One of the world's most prominent advocates for taking action to halt human-caused climate change is Dr. Michael E. Mann, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Pennsylvania. The climatologist and geophysicist's latest book is "Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth's Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis." One might expect it to follow the pattern one so often sees in the literary sub-genre of climate change non-fiction: A breakdown of how the human-caused greenhouse gas effect is warming the planet, a bemoaning of the entrenched powers that thwart necessary reforms, and by extension, a bleak conclusion about humanity's future.
"We are warming the climate on a timescale that's a million times faster than what nature was able to do on its own. That's what makes this moment so fragile."
Yet "Our Fragile Moment" doesn't fall into those traps. Instead of being dire, the book dares to be optimistic: Mann argues that an Earth too hot to support life is unlikely to occur unless there is total inaction on climate change, which does not appear to be happening. Our current trajectory for warming, though dangerous and civilization-altering, is not as bad as some of the earlier worst-case scenarios that scientists warned about.
Additionally, "Our Fragile Moment" celebrates the beauty and resilience of our planet's history by probing it in depth. To complement Mann's glass-half-full perspective on our battle against climate change, the book celebrates the sheer joy of scientific knowledge our species is able to enjoy. Mann reviews the history of Earth's various periods of global climate change over the previous 4.5 billion years, from periods of intense heat to a time when Earth was a "snowball," literally covered in snow and ice.
While the book contains sobering stories detailing everything from civilization collapses to mass extinctions, "Our Fragile Moment" avoids the pitfalls of pessimism simply by sharing scientific knowledge in a neutral and accessible way.
"Skepticism is a good thing in science, but there are a lot of bad faith out efforts to distort and impair understanding, and that's not skepticism. It's anything but skepticism."
That is not to say that the book lacks politics. There is abundant evidence that the fossil fuel industry and its enablers in media and government are hindering progress on climate change. Mann documents how conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch and Republican politicians remain very effective in preventing the full measure of necessary climate reforms from being implemented. As such, "Our Fragile Moment" doubles as both a succinct history of Earth and a plea for humanity to continue thriving on this planet, in spite of its own excesses.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and context.
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Your book includes a lot of information about Earth's geological history. Are there any easy ways for lay people to remember that complicated timeline?
"We are warming the climate on a timescale that's a million times faster than what nature was able to do on its own. That's what makes this moment so fragile."
I would say that roughly speaking: Life on Earth has been around for 4 billion years, and so for billions of years, conditions have been conducive to life and life has played an increasingly important role on the climate itself. Two and a half billion years ago, we had a Snowball Earth. Then we step forward — you can think of telescoping in on finer and finer timescales — we get from the billion year timescale to the hundreds of millions year timescale. And, at 250 million years, we have the greatest mass extinction event on Earth. There are lessons that we draw from that. Then we zoom in again: Now, we're talking 65 million years ago, and we have the episode that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Then we zoom ahead to just a few million years ago, and primates are on the scene. At every step, you have climate changing and climate impacting life.
It's shaping the planet and guiding life, and ultimately, life is impacting the climate itself. That now is happening in a way that we've never seen before, where for life on Earth human beings are now the major lever on the climate. We are warming the climate on a timescale that's a million times faster than what nature was able to do on its own. That's what makes this moment so fragile. We have really taken hold of the climate system, and we are very rapidly leaving that envelope of climate variability in which human civilization evolved.
You mentioned in your book there is a tendency on the part of the media to promote a somewhat alarmist approach to climate change, and that this seems to be derived from, if not scientific illiteracy, at least a lack of familiarity with the complexities of climate science. What are some solutions to this so that the media can balance emphasizing the reality of human-caused climate change with explaining the nuances of science?
Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we all struggle with: Journalists struggle with it, scientists struggle with it. How do we characterize this in a way that best frames what we know from the science? It's a challenge for all of us. I wouldn't want to imply that it's the media's fault or something. We all struggle with how to take complex science and the nuances and the message.
"The evolution of science occurs through incremental increases in our knowledge that don't radically change our understanding, but fine-tune it. "
I talk about the whiplash effect, as [journalist] Andy Revkin once called it. The fact that you knew you need a news hook for a story and so, of course, you want to present what's new and different and novel and exciting and just that very process. And that's not even in the hands of journalists — it's editors and media outlets and how they frame it. There is the incentive structure.
And this is true for press offices at universities and the press releases that they write, which all sort of emphasize about the given study, how much it adds to our understanding, and how there's a tendency to imply that it completely changes our way of understanding the world. Yet scientific understanding doesn't work that way. I talk about some examples in the book that there are paradigm-breaking developments: Plate tectonics was one of them, chaos theory is another and we can go on.
"That's what's so frightening here. It's the rejection of evidence, of reality. And, once we lose that, we are truly lost."
But, by and large, the evolution of science occurs through incremental increases in our knowledge that don't radically change our understanding but fine-tune it, and so that's the struggle. I think that's the challenge: How do we solve that problem? I think you and I are a good example. You've got journalists and scientists who develop close working relationships. We know each other well. You can contact me. I know that if there's something interesting that I think might be worth reporting, I can bring it to your attention. So, I think actually relationships between scientists and journalists are the way that we sort of deal with those challenges.
I agree. I now think it's important to look at the other side of the coin, which is how climate change deniers weaponize the virtue of scientific uncertainty to advocate inaction. I think it's important that — I like how you detailed this in your book — to define what real skepticism is versus what I would call faux skepticism.
Skepticism is a good thing in science, but there are a lot of bad-faith efforts to distort and impair understanding — and that's not skepticism. I think, for too long, we allowed climate deniers and contrarians and critics to sort of frame themselves as skeptics in the mantle of Galileo. It's anything but skepticism.
When you're rejecting the evidence based on the flimsiest of arguments that don't hold any water at all, that's not skepticism. It's agenda-driven anti-science — and that's what we're dealing with today. And, of course, I don't see how you and I can have this conversation today without talking about what transpired last night [the first 2024 Republican presidential debate], where one of the two major parties made it crystal clear that yes, their official stance is that humans are not warming the planet. That is so frightening. It just drives home how this debate is no longer based on like good-faith differing, good-faith differences and interpretation of the evidence. It's based on rejection of the evidence. That's what we're dealing with today.
To use your Galileo analogy: I would argue that the elegance of that analogy is that Galileo created a telescope, and the church literally refused to look through his telescope. The deniers would be cast in the role of the Catholic Church at that time because they had a figurative telescope, and they were refusing to look through it.
Yes, I think that's exactly right, and there are other layers of absurdity to that framing, as well. Galileo was actually a mainstream scientist. He was the chair of his department. He contributed to the peer-reviewed literature. So, he was anything but a maverick sitting on the sidelines throwing potshots at the scientific establishment, which is the way that these wannabe Galileos would frame themselves.
What we're really talking about is partisanship, tribalism, people thinking in terms of politics as a team sport rather than finding the truth. In contrast, when I was reading "Our Fragile Moment," I was thinking of the cumulatively hundreds of years of detailed and meticulous scientific research that went into acquiring all of this information. Can you explain what the actual legitimate process of scientific research looks like?
I think that's a great way of framing it, and I think there is some irony, particularly when it comes to this book because I'm presenting billions of years. It's a Carl Sagan, "billions of years" of information, of data, of evidence. And we have people last night who are literally rejecting billions of years of evidence.
The key lessons that Earth history has to offer us from the earliest beginnings of our planet, it's jarring. We really are taking this very long-term perspective, this deep dive. And I document it meticulously with references to the scientific literature and try to break it down in ways that people can understand.
And, yet, one of our two major parties now will a priori reject whatever it is I have to say or show in this book. In chapter four, I go on this diversion, and there's some popular culture references. You and I both are movie buffs, and I think we've even talked about dystopian 1960s, '70s films and the role that they played. "Planet of the Apes" was one of those dystopian films. It's mentioned in the book, and that's what we were dealing with, where the apes were covering up the evidence as best they could that apes had descended from humans. The levels of irony to that are just remarkable. That's where we are today. That's where we are.
"When you're rejecting the evidence based on the flimsiest of arguments that don't hold any water at all, that's not skepticism. It's agenda-driven anti-science."
We've discussed "Soylent Green," and I've said that that movie was remarkably prescient, especially in determining the deterioration of culture. I feel like there's a cynicism — you use the word venal — because there's a sort of very detached, almost nihilistic perspective that I feel has entered our culture. To me, if you're arguing that "Maybe the earth is heating, but even if it is, I don't want to look at whether it's caused by people and prefer to just let it happen so that I don't have to deal with it" — that is beyond just being stubborn. Nihilism seems to be at play.
Yes, I think it is nihilism. I think it's bad faith. It's tribalistic. It's a refusal to even look at what the evidence is. We have one of our two major parties whose very platform involves the rejection of scientific evidence, whether it's the rejection of the health crisis we have faced in recent years in the form of the pandemic and the solutions to that crisis or the rejection of the even greater crisis that is looming in the background — the climate crisis.
I think you put your finger on it — and that's what's so frightening here. It's the rejection of evidence, of reality. And, once we lose that, we are truly lost. And, if we can't fix it — the fundamental problems we have right now with our democracy and the nature of our public discourse and our political discourse — we have no hope of addressing the climate crisis.
I want to go back to Carl Sagan, who you mentioned a moment ago. Can you elaborate on the connection between the efforts to discredit Sagan's discoveries about nuclear winter in the 1980s and climate change denialism today? Also, right now, thanks to the movie "Oppenheimer," nuclear war is very much part of the zeitgeist.
I allude in the book to the fact that Putin's threat to use tactical nuclear weapons in the current conflict [in Ukraine] — we've not gotten past that crisis. It suddenly becomes far more salient, I think, looking back at the nuclear winter debate and the lessons that it offers us for today. There are all sorts of remarkable parallels and connections, which I struggled to outline in a way that was coherent because there are just so many interesting threads that connect them.
One of them, of course, is just that [Sagan's warning] was about climate change. Fundamentally, nuclear winter was about a global cooling episode, and it was based on climate model simulations. And a group arose — now these groups are called dark money groups — but this was an industry-funded front group, the George Marshall Institute that came into being because the military-industrial complex saw Sagan's messaging on the threat of nuclear winter as a threat to them.
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And just like the fossil fuel industry, they hired scientists to act as attack dogs on their behalf. And so you had scientists who were basically paid to try to discredit Carl Sagan, and one of the avenues they took was to try to discredit climate models. So, what's ironic is that, of course, the George Marshall Institute in later years would remake itself as a climate denial group.
But they started out as sort of a Cold War-promoting interest group that was working for the military-industrial complex. As that became less of an issue with [Soviet Union President Mikhail] Gorbachev and [American President Ronald] Reagan signing on to peace agreements, that sort of went on to the back burner. The George Marshall Institute needed another issue, and then, of course, the fossil fuel industry was more than happy to have them go down that thread of discrediting climate models because that would become ever more important in the context of the even greater debate over climate change and fossil fuel burning.
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