Communicating science accurately in time to save the word has come down to the right memes, and the most powerful image that’s waking people up about climate change is the hockey stick. 
This compelling, even terrifying graphic was created twenty years ago by climate scientist Michael Mann, who spoke last week at Stanford. For this famous graph, Mann figured out how to accurately project earth’s rising temperatures. The turning point at the bottom of the stick represents what could happen if we reach earth’s tipping point with greenhouse gasses and other emissions unchecked.
Mann, invited to speak at Stanford by the Woods Environmental Institute, is a favorite climate hero not just because of his compelling and scientific graphics, but for the way he has handled being constantly bullied on social media because of his success. Mann was ruthlessly and relentlessly harassed by paid fossil fool hacks, including Anthony Watts on his Watts Up With That Denier Blog.
“When the hockey stick became an icon in the climate change debate, I became a public figure.”
In the early 2000s, when everyone was freaking out about the hockey stick, Watts and many others accused Mann of being self-aggrandizing, a liar, and a paid hack, revealing, as they so often do, the despicable things they were actually doing themselves. These climate deniers are still sponsored by the fossil-fuel-entrenched Heartland Institute to fabricate stories challenging climate science, in order to keep the public skeptical. Brazen as they are, they don’t even bother to hide what they’re up to. 
Throughout their decades-long propaganda campaign, these science-denying oil execs understood and accepted climate change science so much that they prepared for it, making plans to raise drilling rigs higher than the seas they denied were rising.
Now they have the gall to ask taxpayers pay to help them raise the rigs. Surely this kind of knowingly lying to the public in the mass media should be a crime? And surely those who perpetrate these crimes should go to jail?
Mann agrees it is, and they should, and further said that in dealing with these nefarious elements, he realized early on that his job was to be a lightning rod. He would let the climate deniers hurl their thunderbolts at him while he kept his calm and stayed on his path. Their attacks helped to make him well-known. He has used his notoriety well. 
Mann is in the midst of another national media tour, made possible by alarming new reports from the International Panel on Climate Change and by California’s record-setting wildfires and other increasingly alarming natural disasters linked to climate change.
Mann’s mission is three-fold:
1. To make the climate science clear and understandable.
2. To present a viable path forward; and
3. To make sure we know the urgency of the matter, that the clean energy transition must happen now.
Mann has again and again taken the oil-infatuated right’s punches and gotten right back up, responding with a colloquial, easy-going confidence: “We could have done this (accomplished the clean energy transition) on a bunny slope if we had started twenty years ago,” he said, “But now instead we’ll have to manage a black diamond.”
Or, as Bill McKibben famously said, “Winning slowly is the same as losing.”
So how does Mann plan to shake many more of us awake so that we can handle the steep demands facing us?”
Mann gave the following advice: Forget the deniers, who are now a minority. Target the confused middle. Make sure they know the actual debate is over, that the science is clear. Make sure everyone understands that there was a deliberate misinformation campaign designed to create doubt over something big oil actually believed. Let them know there are solutions that are real and doable if we can get control of the fossil fuel industry and get them out of the way of our evolutionary progress toward a clean and sustainable planet.
“To right the ship is the biggest part of our job,” Mann said. “We must get the money out of politics and make it illegal for so much of our media to be owned by private corporations.” He also called for a price on carbon, but said that we should allow oil and gas leaders to be part of the solution, since “There’s nothing more attractive than watching a villain get into the hero space.”
We also need to understand, Mann said, that fossil fuel lobbyists have been very effective and have been a formidable opponent of humanity for long enough. We need a mobilization effort every bit as massive and all-encompassing as that of World War Two. 
He likes the Green New Deal idea being promoted by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Cortez-Ocasio. He says climate change the biggest challenge we will ever face, but that our efforts to eliminate Acid Rain in the late twentieth century is proof we can do it.
If you want to help Mann wield his mighty hockey stick in the ongoing hair-raising battle for humanity’s future, you can find him on Twitter at @MichaelEMann and on the web at michaelmann.net.
And of course, you can also share Bucky Ideas.
If through this and other acts of obstruction, Trump succeeds at slowing down the transition to clean energy, he will be directly endangering the futures of our children and grandchildren. Surely it is time to say enough.
Mann says the prophets, like Bill McKibben and E.O. Wilson, believe that nature holds the answers and the reigns and that we must realign ourselves with nature’s design principles if we hope to be kept hanging around. Prophets say we should green up the planet, return our hearts and souls to nature, understanding that she always bats last.
Start by sharing this post with your social media groups. Then speak out every chance you get. Watch for opportunities to show up and be counted. At least you’ll be able to tell your children and grandchildren that you did something. You did not just sit back and watch while an odd orange-haired man dismantled everything you cared about— including their future.
President Barack Obama and the erratic president elect are so far silent on the issue, but pressure is intensifying for them to do or say something. 
take care of all humanity at a higher standard of living than any have ever experienced and do so on a sustaining basis by employing only our daily energy income from Sun and gravity and (2) that we can do so in time to permit the healthy continuance of humans on plant Earth.”
Today’s Americans need to know that we have been traveling on this road for a long time. If they do, then maybe won’t get fooled again.
By Patricia Field Ravasio
“It’s not really that awful, but inevitable and probably necessary. There are two hundred and forty captains on this planet all running different ships, and we need to integrate and work together as one United Spaceship Planet Earth. But thus far, America’s intense sense of nationalism is making it impossible for it to integrate with the rest of the world.”
Buckminster Fuller’s wisdom about the overall superiority of a feminine paradigm of leadership was published in a 1968 McCall’s Magazine article, entitled “Why Women Will Rule the World”.
BUCKYIDEAS 