Media Roundup: The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
“For centuries, powerful forces of greed have tried to hide the truth, but that doesn’t change reality—the earth is round and climate change is very real. The Madhouse Effect brilliantly dissects the climate denial industry, empowering all of us to see the facts and take action before it’s too late.”
~ Leonardo DiCaprio
The award-winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize–winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have been on the front lines of the fight against climate denialism for most of their careers. In continuation of our month-long Earth Day celebration, today’s feature is a media roundup of the The Madhouse Effect:How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. The book offers a clever lampoon of the fallacious claims and absurd arguments of climate-science deniers. To learn more, explore Miachel E. Mann’s website.
For a chance to win a copy of the book, enter our Earth Day drawing.
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Videos Interviews
Watch Dr. Mann’s interview with Thom Hartmann on dangerous climate change and extreme weather.
Climate change is making wildfires more extreme. Here’s how
PBS News Hours: August 2018
High winds, high temperatures, pervasive drought. These extreme conditions are driving two enormous fires in California, and many more throughout the American West and much of Northern and Western Europe. William Brangham talks with Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University about the ways climate change is contributing to the danger and destruction.
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Interview on The Madhouse Effect
C-SPAN: November 2016
Michael Mann was interviewed by C-SPAN at the National Press Club Book Fair about his book, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.
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Experts: If We Don’t Stop Climate Change, CA Fires “Will Seem Mild in Comparison to What’s Coming”
Democracy Now!: August 2018
The Mendocino Complex fire in Northern California is now the largest wildfire ever recorded in California’s history. It started burning in July—the state’s hottest month on record. Of the 20 largest wildfires in California history, 15 have occurred since 2000. This year’s fires have already burned nearly three times as many acres as the same time last year. Experts say climate change has increased the length of fire season.
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Author Op-Eds
Why Does Donald Trump Hate Wind?
Newsweek: March 2019
Unlike President Trump’s inability to pronounce the word “origins,” his recurring anti-windbloviating isn’t a sign of mental decline. Sure, it is stupid and wrong to say the sound of wind causes cancer (just who is the “alarmist” by the way?) or reduces real estate values (it doesn’t.) But it’s also dangerous. This and other anti-science campaigns like the ones against vaccinations and evolution are not just silly ignorance. They’re weaponized stupidity.
Trump’s tirades aren’t reflective of any deeply held belief or well-informed opinion, but instead appear to be informed by, and in service of, Big Oil’s anti-wind propaganda. For decades fossil fuel companies have attacked clean and renewable competition, from working to block local wind power installations to fighting state policies promoting wind. Key to that effort is spreading myths about wind power’s potential as well as its progress, which our Fox News President predictably regurgitates.
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Donald Trump is using Stalinist tactics to discredit climate science
The Guardian: March 2019
Americans should not be fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.
The Trump administration has already purged information about climate change from government websites, gagged federal experts and attempted to end funding for climate change programmes.
Now a group of hardcore climate change deniers and contrarians linked to the administration is organising a petition in support of a new panel being set up by the National Security Council to promote an alternative official explanation for climate change.
The panel will consist of scientists who do not accept the overwhelming scientific evidence that rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are behind climate change and its impacts.
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People Are Already Dying By The Thousands Because We Ignored Earlier Climate Change Warnings
Huffpost: December 2018
Why are we not looking to experience to convince ourselves as a people and as a nation to respond to the risks of climate change before it is too late? Perhaps it is because scientists always make us look into an uncertain future, with climate change being calibrated in decades to come. Even the recent dire forecasts of rapidly approaching risk and vulnerability place the problem in the future, not the present.
Climate change is here now, and people are already dying as a result. Yes, it will continue to get worse, but the damage already being done is deserving of a radical response.
So that we can better communicate the urgency of action, we take a first step in looking back over past decades to assess the contribution of observed climate change to damage that the United States has experienced. That contribution is considerable.
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Book Reviews
The Madhouse Effect, a review
SkepticalScience: September 2016
Climate scientist Michael Mann has teamed up with cartoonist Tom Toles to write The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics and Driving Us Crazy. It’s an excellent book, well-written, authoritative on the science, revealing on the politics and laced with the wit of many superb cartoons. Buy a copy for the climate science doubter in your family. They will be drawn in by the cartoons and may well be unable to resist dipping in to the text.
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The Guardian: Septemer 2016
A new book by Michael Mann and Tom Toles takes a fresh look on the effects humans are having on our climate and the additional impacts on our politics. While there have been countless books about climate change over the past two decades, this one – entitled The Madhouse Effect – distinguishes itself by its clear and straightforward science mixed with clever and sometimes comedic presentation.
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Book review: The Madhouse Effect by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles
Astronomy: November 2016
A few times per year a science book rolls along that should be required reading for every responsible person on the planet. Such is the case with a new book about global warming denial, The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. The work, by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles (174 pp., hardcover, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016, $25; ISBN 978–0–231–17786–3), presents a highly entertaining narrative infused with simple logic, concrete science, and a dash of humor.
