Page 23 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

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long historic line of modest variations suddenly ending in a sharp, almost
vertical, rise, the blade, with three of the 8 years prior to publication being
warmer than for any time since 1400. A later paper, taking a longer time
frame, confirmed their central argument that while past changes in climate
could be plausibly attributed to shifts in solar and volcanic activity “neither
can explain the dramatic warming of the late twentieth century” and “only
anthropogenic influences (principally the increases in greenhouse gas
concentrations)” provide a causal explanation (Jones and Mann 2004: 31).
The argument that global warming was primarily driven by emissions
from cars, factories, power plants and other core components of life in
advanced industrial societies attracted a barrage of hostility from climate
change deniers wedded to business as usual. Mann was subjected to sus-
tained attacks on his professional credibility and personal threats. The
Republican attorney general of Virginia pressed to have his academic cre-
dentials revoked and in 2009 emails he had exchanged with British climate
scientist Phil Jones were stolen and posted in selective and distorted form
on the internet, weeks before the United Nations climate talks were due to
begin in Copenhagen. Mann sees their release as a part of a deliberate effort
to undermine the talks, which ended in failure, an outcome he describes as
a “crime against humanity, a crime against the planet” (McKie 2012). As
he points out in the interview included in this collection, although suc-
cessive investigations into the emails completely exonerated him, they took
several years, during which time climate change deniers were able to
repeatedly exploit the doubts raised about his findings. Other attacks were
more personal, with emails sent to his in box demanding that “You and
your colleagues… be shot, quartered and fed to the pigs along with your
whole damn families,” or “hopin [sic] I would see the news and you
commited [sic] suicide” (McKie 2012).
While Mann’s research confirms the ‘great acceleration’ in climate
change since 1950, it also points to a more recent, second acceleration. In a
recent paper Paul Crutzen and his colleagues have identified the years
between 1950 and 1973 as a distinctive period (Steffen et al. 2011: 850),
and argued that human influence on the climate has been most evident in
the years since 1970 (Gaffney and Steffen 2017: 4). To make sense of these
dates we need to place debates around the Anthropocene firmly in the
context of shifts in the organisation of capitalism. As Jason Moore has
argued:
“The Anthropocene makes for an easy story to tell..... The mosaic of
human activity in the web of life is reduced to an abstract Humanity, a