Climate Denialism, ‘Doom Porn’, Deflection And The New Climate War

The Age - Nick O'Malley

At the heart of the new book by one of the world’s most famous climate scientists, Michael Mann, is the assertion that climate change denialism is now a spent force and, instead, action is being hampered by distraction and what he calls “doom porn”.

Professor Mann asserts in The New Climate War that, with the impacts of climate change now obvious to those living through it, those fighting effective action are determined to deflect and delay rather than deny.

Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, speaks at the climate change science panel held by the Sydney Environmental Institute last year.

Proponents of deflection, he argues, range from the fossil fuel industry and their allies in the media across the political spectrum to purveyors of what he calls “doom porn”, who, in defiance of good science, preach that a climate cataclysm is inevitable and imminent.

Professor Mann, the distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, began writing the book after a sabbatical spent in Sydney as the nation burnt. 

Tony Abbott's climate denial prompted Barack Obama's Brisbane barbs

“Spending that time in Australia, I sort of started to feel like I was, you know, one of you. I really enjoyed my time there, and really bonded with people, I think in part, because we were all collectively experiencing these twin crises,” he says.

That sense lingered with him as he came to write the book over the coming months. “There were a lot of things that people could point to if you’re looking for reasons for pessimism, but, I actually saw reasons for cautious optimism.”

By midyear, Professor Mann believed that former US president Donald Trump would not win a second term, and that, in his absence, nations drawn to “waffling and recalcitrance” over climate change would lose an ally and an excuse. He says renewed climate action in China and a change of tone in Australia are evidence of this.

In Australia, he says he saw a nation abandon those who would argue against climate science, and he believes the new language of the Morrison government — that its preference is to hit net zero emissions by mid-century — to be evidence of that.

Since the US election, he says he has been happily surprised by the determination of the Biden administration to act on climate.

“I didn’t think that he would be quite as bold as he’s been. He’s really made climate one of the central issues that he’s focusing on in the first 100 days of his presidency at a time when we’re still fighting a global pandemic and dealing with issues of racial injustice.

“I underestimated the passion that Biden would embrace climate action going into the first year of his presidency.”

Professor Mann believes that the world has been subject to a deliberate misinformation campaign over climate change, exacerbated by an alliance in the US between the corporate right and the religious right that helped make climate an issue of the culture war rather than science.

He argues that Saudi Arabia and Russia have had an interest in fending off action on climate change and that this interest might have played into Russian support for both Brexit and the Trump election.

Denialism, he says, has been aided by conservative media.

“With Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, the Murdoch [media empire] has almost single-handedly prevented legislative action on climate in [the US] through massive disinformation campaigns,” he says.

Professor Mann has never been one to maintain an academic distance from the political fights of his field.

Source: Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He was one of the authors of the “hockey stick graph”, that so bluntly demonstrated abrupt modern global warming, in the pages of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2001, prompting savage political blowback. Later, during the so-called Climategate controversy, his emails were among those hacked and selectively republished to support the disproved allegations that climate scientists were colluding to falsify their findings.

Today, Professor Mann argues, “inactivism” has become central to opposition to climate action. Inactivism can be seen both in doomism and deflection — the argument that individuals must take action rather than corporations or governments.

Despite this, given global youth activism, the will for change he perceived in Australia, the energy of Biden, the renewed action in China and the surprising determination of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to have the upcoming Glasgow UN climate meeting succeed, Professor Mann writes that he remains “neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful” about the prospects for tacking the climate crisis.

Links 

• The New Climate War - Michael E. Mann
• The New Climate War review: Reasons to be optimistic about the future
• Fossil Fuel ‘Inactivists' Are Still Trying to Distract From Real Progress on Climate Change: Michael E. Mann
• Is "climate doom porn" a tactic of the fossil fuel industry? (audio)
• How Companies Denied Their Role In Climate Change
• Michael Mann: Why Biden's actions are good news from front lines of the climate change war
• Climate Scientist Michael Mann: ‘We’re Going to Need Every Tool We Have’
• Prominent Climatologist Behind 'Hockey Stick' Graph Talks About The 'New Climate War'
• (USA) High Stakes For Earth's Climate Future In US Vote
• (AU) For Australia's Sake, I Hope Trump's Climate Science Denialism Loses
• (AU) Australia, Your Country Is Burning – Dangerous Climate Change Is Here With You Now
• You Can't Save The Climate By Going Vegan. Corporate Polluters Must Be Held Accountable.