ClimateVoices Featuring Michael Mann

In this issue I’m pleased to be talking with Michael Mann , renowned climate scientist and Presidential Distinguished Professor of Earth & Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He is also director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media. Michael tried his best to warn all of us with his famous “hockey stick” graph illustrating the rapid increase in global warming over time.

He’s the author of several books including The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, which details how fossil fuel companies have waged a thirty-year campaign to deflect blame and responsibility and delay action on climate change, and offers a battle plan for how we can save the planet. Now he’s equally on point with his latest book, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis, which arms readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them – and others – to act before it truly does become too late.

Your new book "Our Fragile Moment" is a deep dive into paleoclimatology and the narrative starts 4.5 billion years ago. Why do you think it's urgent right now for people to understand the Earth's climate history?

In short, I’ve seen the science of paleoclimatology misrepresented too often, and not just by climate deniers any more, but by climate “doomists” who insist it’s too late to act. That was part of the message of my previous book (“The New Climate War”), but here I approach it from a different angle: what are the lessons, for example, of past mass extinctions—do they truly indicate that we’re already doomed by the climate changes we’ve caused or are committed to at this point, as doomists argue? The paleoclimate record, when reviewed objectively, tells us otherwise—that we still have agency in preventing catastrophic, civilization-ended warming. But there is a message of urgency too, when we review the evidence from past Earth history. That evidence tells us that there is but a narrow window of opportunity that exists at this point for preserving our “fragile moment’.?

Proponents of disinformation often claim that because Earth’s climate has changed dramatically over time we shouldn’t worry about global warming now. How does that misreading of the record influence the current debates over climate policy and what can be done to elevate calls for climate policy action in spite of continued denialism?

I always get a kick out of climate deniers who use that argument. When they think they’re one-upping me by informing me that “climate has changed dramatically in the past” I inform them that this is true—and the only reason we know this is true is because of climate scientists who study the past and the lessons it offers us. In “Our Fragile Moment”, we see that an honest, objective, and comprehensive assessment of past climate change, rather than contradicting, reinforces our understanding of how human activity—particularly the burning of fossil fuels—is warming the planet today, and the risks that this poses to us and other living things.?

At the end of the book you share a story about rushing your daughter to the hospital at 3 am because she was having trouble breathing. It turned out she had asthma triggered by extreme heat and high ozone levels. As more people experience the negative impacts of climate change, how can we turn our personal stories into strengthened calls for action from our leaders?

Great question. We are creatures of narrative instinct. We learn from each other most readily through storytelling, as did our ancestors many thousands of years ago listening to each other tell stories of the hunt or the quest around the campfire. And so we must look for these stories today—stories that communicate, via not just the head but the heart, the lived reality we are all sharing today—a reality of ever-heightening risk as we continue to warm the planet. If we can reach people's hearts we can change their minds.

In Big Tech, they call me a “shit stirrer” – and I love that nickname. What’s your moniker?

I love it. When they’re kind, they tell me “I’m the Mann!”. When they’re not so kind...well, I won’t go there ??

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