World - Renowned climate scientist Michael E. Mann on what ‘doomers’ get wrong
In his new book, ‘Our Fragile Moment,’ he explains why every fraction of a degree of climate warming is worth preventing.
Michael E. Mann has served on the front lines of climate science and, as a consequence, the wars over climate policy, for more than a decade. Probably still best known as one of the creators of the hockey stick graph, which shows an abrupt rise in the planet’s average temperature since the 1900s, he is also a dedicated science communicator who has previously published five books aimed at the general public, including a book for children.
Now a presidential distinguished professor and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, Mann has just published his sixth book, “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.” Yale Climate Connections discussed the book with Mann over Zoom.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Where helpful, further details have been provided in parentheses.
Yale Climate Connections: Your new book seems rather different from your previous books. You step further back; you paint a bigger picture of a much longer history. Why this book now? Why offer the public a deep dive into Earth’s climatic history at this critical juncture in the effort to address human-caused climate change?
Michael E. Mann: You’re right. I wrote “Dire Predictions” (2008, second edition in 2015) as a layperson’s guide to the IPCC reports. “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” (2012) was my own story of the battles I’ve fought because of the graph of global warming I had created. With cartoonist Tom Toles, I’ve also written about climate denial (“The Madhouse Effect,” 2016). In “The New Climate War” (2021), I wrote about the politics of climate policy. I’ve even authored a children’s book (“The Tantrum That Saved the World,” with artist Megan Herbert, 2018).
So I’ve done all that. What I hadn’t written about was the topic that was my bread and butter as a climate scientist. I cut my teeth on paleoclimate. What are the lessons we can learn from the deep past?
There are a lot of people who think that the science supports this view, but it doesn’t.
MICHAEL E. MANN
And that came together with this other thread — the observation that the primary obstacle to action on climate change no longer seems to be denial; it’s the idea that we lack agency, doomism: “It’s too late to prevent catastrophic, runaway warming and the extinction of all life.”
There are a lot of people who think that the science supports this view, but it doesn’t.
