JunkScience.com has exposed Michael Mann’s creepy effort to recast himself as an “involuntary public figure” for purposes of his defamation lawsuit against Mark Steyn, National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
This series exposes Michael Mann’s “volunteering” to be a public figure in the global warming debate, prior to the hockey stick controversy hitting the mainstream news cycle (pegged at February 14, 2005).
Our initial article in this series featured a transcript of Mann on NBC News from April 22, 1998.
Today’s installment is an interview of Mann televised by CNN also from April 22, 1998.
The transcript is below.
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Scientists Use Tree Rings to Measure Global Warming
April 22, 1998, CNN
NATALIE ALLEN, CNN ANCHOR: We’ll all need energy-efficient homes if global warming turns out to be a reality, and the latest news is not good.
CNN’s Ann Kellan reports on scientists who’ve gathered weather information dating back several hundred years.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: If you think it’s been hot the past few summers, you’re right. Three of the past eight years have been hotter than any year since 1400 A.D. That’s the word from scientists at University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who found a way around a problem that has frustrated climate researchers.
MICHAEL MANN, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS-AMHERST: There’s very little instrumental climate data before — before about 1900, and really just a few records before the mid-19th century.
KELLAN: To fill the gap, Michael Mann and his colleagues turned to natural sources of information. Tree rings, coral reefs and ice cores all hold clues to the climate going back hundreds of years. The scientists matched those natural records with known climate data from the 20th century. That let them build a model that accurately estimates temperatures in the past. They found modest ups and downs over the centuries, then a spike.
MANN: But what was most striking was that the 20th century exhibited a warming trend, which is quite unprecedented in the context of our long-term reconstruction. The past 10 years were warmer by probably about a degree and a half Fahrenheit than the long-term average before industrialization.
KELLAN: Looking back before 1900, they could link some of the warming to cyclical increases in the sun’s brightness, and the cooling to volcanic eruptions that block sunlight. But the 20th-century warming had another cause.
MANN: We found that that trend did not appear to be consistent or describable in terms of changes in — for example — the brightness of the Sun, but instead showed a very strong relationship with the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is attributed to human input.
KELLAN: The scientists say if carbon dioxide levels keep rising at the current rate, the warming trend could get even stronger. They warn that global warming could cause problems ranging from drought, to flooding caused by polar ice melting.
Ann Kellan, CNN, reporting.