Professor Mark Maslin’s book “How To Save Our Planet: The Facts” is out.
Christiana Figueres, Former Executive Secretary UN Climate Change Convention, says:
‘Punchy and to the point. No beating around the bush. This brilliant book contains all the information we need to have in our back pocket in order to move forward.’
Not to beat around the bush, the idea of Ms Figueres moving forward with Mark in the back pocket of her twinset is one to interrupt the train of thought of the most ardent denier.
Penguin Books says:
How can we save our planet and survive the 21st century? How can you argue with deniers? How can we create positive change in the midst of the climate crisis? Professor Mark Maslin has the key facts that we need to protect our future.
Global awareness of climate change is growing rapidly. Science has proven that our planet and species are facing a massive environmental crisis. How to Save Our Planet is a call to action, guaranteed to equip everyone with the knowledge needed to make change.
Be under no illusion the challenges of the twenty-first century are immense. We need to deal with: climate change, environmental destruction, global poverty and ensure everyone’s security. We have the technology. We have the resources. We have the money. We have the scientists, the entrepreneurs and the innovators. We lack the politics and policies to make your vision of a better world happen. So we need a plan to save our planet…
How to Save Our Planet is your handbook of how we together can save our precious planet. From the history of our planet and species, to the potential of individuals and our power to create a better future, Maslin inspires optimism in these bleak times. We stand at the precipice. The future of our planet is in our hands. It’s time to face the facts and save our planet from, and for, ourselves.
[Emphasis in the first two paragraphs is Penguin’s. Emphasis in the last two is mine.]
Mark Maslin, like many confused, unhappy people nowadays, has a problem with pronouns. Take just the final paragraph. It’s not my handbook, it’s Mark’s. And it’s not we together who are going to save the planet, it’s Mark and his friends “the scientists, the entrepreneurs and the innovators” he mentions in the previous paragraph. And it’s they who have “the technology, the resources, the money,” not us. What we have is the £7.99 we are invited to shell out to find out what Mark has in mind for us, the planet, and everything.
But:
We lack the politics and policies… we need a plan …
Yer what? Every respectable political party on the planet is falling over itself to fawn on your every word, and you haven’t got a policy? 200 countries, 30,000 people have been Conference-Of-The-Partying, year in, year out for 26 years, and you haven’t got a plan?
This is a lie, isn’t it? The Big Lie, the multi trillion dollar lie which you refute yourself with every word you write. You’ve got millions of words of plans and policies. There’s hundreds of thousands of you planning day and night what we shall eat, how we’ll travel and live, down to the tiniest detail, for the next hundred years. It’s the most comprehensive totalitarian plan ever devised. Stalin and Hitler were woolly-minded dreamers compared to you.
The problem is that your plan is fascist, but you’re not. You’ve got the policy, the thousand year mindset, and the flag with the spiky criss-cross symbol in a circle, but you lack the Freikorps, and the necessary Blut und Eisen for getting your way. (Especially the Eisen, which is ever so carbon-horrid.)
Not only do you not have any democratic mandate, you don’t have any marching hordes of disciplined, brainwashed masses to impose your Will either. Instead of thousands in blackshirts and jackboots you’re dozens in ethnic hand-knitted pullovers and trainers. You’re all pull and no Putsch. Your plan is so Thirties, and you are so Millennial. I mean, where are the starving, leaderless masses, driven to desperation by unemployment and hyperinflation, ready to swallow your insane dogma and march to your orders? (I’m talking about the1930s of course, not the 2030s.)
Because, let’s face it Mark, temperatures and sea levels have been rising for centuries, and you’re just a geography teacher centimetres out of his depth. You want to take away our cars and boilers and foreign holidays in order to extract the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, one molecule at a time. And insulate and double glaze us until we’re reduced to warming ourselves with our own CO2-loaded breath.
C’mon Mark. You’re in the back pocket of the most powerful woman in the universe, she who embarked the world on a multi trillion dollar spending spree from here to the next century, and you’re telling us it’s up to us to help formulate a plan to save the planet? Stop beating about the bush and pull the other one.
Get out of Christiana’s back pocket and leave the old boiler alone.
Climate Scepticism 
Comparing this latest example of climate alarmist bloviation to Mein Kampf is almost an understatement.
The mendacity of the climate consensus opinion leaders is palpable to anyone still thinking critically.
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“We stand at the precipice.”
Well, we may be lacking many things, but precipices have not been amongst them.
I also note that the good cause is terribly short of cash; that’s if The Conversation’s begging footnote is anything to go by:
“Many people challenging scientific evidence have the money to weave tales devoid of facts. It falls to us, and the research community, to build a trusted channel for disseminating fact-based information on the most important issue of our time…Donate now.”
Given that we at Cliscep have money coming out of our ears, perhaps we should have a whip-round to help the poor blighters out. They say that they cannot continue without our help.
If only that were true.
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Great turns of phrase 🙂
Indeed Maslin is being far too modest regarding a lack of plan. He personally had the basics of a plan back in 2015. Here he is from back then:
“I feel the twenty first century is the ‘human century’ because of the huge global challenges we face. Of these I believe global poverty, global security, global inequality, environmental degradation and climate change are the most pressing. Of these climate change is the most insidious as it make all the other worse. So our challenge this century is to build win-win solutions that tackle these multiple challenges.
These are easy to conceptualise and design but of course much harder to implement given all the vested interests created by our warped global economy. However I see this century through the eyes of an optimist – as things are getting better for the majority of humanity though not nearly fast enough. I feel deep down that politicians and the public know our rules currently governing society are outdated and not fit for purpose and new governance systems will be required to deal with these immense challenges.”
His personal plan is indeed removal of our ‘warped global economy’, aka capitalism, and our ‘not fit for purpose’ governance systems, aka democracy. So indeed fascism, or communism, take your pick as they’re equally extremist ideologies with many of the same implementation detail (mass suppression, mass death, etc). So I think you have him bang to rights here 0:
It’s funny how many people with ‘visions’ like this claim it’s not really their vision, they’re only implementing ‘our’ vision. Yeah, right. Like all the others in history. I think ‘our’ vision is not to sacrifice our central heating, our food and our freedom, indeed our very souls, to yet another wild ideology whose principle narrative about ‘saving the planet’ even *mainstream* science no way supports, let alone any sceptical science.
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Meanwhile, we know that Climate Activism based on ‘certain imminent catastrophe’ and ‘save he planet’ is a cultural thing. Aka the narrative is false, like all strong cultural narratives. Check out the relationship of XR activity per nation with National Religiosities. The latter is of course a purely cultural phenomenon. And for extra fun, see how the XR trend ANTI-correlates with the most personal concern about the impacts of climate change, per nation.
https://wearenarrative.files.wordpress.com/2021/05/gwacc5-xr-sa-trends.png?resize=320%2C320
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Hmmm… that link didn’t come out right. Try here without the ‘resize’ that crept onto the end of the link…
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This is surely redundant education. When was the last time you saw or heard an alarmist arguing with a denier? Deniers have been shut out of public discourse to spare the alarmists’ blushes. I mean, a 1980s chatbot could win an argument with an alarmist just by repeating their own statements back at them.
I suppose someone should volunteer to read it. It would be interesting to know at least the position it takes re: nuclear power.
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ANDY WEST
I disagree about “take your pick.” The similarities with fascism that I referred to are the long timeline (1000 year Reich, centennial planning) some ritualistic weirdnesses (flags and costumes) but particularly the detailed policy.
I also disagree that mass death and suppression are specific to extremist ideologies. The Vietnam war (2 million deaths) was fought in the name of democracy, and the Belgian Congo genocide (10 million deaths?) was perpetrated in the name of capitalist profit. No -ism is innocent.
Communism started out extremely vague about means and ends. The aim was human fulfilment, and who could be against that? In the Russian context that meant more tractors and education, and less religion and serfdom. Again, what’s wrong with that? No doubt Hitler shared this aim to some extent, but it was to be attained by the highly specific means of eliminating Jews and Slavs. No Russian Communist started out saying: “Let’s first eliminate the Ukrainian Kulaks.”
Environmentalism is highly specific about its aim, which is to save the planet (from and for ourselves, says Maslin’s editor) by limiting the average global temperature rise to no more than 1.5°C above the temperature in 1880, as measured by whatever thermometers were working back then. This is far more specific, and far more insane, than Hitler’s stated aims of driving the Jews back into the ghetto and colonising Eastern Europe with Aryans. Maslin and his kind seem to think that their failure to convince of us of the need to punish ourselves in order to save the planet is a psychological failure – a failure of comprehension on our part and a failure of persuasion on theirs – and that a greater effort on the part of social scientists would do the trick.
We think that the failure of comprehension is theirs – and that it’s the science that they’ve got wrong. An alternative interpretation is that their comprehension of science is so bad it’s not even wrong, and what they’ve got wrong is history. They talk of politics and governance, but their knowledge of these things goes back no further than the last opinion poll or the last think tank report they read, or wrote.
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JIT
Quite. Though some have a go, or used to, when deniers were allowed to comment, as you can see by looking at the comments under any of Maslin’s articles at the Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/uk/search?q=mark+maslin
Which is why Penguin offloads the job on Maslin’s readers:
It’s hard work, persuading people to volunteer to be poorer, colder, and to travel less. Maybe Maslin should divide his fans into pairs and send them knocking on doors like Jehovah’s Witnesses.
You should be able to read the first chapter or so by clicking on “look inside” here
but it doesn’t seem to be working.
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Geoff:
‘I disagree about “take your pick”…. …Communism started out extremely vague about means and ends”’
I didn’t say they started out with the same aims. Different ideologies have explicitly different aims; in fact their core narratives differ very widely. But Communism and Fascism (and some others) produced similar results, and ultimately via similar means. This is because the underlying mechanisms are the same. Yet this doesn’t mean either that all ideologies will produce such results. There are different classes, and circumstances matter, the history and politics prevalent as cultures rise. However, all their narratives are fairy stories, which if getting to rule is bound to produce tensions. And those ones cited *did* produce similar results; it seems arbitrary to me what they said they stood for – these are all only fairy-tales anyhow – no matter many claim ‘this is for everyone’s benefit’.
“I also disagree that mass death and suppression are specific to extremist ideologies.”
I never said they were. Mass death and suppression can occur via other routes too. But they are way more likely and more likely larger in scale from extreme ideologies. And they definitely did occur from the two ‘isms’ I cited.
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Save our planet indeed. “Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
peer-reviewed and published, demonstrates beyond any sane doubt that climate models have no predictive or explanatory value.
No one knows what, if anything, CO2 emissions do to the climate. A best guess is nothing at all. Climate modeling is a liberal art decorated with mathematics. The IPCC do not know what they’re talking about.
Save our planet? From what?
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Oh what gorgeous models!
Simulated scenarios that should not beget certainty in cli-sci.
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My plan is we should live on the Ocean {though not ruling out, under the ocean].
My pitch, is we should have low income housing on the ocean. Everyone gets beach property.
I might imagine this whole global warming thing is fear of rich beach owners, losing their property.
And does anyone have problem with urban heat island effects if they are living on the beach??
The path forward starts with people being able to own ocean property. It’s contention if one can buy ocean
property cheap enough, we would already have ocean settlements.
I am all in favor of having public “lands” for ship transportation, but such shipping, should not have the entire ocean.
Or it seems one have residential areas on the ocean [maybe start with 10% of ocean}.
In terms practical aspects, what needed is for there to be cheap breakwaters, or cheap floating breakwater which stop
all waves. And the ocean residential property needs to fairly close current land settlements. Say within several miles.
And in terms being cheap, somewhere around $500 per acre. And if buy at that price, maybe raise the price a bit.
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It is a couple of years since I commented here. One of my pet hobby horses was the relevant “we” to cut global emissions to . Any credible Geography teacher should know what I knew by age 10. The world is made up of lots of countries. “The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” splits these countries into two main groups – developed and developing. It is only the former have the obligation to reduce their emissions in the near future, whilst the latter merely have to when other priorities, such as eradication of poverty, are met. This is repeated in the UNFCCC Paris Agreement 2016 Article 4.1.
These developing countries account for over 60% for global emissions and around the 100% of the increase in global emissions since 1990. These are developing country GHG emissions from the EDGAR database. It has not been updated since 2012.
Yet the 1.5C warming target, as stated in the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2018 required 2030 emissions to be 55% lower than in 2030. As this assumes a step decline from 1st Jan 2020, the current target is greater than 55% lower. So the problem is how do you get >55% cut in global emissions in 8 years when countries with >60% of current emissions are still increasing their emissions?
I used to further note that the UNFCCC Treaty also recognized that countries dependent on the production and export of fossil fuels will be adversely affected by eliminating fossil fuels. The big three in this context are Russia, Saudi Arabia and Iran. Would be nice to see Boris & Co. bringing this up at the COP meeting in Glasgow. Especially in the context of Putin increasing Russian military presence in the Arctic.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9600881/Putin-vows-knock-teeth-foreign-enemies-Russia-clash-Arctic-summit.html
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MANICBEANCOUNTER
Your point is ably made in comments under Maslin’s article (linked above) by Robin Guenier, who makes the same or similar points tirelessly at the Conversation, with a politeness and precision that means he can’t be ignored. The comments are worth reading, in part for the viciousness of the attacks on Guenier.
One day it will become so blindingly obvious that net zero is unachievable without an agreement by two thirds of the planet to halt their economic development that even our blinkered leaders will have to face the fact. What happen next will be a geopolitical and not a scientific decision. Either we in the west will realise that we can’t force the world’s poor to accept our diktats and buckle down to a future of sustainable eco-friendly biodiverse aboriginal carbon-free purity; or we’ll have to have a Big Face-Off with China, Russia, Iran &co.
My fear is that the Dr Strangeloves are going to lead us into World War Three, cheered on by environmentalists, feminists, and human rights activists who can’t tell the difference between repressive policing and genocide. I’m not ready to die to defend the rights of Iranians to wear miniskirts or Uighurs to worship in Turkish. But many of the Net Zero brigade seem to be heading in that direction.
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Geoff
I was first made aware of the developing country issue in the “The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” in an article by Robin Guenier.
https://ipccreport.wordpress.com/2015/10/09/robin-guenier-on-philippe-sands/
Reading the Treaty I came across the recognition that eliminating fossil fuel usage will adversely affect countries whose economies depend on the export of fossil fuels.
It might be blindingly obvious to anyone who does the work that there are political constraints to reducing global emissions. 26 years of COP meetings have not changed that situation. But it is not recognized by the thousands attending the COP meetings. That is down to ideological beliefs. To speak about the policy issues in public you now have to acceptance of the alleged banal beliefs of “scientists”. Evidence and competency is viewed in the light of beliefs. This is the opposite of professional bodies, where membership is based on proven competency in the field and expertise is established by prior works. In my view the ways to tell the real expert from the activist expert is their acknowledgement of the boundaries of their expertise and limits of their knowledge.
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This is quite interesting
https://www.euronews.com/green/amp/2021/05/22/how-europe-s-eco-friendly-nations-are-not-always-what-they-seem?__twitter_impression=true
It seems irritating that the UK is one of the top performers in this vacuous exercise. Why can’t we be like Spain or the Netherlands?
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MANICBEANCOUNTER (27 May 2021 1.19pm)
This corresponds to the difference between activists and experts. The whole climate debate is poisoned by the confusion between activists/NGOs and scientists/experts, with journalists and many professional bodies like the Royal Society siding with the activists. Experts are supposed to know stuff, while activists only have to believe (their key belief being that their beliefs are based on the knowledge of experts, so they’re spared the effort of actually “knowing” anything themselves.)
The same doesn’t hold on the sceptical side. Activists like us are obliged to inform themselves in order to come to a sceptical conclusion. This means that we are vastly more knowledgable than anyone we might want to argue with. Have you ever met a warmist who has even heard of GISTEMP or HADCRUT or the University of Huntsville? We can’t argue with scientists because we’re not scientists, and we can’t contribute to the public debate either because, well, because we’re making scientific points that are not up for debate and the science is settled and Dunning Kruger and all that. We’re not emitting on a frequency authorised for public debate.
Because the activists operate at the level of belief, they can only “hear” us if we, too, operate at that level – e.g. by basing our scepticism on our self-interest or political ideology. That’s why Trump and Delingpole are audible, and we’re not.
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MAN IN A BARREL
What a daft bit of phony pollstering. A country’s position in the carbon purity stakes depends entirely on the starting point. Ruin your economy by closing down your nasty smelly industry and you’re among the Carbon Elect (unless, like France, you were already a low emitter because of nuclear, in which case there’s nothing you can do to be saved. You’re like the goody goody who can’t be absolved because he’s got no sins to confess.)
So Italians believe that Germany has met its targets and both Germans and Italians believe that Italy hasn’t, because Germans are efficient and Italians are not. When you know nothing dredge up the most banal racist cliché you can think of.
As in ManicBeanCounter’s enlightening comment above, we’re in the realm of belief, which is the realm of fantasy. Instead of looking at the hard boring facts of the impossibility of carbon reduction targets, journalists prefer to manufacture stories about fourth order “facts” about the mistakes people make when you ask stupid questions about their belief about a meaningless ranking of countries according to criteria which are as abstruse as the choreography of an angelic pasadoble on a pinhead.
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Geoff @27th May 1:19pm, I think it’s far worse than that. Regarding publics, as opposed to the miniscule community of climate bloggers and climate-informed scientists, *neither* side comes to their conclusions through knowledge; neither side *has* any meaningful knowledge! Both acceptance or rejection of the dominant domain narrative (of catastrophe), and to what level, is via cultural mechanisms. Not only is this measurable, it can also be shown that both real-world activism (e.g. XR activity per my 20th May graph above, or Children’s Strikes for Climate activity) and real-world policy implementation too (e.g. the Renewables Deployment across nations), conform to the cultural attitudes per nation. So actual knowledge is nowhere involved in these processes, which means the conflict in blog-land that does involve knowledge, is currently irrelevant. [It is the case that ‘publics’ also include public authorities and leaders of every type, they are no different in this respect than the ordinary citizens in their care; hence the relationship to policy].
And it is not only sceptics whom these cultural processes steam-roller (unless as you suggest, they try to play on the same battlefield by also getting cultural), it is the knowledgeable orthodox too. Once when they could have shut it down, the great majority of these turned a blind-eye to growing public beliefs they found highly convenient. Now, they can no more stem such monstrously overgrown beliefs with actual knowledge than sceptics can, and will be similarly steam-rollered if they try. Some may still believe they have the tiger under control (actually not the case for many years), probably a very small minority are actual believers themselves. It may take years more yet and perhaps a whole generation of them will be retired by then, but I have a feeling realisation will dawn; the majority will one day be wondering, just like sceptics, where this is all going to end.
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If you click on the Penguin image at my comment 20th May, you now get to look inside Mark Maslin’s book, and read the Preface, the Introduction, Chapter One, and part of Chapter Two.
All of Fourteen words.
Just kidding.
It starts with a reference to Greta Thunberg (remember her?) and is written in the same racy Noddy-book style.
Like Previous Penguin Science publications by Saint Greta and the Royal Court Thespian Professor Chris Rapley, it’s written in punchy one sentence paragraphs.
A sample:
The science shows us that our planet an our species are facing a massive crisis, which we have caused.
Such is its urgency that we need to act now.
There are many books out there on climate change.
Some want to scare you and some want to preach at you.
This book is different.
For a start, it’s written by a moron who’s also a tenured professor at one of the world’s most prestigious universities, and who, unlike failed Presidential candidates like Al Gore and once radical investigative journalists like George Monbiot, feels no need to support his climate hysteria with reasoned arguments arranged logically in paragraphs of the length that an average ten year old could manage.
[Sorry. That paragraph was me.]
It is for anyone and everyone to pick up and read.
I wanted to write a book that makes people feel smarter, more knowledgeable, and empowered to act.
This is a book you can quote in the pub or at a dinner party or even in Parliament.
This is a new style of book to engage everyone who wants to make a difference.
This is a short and punchy handbook that will empower you by providing the knowledge and insight to act to save our planet.
This is not a linear book.
You do not have to start at the beginning or the end.
Each chapter is self-contained.
Choose the most relevant chapter for you and read that one first.
And if you have difficulty with words of three syllables like “relevant,” choose a chapter which starts with your favourite letter of the alphabet.
I don’t mind, as long as you fork out your £7.99
[I’d better stop there, because reviewers are only allowed to quote 15% of a work, and I may be over the limit.]
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Geoff: Interesting. Short punchy paragraphs lend themselves much better to memetic spread.
“This is a new style of book.”
I dispute their claim. It’s been done very many times before. It’s just that we don’t usually call a Comic or a Tabloid paper or a Propaganda pamphlet, ‘a book’.
Can’t see why they’ve burned space for the history of the planet and the history of humanity though. Maybe just to clock up some science cred.
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Andy,
don’t forget there are a lot of believers for whom the petrochemical Prohibition is the *end*, and the cover story about warding off the spectre of 2 degrees Kelvin is the *means.*
Next time someone dreams up a new technology which, if it works, might very well “solve” the global warming “problem” cheaply and painlessly, you MIGHT expect sobs of relief from the Alarmed, the mania of new hope, a sudden erring on the side of optimism, and so on.
But you’re not naive. You know as well as I do that the story will be met with closed arms and scheduled for next-day obscurity. The kiss of death is always delivered in the last para—it’s a requirement of the form:
“Prof Moneyspigot of the East Anglia Insurance Company, however, cautions against getting our hopes up. The danger, he says, is that any such ‘quick fix’ may let us off the hook, distracting us from the unpleasant, but unavoidable, task ahead of us: weaning human civilization off fossil fuels.”
It’s all rather transparent.
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Nice to see you back Brad.
Meanwhile, professor Maslin has been appointed as one of Sir David King’s Climate Commissars, provoking this twitter exchange.
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Jit,
“I suppose someone should volunteer to read it.”
True, but who amongst us can afford £7.99?
As it happens, I’ve just returned from a bookshop in which I did my best to read it under the guise of being tempted to buy. It is punchy and relatively short but, alas, still far too long for my ruse to work. Besides which, having read on page 9 how ‘climate denial is still rampant’, followed by the boast that the book is ‘all fact and no waffle’, I suddenly realised I had a fast expiring life to lead. So I hurried home to post more rampant denial on Cliscep.
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Brad: Welcome back 🙂
“don’t forget there are a lot of believers for whom the petrochemical Prohibition is the *end*, and the cover story about warding off the spectre of 2 degrees Kelvin is the *means.*”
If you’re referencing the measurements of the unknowledgeable I speak of above, these are for *publics*. In absolute terms maybe indeed there’s a big bunch of ‘shut-down civilisation’ believers, but as a proportion of publics I’d guess they are tiny. I don’t think we have a way to count them. No doubt they’re a very much bigger proportion of cult wings like XR. [Interestingly, whose membership group density ranking across nations correlates with national religiosities to a very robust r of 0.87 (low rank = high density). Religiosity is a purely cultural phenomenon].
“You know as well as I do that the story will be met with closed arms and scheduled for next-day obscurity.”
Of course it will. This already happened long ago anyhow, wrt to nuclear. This is also entirely compatible with the above.
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