Michael E. Mann

Tom Toles

The award-winning climate scientist Michael E. Mann and the Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist Tom Toles have been on the front lines of the fight against climate denialism for most of their careers. The Madhouse Effect offers a clever lampoon of the fallacious claims and absurd arguments of climate-science deniers.

How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy

The Madhouse Effect

Bryan Alexander

Madhouse Effect is a quick guide to climate change arguments, focused on what denialists and critics have been saying. I wrote "quick" because it's short and written in a very approachable, concise, nearly verbal style.

It also contains many cartoons by Tom Toles, which are appropriate and might speed some readers along.

Ultimately I didn't find it that useful. To explain: its descriptions of climate change are remarkably concise and accessible, which is fine. That's about two short chapters, and could be excerpted for purpose. Yet I wanted more, such as more on methane, which the book just touches on. After that... I admire Mann and Toles for deeply wading into climate denial, which they do with gusto and detail, perhaps most energetically in a chapter about Trump. But it's awful to work through, a catalog of failure and malice. And it's not too practical, as ultimately the authors advise us to bow out of conversations with deniers, to "leave the madhouse." (146) Madhouse Effect ends up feeling like a primer on a period of history, useful as pointers for future historians who wish to dig into the climate skeptic movement.

The Madhouse Effect How Climate Change Denial is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy

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