‘We’re not doomed yet’: climate scientist Michael Mann on our last chance to save human civilisation | Climate crisis | The Guardianhttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/30/human-civilisation-climate-scientist-prof-michael-mannSo it’s a question of how bad we’re willing to let it get,” he says. “1.5C is already really bad but 3C is potentially civilisation-ending bad.”
Widespread heatwaves, wildfires and floods clearly linked to global heating have given urgency to the call for action, Mann says: “But urgency without agency just leads us towards despair and defeatism. That’s what the polluters would like, to take all those climate activists and move them from the frontlines to the sidelines.”
Ending the climate emergency is possible, Mann says: “We know that the obstacles to keeping warming below catastrophic levels are not yet physical and they’re not technological – they’re political. But there’s some pretty big political obstacles right now.”
“Here at Penn State, there’s so much anxiety, fear and despair, and grief even,” he says. “Some of it comes from the mistaken notion that it’s physically too late and I want to dispel that notion. But part of it comes from an understandable cynicism about our politics, and that’s a much bigger challenge.”
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The UN’s major climate summit, Cop28, begins at the end of November and is being hosted by the United Arab Emirates, which Mann calls “very disturbing”. The UAE has the third biggest net zero-busting plans for oil and gas expansion in the world and the president of Cop28 is also the CEO of Adnoc, the UAE’s state oil company
“It just feels wrong to allow them to adopt the imprimatur of global climate action by hosting Cop28,” Mann says. “It is legitimising behaviour on their part and on the part of other petro states that is fundamentally at odds with the task we have ahead. I find it very disturbing.”
Mann has been a top target of climate deniers since the publication of the hockey stick chart. He is scathing about Elon Musk’s running of the social media platform X, formerly called Twitter.
“Musk used to be held out as an environmental hero, because of his role with Tesla,” Mann says. “But increasingly, he’s shown his true colours, his political allegiance to Trump and fascism.”
“Twitter was a global public square, a forum for communicating about the climate crisis,” he says. “What Musk has done is turn it into a toxic forum for the promotion of climate denialism and everything that’s bad in the world. It’s stunning.” Mann noted that Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia, one of the “worst petro state actors”, played a $1.9bn role in Musk’s purchase of Twitter.
Mann also pointed out that Prince Alwaleed was a key backer of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire until 2017. “Rupert Murdoch has weaponised his global media network for the promotion of climate denialism and to attack renewable energy, which plays to his ideology and to the interests of some of the powerful petro-states, specifically Saudi Arabia.”