Recent reading

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines by Michael Mann


Excerpts:

It is fair to say, though, that even by the mid-1990s there was no longer reason for real scientific debate over the proposition that humans had warmed the planet and changed the climate. That conclusion was now supported by the efforts of thousands of scientists around the world whose work contributed to the various pillars of evidence detailed above.Read more at location 485

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Given the wealth of scientific evidence amassed by the mid-1990s, one might rightly wonder how there could be a viable opposing position on controlling our carbon emissions. It was already difficult for any scientist to credibly argue that Earth wasn’t warming, or that there was no impact on our climate by human activity (though a few still did, nonetheless, and still do).Read more at location 562

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The strategy was simple: While presenting a seemingly forward-thinking, pro-environmental public face, oil companies and allied economic and political interests would, behind the scenes, use various means to sow doubt about the validity of the underlying science on climate change. It was a finely tuned balancing act intended to forestall any governmental policy action to regulate greenhouse gas emissions while seeking to maintain a positive corporate image.Read more at location 1250

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 Will human civilization have the will to confront this challenge before it’s too late? Prominent commentators such as Jared Diamond have pondered the question. In Collapse, Diamond points to past examples of both success and failure when societies and cultures have been similarly challenged, whether by nature or by the consequences of their own behavior.3 The demise of Easter Island’s society, in Diamond’s view, is a cautionary tale of how environmental exploitation can bring upon the downfall of an entire civilization.Read more at location 5037

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Yes, the public discourse has been polluted now for decades by corporate-funded disinformation—not just with climate change, but with a host of health, environmental, and societal threats.