7 0 September 2016
I
magine for a moment the dilemma:
you’re a celebrated paleoclimatol-
ogist whose work has helped shape
the modern science of climate change.
In the course of your work, you have gradu-
ally come to the same basic conclusion as most of your
professional colleagues: humanity and the industrial
civilisation we have constructed is hurtling on a one-
way collision course with physics.
Clearly, as a scientist, your job is to check and re-
check the numbers, then, once the evidence is solid,
alert the politicians and policymakers and provide them
with the expert guidance so they can make the tough-
but-necessary decisions to avert the worst of the
projected negative impacts, while hunkering down for
those which can’t be entirely avoided.
That, in a sane world, is how the system works. This
is not, however, the world in which we live, and it cer-
tainly is not the planet that renowned paleoclimatologist,
Professor Michael Mann inhabits. He sprang to fame in
1999 with the publication of a reconstruction of the
global climate record stretching back some 1,000
years, which became known as the ‘Hockey Stick graph’
since, from past to present, it slopes gently down-
wards, before turning sharply
upwards in recent decades, like the
blade of an American ice-hockey
stick.
This graph appeared in the IPCC’s
Third Assessment Report in 2001
and quickly became the signature
icon of rapid climate change. This
made Mann the target of vicious and
sustained personal and professional
attacks by shills funded by fossil-
fuel interests, culminating in the
‘ClimateGate’ smear attack in 2009
which targeted hacked personal emails written by
Mann and other climate scientists.
This scam was swallowed whole by many in the main-
stream, including Irish Times columnist, Professor
William Reville, who described ClimateGate as an
“explosive development” that will “undoubtedly
weaken the AGW case…”. Reville went on to defame the
entire field of climatology, claiming there was “an
understandable temptation for environmental scien-
tists, who depend on government grants, to exaggerate
dangers”.
When ClimateGate was finally exposed as a canard
many months later, Reville duly reported this fact in his
column, while modestly omitting his own role in prom-
ulgating this sinister campaign in the first place.
It may seem hard to believe in the post-factual era of
Donald Trump and the Republican party’s long-running
war on science, but not that long ago, politicians of all
hues actually listened to – and generally acted on – the
advice of scientific experts.
Even as recently as 1987, a binding international
agreement to rapidly phase out the use of ozone-
destroying CFCs could be rushed through by politicians
(led by Margaret Thatcher, a scientist) in response to a
newly identified threat to the global ozone layer. It is
almost inconceivable that such concerted bipartisan
action could happen today, no matter how dire the
threat and no matter how strong the scientific
evidence.
There is no greater or better-researched threat than
that of climate change, but instead of mobilising socie-
ties to act, financially compromised politicians dither
and squabble as the climate crisis slips into an ineradi-
cable emergency. In Ireland and around the world, the
mainstream traditional media, struggling with declin-
ing revenues and shrinking newsrooms while chasing
clickbait, have spectacularly failed in their primary
Mad
The Madhouse effect
nails climate madness
ENvIRONMENT
When ClimateGate was
finally exposed as a canard
many months later, Reville
duly reported this fact, while
omitting his own role in
promulgating the campaign
in the first place
by
John Gibbons
BOOK
REvIEW
September 2016 7 1
watchdog duty of alerting the public to the
greatest existential threat human civilisation
has perhaps ever faced.
The media that have been most surprisingly
effective at communicating climate change, and
why we are screwing up royally in our response
have been the US comedy channels. First, Jon
Stewart on the influential ‘Daily Show’ on
Comedy Central, and now John Oliver’s often
brilliant ‘Last Week Tonight’ on HBO have
deployed biting satire and ridicule to rip into
climate deniers and anti-science zealots, the
people who have been so skilful in abusing the
mainstream media’s conventions, including
their obsession with ‘balance’.
This leads to the constant framing of TV dis-
cussions as representing two diametrically
opposed views of equal status. This may work
reasonably well for politics and opinion, but
when it comes to science, it’s a recipe for disas-
ter. Closer to home, RTE’s vanishingly rare
forays into covering climate change (via Prime-
Time’s ‘balanced’ studio debates) are casebook
studies in how not to present science.
“The success of the industry-funded climate-
denial machine derives in part from media
outlets’ willingness to emphasise conflict over
consensus, controversy over comprehension”,
is how Mann and Washington Post cartoonist
co-author Tom Toles put it in their new book,
‘The Madhouse Effect – how climate change
denial is threatening our planet, destroying our
politics and driving us crazy’.
By stripping away the pretence of balance
and focusing instead on the motivation, tech-
niques and shady funding sources of the main
actors, under the umbrella of satire, Jon Stewart
and John Oliver have been devastatingly effec-
tive at uncloaking a panoply of fraudsters, from
the seemingly plausible to the downright crazy,
and exposing them to contempt and ridicule.
After all, when the so-called news channels like
Fox and CNBC are a joke, many are now turning
to actual comedians for the real news.
In the print media, a few cartoonists have
been effective where their editorial colleagues
have stumbled and failed, none more so than
the brilliant Tom Toles who has kept a constant
bead on the climate crisis, deploying scores of
cartoons to the subject and, more specifically,
mercilessly lampooning the crooks, phoneys,
blowhards and liars collectively known as cli-
mate deniers.
In what is by any measure a highly unusual
collaboration, ‘The Madhouse Effect’ sees the
left-brained scientist and the right-brained sati-
rist put heads together to see if they could
somehow bridge that gap between what we
know about the science of climate change and
how we feel about it. “A scientist tries to under-
stand the way the world works. An editorial
cartoonist tries to show the ways it doesn’t”, is
how they squared their joint venture.
It’s worth taking a moment to consider what
science is exactly, how it works and what dis-
tinguishes it from opinion, dogma and
pseudoscience. Here, 'Madhouse' provides an
excellent guide. It also clearly sets out the dis-
tinction between bona fide scientific scepticism
– the very bedrock of the scientific method –
and the faux ‘skeptics’ who comb vast data sets
to cherrypick one or two results to spread con-
fusion and stoke controversy, where none
exists.
Put simply, if climate deniers like Benny
Peiser, Matt Ridley or Bjorn Lomborg were gen-
uine ‘science skeptics’, they would challenge
what they claim to be incorrect scientific find-
ings within the peer review process, and in turn
be prepared to present their own fully refer-
enced evidence and supporting data sets to
other scientists to review and critique. That’s
how science advances, even if educational dis-
tortions mean that few realise it.
Charlatans of this calibre who would be
laughed out of scientific conferences or jour-
nals instead peddle their cynical trade in the
altogether less stringent environment of the
media, where slick often industry-funded
pseudo-experts are always on hand to offer
‘balance’ to the findings of the overwhelming
international scientific consensus.
‘Madhouse’ marshalls special scorn at the
faux hippie Lomborg peddling a ‘kinder, gentler
denialism’ where pro-industry special pleading
is dressed up as concern for the poor. “It is dif-
ficult to know whether climate change
contrarians have taken their positions out of
good faith, ignorance, wilful ignorance or cal-
culated deceit…history should not be allowed
to forget who they are and what they have
done”, write Mann and Toles.
Earth is, they continue, “a rarity of literally
cosmic proportions. It is an overflowing treas-
ure chest of life-forms of unimaginable variety
and beauty. It is perfectly suited to us humans
because we evolved to fit it”. It would, they add,
amount to “the gravest criminal act of irrespon-
sibility in human history were we to throw it into
fatal imbalance because of a wanton addiction
to carbon”.
Being aimed primarily at a US audience,
much of the good guy/bad guy framing in ‘The
Madhouse Effect’ is across the Democrat/
Republican political divide, with the Grand Old
Party earning the role of chief villains, abetted
by a diabolical supporting cast of ghastly
power-drunk plutocrats, from Rupert Murdoch
to the Koch brothers.
Ireland – Danny Healy-Rae notwithstanding
– is a good deal less tolerant of patently mad or
corrupt politicians engaging openly in anti-sci-
ence tirades. Despite this, the ranks of our
politicians, civil servants and newsrooms are
filled with otherwise moral, competent people
who appear to have chosen not to notice the
slowly unfolding catastrophe that is climate
change and the global biodiversity crash. 'The
Madhouse Effect' truly begins at home.
‘The Madhouse Effect’ is published by Colum-
bia University Press in October 2016
By stripping away the
pretence of balance and
focusing instead on the
motivation, and funding of
the main deniers, under the
umbrella of satire, Stewart
and Oliver have have
uncloaked the fraudsters
Scientific agreement on
human-caused global warming
Source: www.scepticalscience.com
Expertise in climate scienceLow High
Scientific
Consensus
(%)
100
80
60
40
20
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