:57):
Thanks, Cody. It's great to be with you.
Cody Simms (01:59):
I'm going to start with a question you probably weren't expecting. I am based in Los Angeles, so I'm going to start with a little bit of the Hollywood question. You've got this illustrious career, you've done all this amazing work in climate science. And as I understand it, Leonardo DiCaprio used you as the inspiration for his character in Adam McKay's Don't Look Up. And I'm just wondering how you felt about that portrayal.
Dr. Michael Mann (02:21):
I was invited to the premiere. I know Adam. I've worked with Leo in the past. That's probably why he drew upon his interactions with me. I may be the climate scientist he knows best, and so he sort of drew upon, I guess, his experiences with me and that character. And so, I've been invited to the premiere, but at the last minute they had to call off the panel discussion and the opportunity to meet the audience. It was right in the middle of COVID. And Jennifer Lawrence was pregnant at the time, and so out of precaution, they called off the other events that were going to surround it. And it was no longer worth it for me to fly into New York with my daughter and get an expensive hotel room just to watch a movie.
(03:01):
But they did give us a code. Netflix gave us a code so we could watch it at home in advance, and we did that. And about maybe five minutes into the picture, my daughter, now first year college student, she's like, "Dad, he's you. He's you." She somehow saw in his character mannerisms that I certainly did not see, and I figured this was just her imagination. But indeed, some weeks later in an interview, Leo specifically name checked me when he was being asked about some of the inspirations for this character. And so, you can imagine some consternation on the part of my wife, given that the character in the movie engages in a gratuitous affair with a news personality. And suffice it to say that it was a very loose interpretation, it was very loosely [inaudible 00:03:54]. But I mean, it makes sense that since I've had a number of conversations with him over the years, he might've drawn upon some of those experiences with this character.
Cody Simms (04:03):
One of the reasons I wanted to ask you that, besides just the obvious, it's fun to hear the story. At Penn, the department that you are the director of is the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. I found as I was digging into your background, the and the media part is so interesting, because it speaks to how much importance there needs to be around climate change. Not just understanding the science, but I presume also communicating it. I'm curious if you could unpack a little bit about how the and the media part became part of the center that you run.
Dr. Michael Mann (04:38):
Yeah. When Penn reached out to me a few years ago to see if I might be interested in dropping the state from my affiliation. I was at Penn State, and so it was the easiest job change ever. I just crossed off the state. And now, here at Penn, when they reached out to me, they were interested in the idea of me directing a center that would bring together these twin passions of mine. One of those passions being doing the science and the other, communicating it and working with others. Working with this vast ecosystem of individuals and organizations that are involved in this larger effort to communicate the science and its implications to the public and policymakers. And I jumped at that opportunity. And Penn was the perfect place to make this happen. And so, I actually have one foot in the school, rather, of arts and sciences, and one foot in the Annenberg School for Communication with this center. It's jointly affiliated with both schools.
(05:33):
And indeed, what we're trying to do is to bring all that together, the science, the impacts, the policy and political dimensions, and the communication challenge. And indeed, I would argue that today, by far the greatest challenge is the communication challenge. The science is definitive. There is really no question about the reality and threat that climate change poses from a scientific standpoint. We have the technology to decarbonize our infrastructure. As you know, this podcast is dedicated to that clean energy transition that we know has to happen. And we know that we have the technology to do it. The obstacles are political. And primarily, what constitutes that political obstacle is a very concerted effort by fossil fuel interests, bad actors, including state actors, hetero-state actors, doing the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, doing everything they can to block that necessary transition.
(06:36):
And so, fundamentally, it's a communication challenge. And we need to be much more organized as a community and recognize that we are up against this juggernaut. A very well-funded, arguably the most well-funded, well-organized propaganda campaign in the history of human civilization, the campaign to deny the existence of climate change and to block any effort to do anything about it. So, recognizing that that's the fundamental challenge, that's where I put a lot of my energy these days. Although, part of what keeps me grounded is that I do continue to be involved in the fundamental science itself. And I advise students and post-doctoral researchers on projects seeking to advance our understanding of the science. But at the same time, to me it's as much about translating that in terms of public understanding of the impacts, and the risks, and the need to actually act.
Cody Simms (07:33):
You have been involved in the scientific research on this really since some of the earliest papers were published and the idea of global warming became commonplace knowledge. If I understand correctly, you had a report in the late '90s that was the original hockey stick report that tied CO2 to temperature rise. And given that, I assume you have lived through every phase of climate denial, including many personal attacks on your own work. I'm curious if you want to relitigate any of the history that you have lived through. How have climate myths come and gone? What are still repeated today that are tropes that have been repeated since the late '90s, early 2000s? And also, what's new? What are some of the new things that we all should be on the lookout for in terms of misinformation today?
Dr. Michael Mann (08:24):
The first thing I was going to say is that rumors of my geriatric condition are greatly exaggerated. There are many who came before me, James Hansen, Steve Schneider. There was a whole generation of scientists who came before me, who fundamentally advanced our understanding of climate change. And by the time I actually came into it, I was graduate student in the early '90s, got my PhD, finished up my PhD thesis in '96. And so, when I was coming of age scientifically, that was actually the time when a consensus was being reached among the world scientists, that not only is the planet warming, but we know that it's due to human activity. That sort of consensus was reached in the mid-1990s. It was encapsulated in the second assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1995, which concluded that there is now indeed a discernible human influence on the climate.
(09:18):
And so, I was coming of age scientifically at that time. The evidence for human-caused climate change was already, I would say in. But around that time we were working on extending the climate record further back in time, because there's only a little more than a century of widespread thermometer measurements around the planet. If you want to place modern warming in a longer-term context, you have to turn to indirect archives of information, what we call proxy data, like tree rings, and corals, and ice cores, and sediments. And so, in the mid '90s to late '90s, I was working with a team to take all the information that we could glean from those sorts of data and reconstruct the longer-term history of how temperatures over the planet had varied. And we produced a curve that came to be known as the hockey stick curve because of its shape.
(10:12):
And what it shows is that there is in fact this sharp warming, that's the blade, over the last century and a half, that coincides with the Industrial Revolution. And as you go back in time, and we went back 1,000 years, it is unprecedented. The warming that we've seen over the past century has no precedent. As far back as we were able to go, which was 1,000 years, now other teams have extended those records at least tentatively back tens of thousands of years. And it remains the case that there is no analog for the rapid warming that we are causing today. But here's the thing, the hockey stick told a very simple story. You could just look at it and understand what it was telling us about the unprecedented impact that we're having on our planet today. And that's what made it a threat to some of those bad actors, the fossil fuel interests, the front groups, and talking heads, and attack dogs that they fund.
(11:07):
There's this huge ecosystem itself of climate change denialism funded by fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel states, like Saudi Arabia and Russia. And now, under the current Trump administration, you'd have to include the US as well. And that coalition, I call the coalition of the unwilling, coalition of bad state actors that are blocking meaningful climate progress. Well, that graph, because it told such a simple story, was a threat. Because if you were a member of the public, you didn't need to understand the complex workings of a climate model or the seemingly fairly abstract and complicated science of climate change, to understand what the hockey stick was telling us. It told a very simple story that made it a threat, that made me a target.
(11:54):
And as a young postdoctoral researcher, little did I know that I would spend much of the rest of my career fighting back against efforts initially to discredit the hockey stick and to discredit me personally. But I realized ultimately that it was about something much bigger, about defending the science, the science supporting the evidence for human-caused climate change against this extremely well-funded and well-organized assault. And that the stakes were much larger than me or my research, than really the future of our planet.
Cody Simms (12:27):
Do any of the attacks that you lived through or attempts to discredit your work particularly stand out to you?
Dr. Michael Mann (12:33):
I wrote a whole book about it some years ago called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, where I detail... There's a whole book. I had to write a whole book to describe the various episodes, and the trials and tribulations. But I've been attacked by US senators who are funded by the fossil fuel industry. I've been in the hot seat in Congress a number of times, where Republican congressmen and senators were attacking me and trying to discredit my work. I had been at the receiving end of congressional subpoenas, the Attorney General of Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, who is sort of a figure in right-wing politics today. But back at the time, he was the newly elected attorney general of Virginia. And he tried to issue a civil subpoena against me and the University of Virginia, to get ahold of all my personal emails so he could comb through them and look for something to try to discredit me.
(13:23):
Of course, this is something that we've seen many times over in recent years. In fact, I would argue that the assault that we see today on social media that's been weaponized by bad actors, Hillary Clinton emails, and the way they were used to discredit her and tip the election in Donald Trump's favor. Early on, back in 2009, we actually saw what was a test run for that later campaign. Russia was probably also involved there. Russia sees fossil fuels as their primary economic asset. And they've been trying to undermine any global effort to move away from fossil fuels, because it's inconsistent with their fundamental business model. And so, Russia and Saudi Arabia, two petrostates, have engaged in all sorts of illicit activities.
(14:14):
And they almost certainly both had a role in the theft of climate emails back in 2009. This became known as Climategate, where these emails were combed through, and individual words and phrases were taken out of context to try to discredit climate scientists like myself, going into the Copenhagen Summit of November 2009, which was the first opportunity for serious progress in years. And they hijacked that by creating this false scandal known as Climategate. And if you look at the actors that were involved, if you look at the methods that were used, the modus operandi, it was almost identical to what we saw deployed against Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections. Same actors, the same approach, stolen emails used to try to discredit her, to try to, again, hijack the conversation in favor of Donald Trump who was prepared to remove the sanctions.
(15:12):
Russia was subject to sanctions by the United States during the Obama administration, because of their actions in Crimea and Ukraine. Those sanctions actually got in the way of a half trillion dollar oil deal between ExxonMobil and Rosneft, the Russian state oil company. And they knew they had to get rid of those sanctions for that fossil fuel venture to move forward. There was quite a bit of evidence that Russia's interest in electing Trump was fundamentally about removing that obstacle to their fossil fuel agenda. So, the same thing, and we were at the center of it. Climate scientists were at the center of it before it was deployed at the grand scale we saw in the 2016 election.
(15:58):
And of course, all of those tactics today and especially the weaponization of social media that are blocking meaningful progress in climate, arguably got their start with that Climategate campaign, propaganda campaign back in 2009. And I and other leading climate scientists were at the center of it. So, that's just an example. I've had white powder, envelopes with white powder that had to be investigated by the FBI. You name it, they've probably tried it against me and my colleagues.
Cody Simms (16:25):
So, as you fast forwarded today in 2025, we're going to spend a bunch of time on how the federal government has changed in the last three or four months. But let's take the oil and gas companies, at least in the US. Today, oil and gas companies aren't denying climate change. They're saying climate change is real, and yet there may be acting in a way that wouldn't fully align their actions with what's going on according to the science, perhaps. I'm curious how you've seen the oil and gas companies, at least in the US, change their story over the last two decades.
Dr. Michael Mann (16:56):
Gratuitous of me, once again to cite a book of mine, The New Climate War, which I published a few years ago, which is precisely about this. It's about how the bad actors in question, the fossil fuel industry, and the individuals, and organizations, and front groups, and petrostates that work closely with them, how they have adapted their tactics. There's a whole slew of D words here. So, as they move away from denial, because it's increasingly not credible to deny that climate change is happening, because people can see the impact we bring.
Cody Simms (17:29):
I mean, our president still says it's a hoax, but I would say industry has started changing their story.
Dr. Michael Mann (17:33):
There is this entrenched group with their heels dug in, and they are continuing to repeat the rhetoric, espouse the rhetoric of denial. But when it comes to where the people are, the person on the street no longer believes that it's not happening, because they've seen too many examples of how it's happening, how it's impacting their lives, people they know. And so, in reality, even though you'll hear the Trumps of the world continue to espouse denialist propaganda, that's actually not where the fossil fuel industry and their agents are. They know that that's largely a lost cause. And so, instead, they focused on other D words. It isn't denial so much as delay, and deflection, and division, and even doom mongering.
(18:22):
Ironically, if they can convince us it's too late to do anything about the problem, then why bother? And we've seen a real move in that direction. And it's intended, what's so pernicious about that, it's actually intended. Its target isn't conservatives who might be opposed to taking action. Its target is actually more likely to be environmental progressives, who would be on the front lines demanding change, if not for the fact that they've become convinced it's too late to do anything anyways, so why not focus on other problems, other more seemingly immediate problems. And so, even doomism now has been weaponized by bad actors as a tactic. What do all of these tactics have in common? Nothing, except for the bottom line that they lead us away from taking action.
(19:14):
And so, whether it's deflecting attention. Deflection is, oh, we don't need governmental policies. We don't need carbon pricing. We don't need subsidies and incentives, renewable energy for the clean energy transition. We don't need any of those governmental acts. We just need individuals to lower their individual carbon footprint. And that messaging, originally like BP, to popularized the notion of the individual carbon footprint calculator back in the early 2000s. But fossil fuel industry, that's been one of their tactics to convince you it falls on you, not us. It's your problem. You have to fix it. That's deflection.
(19:52):
Division is getting us fighting with each other, climate advocates, about our carbon footprints or about issues of fairness in how carbon pricing is done. Basically, and especially online, generating conflict with bot armies, and trolls, and regular everyday people become entrained into that and it leads to conflict, it leads to infighting. It's a divide and conquer tactic, because the more we're fighting with each other, the less we are taking the fight to the enemy as it were, those who oppose to climate action. And so, each of these words, division, deflection, doom mongering, and delay. Delay is that, oh, well, we will come up with some techno fix. We promise you geoengineering or massive deployment of carbon capture technology, this supposed promise of future technologies.
(20:51):
And I want to draw a distinction between real technological progress, more efficient solar panels, wind turbines, all that is really important. There's really important technological progress to be made here. But this idea that there's some sort of techno fix that can offset the carbon pollution that we're producing, that's part of that delay agenda, convincing us that we will have some simple technical solution down the road as an excuse for business as usual now, as a license for carbon polluters to continue to pollute.
Cody Simms (21:22):
In some ways, though, economics are driving technology adoption in a way that is causing renewable energy to win. If you look in the US at least, I think our emissions have been on a downward trend for, what, 15, 20 years at this point, as renewable power has taken up. And arguably, also, just as coal has been retired, in some cases just replaced with natural gas. That's a positive thing, I would think, right? And that's just sheer economics winning out.
Dr. Michael Mann (21:54):
Yeah. So, that's absolutely true. And this is a point that I try to make, especially with the climate doomers who will say, "We've made no progress at all. It's been 30, 40 years, whatever, and we've made no progress at all, and it's never going to happen." That's just not true. We've made a whole lot of progress, as you just outlined. We haven't yet made enough progress. And it's difficult for people to keep those two seemingly contradictory notions in their mind at the same time. It's possible to be making significant progress, which we are, and not yet making enough progress, for example, to reach the emissions reduction targets necessary to prevent one and a half Celsius, three degree Fahrenheit warming of the planet. That's a level that we're approaching. And if we continue on the course that we're on, we'll cross that line in a matter of years.
(22:41):
It's not the end of the world, but there are certain impacts that we expect to become that much worse when we exceed 1.5 Celsius and other impacts that become even far worse at two degrees Celsius. So, it's about decarbonizing as quickly as we can. At this point, though, we're not yet decarbonizing fast enough to avoid those targets. And so, we are headed towards increasing climate damage, destruction, and mortality, if we don't accelerate that transition. And what do we need to do to accelerate that transition? We need to stop providing subsidies, as we now are in the United States. You're right that just basic economies of scale and technological progress is making renewable energy increasingly competitive.
(23:27):
The levelized cost of wind, solar, geothermal is lower than the levelized cost of coal or nuclear for that matter. But there're all these incentives, explicit or implicit, that are still encoded in US law that effectively put our thumb on the wrong scale, that keep the fossil fuel industry in the game for much longer than sheer market economics would allow for. And so, that's the problem.
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Cody Simms (24:55):
We use the phrase the fossil fuel industry. I think of coal as being quite different than oil and gas, in terms of their motivations and where they play in our economic landscape. And as we said in the US, we've largely been retiring coal quite successfully. India, China, different story. There's a lot of coal used there. And you're seeing China now by far the world's most emmitive country. I think in a large part because of using coal to power their economy.
Dr. Michael Mann (25:23):
Yeah. I would just gently make a point there. China was actually decommissioning coal-fired power plants during the Obama years. And when Trump pulled out of Paris and signaled that the US, which has a much longer legacy of coal and fossil fuel, dirty energy. When the Trump administration pulled out of Paris, it signaled to China and others that US was no longer serious. And we did then see China start to reverse those policies. But they are actually now at the point in part because of their own clean energy transition-
Cody Simms (25:54):
Yeah. I was going to say they're the largest solar deployment in the world, right, is China?
Dr. Michael Mann (25:58):
Yeah. Electric vehicles. Now, they are now at the point where their economy is becoming decoupled from carbon emissions.
Cody Simms (26:03):
Interesting.
Dr. Michael Mann (26:04):
They're seeing economic growth without a growth in carbon emissions. We expect that to actually turn around soon enough, that their carbon emissions will start to come down earlier than we expected. Now, let's keep in mind, we've been burning fossil fuels for the better part of two centuries. China's only been doing this for a couple of decades. And so, the argument is you guys are the biggest legacy polluters on the planet. And if you're not doing your role, how can you tell us that we shouldn't have access to cheap dirty energy to grow our economies now? That having been said, China is actually leading the way. And they seem to be seeking to claim the role of the world's climate leader now with this vacuum that's been created with Trump's withdrawal.
Cody Simms (26:48):
And China doesn't have an endemic gas industry anyways. They have to leapfrog basically from coal straight to renewables or nuclear. They're commissioning a ton of nuclear now.
Dr. Michael Mann (26:56):
They're a command and control economy, so if the government decides to do something, they can just do it. In some ways they're almost better situated to act than a market economy like the US.
Cody Simms (27:06):
So, the point I was getting at with that is we use the phrase fossil fuel industry. Typically, the companies that are involved in coal are different companies that are involved in oil and gas. It seemed like moving off of coal, at least in the US, has helped bend our curves down. And yet, oil and gas companies are the ones that get a lot of vilification in the media around climate denial and whatnot. Why is that? Why are we not going after coal companies, as much as we are after oil and gas? Is there a legacy reason in terms of oil and gas companies doing more misinformation, for example?
Dr. Michael Mann (27:39):
Coal is in a death spiral. And all this talk about coal on the part of Trump and the Trump administration is performative, because that's what their base wants to hear. That's what their supporters in the coal industry want to hear. And they've made promises to them. But the coal industry, they are a relict industry and they're just not competitive in the energy marketplace anymore. It's just not economically viable to be building out on coal, so it's almost a distraction. Coal is going away no matter what Trump says. It's going away.
Cody Simms (28:12):
That sounds like a good inevitability from an emissions perspective, the fact that that-
Dr. Michael Mann (28:17):
It is.
Cody Simms (28:18):
... economically it's going away, even though a lot of it is transitioning to gas.
Dr. Michael Mann (28:20):
That's the point, that you're seeing this pivot. It would be one thing if that collapse of coal was being compensated by an equivalent growth in renewable energy. But the threat we see right now, especially with the fossil fuel industry having taken control of the reins of the US government, is that that's not what's going to happen in the years ahead. And instead it's going to be diverted to liquefied natural gas. Liquefied natural gas can be used as a fuel, like coal, oil, is mostly gasoline and transportation. But liquefied natural gas could potentially compensate for that decrease in coal, and so we have to be very careful of that death spiral of coal is somehow instead diverted to a growth spiral of natural gas. And that's where the current administration seems to be. That's where the fossil fuel industry seems to be right now. We're seeing a massive increase in natural gas extraction, and it comes with its own problems.
(29:22):
Unlike coal, coal is a very inefficient fossil fuel and it produces a lot of carbon pollution for each watt of power generated. Natural gas, not quite as much. But natural gas is mostly methane. And when it's extracted, a lot of it escapes. That methane escapes into the atmosphere. Guess what? Methane is of an extremely potent greenhouse gas itself, especially on time scales of one to two decades. And so, policy in the US still does make a difference. I mean, we are seeing a structural move away from fossil fuels, but the Trump administration is going to slow that down for several years. And also, it has political ramifications as well, like I said, because we are the biggest legacy polluter on the planet. And that's what the climate cares about.
(30:04):
What the science shows is all that climate cares about is the cumulative carbon pollution up to a given point in time. And we've contributed more of that. And so, to the extent that we are shirking our responsibility, it provides opportunity for fossil fuel interests within other countries to say, "Hey, look, the US isn't doing its role and it's the world's biggest legacy polluter. Why should we be doing any more?"
Cody Simms (30:29):
Just so it's not all gloom and doom, I think something like 80% of new energy capacity planned on the grid right now is renewables. The risk you're highlighting is just if the Trump administration has its way, it will push more natural gas to be coal replacement, as opposed to that very steep renewables buildup we've been seeing.
Dr. Michael Mann (30:49):
Absolutely, it'll slow down that decline curve. We have been declining year after year in carbon emissions here in the US, and that's predicted to now plateau for a few years. So, we will no longer continue that steady decline that we saw for decades. And that's a problem to me less in terms of its overall contribution to global carbon emissions, because it's a small fraction of the global carbon emissions at this point that we're talking about. But in terms of the larger diplomacy and the politics, when the US leads, we see other countries come to the table. When the US doesn't lead, we've seen other countries tend to back off. The hope is that that won't happen this time. And there's some evidence that China actually does want to step up and fill that void. That's some good news.
(31:30):
And the other good news is, as you say, the age of fossil fuels is ending. And there's nothing that Donald Trump or Republicans, or the fossil fuel industry can do about that. There's a saying that Stone Age didn't end for want of stones, and the fossil fuel industry won't end for want of fossil fuels. It's ending because something better has come along. The problem is that we need incentives that accelerate that transition beyond where it currently is, if we are going to evert some of these very dangerous thresholds of warming. And right now, the problem is that to those who say, "Well, the market will sort it out," but the market won't sort it out if we're not internalizing some of the greatest costs, the damage, the death, the destruction caused by the burning of fossil fuels. And that includes water and air pollution from fossil fuel extraction and refining. But it includes the devastating impacts of climate change.
(32:26):
And there's no price signal for that, because there isn't a price at the national level. There isn't in certain states, and it's happening in other scales, but not at the national scale. Without a price on carbon, we're not fully accounting for the damage that fossil fuels are doing. And that's, again, putting our thumb then on the wrong side of the scale, in favor of fossil fuels, rather on the side renewable energies where it should be.
Cody Simms (32:52):
A lot of your work has been... in fact, your most recent book was taking a big zoom out on Earth history, and looking at changing temperatures, and what that meant for various ecosystem life on earth. To people who say, "Hey, we have to fight climate change because we have to save the planet," it feels like that's a little bit of not the right way to think about it. The planet seems like it will figure itself out with or without humans. It's more life as we know it might be radically different, is how I think about. Is that the right way to think about it?
Dr. Michael Mann (33:21):
Sometimes it can come down to semantics. It's like, what do you mean by the planet? Because sometimes implicit... When I say the planet, I mean a planet like the one we live on today.
Cody Simms (33:30):
The one we know. Yeah, sure.
Dr. Michael Mann (33:31):
The one we know with thriving human beings, and other animals and ecosystems, the planet as we know it. And I think it's shorthand for that, but you're technically right. In fact, in the book, in Our Fragile Moment, which is my last book, I say something to that effect like, look, there will be a large spherical object with the dimensions of Earth heated by the sun. That'll still be there. But will we, and the thriving ecosystems, and diverse animal life that we've come to know, will it continue on? That comes down to the decisions that we make in the years and decades ahead.
Cody Simms (34:08):
And the avoidance of potential awful suffering for many humans and many of the other life forms that we know and love today. Those are all dependent on our decisions right now.
Dr. Michael Mann (34:18):
Absolutely. And that's really important, because they're one of those delay tactics or diversionary tactics, whatever you want to call it, that you see that's prevalent among climate contrarians and fossil fuel advocates today, is this idea that, well, we'll just adapt. And we're seeing that narrative increasingly. Well, yes, it's real, but we'll just adapt to it. And this idea that 8 billion people plus on a finite planet with diminishing water, drinkable water, and land, and food will somehow be able to adapt. And that's one of the themes in the book that I talk about. I talk about some of the past natural warming events that we call rapid, because geologically speaking, they were rapid. But they were orders of magnitude slower than the warming we're creating today. And one of them is called the PETM.
(35:06):
It was about 56 million years ago there was a burst of carbon into the atmosphere. It caused a sizable warming, as much as four or five degrees Celsius, seven and nine degrees Fahrenheit, over something like one to maybe 10,000 years. So, again, an order of magnitude slower than the warming we're causing today, but it was a natural warming event that provides some sort of analog for rapid climate change. And there was indeed widespread mortality. There were extinctions. Now, one thing that I point out is that you can take a species like horses. So, when things get hotter, there's a tendency for miniaturization, because the smaller you are, the easier it is to get rid of heat because your surface area, the volume ratio increases as you get smaller. It's a geometric effect.
(35:55):
And so, you see a tendency for miniaturization of species during periods of rapid warming. During the PETM, you see horses, which had existed back then. These were primordial horses. But that order of mammals shrunk on average by about 30% in size over a period of several thousand years. And so, you might look at that and say, "Oh, look at those horses. They adapted." Well, that's not exactly what happened. What happened was that selective pressure to miniaturize was so great that those that failed to do so suffered widespread mortality. And so, if there's such strong selective pressure as to shrink a species by 30% in few thousand years, that means that size was a tremendously maladaptive attribute and there was widespread mortality of maladaptive individuals.
(36:47):
And the same thing will be true today. Yes, there will still be human beings, there will still be most of the species that we know, but there will be widespread mortality. And when we talk about the human species, we're talking about our fellow human beings. And so, there's a moral dimension to this that I think people don't quite appreciate with the discourse of adaptation, because there's an implicit ethical lapse in that sort of thinking.
Cody Simms (37:12):
It reminds me of Thanos from the Avengers. I'll just snap my fingers and half the people are gone. That's not really a good thing. Going to today, fast forwarding from 56 million years ago to right now, your next book is I believe called Science Under Siege. And it's talking about the current pressure on the scientific community. And I know in particular right now, there are very active discussions happening that the federal government may significantly defund, for example, NOAA, which is a very important organization in terms of capturing weather and climate-related data and information. Share a bit more about what is happening right now.
Dr. Michael Mann (37:55):
Clearly, the attitude of those who are running the environmental and energy policy in the current administration, it's easy to say it's Trump, but Trump is just this vehicle that they're working through. There's Project 2025. What we're seeing is the implementation of this plan, Project 2025, which was written by the usual plutocrats, the Koch brothers, Leonard Leo, a small number of billionaires, Heritage Foundation in particular, right wing think tank funded by the Koch brothers and other plutocrats. So, they hatched this plan, that if they could win back the presidency and Congress, that they would dismantle all things that they don't like, all the things that get in the way of unbridled capitalism and in particular, unbridled fossil fuel exploitation at the expense of the environment. That is their agenda. That's what Project 2025 really represented.
(38:53):
It was written by fossil fuel plutocrats and fossil fuel companies to dismantle environmental and climate protections within the US government, to hijack energy policy in favor of fossil fuels, and against the clean energy transition, and to literally dismantle the infrastructure for even measuring the climate. And it's sort of a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil sort of mentality, that somehow we don't even measure the climate, that this'll just disappear from the collective radar screen of the populace. And so, that's what they're doing. They're dismantling NOAA, because NOAA is tasked with actually measuring the state of the atmosphere, and the ocean, and the Earth's climate system. But in so doing, they're also dismantling the infrastructure we have for measuring weather around the world, around the United States.
(39:51):
There are networks of weather measurement sites that we use, that we feed into our numerical weather forecasting models, so that we can make better weather forecasts. They're dismantling the network of data that feed into those model forecasts. NOAA is also responsible for the hurricane hunters that fly into those storms to make critical measurements that can then be fed into forecasting models, that help us predict the paths and the intensification of impending hurricanes, land falling hurricanes. And so, quite literally, by doing this, the Trump administration and more to the point, the fossil fuel barons and plutocrats that are dictating their policies now, they are literally putting people in harm's way. And that's true with respect to extreme weather events. And obviously, in a grander sense, it's true with respect to the even more devastating long-term consequences of climate change.
Cody Simms (40:52):
What are the specific cuts to NOAA that are being proposed today? And where are we in the playing out of that happening or not?
Dr. Michael Mann (41:01):
To my knowledge, pretty much all of NOAA is slowly being dismantled as we speak. There are new reports every day of new offices. Just yesterday, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, which is part of that infrastructure, closely works with NOAA and other government agencies. There are other various NOAA data centers are being defunded. We're seeing that with NASA as well. NASA is one of its main climate modeling centers. The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, it used to be headed up by James Hansen, the famous climate scientist James Hansen. The director today is my friend and colleague, Gavin Schmidt. They've been told that the government isn't renewing the lease for the NASA Goddard building, which is in the Upper West Side of New York.
(41:46):
In fact, if you've ever seen the Seinfeld show and the restaurant in the Seinfeld show, Tom's Diner, there's a song about Tom's Diner by Suzanne Vega, I believe it is. That's the building that houses the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The government just refused to renew the lease, so now that whole climate modeling institute has to find another home, if that's even possible. And so, it isn't just NOAA, it's NASA, it's EPA, firing hundreds of EPA administrators who work on climate related matters. They're dismantling. And that's part of Project 2025. It was very clear to dismantle all of the climate related institutes, and centers, and institutions in the federal government, and that's what they're doing.
Cody Simms (42:33):
Where do you see that work getting picked up, if not inside the government, if at all?
Dr. Michael Mann (42:38):
Yeah. I mean there is the private sector. Of course, they're doing their best to destroy academia as well, to defund academia, to tax endowments, and to get rid of overhead return that fund basic operations at universities. There is an assault across the board, not just on scientific institutions, but on academic institutions, which traditionally would be where a lot of that work continues to get done, would be at universities like my own, where we have climate scientists and environmental scientists. They're trying to defund all of that work right now. Even if you take the US out of it altogether, of course, there's the rest of the world.
(43:13):
And other countries, Canada, France are looking at the situation as an ideal opportunity to recruit the best scientists and the best academics from the US. So, we're going to see a massive brain drain from the US to other countries, which is tragic, because this is a country that was built on science and technology. That's how we got to where we are.
Cody Simms (43:34):
It sounds like all the German and Russian scientists who came to the US in the 1940s and '50s.
Dr. Michael Mann (43:40):
Remarkable, isn't it? It's literally the reverse brain drain now. And the tactics, by the way, that the Trump administration are using, are right out of the Russian tool book. If you read up on the era of Lysenkoism during the Stalin era, where the government had their own preferred ideology, anti-scientific ideology and scientists headed up by this Trofim Lysenko, who was this crank who had completely anti-scientific theories about that genetic characteristics aren't inherited. They're not passed along through genes, but are inherited directly from our parental for the offspring. It's sort of like the idea that genetic traits can be inherited during one's lifetime. Like the giraffe stretches its neck to get the food that it can reach on the higher branches. And that giraffe, which stretched its neck, its children will adopt that characteristic.
(44:39):
And it had widespread implications for agriculture. It led to devastating famines in Russia and perhaps China, that also picked up on these policies. And that was because the government decided to purge academic institutions and scientific institutions of any scientists that didn't agree with the official government line. And so, if you read up on what happened during the Stalin era and the collapse of science in the Soviet Union, those tactics, those Stalinist tactics are being used today by the Trump administration.
Cody Simms (45:13):
Great leap forward in China, the same thing as you mentioned.
Dr. Michael Mann (45:15):
Yeah.
Cody Simms (45:15):
I know we're up against time here. I so appreciated you joining us and spending some time to share all of your knowledge of working in this space for many decades now. I'm curious, you first shared your research over 25 years ago, that the hockey stick research that generated such amount of feedback to you. What do you think we'll be talking about 25 years from now? If you truly take into account everything that's happening from an economics perspective, everything that's happening from a political perspective, and everything that's happening from a cultural perspective, what's your best guess of where we're going to be in 2050?
Dr. Michael Mann (45:48):
Yeah. I'll tell you, we have warmed the planet more than we should have. That's already true, so that's going to remain true. We should've acted decades ago, and we didn't because of a massive propaganda campaign by the fossil fuel industry continues on today. I'd like to think that we will be talking about 25 years from now, looking back, is that there were a small but extremely influential group of malefactors who did everything they could to block meaningful progress towards a clean energy economy for their own personal profit and gain. And happily, they were unsuccessful, because the voice of scientists rose up.
(46:32):
There was a massive reaction to their anti-scientific tactics that was organic in nature by the people rising up and that we prevailed. And we will have seen the fruits of those efforts in a livable planet, a livable planet that will still exist for our children and our grandchildren. That is the future that I hope we will be able to talk about. 25 years from now, that is what I hope our perspective will be on this moment.
Cody Simms (47:02):
Dr. Mann, thanks for your time. Appreciate it. It was great to meet you and enjoyed the conversation.
Dr. Michael Mann (47:07):
You as well. Thanks very much.
Cody Simms (47:09):
Inevitable is an MCJ podcast. At MCJ, we back founders driving the transition of energy, and industry, and solving the inevitable impacts of climate change. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ, visit us at mcj.vc and subscribe to our weekly newsletter at newsletter.mcj.vc. Thanks and see you next episode.
