Michael Mann – “Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. … they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.”
Doomist or realist? Meet the scientist who says the climate collapse has already begun
By Nick O’Malley August 23, 2024 — 5.00am
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Just shy of 40 years old he was made a full professor. He was publishing papers in prominent journals and his two books had been well received.
“I was living in a beautiful part of the world, the Lake District in the UK,” he recalls, speaking from his new home in Bali as he prepares to travel to Sydney for this weekend’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Then, while preparing for his inaugural professorial speech, Bendell dived back into the scientific literature to check in on how quickly the climate was heating, and how well our efforts were going at cutting emissions to slow the process on rates of habitat and biodiversity loss.
What he read shattered him. “I’d always thought, you know, we had the rest of the century to change, otherwise we would be in a pickle.” He began to tuck the scientific papers and new stories that bothered him most into a folder. These were the sorts of stories many will remember. Stories about ancient frozen gasses burping from the Arctic tundra decades before scientists predicted such a thing might happen, weird heat spikes in Pacific. They were stories about events he had read about, but not expected the world to see during his lifetime.
He came to believe that the scientific data was being downplayed, minimised or misunderstood.
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Read more (paywalled): https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/doomist-or-realist-meet-the-scientist-who-says-the-climate-collapse-has-already-begun-20240820-p5k3wj.html
A fascinating narrative battle appears to be heating up between people who think climate doomsday is unstoppable, and those who want governments to stop the climate apocalypse.
Michael Mann has doomers firmly in his sights. From 2021;
… Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?
Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement. They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair. But “too late” narratives are invariably based on a misunderstanding of science. Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that. …
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/27/climatologist-michael-e-mann-doomism-climate-crisis-interview
Jem may have made millions of dollars from climate doomsday book sales, though to his credit he offers a free ebook version of his latest work, so its difficult to tell how many of the sales or downloads registered on Amazon were the free version. His current efforts appear to be focussed on translating his climate doomsday book into as many European languages as possible.
Jem Bendell currently lives in the tropical island tourist paradise of Bali according to his Wikipedia article, which strikes me as a strange place to ride out the global warming apocalypse. One of my favourite books, “Snowing in Bali”, details how South American cocaine traffickers turned Bali into a drug crazed party town and a drug transhipment point for imports into Australia and the rest of Asia, kind of an Acapulco in the West Pacific.
Jem’s Wiki entry claims he is in Bali trying to establish a school for regenerative farmers, so perhaps he sees his new life in Bali as a way of helping the most vulnerable people in the world survive on the front lines of the climate apocalypse.
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