The Fight to Take Back Our Planet

By Michael E. Mann

 

Michael Mann is an American climatologist and distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University. He is famous for the hockey stick graph, a reconstruction of the global mean temperature record of the past 500–2000 years, which demonstrated a gradual cooling trend, alarmingly changing to rapid warming in the twentieth century.

In his latest book, Mann discusses the “powerful Ds: disinformation, deceit, divisiveness, deflection, delay, despair-mongering, and doomism,” all of which are being used by the fossil fuel industry to discourage and diminish effective responses to greenhouse gas emission and climate change. He opens with the fictional account of an amateur Norwegian scientist who challenges the local economy after finding that the town’s water supply is polluted by chemicals from the local tannery. For his efforts, the scientist and his family are reviled, stoned, terrified, and nearly run out of town. His narrative, the plot of Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, is fiction, but Mann uses the metaphorical account to describe the consequences of challenging a large, entrenched, and profitable industry. Clearly, Mann has no patience for the tactics used by the powerful fossil fuel industry, likening many of them to efforts used by the tobacco industry to combat and destroy the crystal-clear relationship between cancer and tobacco use. He names and discusses the efforts of the many science-deniers-for-hire who have aided and abetted these industries in their efforts to distract and sow doubt.

Mann raises a provocative point: Is the coronavirus pandemic acting as Gaia‘s immune system, noting that pollution from industry, air traffic, and public transportation and greenhouse gas emissions has fallen since the onset of the pandemic? Stretching this metaphor a bit, perhaps we humans are the planet’s virus, based on the damage we are inflicting on the earth. Knowledge is the vaccine for the current problem; we must use knowledge to vaccinate the public and build support for the proposed solutions.

He lays out a four-point battle plan:

• Disregard the Doomsayers (ignore the “climate doom porn”)
• A Child Shall Lead Them (Greta Thunberg and colleagues)
• Educate, Educate, Educate (inform victims of disinformation)
• Changing the System Requires Systemic Change (large, systemic changes are needed)

He addresses each in detail in the last chapter of the book. He relieves the individual reader of guilt by asserting that the climate change problem cannot be solved by individual personal choices. These choices are too small and too ineffectual to make a difference. Rather, progress will come about with large policy changes that require global cooperation of all countries to save the planet. Predictably, he is thrilled that the United States has re-embraced the Paris Agreement, although he admits this agreement is only a start on the right path. “The answer is that there is no path of escape from climate-change catastrophe that doesn’t involve policies aimed at societal decarbonization.” He supports “intergovernmental agreements like those fostered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that bring the countries of the world to the table to agree on critical targets.”

Mann supports carbon pricing and believes we are nearing a tipping point on climate action. In doing so, he paints a guardedly optimistic picture of the future—assuming that we achieve a necessary shift away from fossil fuels and other sources of carbon pollution. Let’s hope he is correct. His book is well worth reading for the context it gives to this societal, political, and global challenge.

—Margan Zajdowicz, Book Corner Co-editor