The book, by the eminent American climate scientist Prof.
Michael E Mann and “Washington Post” cartoonist Tom Toles, is a short (150
pages plus notes) and very readable overview of the climate denial and
disinformation machine in the USA that is funded by the fossil fuel industry,
with dark tentacles reaching into the highest level of politics, aided and
abetted by the conservative media, with agents for hire who have peddled their
denial across many industries and many decades.
Mann is uniquely qualified to write in this area. He has
been in the front line of scientists standing up to the climate deniers’
attacks. He has given congressional testimony facing hostile, Republican-run
committees; he has helped unravel the “Climategate” email attack on scientists;
and achieved a series of legal victories over former Virginia attorney general
and climate denier Ken Cuccinelli.
Having lost in the courts, Cuccinelli then ran for governor, only to be
confronted by Mann linking with Cuccinelli’s opponent on a public “science
week” campaign tour. Cuccinelli lost and then, ironically, “opened an Oyster
farm on Tangier Island, an island in Chesapeake Bay slowly being inundated by
global sea-level rise”.
In neighbouring Virginia the anti-science fervour led state
Republicans to try outlaw climate model predictions of accelerating sea-level
rise. Yes, you heard it right, laws to outlaw science. Florida has more than 1900 kms of coastline
and five million residents who would be displaced by a three-metre sea level
rise, but that has not stopped Republican governor Rick Scott’s banning the use
of the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in all official state
communications and publications.
Read the Climate Code
Red story by David Spratt - “From White House to madhouse: climate denial in the era of Donald Trump.”
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