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Our Fragile Moment
In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course.For the vast majority of its 4.54 billion years, Earth has proven it can manage just fine without human beings. Then came the first proto-humans, who emerged just a little more than 2 million years ago — a fleeting moment in geological time. What is it that made this benevolent moment of ours possible? Ironically, it’s the very same thing that now threatens us — climate change.Climate variability has at times created new niches that humans or their ancestors could potentially exploit, and challenges that at times have spurred innovation. But the conditions that allowed humans to live on this earth are fragile, incredibly so. There’s a relatively narrow envelope of climate variability within which human civilisation remains viable. And our survival depends on conditions remaining within that range. In this book, renowned climate scientist Michael Mann arms readers with the knowledge necessary to appreciate the gravity of the unfolding climate crisis, while emboldening them — and others — to act before it truly does become too late.
- GenresScienceClimate Change
320 pages, Paperback
Published November 9, 2023
10 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
About the author
Michael Mann
107 books97 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.
In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.
Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.
Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.
Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.
In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.
Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.
Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.
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December 13, 2023
Our Fragile Moment – A review
Abstract
This is a very complete book. It’s fact rich in defining what Professor Mann accurately calls Our Fragile Moment. It reads like a scientific detective novel, presenting the evidence that it is us, humans, that are guilty of altering the climate, to such an extent, that we are altering the safe space that the human species has flourished in. In this respect it is very entertaining and keeps the reader hooked. This is such a comprehensive all-encompassing book about the time in which we live and the history of the Earth and the events that have shaped Our Fragile Moment. Professor Mann’s book presents the voice of reason with the need for change.
The full review
It has taken me some time to write the review of this book because it is so complete that I am sure that I will miss something. I wrote a lot of notes while I was reading it and I know that I will keep dipping into this text in the future because it blows away the arguments of deniers, distractors and doomists. Therefore, this review is written with a certain amount of trepidation of missing a key point.
So Carl Sagan said, describing the photograph that Voyager 1 took and that he named Pale Blue Dot, that’s here, that’s us. Professor Mann’s book extends that and says effectively, that’s here, that’s us at this moment. We could also add in a reference to the title of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time because Professor Mann’s book describes this, the briefest of moments within the context of the long history of not only Earth and our solar system but of the very difficult to imagine age and expanse of our universe. Specifically, he describes Earth’s roughly 4.5 billion-year history.
He covers many events in that history. The one that most people of heard of is the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, a climate change altering event, giving the chance for our small mammal ancestors to fill the niches left. Fast forward roughly 10 million years after or 56 million years ago and he describes the PETM, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which created the niche for primates. The Eocene cooled and became the Oligocene epoch around 34 million years ago. Early on at this time Antarctic ice sheets started to form. Professor Mann explains the paradox as to why, when we entered the Pliocene only five million years ago and the last time the planet had similar levels of CO2 to today, that it was 3.5 to 5F warmer. He also goes on to say why our descendants won’t live in the equivalent to the film Waterworld but coastal flooding will be bad enough unless we stop burning fossil fuels.
From the rise of humans from hunter gatherers to agriculturists Professor Mann recounts the history of past civilisations and how they have come and gone, as conditions have changed. Where drought and volcanic activity have for instance, played their part in ending them. How physics, chemistry and biology interact to give us the world in which we currently live. He tells us of other climatic events nearer in time, such as the Younger Dryas that have shaped us as a species. Then he takes us into the Common Era, the last 2000 years. In this era, he discusses the paleoclimate data that did and did not affect the Roman Empire. He introduces us to the North Atlantic Oscillation and to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and its slowing down. Importantly he states that we have taken out of the ground in a couple of centuries, millions of years of buried carbon and returned it to the atmosphere in the equivalent of a geological instant.
Without writing a book on what Our Fragile Moment covers you will be introduced to many other subjects and how they relate to our current human predicament. These include but are not limited to modelling of the climate, hysteresis, tipping points, stabilizing and destabilizing feedbacks, Milankovitch cycles, Earth Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Earth System Sensitivity (ESS), ocean acidification and the Permian-Triassic (PT) extinction event.
Throughout the book you will be introduced to mentors, colleagues, students and friends of Professor Mann. Also, he highlights some of his worries in regards to droughts generating wildfires and that the migration of plants and animals is blocked in these modern times by the amount of human infrastructure that we have built. He does add that we will only make the planet totally uninhabitable if we try really hard and reverse all the changes we have made so far.
Of course, no explanation of what’s happening today would be complete without the Hockey Stick, the piece of work that Michael Mann and colleagues published in the 90s. Data from the project was manipulated by nefarious others, in an attempt to discredit the group of scientists and Professor Mann and others suffered various threats because of this. It has however stood the test of time but Professor Mann now likens it more to a scythe.
Uncertainty is not our friend is mentioned in different places in the book even though climate models have got much better as computer power has increased. Summing up, he asks, “What did we learn?”. For one, that our world is very different to the conditions during the Faint Young Sun and Snowball Earth events for example. He asks the question that many ask, “Are we doomed” and replies that it is something that really is up to us. Finally, he asks if our climate is on a knife edge or is it resilient. Answer, it is neither. He makes the point that we have the technology but lack the political will and that we must decarbonise now and not rely on technologies still in development, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
As an undergraduate many years ago, part of my course involved reading H.H. Lamb’s Climate, History and the Modern World. A book that fascinated me as to how weather and climate shaped human events. I still have that interest and fascination many years later and Our Fragile Moment is the perfect book for today, for people interested in what’s happening at this moment and outside everyone’s window.
And I still haven’t done this book the justice that it deserves. Buy it, buy it for friends, lend it, because everyone needs to understand how critical this period in time is and how our political leaders must make the right decisions for the benefit of all, human and non human.
Abstract
This is a very complete book. It’s fact rich in defining what Professor Mann accurately calls Our Fragile Moment. It reads like a scientific detective novel, presenting the evidence that it is us, humans, that are guilty of altering the climate, to such an extent, that we are altering the safe space that the human species has flourished in. In this respect it is very entertaining and keeps the reader hooked. This is such a comprehensive all-encompassing book about the time in which we live and the history of the Earth and the events that have shaped Our Fragile Moment. Professor Mann’s book presents the voice of reason with the need for change.
The full review
It has taken me some time to write the review of this book because it is so complete that I am sure that I will miss something. I wrote a lot of notes while I was reading it and I know that I will keep dipping into this text in the future because it blows away the arguments of deniers, distractors and doomists. Therefore, this review is written with a certain amount of trepidation of missing a key point.
So Carl Sagan said, describing the photograph that Voyager 1 took and that he named Pale Blue Dot, that’s here, that’s us. Professor Mann’s book extends that and says effectively, that’s here, that’s us at this moment. We could also add in a reference to the title of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time because Professor Mann’s book describes this, the briefest of moments within the context of the long history of not only Earth and our solar system but of the very difficult to imagine age and expanse of our universe. Specifically, he describes Earth’s roughly 4.5 billion-year history.
He covers many events in that history. The one that most people of heard of is the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, a climate change altering event, giving the chance for our small mammal ancestors to fill the niches left. Fast forward roughly 10 million years after or 56 million years ago and he describes the PETM, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum which created the niche for primates. The Eocene cooled and became the Oligocene epoch around 34 million years ago. Early on at this time Antarctic ice sheets started to form. Professor Mann explains the paradox as to why, when we entered the Pliocene only five million years ago and the last time the planet had similar levels of CO2 to today, that it was 3.5 to 5F warmer. He also goes on to say why our descendants won’t live in the equivalent to the film Waterworld but coastal flooding will be bad enough unless we stop burning fossil fuels.
From the rise of humans from hunter gatherers to agriculturists Professor Mann recounts the history of past civilisations and how they have come and gone, as conditions have changed. Where drought and volcanic activity have for instance, played their part in ending them. How physics, chemistry and biology interact to give us the world in which we currently live. He tells us of other climatic events nearer in time, such as the Younger Dryas that have shaped us as a species. Then he takes us into the Common Era, the last 2000 years. In this era, he discusses the paleoclimate data that did and did not affect the Roman Empire. He introduces us to the North Atlantic Oscillation and to the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and its slowing down. Importantly he states that we have taken out of the ground in a couple of centuries, millions of years of buried carbon and returned it to the atmosphere in the equivalent of a geological instant.
Without writing a book on what Our Fragile Moment covers you will be introduced to many other subjects and how they relate to our current human predicament. These include but are not limited to modelling of the climate, hysteresis, tipping points, stabilizing and destabilizing feedbacks, Milankovitch cycles, Earth Climate Sensitivity (ECS) and Earth System Sensitivity (ESS), ocean acidification and the Permian-Triassic (PT) extinction event.
Throughout the book you will be introduced to mentors, colleagues, students and friends of Professor Mann. Also, he highlights some of his worries in regards to droughts generating wildfires and that the migration of plants and animals is blocked in these modern times by the amount of human infrastructure that we have built. He does add that we will only make the planet totally uninhabitable if we try really hard and reverse all the changes we have made so far.
Of course, no explanation of what’s happening today would be complete without the Hockey Stick, the piece of work that Michael Mann and colleagues published in the 90s. Data from the project was manipulated by nefarious others, in an attempt to discredit the group of scientists and Professor Mann and others suffered various threats because of this. It has however stood the test of time but Professor Mann now likens it more to a scythe.
Uncertainty is not our friend is mentioned in different places in the book even though climate models have got much better as computer power has increased. Summing up, he asks, “What did we learn?”. For one, that our world is very different to the conditions during the Faint Young Sun and Snowball Earth events for example. He asks the question that many ask, “Are we doomed” and replies that it is something that really is up to us. Finally, he asks if our climate is on a knife edge or is it resilient. Answer, it is neither. He makes the point that we have the technology but lack the political will and that we must decarbonise now and not rely on technologies still in development, such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
As an undergraduate many years ago, part of my course involved reading H.H. Lamb’s Climate, History and the Modern World. A book that fascinated me as to how weather and climate shaped human events. I still have that interest and fascination many years later and Our Fragile Moment is the perfect book for today, for people interested in what’s happening at this moment and outside everyone’s window.
And I still haven’t done this book the justice that it deserves. Buy it, buy it for friends, lend it, because everyone needs to understand how critical this period in time is and how our political leaders must make the right decisions for the benefit of all, human and non human.
September 28, 2024
Our planet, the only one we have, has been around for 4.54 billion years (4,540,000,000,000 years). The very first proto-humans emerged around 2,000,000 years ago, and human civilisation (such as it is) has been around for under 6,000 years. Only for 0.0001% of the history of the Earth have modern humans been around. And look what we’ve achieved in that tiny, infinitesimal moment of our existence.
Nature, modified by extra-planetary events including the varying power of the Sun, collisions with asteroids both large and small, has managed to create a sustainable world on which we have thrived. Until now.
Humans are the only known life form that has managed to negatively alter the environment in which we, and all other life, currently exist.
This book examines, in forensic detail, the history of our world. The author explains what changes have occurred during the formation and gradual settlement of our home to bring it to its current state of relative equilibrium. We, however, during the very short period since we began to industrialize our planet, have introduced such a state of instability that we now occupy a space that may very soon become impossible to live in for some plants and animals, and where large portions of our world may soon be uninhabitable for the human race.
Michael Mann explains how we have come to this, how our influence has created what is elsewhere described as our climate emergency. But, as a scientist, he avoids the emotional aspects of predictions designed to cause panic and even a sense of defeatism by some people.
He describes how it is neither too late to make the necessary changes nor inevitable that we destroy ourselves along with many thousands of other life forms.
It is not an easy read, but it is fascinating and illuminating. I suggest you arm yourself with a small pad and a pen to list the many acronyms in full form. Michael Mann explains the full terms when initially introduced, but I confess I lost track of some of the full terms whilst reading.
This is a book based entirely in science. It avoids opinion, both pessimistic and optimistic, instead delivering a neutral picture devoid of nightmare or complacency.
There is no doubt some readers will find aspects of this extraordinary book difficult. Some will be tempted to skip certain passages. But if all readers fully read the final chapter, which provides an excellent summary, both comprehensive and relatively brief, well presented and giving an overall assessment of what is needed to prevent the worst of the excesses we face if we do nothing, there is a chance we may manage to more than merely survive this threatened emergency and actually continue to thrive here on the only planet we have.
‘The impacts of climate change, no doubt, constitute an existential threat if we fail to act. But we can act. Our fragile moment can still be preserved.’ Michael Mann
Nature, modified by extra-planetary events including the varying power of the Sun, collisions with asteroids both large and small, has managed to create a sustainable world on which we have thrived. Until now.
Humans are the only known life form that has managed to negatively alter the environment in which we, and all other life, currently exist.
This book examines, in forensic detail, the history of our world. The author explains what changes have occurred during the formation and gradual settlement of our home to bring it to its current state of relative equilibrium. We, however, during the very short period since we began to industrialize our planet, have introduced such a state of instability that we now occupy a space that may very soon become impossible to live in for some plants and animals, and where large portions of our world may soon be uninhabitable for the human race.
Michael Mann explains how we have come to this, how our influence has created what is elsewhere described as our climate emergency. But, as a scientist, he avoids the emotional aspects of predictions designed to cause panic and even a sense of defeatism by some people.
He describes how it is neither too late to make the necessary changes nor inevitable that we destroy ourselves along with many thousands of other life forms.
It is not an easy read, but it is fascinating and illuminating. I suggest you arm yourself with a small pad and a pen to list the many acronyms in full form. Michael Mann explains the full terms when initially introduced, but I confess I lost track of some of the full terms whilst reading.
This is a book based entirely in science. It avoids opinion, both pessimistic and optimistic, instead delivering a neutral picture devoid of nightmare or complacency.
There is no doubt some readers will find aspects of this extraordinary book difficult. Some will be tempted to skip certain passages. But if all readers fully read the final chapter, which provides an excellent summary, both comprehensive and relatively brief, well presented and giving an overall assessment of what is needed to prevent the worst of the excesses we face if we do nothing, there is a chance we may manage to more than merely survive this threatened emergency and actually continue to thrive here on the only planet we have.
‘The impacts of climate change, no doubt, constitute an existential threat if we fail to act. But we can act. Our fragile moment can still be preserved.’ Michael Mann
April 17, 2024
Making Greater Understanding of the Climate Crisis through the available Whole Earth History
Professor Mann's "Our Fragile Moment" allows complex, difficult climate science to be understandable to everyone with an open enquiring mind. It encourages strengths to continue along this road of positive expectations, and crucially provides the courage to talk to others and get them on board.
Professor Mann's "Our Fragile Moment" allows complex, difficult climate science to be understandable to everyone with an open enquiring mind. It encourages strengths to continue along this road of positive expectations, and crucially provides the courage to talk to others and get them on board.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews