Michael Mann hasn’t grasped the simplest and most basic point about climate change yet:
Mann told the Observer that although flat rejection of global warming was becoming increasingly hard to maintain in the face of mounting evidence, this did not mean climate change deniers were giving up the fight.
“First of all, there is an attempt being made by them to deflect attention away from finding policy solutions to global warming towards promoting individual behaviour changes that affect people’s diets, travel choices and other personal behaviour,” said Mann. “This is a deflection campaign and a lot of well-meaning people have been taken in by it.”
Mann stressed that individual actions – eating less meat or avoiding air travel – were important in the battle against global warming. However, they should be seen as additional ways to combat global warming rather than as a substitute for policy reform.
This is to run with the Fat Controller view of the world. That it’s only if – when – there’s some portly middle aged man pulling the levers of society do we get either action or change.
30 years after Egon Krenz was tossed out on his ear this isn’t the right way to be thinking about society at all.
Instead society is the interactions of 7 billion people. And if you wish to change the outcome of that aggregation then it’s the activities of the 7 billion that need to be changed.
This is not to say that all the climate science is correct, that doom is just around the corner and all that. Nor is it to say that it isn’t. It is to, instead, make the obvious point that it is the people doing the emissions. Thus, if we want fewer emissions, the change has to be in the lifestyles of the people.
How could it be otherwise?
Micheal Mann, as Professor Tim Ball said “should be in the State Pen, not Penn State”. Guilty of fabricating data, really bad science and bullying colleagues, as well as being wrong, very wrong. Perhaps most incredibly in the 1970s he was warning of a coming ice age, he has made a career out of spreading fear. He is a litigious climatologist who invented the completely discredited “Hockey Stick” chart and was implicated heavily in the Climategate scandal. Pretty much anything he has to say needs to be taken with more than a pinch of salt. So yes he is wrong,… Read more »
Prof. Mann appears not to know that a study without data or calculations is worthless. Sadly many others that should know better also don’t appear to get this point.
Which leads me to disregard their work.
An awful lot of climate “science” doesn’t measure anything except the number of other papers. Some is mere polemics about how bad things will be if other people’s predictions are true.
Everywhere?
No, individual adaptation can’t be the solution, we need global coercion to FORCE individual adaptation. He’s starting from a foregone conclusion, as is Robert Reich in your nearby post. The science behind anthropogenic* runaway* climate change is UNBEGUN, as there is still no uninhabited Earth for comparison. There is no need to be so agnostic about it, except to protect your carbon tax advocacy. Earth has dealt with ice ages and fluctuating ocean levels; we don’t know which is next; but the key is to get wealthy enough to abandon cities and build new ones if we have to. A… Read more »
It seems to me that it’s the climate changers, not the deniers, who’re slavering at the prospect of compelling individuals to change their behaviour. Most of the real sceptics I talk to (well, ok, I very rarely talk to anyone else) feel that the obvious, simple, cheapest and least annoying way is to simply switch everything over to nukes. We can use the electricity to produce H2 and CO2 from seawater and turn it into petrol or unnatural gas, so nothing has to change there either. Of course the only way we can figure out how to make this happen… Read more »
There are some sensible environmentalists, I’m part way through listening to Brendan O’Neill talking to environmentalist Michael Shellenberger, founder of Environmental Progress, and he’s a big advocate of nuclear. He also likens Extinction Rebellion and the fuss around Greta Thunberg as like religious cults.
He’s also sensible on fires in Brasil and other disasters that are often claimed to be caused by global warming.