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Hypocrisy, They Name Is Climate Change Denial
Earlier this month, my co-author Tom Toles (the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist for the Washington Post) and I published our new book: The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy.

Some great early reviews of the book can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Tom and I had a commentary excerpting parts of the book in yesterday's (Sunday) Washington Post. In addition to calling out the most prominent current climate change denier of them all--Donald Trump--we profile eight other leading climate change deniers in the world of politics, individuals whom--as the commentary notes--have been responsible for "clouding the climate change debate" and stalling action by participating in "a campaign of deliberate misinformation".

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Among the Rogues Gallary of leading climate change deniers are (from left to right, top to bottom): congressman Joe Barton (R-TX), fossil fuel shill Steve Milloy, media mogul Rupert Murdoch, self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, scientist-turned-denier-for-hire Fred Singer, the inimitable Sarah Palin, conservative funders Charles and David Koch (aka the Koch Brothers), and "swift-boat" architect Marc Morano.

A notable honorable mentionee is James Inhofe (R-OK). Though Inhofe didn't make the Rogues Gallery, he gets the attention he deserves in the book. From chapter 6 of the book (entitled "Hypocrisy, They Name is Climate Change Denial"):

Consider Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a recipient of extensive funding over the years from the fossil fuel interests including ExxonMobil and the Koch Brothers . He is perhaps best known for declaring that climate change is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and for introducing a snowball on the U.S. Senate floor as ostensible proof against global warming.

And Inhofe of course gets the full TTT (Tom Toles Treatment):

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When it comes to hypocrisy and irony, Inhofe is truly king. Under the heading of "you can't make this stuff up", there is for example this particular episode that we recount in the book:

Back in July 2011, Inhofe was selected as keynote speaker at the Heartland Institute's annual global warming denier "conference". He had to cancel out at the last minute however. He had grown ill swimming in a lake back in his home state of Oklahoma. The lake was suffering from an algal bloom as a result of the unprecedented heat and drought that Oklahoma experienced that summer --an event that scientists have determined was tied to climate change.

Though he quipped afterward, "the environment strikes back", he was obviously undeterred in his climate change-denying ways, remaining one of the most prominent advocates for fossil fuel interests in the U.S. Senate.

Which, finally, brings us to Inhofe's home-town newspaper, The Oklahoman, named the "Worst newspaper in America" by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) for "conformance to the right-wing political views" of the paper's owners and its "alleged racist hiring practices" among other things.

The Oklahoman has an unusually atrocious record on all things environment. As CJR notes:

Where else can you find a big-city editorial page -- run by a Christian Coalition devotee plucked from Washington D.C.'s right-wing Free Congress Foundation -- that..demonizes..environmentalists...

.

And it hardly comes as a surprise that The Oklahoman, like Inhofe, is a major promoter of climate change denialism, acting as thinly veiled advocates for the fossil fuel lobby that dominates their state rather than a conduit of objective news for their readers.

So how low could they go, you might add? This is how low:

Stan Glantz has been called the "Ralph Nader of the anti-tobacco movement". He has led the effort to expose how tobacco interests hid the detrimental effects of their product on human health from the public, and has advocated staunchly for policies to reduce smoking.

Glantz has explicitly likened the fossil fuel industry's campaign to deny the science of human-caused climate change to the earlier campaign by the tobacco industry to deny the adverse health impacts of their product. Same modus operandi, even some of the same paid deniers-for-hire (like Fred Singer listed in the Rogues Gallery above).

Just last week, Glantz published a new high-profile study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) exposing how yet another industry tried to hide the adverse health impacts of their product. Glantz and colleagues found internal documents revealing that the junk food industry paid scientists to "play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead".

So, how does The Oklahoman cover this development? You guessed it: by turning the entire matter on its head, attempting to use it as an opportunity to blame the government rather than the powerful corporate interests who were exposed by Glantz' research. And, for good measure, they attempt to use the episode to attack the science of climate change! Indeed, they attack me specifically, resurrecting untruthful climate change denier talking points about the the discredited 'climategate' affair, and the widely debunked attacks on the famous "hockey stick" curve my co-authors and I published in the late 1990s (if you want to learn the truth behind all of this, consider reading my previous book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars).

It is possible that such a twisted viewpoint, wherein an obvious example of industry malfeasance is used to attack the scientific community, including climate scientists specifically, could arise purely from profound ignorance, rather than cynicism and malice. Yes, anything is possible.

But in the end, we see that Hypocrisy: Thy Name is Truly Climate Change Denial.

Thy Nickname might just be The Oklahoman.

__________

Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change, and just out in September, The Madhouse Effect, with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles.

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

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Don't Let Email Zombies Eat Up Your Day

Let's face it: Email is killing our productivity. The average person checks their inbox 11 times per hour, processes 122 messages a day, and spends 28 percent of their total workweek managing their inbox. Outside of work, more than 80% of workers monitor their email over the weekend, nearly 60% tend to their inboxes on vacation, and 6% admit to checking email while their wife was in labor or during a funeral. So much for life's precious moments!

And for those of you who think that Slack is killing email, think again. Recent projections suggest that worldwide email usage will grow by 12% in the coming years. What's more, it ain't just the “olds” who are obsessed with email. It turns out that email addiction is more—rather than less—prevalent among the younger generation. One recent study found that millennials are more frequent users of email than any other age group: They are more likely check email from bed (70%), from the bathroom (57%), or—most disturbingly—while driving (27%).

Like some evil workplace zombie, email is literally sucking away our time, our attention, and our energy. Frustrated by its debilitating impact on our working lives, I spent a year delving into the science behind our email addiction for my new book, Unsubscribe. These are four of my favorite research-backed strategies for minimizing the time you spend on email and maximizing the hours you spend on meaningful work.

1. Check your email in “batches” for less stress and more happiness.

There are two types of emailers: reactors, who rely on notifications and near-constant monitoring of their inboxes to nibble away at their email throughout the day, and batchers, who set aside specific chunks of time to power through their email, so they can ignore it the rest of the day. Not surprisingly, batchers are significantly more productive when it comes to getting shit done, and according to recent research, they're also less stressed and more happy.

To get yourself into the groove of batching, try blocking out two to three daily email check-in times on your calendar, perhaps 30 minutes a piece. If at all possible, schedule an additional 45-90 minutes for creative work before you check your email for the first time. Then, when you do turn your attention to your inbox, no matter what you find there—what fires you have to put out, what unwanted questions you have to respond to—you've already gotten some good work done that day.

If at all possible, schedule an additional 45-90 minutes for creative work before you check your email for the first time.

2. Neutralize your “fear of missing out” by using VIP email notifications.

If you'd like to stick to specific blocks of time for checking email, but you have a special someone who will freak out if you don't tend to their email within five minutes of receiving it—or if the whole idea of ignoring your inbox just makes you too anxious—compromise by using VIP notifications. On an iPhone, you can designate certain people as VIPs so their emails go to a separate VIP inbox. You can also configure your notifications to play a special tone when that inbox gets a message. If you have an Android phone, you can use the Gmail app to set up a similar system for notifications when messages arrive from designated “priority senders.”

And your VIPs don't have to be fixed. I change mine regularly based on what projects have priority at the moment and what I'm feeling anxious about. If I notice I can't stop peeking at my inbox because I want to know if I scored the dream apartment I just applied for, or I'm awaiting a time-sensitive reply from a client for a project that's on deadline, then I just pop that person onto my VIP list. Now I no longer have to monitor my inbox like a maniac because I know I'll be alerted as soon as the message arrives.

3. Boost your focus by closing your email when you're doing other tasks.

Research has shown that just having your email program open in the background of your computer screen as you focus on another task, even if the window is minimized, can decrease performance. Even if your email isn't front and center, your brain still knows it's there in the background and devotes a certain amount of energy to monitoring it, which drains your focus for executing on the task at hand.

Avoid such distractions by quarantining your email in a separate area from your main workspace. This might mean setting up a separate monitor just for email or checking your email only on a mobile phone or tablet. Checking your email in a physically separate space can actually make your incoming messages—and any attendant anxiety or urgency—feel more distant and less pressing. The less cluttered your primary work screen is, the more serene your mind is, and the easier it is to focus.

Pro Tip: This advice about “quarantining” apps with constant push notifications also applies to Slack or other collaborative apps that emit constant notifications and updates. The tax on your attention is lower if you keep them running on a separate, glance-able screen nearby (or on your phone if a second screen isn't an option) rather than on your primary computer screen. It sounds silly, but interruptions sabotage your short-term memory, so one of the problems that sets us back is literally remembering what we were just working on. If your primary screen is reserved for your primary task, rather than buried under a bunch of Slack and social media windows, you're more likely to be able to return to it quickly after an interruption.

The less cluttered your primary work screen is, the more serene your mind is, and the easier it is to focus.

4. Know that multi-tasking with email reduces your IQ and your creativity.

Every time you stop doing a task you are working on to check your email, you incur what researchers call a “switching cost.” Particularly if you're doing any kind of work that requires deep concentration (aka creative flow) such as writing, coding, or assembling a presentation, it typically takes at least 25 minutes to get properly back into the task after you've interrupted yourself. (I'm no great shakes at math, but I'm pretty sure that means if you check your email twice while doing an hour of creative work, you've basically gotten nowhere.) Another study done in the UK found that when people tried to juggle managing their inbox with doing their work, their IQ fell by 10 points—the equivalent of working without a night of sleep or smoking reefer on the job. So the next time you want to interrupt yourself for a quick glance at your inbox, remember that it could literally make you dumber.

—

This post is adapted from the book Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distraction, and Get Real Work Done, by Jocelyn K. Glei, the founding editor of 99U and author of Manage Your Day-to-Day. It's available on Amazon now.

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