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.
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
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.