Human-caused climate change is arguably the greatest threat we face as a civilization. Efforts to attack and deny the scientific evidence have constituted a major impediment to action over the past two decades. At a time when we appear to be moving past outright denial of the problem, we face a multi-pronged strategy by polluting interests to distract, deflect, attack, and divide the climate activist community. This involves, among other things, (a) efforts to deflect attention from systemic change and regulatory policy solutions to personal behavior, (b) doomist framing that disempowers us by exaggerating the threat in such a way as to make catastrophic changes now seem unavoidable, and (c) the promotion of false solutions that seek to enable the continued burning of fossil fuels that is at the very root of the problem. It is important to recognize that while there is great urgency in acting, there is also agency. There is still time for us to avert the worst impacts of climate change if we act now and we act boldly. Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Pennsylvania State University and author of The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet, will discuss what we can do to fight back, emphasizing the importance of both urgency AND agency in efforts to save our planet.
Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Pennsylvania State University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He achieved widespread attention with his 1998 paper that introduced the “hockey stick curve” graph, which revealed the global temperature increase over the last thousand years. Since then, his research has been the focus of numerous right-wing attacks.
Mann is the author of many books, including The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet(Public Affairs, 2021); https:// michaelmann.net/. Mann was a co-recipient of the first Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He is a co-founder of the climatology blog RealClimate.
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