Category: News

Originally published August 10, 2023 through the Penn Today email newsletter. Learn more about Penn Today here.

Studying giant clams helps scientists understand increasing ocean acidity, which could lead to population decline in some species and leave fish more vulnerable to predators, rising third-year Alice Andrews of the College of Arts and Sciences writes in a blog post. “Giant clams serve as remarkable timekeepers, allowing us to unlock the secrets of the past and shed light on the effects of ocean acidification caused by anthropogenic carbon emissions,” writes Andrews, who is from Belfast, Maine.

Read Alice’s Blog here.

Originally published by Peter Coy for The New York Times on December 8, 2023

Illustration by The New York Times

Fighting climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air with giant blowers seems like a brilliant idea. Why knock yourself out trying to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions when you can continue to produce the emissions and then snatch them back from the atmosphere? That solution reminds me of the little red vehicle with robotic arms that the Cat in the Hat uses to clean up the house that he, Thing One and Thing Two have just trashed. “Have no fear of this mess,” the Cat in the Hat tells the children. “I always pick up all my playthings.”

But direct air capture of carbon, as the nascent technology is called, is not as reliable as Dr. Seuss’s three-wheeled deus ex machina. And it’s coming in for heavy criticism at COP28, the United Nations climate summit that’s happening in the desert city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. “It’s incredibly dangerous for the fossil fuel industry and its enablers in government to promote the idea that they can keep burning fossil fuels while pulling carbon out of the air or out of the smokestacks with technologies that consistently fail to deliver,” Collin Rees, the U.S. program manager at Oil Change International, wrote in an email.

Direct air capture of carbon isn’t a completely bad idea. In fact, it’s going to have to be part of the solution to climate change eventually. That’s because in some sectors of the economy, it’s impossible or extremely costly to reduce greenhouse gas emissions all the way to zero. Jet aviation and cement production are two examples that people sometimes mention (although technological breakthroughs may change that). In such sectors, it’s more cost-effective to get to net zero by allowing a little carbon to dribble out and then cleaning it up through direct air capture.

To continue reading the article, click here. This is a NYT subscriber only article.

Originally published by Frank Kummer for The Philadelphia Inquirer on November 20, 2023

Mann, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Socolow, of Princeton, were named 2023 John Scott Award winners.

Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania (left) and Robert Socolow of Princeton University are winners of the 2023 Scott Awards.Joshua Yospyn / David Kelly Crow -Princeton University

Michael Mann, a nationally recognized climate scientist at Penn, notes that Benjamin Franklin charted the Gulf Stream, launched complaints against tanneries polluting Philadelphia’s Dock Creek, and studied weather patterns.

Maybe it’s a bit of kismet then that he’s one of two scientists, along with Princeton’s Robert Socolow, named as winners of the 2023 John Scott Awards. The prestigious awards are named after the 19th-century chemist who endowed the prize in honor of Franklin.

“The award means a lot to me,” Mann said, “because it reflects sort of the legacy of Benjamin Franklin. He was an environmentalist. You could even argue he was an early climate scientist and a climate advocate.”

The awards this year focused on climate change, “recognizing the growing urgency worldwide to address the crisis of global warming.” Mann and Socolow will be presented with their awards Nov. 30 at the American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743 by Franklin in Philadelphia.

The award comes with a prize of $15,000 each. Winners are selected by other scientists from around the nation. The awards are administered by the Board of Directors of City Trusts, a group that manages dozens of charitable trusts for which the City of Philadelphia has been named as trustee.

Mann, 57, is a presidential distinguished professor in the department of earth and environmental science and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. He was long associated with Penn State, until he took the job at Penn in 2022.

Mann became widely known in climate science after the 1999 publication of his “hockey stick” graph, which showed earth’s average temperature had been mostly stable for 1,000 years until 1900, when it spiked sharply up. His latest book, Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from the Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis, seeks to show how conditions that allow humans to live on this earth are incredibly fragile.

Mann, who has strong family connections to Philadelphia, said he’s glad he made the move in 2022 to Penn, where he focuses not only on climate science, but also on how to reach the public on misinformation that spreads so quickly on cable TV, the internet, and social media.

“My view is that the debate over the science has really moved on,” Mann said. “Obviously there’s a denialist fringe out there. But the debate has moved away from denial because that position is no longer tenable. It’s about division and distraction.”

He’s teaching a joint course in the spring with Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, on the challenges communicating about climate and environment. He refers to new media, which includes social media, as “the Wild West,” where misinformation about climate science spreads virally.

“It’s sort of fun for me to be bringing together communication students and science students in the same class,” he said. “I think the interaction will be very interesting.”

Originally published by Dr. Michael Mann for The Hill on November 5, 2023

This op-ed is part of a series exploring what a second term would look like for either President Biden or former President Trump.

Back in the home stretch of the 2020 presidential election, I stated that a second Trump term would be “game over for the climate.” That hasn’t changed in the years since. In fact, it’s become even more true.

Originally published by Nathi Magubane for Penn Today on November 9, 2023

As the world leaders and climate policymakers brace for the forthcoming COP28, Joe Romm, a senior research fellow in the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media, presents two new research papers that cast a sobering light on much-touted “solutions” to curb climate change.The papers—“Why direct air carbon capture and storage (DACCS) is not scalable, and ‘net zero’ is just a dangerous myth” and “Why scaling bioenergy and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) is impractical and would speed up global warming”—serve as reminders that in the race to avert climate calamity, all that glitters is not green.On Nov. 9, he will deliver his keynote at The Third Annual Carbon Dioxide Removal Law & Policy online conference at American University. Ahead of the event, Romm, a met with Penn Today to discuss the intricacies of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) and expose the fallacies that threaten to derail climate action.

Question: What inspired you to focus your research on CDR technologies and their role in climate policy?

Answer: I have been focused on the solutions to climate change since I was at the U.S. Department of Energy from 1993 to 1998 and acting assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy in 1997. Over the last quarter century, the technologies that we invested in back then heavily—solar, wind, geothermal advance batteries, alternative fuel vehicles, and various energy efficiency technologies in buildings and industry—have emerged as the scalable solutions to the urgent need to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions.

But in the last decade as global emissions have soared to 50 billion tons (Gt) of CO2 equivalent, carbon dioxide removal strategies have generated great interest. The three most widely analyzed and modeled are direct air carbon capture and storage which pulls CO2 directly out of the air and stores it underground; planting trees; and bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, whereby growing biomass removes CO2 from the air and a CCS system on the bioenergy plant could permanently bury it.

Many people have even argued that because of these CDR strategies, we don’t have to actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions so rapidly. But I had always been concerned that DACCS and BECCS are not even commercial yet, so relying on them was risky. So, that is why I took a close look at CDR.

Question: What are some of the primary barriers to the scalability of DACCS that you’ve identified?

Answer: The first barrier is simply how difficult it is to extract CO2 out of the air in large quantities. The overall efficiency of DACCS is very low (5% to 10%) and the price very high because CO2 in the air is so diluted—420 parts per million. For context, the entire Houston Astrodome contains only about 1 ton of CO2.

Per ton of CO2 captured and stored, current costs range from $600 to $1,000 or more. Yet as a document, many experts in and out of the industry believe that it will be difficult to bring costs substantially below $300 per ton.

Also, you must run the system on a huge amount of renewable energy to actually reduce net CO2 emissions. A 2020 review concluded ‘renewables-powered DAC would require all of the wind and solar energy generated in the U.S. in 2018 to capture just 1/10th of a Gt of CO2.’

But the opportunity cost of all this money and renewables is huge because you could have achieved far more CO2 emissions reductions for a far lower cost simply by using them to replace existing fossil fuel plants on the grid and to power electric vehicles to replace gasoline powered cars. So, studies make clear that until you have eliminated most fossil fuel use, which is unlikely to occur before 2050, DACCS is a costly distraction.

Question: What does ‘net zero’ mean, and why has it become such a focal point in climate discussions?

Answer: The science says that to stabilize global temperatures at levels needed to avoid dangerous climate change, we need to reduce emissions from 50 GT/year to zero by 2050. But, in theory, with a scaled-up CDR effort, we might only have to make reductions of, say, 50 GT/year if we could remove 10 GT/year.

This is a dangerous myth because it could easily delay or deter real emissions reductions in the next decade or two. And one 2020 study argues that if in fact all that CDR does not pan out, then that could result in ‘an additional temperature rise of up to 1.4°C’ (2.5°F).

And a great many people have even argued that with enough CDR we could conceivably overshoot a temperature target by mid-century and then turn global emissions massively negative to quickly cool back down. But this is dangerous magical thinking since, in reality, we don’t have anywhere near that amount of scalable CDR.

Given the complexity of climate models, how do you simplify the concept of carbon capture for a broader audience without losing the essential details?

I think that people understand the essential idea that we have to dramatically reduce total CO2 emissions sharply by mid-century to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. The basic idea of CCS is that one way to reduce emissions is to put a system on an existing coal plant to capture the CO2 in the exhaust gas of the power plant and then bury the captured CO2 underground. So far, efforts to do this have failed to make this a practical, affordable, and scalable strategy. The U.S. government has created a large subsidy for CCS under the Inflation Reduction Act to see if that will fix things.

With BECCS, all you are doing is putting the CCS system on a bioenergy plant. DACCS is more complicated because you have to build a huge device to pull CO2 out of the air and then you use a CCS system to capture and bury it.

Question: You mention that massive tree-planting is not a practical climate solution. What are the limitations of this strategy?

Answer: The basic problem is that it requires a huge amount of land to achieve even modest impacts.

As an August piece I wrote with Climate Interactive Executive Director Andrew Jones explained, their modeling ‘found that planting 1 trillion trees, under optimistic conditions, would remove only 6% of the needed CO₂ reduction [to limit total warming to 1.5°C]. And that would require a wildly unrealistic amount of land, over 2 billion acres, which is to say over 2 billion football fields—greater than the total land area of the contiguous United States.’

Question: If carbon capture isn’t the silver bullet, what alternatives do you believe should be our focus to reduce CO2 emissions?

Answer: The core strategy to reduce CO2 emissions is well understood. You need to rapidly decarbonize the electric grid by replacing coal and gas plants with solar and wind power–and other renewables as they become available. You also have to add storage technologies and strategies to deal with the fact that many renewables have variable emissions. You also need to continue the development of new carbon-free power sources that don’t need storage.

At the same time, you need to replace the technologies that rely on fossil fuels for transportation and heating and industrial processes with ones that rely on electricity. These include electric vehicles, electric heat pumps for heating, and the like.

This way by mid-century you end up with a zero-carbon electric grid and the vast majority of the economy running on electricity.

Question: Looking beyond COP28, what gives you hope about our ability to address the climate crisis?

Answer: What gives me the most hope is the tremendous advances in the last two decades in bringing down the cost of various technologies that are essential to rapidly reducing emissions. These include solar and wind power, batteries, electric vehicles, and various forms of energy efficiency such as LED lights. The vast majority of the technologies needed to address the climate crisis are already commercial—and the rest of technologies are near commercial. What we lack now is only the political will to deploy these technologies fast enough to minimize the worst impacts of climate change.

Originally published by Phil McKenna for Inside Climate News on October 3, 2023.

The maker of the iPhone is a leader in efforts to reduce the climate impact of its products, but a recent claim about its new line of Apple Watches may be “climate-wash,” a Chinese environmental research organization says.

Apple’s recent announcement of its first-ever “carbon neutral” product was questioned in a new report by a Chinese environmental research organization that gathers and tracks data on greenhouse gas emissions from China’s manufacturing sector, which makes the majority of Apple products.

As part of a high profile environmental campaign including a 5-minute video featuring an approving “Mother Nature” played by actress Octavia Spencer,  Apple announced on Sept. 12 that its new Apple Watch was carbon neutral, meaning its production does not contribute to climate change.

But the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), a well-regarded nonprofit entity based in Beijing, concluded in a Sept. 22 report that the company may be “climate-washing,” or overstating its efforts to address climate change.

Apple has previously praised IPE as “a leading non-profit environmental research organization” that is “dedicated to collecting, collating, and analyzing government and corporate environmental data.” The organization has been analyzing the environmental performance of production facilities in China for more than a decade.

In response to IPE’s latest report, Apple responded that the carbon neutrality of its Apple Watch line has been independently verified by SCS Global Services, a “leader in environmental standards and certification.”

“By far, the most impactful action a supplier can take to address climate change is to transition to renewable energy,” Apple said in a written statement. “That’s why we work closely with suppliers to help them procure more renewables and advocate together for reliable, cost-effective access to clean electricity in grids around the world.”

The IPE analysis concluded that Apple is not revealing enough information about suppliers who manufacture Apple products to substantiate the claim of carbon neutrality. IPE said it had received data on greenhouse gas emissions from fewer of Apple’s suppliers in 2023 than in prior years.

The report said that the company’s suppliers rely heavily on the purchase of renewable energy certificates, the efficacy of which have been called into question, rather than the direct use of renewable energy.

Apple would likely need 100 percent renewable energy to make carbon neutral watches. If the emissions profile of iPhones suddenly increased, as Apple also disclosed, one plausible explanation would be that the company allocated less renewable energy to iPhones so that it had more renewable energy to allocate to its watches, the IPE said.

“If this assumption is correct, is Apple’s carbon neutrality ‘milestone’ really a significant reduction in the carbon emissions of its product manufacturing process, or just a mathematical equation whereby Apple cherry picks the limited green electricity from its suppliers and allocate them to one relatively niche product?” the report asked.

Apple responded in a statement that it did not re-allocate renewable energy from the production of iPhones or other products to the Apple Watch. The company added that greenhouse gas emissions for its new  iPhone 15 Pro are 28 percent lower than the company’s 2015 baseline, due largely to an increase in the amount of renewable energy used by their suppliers.

In 2011, IPE released two scathing investigative reports calling out Apple for its failure to disclose information about its suppliers and for the pollution those suppliers released from their factories. Following the reports, Apple disclosed more information about its suppliers and worked with them to clean up their practices. IPE has subsequently ranked Apple at or near the top of its annual “Green Supply Chain” and “Climate Action” indices.

In 2019, Apple became the first among more than 400 companies with manufacturing suppliers in China to receive IPE’s “Master” title for their outstanding green supply chain performance.

“In many years of our index assessment, Apple was one of the top performers, so we did give it credit for that, but when it started making the claim of [a] carbon neutral product, that is a very high standard and I think it needs an even higher level of disclosure,” Ma Jun, IPE’s director, said last week.

However, Ma said that the company appears to be regressing on public disclosure. He noted that fewer than 30 Apple suppliers disclosed facility level greenhouse gas emissions data to IPE in 2023, down from about 100 suppliers in prior years.

“The number has dropped at a very special moment, when carbon neutral products are being released,” Ma said.

Apple disputed the claim and said many of its suppliers publicly disclose their greenhouse gas emissions data, and Apple encourages them to do so.

“We strongly support climate disclosures to improve transparency and drive progress in the fight against climate change,” Apple said. “For the last decade, Apple has modeled, measured, and voluntarily reported our greenhouse gas emissions across all scopes of emissions, and publicly advocated for disclosure around the world. As stated clearly in our Supplier Code of Conduct, we require suppliers to report their Apple-related greenhouse gas emissions to us each year, and to comply with any laws and regulations that mandate reporting of emissions to local or national authorities.”

Joseph Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media, praised the IPE report and concurred with many of its findings.

“What exactly does it mean to say one of your products is carbon neutral” when reported emissions associated with the new iPhone 15 actually increased? Romm asked. “It seems to me to be kind of like saying your pinky is cancer free, but the rest of your body isn’t.”

Romm said Apple’s definition of carbon neutral, described in its 2023 sustainability report as reducing its emissions by 75 percent and balancing the remaining emissions with the purchase of carbon offsets, is arbitrary and less ambitious than other definitions.

He noted that the Science Based Targets initiative, a partnership that includes CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), the United Nations Global Compact, World Resources Institute and the World Wide Fund for Nature, defines carbon neutral as reducing direct emissions by at least 90 percent and using carbon offsets to balance out no more than 10 percent of remaining emissions.

Romm said that the carbon offsets that companies buy to balance out their own emissions have come under increasing scrutiny. A white paper he published earlier this year noted that many companies and events, including Delta Airlines and the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, have had their climate neutral claims challenged in court due to reliance on problematic offsets.

“A lot of companies have stopped buying offsets,” Romm said, citing recent news reports that Shell, Gucci and Nestlé all recently discontinued the practice. “Apple seems to have missed the boat, that the world is really changing here.”

The New Climate Institute, an environmental organization based in Germany, gave Apple high marks in its 2023 Corporate Climate Responsibility Monitor report but wrote in a recent blog post that the company’s carbon neutral claim for Apple Watches is “a bold exaggeration.”

A key challenge in Apple’s quest for carbon neutrality—the company’s goal is for all of its products to be carbon neutral in 2030—is manufacturing and the greenhouse gas emissions tied to the electricity its suppliers use to power their factories.

“The electricity that our manufacturing suppliers use represents the largest single source of carbon emissions throughout our manufacturing supply chain,” Apple states in its most recent sustainability report. The vast majority of Apple products are made in China, where 63 percent of the grid was powered by coal in 2022.

Apple has made substantial direct investments in renewable energy, including nearly 500 megawatts of solar and wind projects in China and Japan. The company is also widely recognized as a leader in helping its suppliers develop or purchase renewable energy to power their factories.

As of March 2023, Apple noted that “over 250 suppliers making up over 85 percent of Apple’s direct spend for materials, manufacturing, and assembly of our products worldwide have committed to using renewable electricity for their Apple production.”

However, many of Apple’s suppliers still have only limited access to renewable energy. IPE noted in its report that, based on Apple’s own reporting, 24 percent of the 250 suppliers that have pledged to use renewable energy “are unable to achieve clean energy substitution through onsite renewable electricity or renewable power purchases, etc., and need to purchase renewable energy certificates.”

Such certificates, which are intended to help fund new renewable energy development, are “unlikely to lead to additional renewable energy production” and “threaten the integrity” of corporate emission reduction targets, according to a 2022 study published in the journal Nature.

Further, some of Apple’s leading suppliers, such as Foxconn and Pegatron, report renewable energy made up just 8 percent or less of their electric power, according to a New Climate Institute assessment of the companies’ recent sustainability reports.

Recent media reports have named Foxconn as a producer of Apple’s watches, but it’s not clear what mix of renewable versus fossil energy it used in the specific factories that make those products.

While Apple said in its response to the IPE report that SCS Global Services has verified the carbon neutrality of its Apple Watch, Ma said more transparency is needed to substantiate that claim.

“Just to say that a third party has done it, that’s not sufficient,” Ma said. “Apple should be the one that needs to be held accountable for this and should provide a more transparent way for this to be verified.”

Originally published by Nathi Magubane for Penn Today on September 22, 2023. Image: Courtesy of Gabrielle Szcepanek.

In a session moderated by Simon Richter, panelists Erol Akçay, Michael Mann, and Zinta Zommers discussed the impact of climate change on efforts to conserve biological diversity.

In era punctuated by climate-driven disasters and an ever-worsening ecological crisis, the question of our planet’s future has never been more urgent. As wildfires, floods, and cyclones become increasingly frequent and severe, how we respond to these challenges could determine the fate of millions of species, including humankind.

Addressing this urgency, Perry World House joined with the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media and the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania to present a panel discussion, “The World Today: The Crisis of Climate-Driven Extinction.”

The Sept. 19 event was part of Climate Week at Penn and convened a panel of experts across disciplines to discuss the intersection of biodiversity loss and climate change, a crisis that the United Nations describes as a “triple planetary crisis.”

The conversation was moderated by Simon Richter, who specializes in cultural aspects of adaptation, resilience, and migration in the context of the climate emergency. The panel included Erol Akçay, a theoretical biologist; Michael Mann, a climate scientist; and Zinta Zommers, a former visiting fellow at Perry World House and specialist in risk management and climate-change adaptation.

Defined as a measure of variability and diversity of all life on Earth, biodiversity, Akçay explained, is as pervasive as it is important in maintaining functional and thriving ecosystems. In much the same way that diversity of producers and consumers can disparately facilitate exchanges of goods and services that have a ripple effect through economies at varying scales, biodiversity serves as a catalyst for ecological stability, he said.

According to Akçay, the interactions among various species are not isolated incidents but interconnected events that have far-reaching implications for the health of the planet. As such, threats to reducing biodiversity increase the risk of extinction for not just one species but for many others.

As an example to highlight the often-unexpected ways in which reduced biodiversity can impact us, Akçay noted how, in 2019, researchers discovered the first new class of antibiotics effective against gram negative bacteria, such as E. coli, since the 1960s.

“This is significant because antibiotic resistance is a grave concern for both human health and agriculture,” Akçay said.

He noted that the initial discovery was made in the gut microbiome of a nematode, a parasitic worm found in insects, and that, when you diminish insect populations, you reduce the diversity of bacteria essential for creating antibiotics. “If this situation is further exacerbated, it could lead to pre-penicillin-like condition, wherein a simple cut could lead to death, due to a lack of antibiotics to treat a possible infection,” he said.

Akçay said that, in the context of biological problems, consequences often cascade in unforeseen directions, making reductions in biodiversity a potential trigger for a host of unforeseen problems.

In answering Richter’s question regarding how human activity could set a course correction for mitigating costs to biodiversity, Akçay mentioned two major contributors to species extinction: land-use change, as in repurposing habitats for agricultural, housing, or business needs; and direct exploitation via hunting or fishing.

“If we don’t get a handle on these, we’re going to continually see massive biodiversity reductions in the face of climate change as fewer habitats and smaller population sizes due to exploitation mean less capacity of species to adapt to changing climatic conditions,” Akçay said.

Zommers brought up the policy-based efforts towards mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss and noted that both the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were created in 1992, “so, they are almost like brother and sister but both haven’t been successful in many ways,” she said. “The CBD had targets set in 2010  (the Aichi Targets) that outlined what the governments of the world should do to protect biodiversity, but in 2020 the CBD reported that none of these targets had been met.”

Zommers said that this highlights a major issue that plagues climate communities: “We’re making lots of pledges, but where is the action?”

She noted that in 2022 governments met to urge for more commitment to these targets in the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) and adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which set out an ambitious pathway to achieve the CBD’s goals. Zommers believes what’s interesting here is that both the CBD and the UNFCCC have these similar histories and, going forward, a similar framing, wherein both have goals and the idea is to ratchet up the ambition over time. And in both, she said, there is a great deal of discussion about financing these actions.

She mentioned that the difference is that the CBD now has a clearer road map for what governments should do such as, reducing subsidies in certain areas and helping industry focus on biodiversity, whereas UNFCCC has targets like the 1.5°C goal but with no clear road map for how this should be implemented and with each government is meant to come up with their own strategy.

“Overall, the two are tied to some degree, in that unless we achieve our climate goals, a significant amount of this planet’s biodiversity will be lost,” Zommers said.

In tying it all together, Mann said his research in climate science is congruent with the concerns outlined by Akçay and Zommers, as climate change is a major contributor to what has been characterized as the next major extinction event. He noted that in conducting research for his latest book, “Our Fragile Moment,” his perspective was colored by looking at past extinction events such as the The Great Dying Event, wherein 96% of all marine biota went extinct. He said that many look at as an analog for human-driven extinction related to human-driven activities that cause climate change.

“The extinction that will result from climate change could be much like the Great Dying Event, which was driven in part by climate change that occurred from carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere from a major volcanic out gassing event,” Mann said.

“Much like we’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere today, this was a natural addition of carbon dioxide, which also resulted in a massive deoxygenation of the oceans that probably led to an increase in hydrogen sulfide; my colleague describes this as a global stink bomb.”

Mann argued that humanity may be headed towards Great Dying-like conditions unless there is a major course correction. He said that, while this would be a “rapid event,” there are others that occurred 56 million years ago that are also considered rapid and led to mass extinctions; however, these “natural events pale in comparison to the events we’re witnessing today as the ones we’re seeing are at least 100 times more rapid than any of the natural events. And that’s the cause for concern,” he said.

He added that, although the planet has seen much higher temperatures, it hasn’t seen these rates before, which poses a major challenge for species to adapt to in terms of biological and evolutionary time scales. “If you have a long time to adapt to the changes we’ve made to the planet, like building elaborate housing and transport networks that interfere with the migratory patterns of animals, it’s much easier to adapt, but the rate at which we’re changing the environment’s conditions—via things like physical obstacles or contaminants to the natural environment—is unprecedented” Mann said.

“So, the lesson is,” he said. “it’s all about the rate of contribution of carbon input, and, if we continue on this trajectory, then I believe there’s no question that climate change will be a major contributor to what will be described as the sixth great extinction event.”

Simon Richter is professor of Germanic languages and literatures, a Perry World House faculty fellow, a faculty fellow of Penn Institute of Urban Research, and a faculty advisory board member of the Water Center at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Michael Mann is a Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts & Sciences with a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication and the director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania.

Erol Akçay is an associate professor in the Department of Biology in the School of Arts & Sciences at Penn. 

Zinta Zommers is a humanitarian affairs officer with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and served as the Wolk Visiting Fellow (2021-22) and a Visiting Fellow (2022-23) at the Perry World House at Penn. 

Originally published By Michael Mann for the LA Times on September 24, 2023.

“The climate is always changing!” So goes a popular refrain from climate deniers who continue to claim that there’s nothing special about this particular moment. There is no climate crisis, they say, because the Earth has survived dramatic warming before.

Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy recently exemplified misconceptions about our planet’s climate past. When he asserted that “carbon dioxide as a percentage of the atmosphere is still at a relative low through human history,” he didn’t just make a false statement (carbon dioxide concentrations are the highest they’ve been in at least 4 million years). He also showed fundamentally wrong thinking around the climate crisis.

Originally published by Rikki Schlott for New York Post on September 27, 2023.

The petulant protesters just won’t let up.

On Sunday, climate activists attempted to interrupt the Berlin Marathon by dumping orange paint on the race course and lying down in the middle of the road.

Weeks earlier, Climate Extinction protesters wearing shirts reading “End Fossil Fuels” screeched and hollered during a US Open match at Arthur Ashe Stadium in Queens.

One even glued his feet to the floor, stalling the match between Coco Gauff and Karolina Muchova for 50 minutes, thousands of paying spectators be damned.

And who can forget the viral soup-slingers who splattered Van Gogh’s iconic “Sunflowers” painting at the National Gallery last fall? Or the PETA protester — her mostly naked body painted with the words “Coach Leather Kills” — who crashed the brand’s runway show at New York Fashion Week in early September?

I’m actually sympathetic to her cause — so much so that I haven’t eaten meat since I was 14 — and yet I am embarrassed by her tactics. Imagine how many others whose minds could be changed were turned off completely.

Sure, these stunts get headlines … but for all the wrong reasons. Who in their right mind looks at a Van Gogh covered in tomato chunks and thinks, “Maybe I should listen to what the people who did that have to say”?

It’s also churlish to take the spotlight away from runners who trained for months and traveled around the world to compete in a marathon, or athletes who spent a lifetime working their way to the US Open.

But when these stunts meaningfully disrupt the day-to-day functioning of society — that’s simply inexcusable.

In late August, climate protesters in Washington, DC, sat cross-legged blocking traffic along Interstate 396, a multi-lane highway. Was anyone surprised when furious commuters emerged from their cars to snatch away signs and demand these people move?

“I want to go to work! I want to go to work,” one driver shouted.

“Y’all can find a better way to protest,” another chimed in. “Y’all holding me up.”

“I have kids to feed, b—ch,” a woman shouted in the face of one stoic protester. “You don’t think we know the Earth is f—king melting?”

And climate protesters in the United Kingdom went as far as blocking fire engines and ambulances from responding to emergencies last year — a move so egregious that even Greta Thunberg rightfully condemned them.

Disrupting innocent bystanders’ commute to work — or worse, their potentially life-saving ride in an ambulance — is absolutely unacceptable and entirely counterproductive.

I’m not alone in thinking these protests fail to change minds.

A 2022 survey conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that Americans overwhelmingly disapprove of these sorts of stunts.

In fact, 46% of respondents said nonviolent disruptive protests decrease their support for efforts to address climate change, and a mere 13% said they increase them.

A similar poll from Germany found that 83% of respondents felt climate protests had gone too far.

The West has a laudable history of protesting, from women’s suffrage to the civil rights movement.

That heritage has led generation after generation to pick up the mantle of civil disobedience with righteousness — so much so that the organization behind the DC highway debacle took to X, formerly Twitter, to say as much.

“For us,” Declare Emergency organizers wrote, “this was a great way to honor the legacy of Dr. King and to carry on his tradition of disruptive, nonviolent civil disobedience!”

But not all protests are created equal.

As much as these self-righteous agitators might like to fashion themselves as the successors of King’s legacy, the truth is they aren’t. Having petulant meltdowns while dripping with glue and soup simply doesn’t have the same effect.

Originally published on September 13, 2023 by Jacob Goldberg, Léopold Salzenstein, Sarah Brown, and Shaz Syed for The New Humanitarian

An investigation by The New Humanitarian and Mongabay

About this investigation: The UN has long championed the need for urgent climate solutions. Yet its own actions – particularly its reliance on low-quality carbon offsets – undermine its leadership on fighting climate change. Building on our 2021 investigation that found the UN failed to count all of its emissions, The New Humanitarian teamed up with Mongabay, a US-based environmental news outlet, to investigate the UN’s claims of climate neutrality. In an investigation that took a year and spanned multiple countries, reporters obtained details about carbon credits purchased by 33 UN entities, representing more than 75% of its reported offset portfolio since 2012. More than a dozen of the projects that issued the UN’s carbon credits were linked to reports of environmental damage, displacement, or health concerns. Others were deemed worthless by a number of leading climate experts.

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