With the election of Donald Trump, denial of climate change reached the highest level of US government. “We’ve returned to the madhouse,” says pioneering climate scientist Michael Mann, Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State.
Mann will speak at the University of Vermont on Thursday, October 10, to address what this policy of denial means for today’s politics and the future.
His talk will be held at Ira Allen Chapel, 4:30-5:30pm. The event is free and open to the public.
Winner of the AAAS Public Engagement with Science Award and the Tyler Prize—and renowned for his work on the famed “hockey stock graph” of spiking global temperatures—Mann will review the evidence of climate change, and identify efforts by special interests to confuse the public and attack science. He’ll also explain why he’s optimistic we can avert climate catastrophe.
Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute. He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. Mann is frequently called on as an expert—with interviews ranging from the NBC Nightly News to committees of the US Congress.
Mann is the author of several books including his most recent work, The Madhouse Effect, which features cartoons by Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles. Through satire, the book portrays the “intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that man-made activity has changed our climate,” he notes.
Mann and Toles' book was published just before Donald Trump was elected. “At that time,” says Mann, “we were criticized by some colleagues who said: ‘why are you writing a book about climate change denial? We're past that now. From here on, it's all going to be about solutions and action.’ There was a false complacency—we can now see, of course—because we went on to elect the first climate-change-denying president.”
“We are certainly still very much in the madhouse, where the chief executive of our nation is in denial that the greatest threat that we arguably face even exists,” says Mann. “So my lecture at UVM will be an update on the story of the book to include everything that's happened since the presidential election—and I’ll assess where we are today in the larger public discourse over climate change.”
Mann describes himself as “cautiously optimistic,” he says. He observes political leaders across the spectrum moving in the direction of acknowledging that climate change exists and “moving onto the worthy debate about what to do about it,” he says.
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