Draft:Our Fragile Moment

• Comment: This is a book review, not an encyclopedia article. -- NotCharizard ^🗨 07:24, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

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This is a must-read book for anyone who cares about the origins and causes of our current climate crisis. Written by renown climate scientist and creator of the “hockey stick” graph, Mr. Michael Mann, is a presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania," Our Fragile Moment" uniquely elaborates on the alarming rate of global warming, without causing panic, to fully explain that the lessons from the earth’s climate past can impart to us what to do about our rapidly declining range of climate livability, fueled by the worsening climate crisis.

The book’s road to climate enlightenment takes readers on a 4.5 billion year journey to explore the fundamentals of the earth’s climate history, with several detailed comparisons of the various climate driven mass extinction episodes, right up to human-induced climate change, which began with the advent of human agriculture, and accelerated with the burning of fossil fuels. Mr. Mann highlights the earth’s fragility which balances on a “relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilization remains viable.” Ultimately, we learn that these past climate scenarios inform us about our current climate crisis: we are living during a very “fragile moment” with regard to a livable climate on earth. Although we may be on a stormy precipice of climate emergencies, our present-day actions will influence the earth’s degree of climate livability in the future, as studies of past climatic changes point to a certain degree of resilience on behalf of the earth’s natural systems. Mann reassures us that “climate change is a crisis, but a solvable crisis.”

In addition to the paramount discussion on the natural and human-made drivers of climate change, is a lucid discourse about vested interests’ role in spreading misinformation about scientifically validated climate science. This powerful climate denial campaign must be confronted in order to create societal pressure for the adoption of policies that will create a livable climate for our future. Mr. Mann sagely advises us to drastically reduce the amount of global carbon emissions that are being spewed into the atmosphere, through our burning of fossil fuels. Furthermore, we need to restore and protect our forests, and oceans, both of which sequester carbon, and thus, aid the earth’s climate sensitivity equilibrium, which we depend on for our survival.

In terms of entertainment factor, this incredibly readable book knits closely the evolution of climate science with engaging anecdotes and allusions from popular songs, and movies, providing an eye-opening link between the context of climate change within the cultural background of the past half century. For example, the author writes of the 1983 movie, The Day After, which depicts a civilization-ending nuclear fallout between the United States and Russia, (it was the most-watched TV film of all time), and astronomer and prominent science communicator, Carl Sagan’s findings, released around the same time, that a nuclear exchange between the two aforementioned super powers could lead to a mass extinction event, due to a “combination of extreme cold, nuclear fallout, radiation exposure, and ozone destruction.” Sagan’s prediction of a devastating catastrophic global cooling that would result from a nuclear war is a two-fold analog for our climate crisis: human actions directly influence the earth’s climate; human civilization will not survive if it pushes the earth’s climate too far in any one direction. Besides documenting Sagan’s significant role in highlighting the fragility of the earth, the book imparts readers with the teachings of some of the great scientists of modern times, such as James Lovelock, Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson and Luis Alvarez.

Another great aspect of this “hard” science book is that it is full of understandable explanations about geological, physical, chemical and biological phenomena as they pertain to the creation and change of the earth’s climate. Mr. Mann argues that within the scientific community, theories of knowledge are constantly being revised to reflect any advancements in this knowledge due to new findings. This “revising of knowledge” process is accomplished through scientific studies, peer reviews, and finally, acceptance of these confirmed and published findings in peer reviewed academic journals. Additionally, the forecasts of climate science can be trusted because scientists are constantly refining their tools of climate prediction, and as their data-driven models continue to advance they get more accurate at predicting what the climate will look like in various future scenarios, at different rates of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. This helps us plan for the future, in terms of mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Lastly, Mr. Mann makes it clear that individuals, governments and corporations still have a window within which to limit the amount of future suffering that will occur due to climate change. He convincingly argues that what we do now matters for our future. That being said, Mr. Mann pleads with the reader not to despair over the climate crisis, and he argues that one of the greatest threats to meaningful climate action is climate despair and doomism, because they are premised on the idea that it is to late to do anything. Thankfully, it is not.