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Michael Mann, climate scientist in the crosshairs, says fake news must be fought

Peter Hannam

Climate change has long been the target of so-called fake news and its researchers can offer lessons for the wider society in how to handle deliberate misinformation, a leading US scientist said.

Michael Mann, a professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University who has been attacked by climate change deniers for developing in 1998 the so-called hockey stick graph revealing sharply higher global temperatures after 1900, said the spread of social media made it harder to tackle falsehoods before they gained traction.

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"It's not new to us but it's nonetheless alarming," Professor Mann said. "We're seeing the same opposition to facts and logic and objective discourse, and we're seeing that challenged in our entire body politic."

Dr Mann cited the weekend attack on climate science, a Daily Mail UK article claiming to have uncovered a whistleblower inside the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), as one example. The person questioned the validity of the agency's 2015 finding there had been no pause in global warming in the 1990s onwards, a result that other scientists have recently confirmed.

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The UK article drew rapid praise and dissemination from the Republican-controlled House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and other climate denier groups. But it also sparked a speedy debunking from leading scientists such as Gavin Schmidt, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who identified muddled use of timelines meant to support the notion of data manipulation.

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Others, including a former colleague of the named "whistleblower", John Bates, outlined at length online why the attack on NOAA was flawed. Another report found NOAA's data closely matched other major agencies.

"This time you've seen a very rapid and concerted pushback against the disinformation and misinformation," said Professor Mann, who is on an Australian speaking tour including with the Sydney Environment Institute. 

Such a response, though, may become more difficult in the US if new President Donald Trump and his advisers followed up on early signs they would be far more anti-science than the previous Republican president George W. Bush.

"What's different is the total antipathy towards both science and the environment that we see in the incoming administration," he said. "It takes courage to stand up when you have the biggest bully of them all with the pulpit of the White House. threatening scientists with findings he doesn't like."

Professor Mann, a pugnacious 51-year-old who has fronted numerous congressional hearings and faced death threats, said there was little point trying to break through "the politically partisan filter" in which about one-quarter to one-third of Americans screened out the reality and threat of human-triggered global warming.

"No amount of facts or evidence is going to change their views because fundamentally it comes from a place of ideology," he said. On the other hand, efforts should be directed to those who were genuinely confused by the debate stirred up by sceptics but who still had open minds.

One outcome of the attacks on science, though, was that scientists were more reluctant to speak out about the seriousness of the risks, or accepted censorship from state or federal governments in the thrall of vested interests, such as the fossil fuel industry.

"We have to resist them because otherwise the forces of denial prevail, and it grants them success in this effort to cow any voices they don't like into submission," he said.

Among the reasons for optimism were the growth of corporate technology giants, such as Google and Tesla, that increasingly underpin the US and wider economy. 

"If you give into the pessimism and gloom too early, you don't have the chance to prevail in the end," Professor Mann said.

Professor Mann will give a public address on Wednesday at Sydney University's Abercrombie Building from 6pm.