On his and Michael Mann’s 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
Different Backgrounds, Joint Take
As co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks
of climate change to the public.
I am an editorial cartoonist and I have been exposing the hypocrisy of climate change denying politicians and fossil fuel industry front groups and advocates for years on the pages of the Washington Post.
I have felt that the media in general has done a poor job in explaining the subject and its critical nature of its importance. My response has been to keep the subject front and center for readers, and to point out in my artwork both the challenge and the obstacles.
My co-author Michael Mann is a climate scientist who has been on the front lines of the battle. In the late 1990s, Michael published the iconic “Hockey Stick curve which has now become both a symbol of the reality and threat of climate change and an object of attack by climate change deniers.
The Madhouse Effect represents an effort by both of us to draw upon our very different backgrounds and perspectives and to jointly provide readers with a unique take on the issue of climate change.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Different Backgrounds, Joint Take
As co-authors, each of us two has experience on the front lines of the battle to communicate the risks of climate change to the public.
I am an editorial cartoonist and I have been exposing the hypocrisy of climate change denying politicians and fossil fuel industry front groups and advocates for years on the pages of the Washington Post.
I have felt that the media in general has done a poor job in explaining the subject and its critical nature of its importance. My response has been to keep the subject front and center for readers, and to point out in my artwork both the challenge and the obstacles.
My co-author Michael Mann is a climate scientist who has been on the front lines of the battle. In the late 1990s, Michael published the iconic “Hockey Stick curve which has now become both a symbol of the reality and threat of climate change and an object of attack by climate change deniers.
The Madhouse Effect represents an effort by both of us to draw upon our very different backgrounds and perspectives and to jointly provide readers with a unique take on the issue of climate change.