DIMITRI LASCARIS: Right. One thing I'd like to talk to you lastly before we conclude our interview is something that we're seeing this summer, it's quite striking in certain parts of the world including here in Canada where I am. In British Columbia, we've seen devastating wildfires spinning out of control in many parts of the province. We've seen similarly devastating wildfires in California. Portugal, where a number of people died recently. To what extent can we say with confidence that there's a link between climate change and this phenomenon in particular that we're seeing? These extremely intense and proliferating wildfires in various parts of the world.
MICHAEL MANN: Yeah, there's a very clear link. In some of these cases like the 2015 California wildfires, we've actually published some work that demonstrates that one of the features of climate change related to how it changes the properties of our jet stream and the way weather patterns move or don't move around, that that phenomenon may have been implicated with the 2015 California wildfires. There are cases where we can point to very specific mechanisms that we think are being exacerbated by climate change and say there was probably a linkage there.
More generally, when we step back and we look at North America and we see that there's been a tripling in the extent of wildfire over the past half century, that's not a small change. That's not a subtle signal. That's a big signal. We can see the impact of climate change here. In a sense, it's because these wildfires, forgive the pun, represent sort of a perfect storm. You have various factors coming together. Extreme summer heat and drought, diminished snow pack, which means less spring run-off, and warm winters which allow pests like pine beetles to infest our forests and weaken them. You bring all those factors together, and you've got a recipe for massive wildfires, and that's what we're seeing. The science is very clear that it predicts this. The observations are very clear that we're seeing this. There is a connection.
