On his and Tom Toles’ book The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy
Cover Interview of March 29, 2017
In a nutshell
This book is about the single greatest challenge that we face as a civilization, the challenge to tackle the problem of human-caused climate change. It is about the ongoing campaign, by fossil fuel interests and those who do their bidding, to deny the reality and threat of climate change. It is about how we get out of this “Madhouse” in which find ourselves.
When we published the book in Fall 2016, prior to the latest presidential election, some of our colleagues criticized us about writing a book about climate change denial. Denial has become irrelevant, they said. Why give it oxygen by writing about it?
Sadly, climate denialism is very much back in vogue in Washington DC now. A climate change denying president has appointed climate change deniers to key positions in his nascent administration. If there was any question about it before, there is none anymore. We are very much back in the Madhouse.
We use brilliant, hard-hitting climate-themed cartoons by my co-author Tom Toles as the scaffolding for telling the story. The text unpacks, supports and expands
on the message of the cartoons. This book has attitude.
In the book’s eight chapters we cover the basic philosophy of science, the science of climate change, climate change impacts, the campaign to deny climate change and the hypocrisy associated with it, the dangers of so-called “geoengineering” techno-fixes to the problem, and finally, the path forward toward actually solving the problem. Where appropriate, we name names and call out the bad actors. The book ends on a note of cautious optimism.
Where our book differs from past books about the climate change topic is that it uses humor, satire, and ridicule — rather than graphs and charts and science-speak — to assess the problem. By framing the issue in terms humor and satire, we hope to reach folks who haven’t otherwise yet been engaged by the issue.
[M]odern art still commonly refers to a rather narrow range of meaning and scope. It basically focuses on developments in Paris (Impressionism etc.) in the nineteenth century, and to selected Euro-American movements in the twentieth century (Cubism, Abstract Expressionism etc). But if we understand modernity as a socially transformative condition that was in force across much of the world from the nineteenth century on, how are we to understand artistic practices that were associated with these momentous changes?Iftikhar Dadi, Interview of March 26, 2012
The two world wars of the twentieth century were a product of the dislocations brought about of modernization in an environment where great power competition and the drive for hegemony were conducted primarily by violent means. Now that this era has passed in Europe and is receding in much of the Pacific rim, and hegemony achieved by force is no longer considered a legitimate ambition, the security requirements and fears of great powers should decline.Richard Ned Lebow, Interview of October 4, 2010
In a nutshell
This book is about the single greatest challenge that we face as a civilization, the challenge to tackle the problem of human-caused climate change. It is about the ongoing campaign, by fossil fuel interests and those who do their bidding, to deny the reality and threat of climate change. It is about how we get out of this “Madhouse” in which find ourselves.
When we published the book in Fall 2016, prior to the latest presidential election, some of our colleagues criticized us about writing a book about climate change denial. Denial has become irrelevant, they said. Why give it oxygen by writing about it?
Sadly, climate denialism is very much back in vogue in Washington DC now. A climate change denying president has appointed climate change deniers to key positions in his nascent administration. If there was any question about it before, there is none anymore. We are very much back in the Madhouse.
We use brilliant, hard-hitting climate-themed cartoons by my co-author Tom Toles as the scaffolding for telling the story. The text unpacks, supports and expands on the message of the cartoons. This book has attitude.
In the book’s eight chapters we cover the basic philosophy of science, the science of climate change, climate change impacts, the campaign to deny climate change and the hypocrisy associated with it, the dangers of so-called “geoengineering” techno-fixes to the problem, and finally, the path forward toward actually solving the problem. Where appropriate, we name names and call out the bad actors. The book ends on a note of cautious optimism.
Where our book differs from past books about the climate change topic is that it uses humor, satire, and ridicule — rather than graphs and charts and science-speak — to assess the problem. By framing the issue in terms humor and satire, we hope to reach folks who haven’t otherwise yet been engaged by the issue.