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With Seriousness and Satire, Top Scholar Examines Climate Change in Trump Era


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The serious side of Dr. Michael E. Mann approaches his battle with the climate change deniers in the Trump Administration with scholarly excellence. But, the author side of Dr. Mann approaches the same topic with science, satire and cartoons.
Dr. Mann is one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate change and its impacts. He is an award-winning scholar. He is a Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He also is the director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC.)
He has published over 200 peer-reviewed articles in his field and is known as one of the top scholars on this topic.
He discusses with the Spectrum podcast the serious side of climate change and the dangers we face with climate change deniers both in the Trump Administration as well as in Congress.
He also, however, discusses his most recent book and how he takes a different approach to effectuate change.
As an author, he makes the climate change issues accessible to the general public through the use of satire and cartoons in “The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy,” published by the Columbia University Press.
In this book he teamed up with Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist Tom Toles of the Washington Post to approach the topic with a combination of hard science, satire and humor.
According to a book summary presented by Amazon: “The Madhouse Effect portrays the intellectual pretzels into which denialists must twist logic to explain away the clear evidence that human activity has changed Earth’s climate. Toles’s cartoons collapse counter-scientific strategies into their biased components, helping readers see how to best strike at these fallacies. Mann’s expert skills at science communication aim to restore sanity to a debate that continues to rage against widely acknowledged scientific consensus. The synergy of these two climate science crusaders enlivens the gloom and doom of so many climate-themed books―and may even convert die-hard doubters to the side of sound science.”
The book makes the complicated issues surrounding climate change accessible to both believers and deniers.
Dr. Mann is lecturing about his book at the Templeton-Blackburn Memorial Auditorium on the Ohio University campus on March 28, 2018 at 7:30 p.m.