Table of Contents
The Madhouse Effect
The Madhouse Effect
How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
MICHAEL E. MANN and TOM TOLES
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2016 Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-54181-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mann, Michael E., 1965 | Toles, Tom.
Title: The madhouse effect : how climate change denial is threatening our planet, destroying our politics, and driving us crazy / Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles.
Other titles: Climate change denial is threatening our planet, destroying our politics, and driving us crazy
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016009004 (print) | LCCN 2016010170 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231177863 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541817 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Climatic changes. | Global warming. | Climatic changesPsychological aspects. | Global warmingPsychological aspects. | Denial (Psychology)
Classification: LCC QC903 .M3625 2016 (print) | LCC QC903 (ebook) | DDC 363.738/74dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016009004
A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .
COVER IMAGE: Tom Toles
Michael Mann dedicates this book to his wife, Lorraine Santy, and daughter, Megan Dorothy Mann, and to the memory of his brother Jonathan Clifford Mann.
Tom Toles dedicates this book to his wife, Gretchen; his daughter, Amanda; and his son, Seth.
CONTENTS
Why We Wrote This Book
Coauthors Tom Toles (left) and Michael Mann (right) with their preferred implements.
What would bring a pointy-headed, lab-coat wearing, left-brained scientist and a laid-back, artistic, right-brained editorial cartoonist-satirist to collaborate on a book?
The answer is simple: climate change.
The warming of the planet caused by our profligate burning of fossil fuels poses perhaps the greatest challenge that human civilization has yet faced. But thus far, we have not met the challenge. We have failed to engage in the actions necessary to prevent dangerous and possibly irreversible changes in our climate.
Why? Its not as if the science isnt compelling. It is.
Its not as if the threat isnt clear. It is.
Its not as if many smart, informed, and concerned individuals havent sought to bring attention to this crisis. They have.
It isnt even that the overwhelming majority of citizens dont recognize the urgency of acting on the problem. They do.
So how is that we have arrived in a madhouse atmosphere where politicians are able to do the bidding of powerful fossil fuel interests while ignoring the long-term good of the people they are supposed to represent?
Both of us have asked ourselves this question many times.
A scientist tries to understand the way the world works. An editorial cartoonist tries to show the ways it doesnt.
These jobs exist in happy parallel universes until something very unusual happens to bring them together. In this case, that something unusual is the outrageous distortion of science in public policy. The distortion, denial, and confusion in the public-policy response to climate change has been nothing short of a madhouse. The challenge has been, and still is, to figure out where we are and find the way out.
And this is where the scientist and the cartoonist meet. The scientist tries to understand what the facts and implications are. The cartoonist reads about the growing dangers and tries to vividly illustrate them.
Each of us in his own way is passionate about communicating the urgency of the problemMike through public lectures, media interviews, and the university courses that he teaches and Tom through his famous editorial cartoons and blogs in the Washington Post, which have used humor and satire to highlight this issue for millions of readers.
It occurred to both of us that conventional approaches are not succeedingat least not quickly enough to avert a catastrophe. Perhaps we need to talk and think about the problem in a different way.
Maybe, we thought, we need to combine our left brains and our right brains, use both our cerebral cortices and our hearts.
And thus was born this collaboration between an editorial cartoonist known for his biting sociopolitical commentary and a climate researcher known largely for his scientific work.
Despite our very different vocations, both of us are committed to informing the public discourse over what is arguably the greatest challenge yet faced by human civilization: the challenge to avert catastrophic interference with Earths climate.
There is a fire in the house, almost a literal one. But even as the evidence has become unmistakable, and even though the alarm has been sounded several times, public policy has been paralyzedsometimes from ignorance, sometimes from uncertainty, but often from a campaign of deliberate misinformation.
This is the madhouse of the climate debate. We have followed Alice through the looking glass. White roses here are painted red, and words suddenly mean something different from what they used to mean. The very language of science itself, of skepticism and evidence, is used in a way opposite of how science really employs it.
Not everyone wants the facts to be known. We have run squarely into what Upton Sinclair famously warned us about: It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And there are many powerful interests whose salary has very much depended on the public not understanding climate science.
And so the battle continues to get the world to recognize the possibly permanent damage we are doing to Earth, to ourselves, and to every ecosystem. The fight to preserve the forests, lakes, mountains, even oceans of the only planet we have is not like other battles. This one will not be ending. Time is no longer on our side. Time will not be healing wounds but instead will be inflicting more and more of them if we dont stop shambling around like confused zombies.
In this book, we talk about the basic science underlying climate change, of course, because, frankly, you cant solve a problem if you dont understand what it is in the first place. But first we talk about science itself because you have to know what it is before you can understand what it is not. In the debate over climate change, pseudoscience or antiscience is too often allowed to masquerade as science, and denialism is allowed to pose as skepticism.
The media too often throw up their collective hands and say, We cant tell the difference. So we get the problem of false balance, wherein industry propaganda too often is given an equal place on the media stage with actual science when it comes to the issue of climate change. And the rest of us pay the price in the form of a skewed public discourse. This is a problem that one of us has explored in his cartoons and the other has discussed in his previous writingsand we explore it together in depth in this book.
