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The Madhouse Effect
Book

The Madhouse Effect

How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy

Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles
Columbia UP, 2016

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Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Comprehensive
  • Eye Opening
  • Concrete Examples

Recommendation

The science is clear: The Earth is growing warmer due to excess CO2, which directly results from carbon-based fuel emissions. Climate change threatens the planet and its inhabitants, but some corporate actors and the politicians they support won’t accept the truth. They hire climate change-denying scientists to sow doubt, confusing the public and giving politicians an excuse to do nothing. Those who deny climate change’s reality despite overwhelming evidence cause what academician Michael E. Mann and cartoonist Tom Toles dub “the madhouse effect.” The barrage of propaganda against established scientific fact divides the public and delays needed policy solutions. Mann’s and Toles’s accurate overview came out before Donald Trump’s administration, which is changing the regulatory landscape in favor of deniers and allowing the release of more pollutants. Toles’s witty cartoons punctuate the chapters with levity on this sober subject. While always politically neutral, getAbstract recommends this report to policy makers, environmentalists, those who want to know more and even climate deniers as an avenue for, perhaps, starting to see the bigger picture.

Take-Aways

  • Between 95% and 97% of scientists say heat-trapping CO2 is changing Earth’s climate.
  • Regulating carbon emissions and shifting to renewable energy sources would slow the pace of climate change.
  • Climate change is linked to more frequent, stronger freak weather events such as hurricanes and floods, which cause large-scale damage and death.

About the Authors

Michael Mann teaches atmospheric science at Penn State University, where he directs the Earth Systems Science Center. He wrote The Hockey Stick and The Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Tom Toles is the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for The Washington Post.

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    L. C. 6 years ago
    This is left-wing political propaganda posing as science. The change in temperature precedes the changes in CO2 levels, not the other way around. Everyone ignores the Sun, which drives temperature, weather and climate change. This is anti-capitalist catastrophism dressed up as good sense. Use of the word Denier in this context proves this beyond any doubt, by associating sceptics with Holocaust Denial, which is a disgusting and stupid smear by these idiotic authors.
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      5 years ago
      You are a Denier. Trump is a Denier. Are you Trump?