On Human-Induced Climate Collapse and how Capitalism and too many unaware humans are to blame.

[Peter Lemkin]

We go now to Oxford in Britain to speak to George Monbiot. He's a columnist with The Guardian. His book, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, is out this week. His latest article for The Guardian is headlined "Why are the crucial questions about Hurricane Harvey not being asked?"
George Monbiot, welcome back to Democracy Now! Well, answer your question.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, because to ask those questions is to challenge everything. It's to challenge not just Donald Trump, not just current environmental policy. It's to challenge the entire political and economic system. And it is to recognize that the system which we tell ourselves is the best system you could possibly have, of neoliberal capitalism, which will deliver the optimum outcomes and the best of all possible worlds, actually is destined to push us towards catastrophe, and unless we replace that system with a better one, with something really quite different, then it will destroy us. Instead of making us more prosperous, more comfortable, it will rip apart everything that makes our lives worth living, and result in the deaths of very large numbers of people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, quite apart from the fact, George, that the issue of climate change is not mentioned in the media, as you write in your article, you also think that the term "climate change" is misleading, and the term that should be used is "climate breakdown." Could you explain why that is?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Well, "climate change" is a curiously bland term to describe our greatest crisis, our huge human predicament, that will inevitably lead to catastrophe if we don't take drastic action to prevent it. It's a bit like calling a foreign invasion "unexpected guests." It's that crazily bland, for something which is going to have such an enormous impact on our lives, and, as we've just been hearing, has already had such an enormous impact on many people's lives around the world. And unless you use the right language to describe what you're talking about, you mislead people as to what the likely implications of that are. And by talking about climate change as if it"You know, it could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, who knows? It might be a neutral thing. You know, we like a bit of climate change, don't we? We like it when the winter gives way to summer"we suggest that this huge catastrophe might not be a catastrophe at all. I don't think "climate breakdown" is the perfect term. I can't quite put my finger on the right term, but I think it comes a lot closer to what we need to be saying than "climate change" does.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you say to those who say you cannot link this one hurricane or storm to climate change or climate chaos, climate breakdown, as you describe it?
GEORGE MONBIOT: I would say you cannot not link it. We have, so far, 1 degree centigrade of global warming, and that now affects every single weather event on Earth, just like the 4 degrees centigrade of global warming that followed the Ice Ageit was 4 degrees between the last Ice Age and the 19th centuryaffects every single weather event on Earth. And we wouldn't have warm summers without that 4 degree of warming. With that extra 1 degree of warming, that creates further implications for every single weather event on Earth.
And for hurricanes, the link is crystal clear. There are three ways in which the impact of hurricanes is affected by that 1 degree of warming. First of all, sea levels are higher. So coastal cities, like Houston, like Port Arthur, getare more likely to be hit by storm surges as a result of those higher sea levels, as we were hearing from your wonderful guest Hilton Kelley in the last segment. Number two, the sea is warmer. The temperature of the sea is higher, and that can enhance the intensity of the storm, because it puts more energy into the storm. The storm is picking up energy from those warmer waters. And number three, the air itself is warmer. And warmer air holds more moisture than cooler air. And that means that you can have much more intense rainfall events. So, what we see here is that it's impossible for the hurricane not to have been affected by climate breakdown.
Now, of course, what we can't say is there would have been no hurricane if it weren't for climate breakdown; if it weren't for the human contribution, for the fossil fuels we've been burning, there wouldn't have been a hurricane. Of course there were hurricanes in the past. What we can say is that this hurricane, whether or not it was caused by the human contribution, was affected by the human contribution. That is unequivocal.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, nevertheless, George, you've been accused, as, no doubt, have others, of politicizing Hurricane Harvey and events like it, extreme weather events like it, by linking it to climate change.
GEORGE MONBIOT: Yes. And now, in fact, the Environmental Protection Agency itself has accused climate scientists in the U.S. of politicizing it by mentioning climate change or climate breakdown. It's an extraordinary thing. It's clear to me that by not mentioning it, you are politicizing this issue. The linkage is so clear, it is so obvious, that when you don't talk about it, you're taking a decision, you are taking a position. And the position is, we're not going to talk about climate change, we're not going to talk about climate breakdown. That is a political decision. And it's a highly charged political decision, which reflects powerful interests. It reflects the kind of interests we've just been hearing about, the oil refineries and the oil rigs, which themselves have been hit by Hurricane Harvey and its aftermathan extraordinary irony, something which pulls up into stark relief the issue that we're dealing with, but just is not being discussed at all.
And those people, the people who run those companies, they are responsible for shutting down all discussion of climate breakdown so that we don't go there, we don't talk about it. And journalists and editors, with the glowing exception of yourselves, they have a powerful instinct not to go there. It's not that they wake up in the morning and say, "Don't talk about climate change. I mustn't talk about climate change. Whatever I do, don't mention climate change." They don't need to say that. It's already in their guts. They have a visceral sense that if you go there, then you open up everything. You open Pandora's box, and you open up a discussion of whether capitalism is working. You open up a discussion of whether the political system is working. You open up a discussion of what the world's most powerful actors, including the fossil fuel companies, are doing to the rest of the world's people. And to go there, you put everything at risk. You put your career at risk. You put your piece of mind at risk. You put the good opinion of your colleagues at risk. To challenge everything is to become an outcast.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to George Monbiot, the British journalist and author. President Trump just went to Texas, and he's going back. When he landed, he didn't address the victims at all. He didn't talk about the victims. But he did say, about the people around him, "What a crowd! What a turnout!" Now, President Trump is a proud climate change denier, as is the governor of Texas, Governor Abbott. You point out that Trump denying human-driven global warming is interesting given that he built a wall around his golf resort in Ireland to protect it from the rising seas. Talk more about this.
GEORGE MONBIOT: He's trying. He hasn't yet succeeded, but he's applying for permission. His company is trying to build a sea wall around his golf resort, because it knows that the seas are rising and his golf resort is now at risk. And similarly, in the Gulf of Mexico, the oil companies keep raising the height of their oil platforms. In the 1960s, they were 40 feet above sea level. Then, in the 1990s, they were 70 feet. Today, they are 91 feet above sea level. And they have raised those platforms because they know the sea level is rising and storms are intensifying. And they have done so to get the oil platforms out of the way of those impacts caused by climate breakdown, caused by the oil companies themselves. So, though those same oil companies, particularly ExxonMobil, have poured millions of dollars into paying professional liars to deny climate change across the media and across social media, they themselves know that it's happening, and they're taking precautions to protect themselves against it.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, George, I'd like to turn to another issue that you raise in the piece. You talk specifically about the fact that the U.S. media have failed to cover climate breakdown-related disasters in the U.S. itself, but there's even greater silence on climate disasters in the rest of the world. I mean, we've just heard, in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, over 1,200 people have died. There are floods in Niger. Now, in Karachi, a state of emergency has been declared. So, can you talk about that, the media silence on that? And what's actually happening in these places where people are so much more vulnerable than here?
GEORGE MONBIOT: It's an extraordinary thing to contemplate, isn't it? That the part of the world worst hit by current flooding is not actually Texas. Disastrous, catastrophic as it is in Texas, it is now even worse particularly in India and Bangladesh and Nepal, where we're seeing huge, horrendous levels of flooding, 40 million people affected by it, 1,200 people dead, basically the complete shutdown of the economy, of public life, of private life across a great swathe of those countries. And yet, there's almost media silence throughout the rich world.
This week in the U.K., we've been hearing a lot about Bangladesh. Bangladesh has been in the headlines for the last two days, and there's been loads of commentary written about it. Why is that? Because Bangladesh won the cricket against Australia. I'm quite serious. This is a country in which 6.9 million people are now displaced by flooding, in which a third of the country is underwater, in which hundreds have died. We don't yet know how many, because it will be a long time before that count is ever made, if it is made at all. Loads of children can no longer go to school. It's a total disruption, devastation of that country. And finally, it features in the news, because of the cricket.
And again, it is this politically driven silence, because if we were to consider what is going on in the rest of the world, and if we were to consider our contribution to what is going on in the rest of the worldand there's this terrible irony about climate change that the main perpetrators of it, with the exception of those refineries and rigs in the Gulf, in the Gulf of Mexico and in Texasgenerally, the main perpetrators are those who are hit least and last, whereas people who have made very little contribution to climate breakdown are hit first and worst, like the people of Bangladesh, who have a tiny carbon footprint. Were we to really bring this to the front of our consciousness, as we should, it would necessitate a major change in the way we run our societies, a major change in the way we run our economies and a major change in the way we live. So that is why we do not talk about it. Or if we talk about it, we do so tangentially, or we relate it as a natural disaster, another act of God, a terrible thing which has happened to those people: "Poor people. Send them some money. We feel so sorry for them, but we wash our hands of it. There's nothing we can do."
AMY GOODMAN: George Monbiot, I'm embarrassed to say
GEORGE MONBIOT: As it happens
AMY GOODMAN: We just have a minute, but can you give us a hint of what that change would look like?
GEORGE MONBIOT: Right. We need a radical change, driven by the need to prevent this catastrophe, to both politics and economics. And an economic system which depends on perpetual growth on a finite planet is destined to deliver disaster. We need a new economy built around the commons, built around community ownership of local resources, inalienable ownership of those resources, which are not expected to deliver more and more and more money, but are expected to deliver continued and steady prosperity to the people of those communities and the people of this planet. The system we have at the moment, which is about accumulation, the accumulation of capital, the continuation of growth, in a planet which does not itself grow, that system is destined to push us over the cliff.

[Peter Lemkin]

A Triple Threat to Humanity: Climate Change, Pandemics, and Anti-Science
Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez
From: Volume 49, No. 1
January/February 2025


Over the past decade, many of us in the scientific community have come to appreciate the existential threat we face today—a threat unlike any we’ve witnessed since the days of the U.S. and Soviet Cold War in the last half of the twentieth century. While even today the specter of nuclear annihilation remains, especially given the escalation of hot wars in Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Iran, we now face entirely new twenty-first-century forces that place the future of humankind in even greater peril.
Our newest and gravest challenge may not feel as acute as the 1980s Cold War threat of mutual assured destruction (MAD). There are no missiles with nuclear warheads crisscrossing the oceans. But it is every bit as real, posing a threat to civilization and our planet. This NextGen MAD consists of three synergistic components.  
The first component is the unprecedented warming of our planet and temperatures that one of us (Michael Mann) highlighted more than two decades ago while still a postdoctoral researcher in the form of the now-famous “hockey stick” curve. The warming of the planet and its impacts—which include coastal inundation from melting ice and intensified more deadly hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires—is taking an increasing toll on our civilization by any measure, be it loss of life (which can be measured in millions of lives per year) or economic costs (which can be measured in trillions of dollars per year in lost GDP globally). Look no further than deadly temperatures that exceeded 50oC (122oF) this past summer. More than 2,000 Americans died from extreme heat in 2023, a tragic new record. The death and destruction will continue to accelerate as long as we fail to address the problem at its source: chiefly, our ongoing reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transportation.  
The famous “hockey stick graph” from Mann, Bradley, and Hughes (1999)
A “hockey stick” description also applies to the new pattern or cadence of pandemic threats—the second component. One of the most common questions that one of us (Peter Hotez) is asked: “Hey doc, what the heck is going on?” Why are we seeing three major coronavirus global epidemics—SARS, MERS, and now COVID-19 (caused by SARS-2), or Ebola epidemics in West Africa in 2014 or in DR Congo in 2019? These viruses all originate from bats; a part of this accelerating cadence of pandemics may be shifts in bat habitats that bring them closer to humans in concert with expanding human populations in formerly forested areas due to urbanization. Similar expansions in urbanizations, together with climate change, also explains why we’re seeing more mosquito-transmitted virus infections such as dengue or chikungunya and also parasitic infections such as malaria along the Gulf of Mexico, including in the United States (Hotez and LaBeaud 2023). This is also occurring in southern Europe and elsewhere. 
This brings us to the third and perhaps the most insidious component of all: a well-organized, financed, politically motivated, and steadily globalizing campaign of disinformation and attacks against mainstream science that makes it extremely difficult to mount an effective global response to the climate and pandemic threats. We witnessed an early instance decades ago as one of us (Michael Mann) described in his book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars when he and his colleagues came under vicious attack by forces linked to the oil and gas industry who viewed the hockey stick curve as a direct threat to their future profits and business ventures. As a pediatrician-scientist, Peter Hotez came under attack for his staunch defense of vaccines. Hotez’s book, Vaccines Did Not Cause Rachel’s Autism, about his youngest daughter, was a threat to a group that became known as the “disinformation dozen” (named by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, see also Nick Tiller’s piece in SI’s September/October 2022 issue), monetizing the internet through sales of nutritional supplements, spectacular cures, or anti-vaccine books on Amazon. Anti-vaccine activism took an even darker turn during the COVID-19 pandemic when more than 200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they refused COVID-19 vaccines during the delta and BA.1 omicron waves of 2021–2022. This occurred when the anti-vaccine movement fell under a new banner of “health freedom” in conservative circles.  
Increasingly, we recognize how the forces behind the attacks on climate science and biomedicine (around vaccines and pandemics) have begun to converge. Unfortunately, they also include not only attacks on the science but also the scientists themselves. Tragically this even includes personal attacks from high-ranking public officials and even members of the U.S. Congress and U.S. Presidential candidates. They also include attacks from billionaires and the conservative media, especially Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial pages. However, even the mainstream media has increasingly helped spread anti-scientific disinformation and has platformed activists seeking to discredit both science and scientists.  
In all, we have identified five major forces that have advanced attacks on science and scientists and promoted anti-science disinformation. We call them the “5 Ps,” the plutocrats and petrostates (billionaires and state actors, respectively, who fund the attacks), the pros (the hired guns), the propagandists (industry shills and opportunists posing as experts), and—as we’ve already explained above—the press. Together they compose a coordinated, powerful, and formidable anti-science leviathan that threatens our future. 
Although we are first and foremost researchers and academicians, this is far more than an arcane discussion for our faculty and students. Anti-science is now a lethal force that threatens human civilization. We can no longer fight climate change and pandemics unless we can find a means to defuse the anti-science bomb that threatens our future. So far, we are losing this battle. While time remains, the window of opportunity is beginning to close, and it is absolutely critical that we take action now.
Reference
Hotez, Peter J., and Angelle Desiree LaBeaud. 2023. Yellow Jack’s potential return to the American South. New England Journal of Medicine 389(16):1445–1447. Online at https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2308420.


Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez
Michael E. Mann, PhD, is Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication. He also serves as vice provost for Climate Science, Policy, and Action and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media (PCSSM). He contributed, with other Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He’s author of numerous books, including Dire Predictions, The Madhouse Effect, The New Climate War, Our Fragile Moment, and Science under Siege: How to Fight the Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World (forthcoming and coauthored with Peter J. Hotez).

Peter J. Hotez, MD, PhD, is dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine and professor of Pediatrics and Molecular Virology & Microbiology at Baylor College of Medicine, where he is also the codirector of the Texas Children’s Center for Vaccine Development (CVD) and Texas Children’s Hospital Endowed Chair of Tropical Pediatrics. He is also University Professor at Baylor University. In 2022, Hotez and his colleague, Dr. Maria Elena Bottazzi, were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for “their work to develop and distribute a low-cost COVID-19 vaccine to people of the world without patent limitation.” His books include Blue Marble Health; Poverty and the Impact of COVID-19; Preventing the Next Pandemic; Forgotten People, Forgotten Diseases; and The Deadly Rise of Anti-science.

[Lauren Johnson]

Peter Hotez is actually a villain. He played a major role in the weaponization of the Covid virus through gain-of-function research and the development of the vaccines which have killed millions. He's a more effective Mengele.

[Lauren Johnson]

I know off topic, but there is no bottom when it comes to Hotez.

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