Michael Mann repudiates the climate emergency

What is certain is that the cost to human life of precipitately stopping the use of fossil fuels is immeasurably higher than any benefit.

We rely on them not just for electricity and transport, but for steel, plastics, glass, explosives and fertilisers, without which it would be impossible to sustain the 10 billion or so humans who will live on this earth by the end of this century.

If we stopped all that tomorrow, how many humans could the earth support? 500 million? Take that figure from 10 billion, and that’s how many billions you would kill.

It would be wise to transition away from fossil fuels, and also wise to understand that any transition will be in the order of centuries, not decades.

Afterall, the first steam engine was developed in 1712, but it wasn’t until the early 20^th Century that it became dominant in sailing technology. Internal combustion engines have been around since 1860, but they are still developing.

Why should the decarbonised economy take only a matter of decades?

But to have a rational debate it requires rational premises all round, and this book is a good contribution to it, and hopefully reflects a broader recognition amongst realists on the more climate catastrophic end of the debate that if everything is a crisis people will become so worn out that eventually nothing is a crisis, because what’s the point, we can’t do anything about it? Crisis overload.

If Mann can help to cool the debate, then I’m happy to have his support, even if his science might be less than rigorous.