001hello greetings amherst middle school uh i'm dr laroche and i am here with a special guest today for our uh look at uh climate change we're here with dr michael mann hi dr mann hi it's good to see you thank you so much for joining us so uh students dr mann uh is actually an amherst uh are you an amherst alum did you graduate from amherst schools i absolutely did spent my whole life uh growing up in amherst well thank you so much um it's it's a pleasure to have you join us back in amherst virtually uh you're where are you today do you want to let us know absolutely i'm right in the middle of pennsylvania in state college pennsylvania which is where penn state university is where i teach and uh dr mann
002is the director of the earth system science center uh and was critical to helping people understand uh climate change and so we would like to hear a little bit about your your research and um how how you've helped us to advance our understanding of this important topic well thanks very much it's great to be with you um virtually back in amherst i'm sorry i can't be there in person um but uh some of my fondest memories are growing up um and going to school back in the day it was amherst regional junior high school now it's the middle school but uh this is the same school that i went to and where i first began to learn about science um back in the night uh i think it was the the eighth grade we had
003a course with a teacher named charlie davonzo which was uh learning about the natural world i think was the title of the course and that's sort of where i first became introduced to science to physics and chemistry and math and earth science and ultimately i went on to do my degrees in college in applied math and physics went on to graduate school to study theoretical physics and then got interested half halfway through uh in sort of earth's climate in understanding earth's climate using math and physics to model the behavior of our climate system that ultimately took me down a road that led me right into the center of one of the most contentious issues we've ever dealt with which is human-caused climate change and what we need to do about it but i would say
004that the solid training that i got in math and science in the amherst school system really prepared me to go on and pursue a career doing what i love doing trying to solve interesting problems um and so that sort of that that's sort of my my history um how i got into this uh and um you know it's an interesting time because back when i was in high school decades ago you know climate change seemed far off it seemed theoretical it seemed very speculative well today that's no longer true because we can see the impacts of climate change playing out in real time in the form of unprecedented heat waves and wildfires and floods and superstorms and i want to ask the students a question if i might because i was an amherst hurricane i
005ran track and cross country and had one of those jackets that was emblazoned one of those maroon jackets emblazoned with the amherst hurricanes moniker do uh any of you know why we're the amherst hurricanes that's an interesting question so students and um teachers who are out there watching on the youtube channel um teachers can go ahead and uh respond in the chat to dr mann's question so the question is um do we know why uh we are called the amherst hurricanes and i have been teaching here since 2003 dr mann and i actually don't know the answer so i'm really interested um let's see if anybody wants to put anything into the chat um it might take just a minute for it to come i would say i would like to think it's because we
006were so ferocious um and intimidating to other schools but at least during my senior year i don't think we won a single football game so that's probably nothing that's not it must be something else i have to show you that i'm wearing our new staff shirts and it says sunshine mixed with a little hurricane which um is appropriate for our for our talk well hurricane season just uh started two days ago the official hurricane season so what a perfect time to be talking about it so i'm seeing in the chat that uh mr kelly is saying a hurricane came through here a really long time ago is that the reason absolutely it's the 1938 new england uh storm which at one point was a category five storm by the time it reached rhode island it
007had weakened to a category three storm but it basically followed the the connecticut river right up the kinetic kinetic river uh valley and made a direct hit on amherst and if you go online if you google the images you will find images of total devastation of homes and barns farms uh here you know in in amherst massachusetts so it was indeed this ferocious hurricane that um gave us our name the amherst hurricanes today of course we're seeing uh ever more intense hurricanes we're breaking records both for the strength of these storms the intensity of these storms and the um and the the sheer number of them last year we had 30 named storms in the atlantic hurricane season we went halfway through the greek alphabet we've never done that before so this is another profound
008impact that climate change is having and here's the sort of cruel irony for new englanders and for folks in massachusetts and amherst one of the things that the science has led us to understand over the last really just over the last decade is that climate change is not just causing these storms to become stronger because there's more energy a warmer ocean provides more energy to strengthen these storms to intensify these storms but climate change is also shifting wind patterns it's shifting the jet stream in a way that's causing many of these storms to track further north than they used to so storms that would have made landfall in the past say along the coastline of georgia or the carolinas or jersey are more likely to actually track north into new england and so there's the
009possibility that we will see more of those ferocious storms like the 1938 storm that gave us our name well as a social studies teacher um i appreciate that history lesson dr mann and i will definitely be exploring that it sounds like our students also were some of the ones who contributed the answers so uh are writing also in the chat via their teachers so they're sharing something yeah so i really appreciate that students for for your knowledge as well um and at this point i want to allow for i know dr man probably has some more things to say to us but i want to just let teachers know if they can go ahead and collect any of the questions that students have for dr mann and type them into the chat we will try
010to address those um in the next part of our our segment we have about 12 minutes left with dr mehan um so thanks very much um so dr man um you had talked about how when you first started your um your work um it was controversial um and in our um civics work in in our school we're kind of thinking about how do we take action um and what are you know what did you have to come up against and how did you proceed to to um come up against that controversy because we don't always take action without any uh reaction yeah and you know it's it's sort of interesting sorry i was sort of a computer nerd in uh junior high in high school in fact i used to hang out in the computer
011room on friday nights with my computer nerd friends and we'd be doing computer programming and eating pizza i guess we're not supposed to sorry i let the the secret out yes we would order pizzas and bring it into the school um but um that's so you know i was sort of a geek a nerd the last thing i expected as i pursued a career in science was that i would find myself in one of the most contentious debates um that we've ever experienced but my work ultimately led me into the center of the climate change debate back in the late 1990s when i was in fact pursuing a postdoctoral research fellowship at the university of massachusetts i literally moved back home to do my post-doctoral research with a professor named ray bradley in the department
012of geosciences at umass and we published this curve called the hockey stick which extended temperatures back a thousand years and it placed the modern warming in a long-term context it allowed us to see how profound the warming trend that we've experienced over the past century really is and and how obviously it relates to fossil fuel burning the industrial revolution our dependence on fossil fuels the burning of fossil fuels that's generating carbon pollution that's warming the planet and because that science has implications for some powerful vested interest the fossil fuel industry you know the science tells us we we need to move off of fossil fuels we need to move towards renewable energy and that proved a real threat to the fossil fuel industry and uh they in many cases actually funded efforts to try to
013discredit and attack the science and the scientists and i found myself right at the center of that it's the last thing i expected it's the last place i expected to be as a computer and science nerd who wanted nothing more than to be left alone in the computer room working on problems solving interesting problems but my science led me into the center of this very contentious public debate and ultimately i've come to embrace that role because it's given me an opportunity to inform the conversation about what is arguably the greatest challenge that we face as a civilization and i feel privileged to be in that position even though it's really not what i signed up for thank you and students have learned that uh that your emails were broken into and they're curious about what
014happened to those people who broke into your emails did they get in trouble did anybody hear uh yesterday that uh anthony fauci um a public health expert anthony fauci who's been very instrumental and government efforts to confront the coronavirus pandemic his personal emails were released through a freedom of information act uh request and it's sort of amusing to watch him go through that because of course many of us have gone through that there have been all sorts of efforts to try to discredit us because of the implications of our science the implications that are inconvenient to for example some powerful fossil fuel interests and so one of the means that they've used is literally to steal to hack into you know university web servers to steal emails and they stole a number of my emails
015many other scientist emails and they would take things out of context for example in science you know we often refer in fact some of you probably have used the term um you know in your algebra homework or what have you hey there's a trick to solving that problem a trick in science and math means a clever but not obvious approach to solving a problem to to um you know a a sort of shortcut um a clever sort of um uh sort of uh way around the problem um so it's a good thing it's you know scientists and mathematicians look for tricks uh to solving difficult problems uh but if you take that out of context hey look these scientists they were talking about tricks clearly they're trying to trick the public they're lying about climate
016change these are the sorts of attacks that we were subject to again because there were some powerful interests who wanted to see our work discredited ultimately there were a number of investigations that looked into it and there was no impropriety revealed by these emails the only wrongdoing that was revealed was the criminal theft of the emails in the first place but you have to grow a thick skin and you have to be ready for these sorts of assaults if you're going to be a public figure in areas like climate change where there is great conflict and contentiousness thank you so much students are curious about um how you got your idea about the data collection that you did can you explain where you where your thinking started yeah thanks um so originally my phd research
017in graduate school actually didn't involve climate change i was interested in studying very long-term cycles in the climate uh oscillations in the climate record long-term oscillations and we were um you know interested in understanding whether there are some very long-term natural oscillations well the instrumental record of temperatures thermometer based temperature measurements around the world only go back about a century and a half so if you're interested in seeing if there are much longer term patterns of variation uh back in time then those thermometer records aren't adequate you need to try to extend the record back in time and i ended up doing getting a postdoctoral fellowship from the department of energy that allowed me to come to the university of massachusetts and work with one of the leading experts in the world in uh studying
018long-term longer-term records which we call proxy records that's raymond bradley in the geosciences department and so we ended up looking at things like tree rings and corals and ice cores and lake sediments in fact i worked with another umass professor julie brigham gretty and a student of hers tammy rittenhour we were actually looking at lake deposits that go back thousands of years to try to understand the longer term patterns and we had all of these records from different parts of new england that covered different time periods as the glaciers moved north at the end of the last ice age and left behind these lakes as they melted there were these series of lakes and you can look at the sediments but there was a piece missing we would have had a four thousand year record
019but there was one piece missing that we needed to fill in and we finally determined where the optimal place to find those lake sediments was it was the soccer field at the university of massachusetts we ended up drilling down through the umass soccer field because that was a pro-glacial lake that was once part of the glacial lake hitchcock that was left behind as the ice sheets melted so we have these long-term records i was interested in in what they can tell us about the natural variation in climate but when we piece together the puzzle of how the climate changed in the deep past it gave us this result the hockey stick shape this dramatic warming of the last century which is like the blade of a hockey stick um and so it had implications for
020climate change even though it wasn't climate change that drove our interest in that work in the first place and that's a lesson about science it's sort of what i call a random walk you don't really know where it's going to lead you and we'd like to think that everything is well planned out in the project and you've got the grant and you know exactly what you're going to do but in fact it's just like life you learn things along the way certain things don't work out you get lucky um and and sometimes science takes this erratic path and so it's about using your your mind but it's also sometimes about following your heart i'm using your intuition as to where to go what to investigate thank you that that was really helpful um there are
021a number of questions here we have a few minutes left a couple minutes left um around what um actions people might be able to take to stop climate change so for example question is do trees help climate change more than solar panels is there a technology um that can be used to stop storms so what are some actions that might solutions that you can talk about yeah great questions folks um and i wish we had more time for q a i should spend less time talking and more time addressing your questions um great question there are so many things we can do and there's no magic bullet um we need individual actions of course things that we can do to decrease our own environmental impact and our own carbon footprint um uh you know bicycling
022rather than driving if you know you guys aren't driving yet but um encouraging your your family to use more fuel efficient uh transportation um you know changing your diet in a way that's climate friendlier more vegetables less meat um there are million things you can do individually but the most important thing you can do is use your voice and demand action and part of the reason i'm optimistic that we are going to rise to this you know this immense challenge to avert catastrophic climate change is because of folks like you the youth climate movement kids your age who have marched out on the streets uh i hasten to say actually struck it went on strike against school every friday i don't want you to necessarily do that but they used creative ways of getting their
023message out because you know kids aren't in a position of um of authority yet they can't make policies they can't even vote you guys can't even vote yet and yet we are making decisions today that will have you know a great consequence for the world that you inherit and so there's so many ways to use your voice and use it um speak out about climate change make sure that the adults in your life are aware of the crisis that this represents and how it threatens your future in particular um and that's the most important thing you can do be the change as gandhi said you wish to see in the world i would say one more thing if i may a good friend of mine you guys might know bill nye bill nye the science
024guy um you know bill likes to say at the end of his um you know public presentations he'll say change the world i like to tweak that a bit change the world for the better thank you so much dr manon um i'm glad to hear you talk about those steps because our students are in fact already engaged in those um they are very using using their voice um learning about the variety of solutions that that people can take um and today's workshop um is gonna be continuing that so we're doing an entire day here at amherst middle school where students are going to be attending workshops and learning about both the action steps in terms of using their voice and and civics as well as the science and the solutions um so we're bringing it
025all together in our day and um i'm so happy to have you be our kickoff for it it was very appropriate to have not only an incredible and esteemed expert on on climate change but a graduate of amherst schools it's my pleasure thank you so much our very very last question and um if you don't mind i might send you some of the questions from the chat in an email and we can maybe get back to the students later sure the ones that we didn't get to but um i know you're busy very busy so we'll let you go in just a moment but the last question is what elementary school did you go to i went to wildwood elementary i grew up on wildwood lane in a house just uh just up on a
026hill uh wildwood lane um right near the uh the cemetery and the pond and i would walk uh to to wildwood elementary school uh every morning uh for kindergarten and then elementary school so yeah then we ended up moving uh later on uh other side of town sunset avenue um just down amity street from the town center and the the walk to school was it was much longer at that point well thank you so much again dr mann for um taking your time out of your busy schedule to talk with us about climate change and your and your work um we truly appreciate it and uh students uh you can and teachers you can go ahead and say thank you in the chat i see that folks are already doing that and um we're gonna
027get ready uh to move on and and uh i really just appreciate so much you taking your time out today so thank you well thank you dr laroche it was great talking with you and with the students and arms you make us proud change the world for the better thanks everyone you