The New Climate War: The fight to take back our planet

Michael E. Mann

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MOST people accept that climate change is happening, but that doesn’t mean the war against climate science is over. The denialists have just changed their tactics, argues Michael Mann in his book The New Climate War.

Mann should know. A climatologist at Penn State University, he has been a target since his “hockey stick” graph was published in 1999. The graph shows the rapid rise in temperature globally since industrialisation caused heat-trapping carbon dioxide to spew into the atmosphere.

This dramatic visual, featured in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth, earned Mann decades of harassment and death threats. This was part of a war against climate research that has been waged since the 1970s, first to cover up and then to contest the growing evidence that shows our planet is warming.

However, as data about rising sea levels, higher temperatures and megafires mounted, the climate sceptics shifted to “a kinder, gentler form of denialism”, says Mann. They now mostly concede that, yes, there is some warming and human activity plays some role, but it’s not nearly as bad as those “alarmist” scientists say.

This new effort (bankrolled by the same polluting interests that funded the old one) no longer disputes climate change, but tries to block the action needed to move towards a low-carbon future. It is being fought by the successors to climate change denialists, who Mann calls the “inactivists”. They lobby against effective carbon pricing programmes and subsidies for renewable energy that would imperil big energy’s bottom lines.

According to Mann, central to this strategy is a campaign to shift culpability for climate change from the corporations selling fossil fuels to those who use them. Fossil fuel companies aren’t to blame, “it’s the way people are living their lives”, Chevron argued in court in 2018.

“Doomism and the loss of hope can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial”

Some environmentalists have bought into this argument. While Mann agrees it is good to eat less meat, travel less and recycle more, such actions alone aren’t enough. We need to decarbonise the economy, he says. Focusing on personal responsibility takes our eyes off that prize.

Another thing inactivists do, Mann says, is to support divisive films like Michael Moore’s recent documentary Planet of the Humans that purported to show that renewable energy is ineffective and polluting.

The film was condemned by environmental activists and climate scientists. But the pro-fossil fuel American Energy Alliance spent thousands to promote a film it hoped would take the wind out of the sails of the push for clean energy.

“Doomism and the loss of hope,” writes Mann “can lead people down the very same path of inaction as outright denial. And Michael Moore plays right into it.” Despair is counterproductive.

Fossil fuel interests also cynically push “non-solution solutions” like natural gas, carbon capture and geoengineering, whose inadequacies Mann details. Again, the effort is to distract from the real task of weaning the world off fossil fuels.

But in the end, Mann says he is optimistic, heartened by the upswell of youth activism and the rapid development of green technologies. Even investors are beginning to flee from fossil fuels. Moreover, botched responses to covid-19 underline the peril of ignoring science and failing to act.

With the major COP26 UN climate summit due to be held later this year in Glasgow, UK, Mann’s call to get serious about climate change couldn’t be more timely. Let’s hope he is right that the tide is finally about to turn.

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Climate justice

A personal pollution guardian is here. Today the world’s first low-cost wearable air quality sensor is for sale, capable of monitoring your exposure to the three most harmful pollutants.

The “Flow” device can be used as a handheld sensor or attached to pushchairs, purses and bags. It can be bought worldwide for under $200.

The sensor was tested by 100 volunteers this summer in central London. The crowdsourced results are now being used to map the air quality of more than 2000 kilometres of the city’s pavements. “We want to help people take ownership of what they breathe,” says Romain Lacombe, the CEO of , the Paris-based firm behind the device.

“It will certainly be the most complete,” says at Val-de-Marne University in Paris, who has advised Plume. A few similar devices are already on sale, but Flow will be the first to be able to detect levels of the big three pollutants: volatile compounds, airborne particulates and nitrogen oxides. The device tells you whether they exceed safe levels on the street or in your home.

Plume’s sensors will work with a free mobile app to create pollution maps the same way we can now monitor traffic jams on our smartphones. These won’t just rely on readings made by its users. Instead, air quality data will be melded with information on wind flow, temperature and other variables to forecast pollution hotspots. This could benefit those most at risk from bad air: young children, joggers and people with asthma and cardiovascular illnesses, whose lives may be endangered on heavily polluted days.

Stay-at-home day

Giving people precise information about their exposure will let them change their daily routine. For example, the parents of young children might decide to stay at home on high pollution days, joggers could take a different route or people with asthma could keep the windows open when they are cooking or using indoor fireplaces.

Air pollution levels have been falling in many cities in Europe and the US as regulations governing vehicle exhaust and other emissions tighten. But at Columbia University in New York says city dwellers should still be concerned. “Our studies and those of other researchers have found no convincing evidence of a pollution threshold or safe level of exposure to common urban air pollutants,” she says.

Until recently, cities depended on a few fixed monitors to track air quality over vast urban areas. But these offered little insight to the average person because pollution varies from block to block due to the effects of trees, traffic patterns and architecture.

Rising concerns about the health effects of pollution, plus recent breakthroughs in sensing technology have spawned an explosion of cheap, portable monitoring devices.

But while many of these have launched over the past few years, the few that remain on the market only monitor one class of pollutants. That is largely due to space and data processing constraints, says Doussin.

Street-level pollution maps

Recent technological developments include nanowire gas sensors built into microchips in the Flow device. These are small enough to enable sensors for three key pollution components to be crammed into the device.

The Flow is one of a range of efforts to make high-resolution street-level pollution maps. The “Biking and Breathing” project in New York is now strapping wearable monitors on cyclists who volunteered to assess the health effects of biking around the city’s streets.

Small mobile sensors have also been mounted on drones and balloons, and even pigeons to create 3D models of how plumes of pollution move through urban areas. This is all designed to give researchers “a new, hyperlocal understanding of pollution”, says of , an air monitoring company working with Google to track pollution in several Californian communities using equipment mounted on Google Street View cars.

Lunden hopes these new readings will give governments a tool to evaluate the impact of projects such as electrified bus lines, bike lanes and adding green space in congested urban cores.

Doussin says smaller sensors like Flow are less accurate than the equipment scientists use, but they are “more than sufficient to evaluate personal exposure to air pollution”.

He hopes that future versions of the device will detect ozone too and that the current sensor will create pressure on local officials to get serious about cleaning up the air. “The problem that we have with air quality is that it is an invisible problem,” he says. “These devices make the invisible visible.”

Deforestation rise

Loss of safeguards

The bad news for Australia’s Great Barrier Reef just keeps on getting worse.

Last month, scientists from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, reported that the northern third of the reef was severely bleached in 2016. Well over half the corals there were lost in that event.

Today, the same team announced that the central portion of the reef, a popular tourist area, is now suffering a similar fate. Corals bleach – and can die – when stresses such as abnormal heat make them expel their symbiotic algae.

In 2016, the bleaching was caused by El Niño, a periodic global climate event that heats up a vast band of the ocean’s surface in the equatorial Pacific.

But this year’s bleaching is occurring during a so-called “normal” year without such an event.

“The water is just too damn hot,” says Terry Hughes, the leader of the survey, who fears that climate change is creating a new norm that corals are unable to endure.

Hughes flew over the worst-affected area in a small aircraft to investigate the gradual whitening of the reef, which started to be noticeable in early February. Nearly 200 divers have also been documenting the destruction under the waves.

Recovery fears

It will take up to nine months to find out how many of the bleached corals end up dying, but Hughes fears that the central reef may have been nearly as badly damaged this year as the northern part was last year, when 67 per cent of the corals were lost there.

“Our combined 2016 and 2017 surveys show that two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef has now been badly degraded,” says Hughes.

It is a loss that under normal circumstances would take a decade to recover from. “But now that bleaching is happening every year or every other year in some areas, recovery will be difficult if not impossible,” he says.

“This is really scary, because the Great Barrier Reef is losing its insurance policy,” says marine biologist Randi Rotjan at Boston University in Massachusetts. “The scale of the devastation means that it is losing its potential to reseed the parts of the reef that were previously damaged.”

Read more: Face-to-face with Great Barrier Reef’s worst coral bleaching