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What Are the Most Effective Strategies To Inspire Action on Climate Change?

By Hailey Reissman for Annenberg School for Communication News – originally published March 18, 2024

Climate change is an undeniably complex global problem. It’s often challenging for individuals to feel like they can make an impact — if they even know how. Should you be turning off your lights more? Recycling? Taking public transit? Purchasing carbon offsets? Even when people understand what they should be doing, they often default to inaction because the crisis can seem so distant from everyday life or scary to think about.

To figure out how to effectively motivate people toward climate change action, researchers in the Communication Neuroscience Lab at the Annenberg School for Communication, the Climate Communication Division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at the University of Pennsylvania are testing numerous methods to educate people about climate change and spur them to take action. Ranging from quizzes to imagination exercises, the researchers hope to determine which strategies are most effective and for whom.

Alyssa (Allie) Sinclair, Ph.D. — Allie Sinclair, Ph.D.

“Climate change is primarily a problem of human behavior. As psychologists and communication scientists, we have the tools to discover how we can motivate people to feel like they can and should take action,’” says Allie Sinclair, study leader and the Joan Bossert Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Communication Neuroscience Lab and the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

The interdisciplinary team has already run experiments with more than 6,000 people to test a range of different strategies informed by how the brain works.

After every intervention, participants are asked to rate their intentions to do things like engage in individual and community-focused climate mitigating actions, share articles about the climate crisis, or sign petitions about climate policy, as well as emotional aspects, such as how distant the climate crisis feels to them — in terms of time, geographic space, and personal impact.

“By using the tournament format, we can test many different behavioral interventions with the same group of people and see which intervention worked best for each goal, and for which demographic groups,” Sinclair says.

The team is using strategies that tap into a number of well-defined psychological processes.

For example, several interventions tap into people’s sense of what is relevant to them or to people they care about. In one intervention, participants reflect on why climate-related news matters to themselves or to people they know. Previous research from the team had people consider articles about health, climate change, voting, and COVID-19 and found that an individual is more likely to share information that they feel is meaningful to themselves or to the people they know.

Emily Falk, Ph.D.

Other groups of interventions are focused on imagining the future, and on the impact of different possible choices people can make.

The strategies focused on imagining the future are based on previous research led by Sinclair showing that when people fire up their imaginations to picture a COVID-related scenario — like a person contracting the virus at a party — it can change how dangerous they perceive various COVID-related risky behaviors to be, and whether or not they’re willing to do those risky behaviors. Finally, the strategies focused on impact are riffs on other commonly used intervention to engage people in climate action.

“We’ll take some of our top winners from this wave and pit them against each other, both to replicate our results and to see if combining them creates synergistic effects,” Sinclair says. “By testing them together, we hope to find an intervention that is even better at encouraging climate action.”

“Climate change is one of the most important issues of our time,” says Emily Falk, the senior author and lab director. “This work will provide actionable insights about what works and what doesn’t, so we can shape the future in positive ways.”

Members of the lab involved in the tournament include Director of the Communication Neuroscience Lab and Vice Dean of the Annenberg School Emily Falk, Research Director Dani Cosme, Senior Research Coordinator José Carreras-Tartak, Annenberg doctoral student Kirsten Lydic, as well as Penn Psychology doctoral students Taurean Butler and Christian Benitez. The team is also collaborating with Presidential Distinguished Professor Michael Mann and Administrative Coordinator Heather Kostick at the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media.

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. 140D0423C0048. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA); or its Contracting Agent, the U.S. Department of the Interior, Interior Business Center, Acquisition Services Directorate, Division V.

Michael Mann, a Leading Climate Scientist, Wins His Defamation Suit

Originally published by Delger Erdenesanaa for The New York Times on February 8, 2024.

Feature image: Michael Mann leaving D.C. Superior Court on Wednesday.Credit…Pete Marovich for The New York Times

The researcher had sued two writers for libel and slander over comments about his work. The jury awarded him damages of more than $1 million.

The climate scientist Michael Mann on Thursday won his defamation lawsuit against Rand Simberg, a former adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and Mark Steyn, a contributor to National Review.

The trial transported observers back to 2012, the heyday of the blogosphere and an era of rancorous polemics over the existence of global warming, what the psychology researcher and climate misinformation blogger John Cook called “a feral time.”

The six-member jury announced its unanimous verdict after a four-week trial in District of Columbia Superior Court and one full day of deliberation. They found both Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn guilty of defaming Dr. Mann with multiple false statements and awarded the scientist $1 in compensatory damages from each writer.

The jury also found the writers had made their statements with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm,” and levied punitive damages of $1,000 against Mr. Simberg and $1 million against Mr. Steyn in order to deter others from doing the same.

“This is a victory for science and it’s a victory for scientists,” Dr. Mann said.

In 2012, Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn drew parallels between controversy over Dr. Mann’s research and the scandal around Jerry Sandusky, the former football coach at Pennsylvania State University who was convicted of sexually assaulting children. Dr. Mann was a professor at Penn State at the time.

“I am pleased that the jury found in my favor on half of the statements at issue in this case, including finding my statement that Dr. Mann engaged in data manipulation was not defamation,” Mr. Simberg said in a statement emailed by his attorney.

Mr. Steyn’s manager, Melissa Howes, wrote in an email: “We always said that Mann never suffered any actual injury from the statement at issue. And today, after twelve years, the jury awarded him one dollar in compensatory damages. The punitive damage award of one million dollars will have to face due process scrutiny under U.S. Supreme Court precedent.”

The two sides argued for days about the truth or falsity of the posts, presenting evidence that included unflattering emails between Dr. Mann and colleagues, excerpts from investigations by Penn State and the National Science Foundation that cleared Dr. Mann of academic misconduct, other scientists who testified that Dr. Mann had ruined their reputations, and a detailed but controversial critique of his research methods by a statistician.

“It’s constitutionally deliberately hard to win defamation suits in cases involving matters of public concern and prominent public figures,” said RonNell Andersen Jones, a law professor at the University of Utah.

Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn testified that they sincerely believed what they wrote.

In statements in court at the beginning and again at the end of the trial, Mr. Steyn said he stood “on the truth of every word I wrote about Michael.”

“Inflammatory does not equal defamatory,” said Mr. Simberg’s attorney, Victoria Weatherford, in her closing statement. “Rand is just a guy, just a blogger voicing his truly held opinions on a topic that he believes is important. That is an inconvenient truth for Michael Mann.”

Dr. Mann argued that he lost grant funding following the blog posts and that he had been excluded from at least one research collaboration because his reputation had suffered. The defendants argued that Dr. Mann’s star continued to rise and that he is one of the most successful climate scientists working today.

The presiding judge, Alfred Irving, emphasized to the jury that their job was not to decide whether or not global warming is happening. “I knew that we were walking a fine line from a trial concerning climate change to a trial concerning defamation,” he said earlier while discussing which witnesses to allow.

The story of this lawsuit isn’t over.

In 2021, Judge Irving, along with another D.C. Superior Court judge, decided that the Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review could not be held liable. The publishers did not meet the bar of “actual malice” imposed on public figures suing for defamation, the judges ruled, meaning employees of the two organizations did not publish Mr. Simberg and Mr. Steyn’s posts knowing them to be false, nor did they have “reckless disregard” for whether the posts were false.

Dr. Mann’s attorneys have indicated that they will appeal this earlier decision. Asked about Competitive Enterprise Institute and National Review, John Williams said, “They’re next.”

Delger Erdenesanaa is a reporter covering climate and the environment and a member of the 2023-24 Times Fellowship class, a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Delger Erdenesanaa

Taylor Swift Can Be the Climate Hero We Need Now

Originally published by Joseph Romm for Moms Clean Air Force on February 5, 2024.

One of the most viral zingers from last year—the hottest year on record—was this tweet thumb-slammed in response to the global news of America’s beloved pop star taking up with Kansas City Chief’s All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce: “I wish Taylor Swift was in love with a climate scientist.” She’s not, but we climate-concerned folks still stan her.

Why? Because we know that the 14-time Grammy winner could spur massive action on climate change, which, unlike the outcome of the Super Bowl LVIII, will affect all of us beyond imagining. After all, she knows from “Cruel Summers.”

The first thing Taylor needs to do to be a climate hero is to take a look at her emissions. If we are being honest, right now she’s being a climate “Anti-Hero” in at least one important way: her flying preferences.

In mid-2022, her private jet was named “biggest celebrity CO2e polluter this year so far.” Of the toxic contributors that the wealthy have access to, private jets are probably the worst. Taylor has two. A 2023 study found the wealthiest 1% of air travelers cause half of all aviation emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide. It is a staggering—“It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me”—stat.

To her credit, Swift has invested in carbon offsets—where you pay someone else to (supposedly) reduce their emissions or plant enough trees to balance your emissions, so the impact of your harmful output is seemingly minimized. A spokesperson explained that Taylor bought twice as many carbon credits “needed to offset all tour travel.” Understandably, though her heart is clearly in the right place, Taylor Swift has fallen for the shameless greenwashing that offsets sailed in on.

“The large majority are not real or are over-credited or both,” as one expert told me for a paper I wrote about the trend. That’s why so many companies, like Nestlé and Shell, abandoned them last year, and Taylor should follow suit. After all, she is an expert on things that look good but are really not: “Oh, my God, look at that face. You look like my next mistake” and “You’ll come back each time you leave ’cause, darling, I’m a nightmare dressed like a daydream” come to mind.

Taylor cares about climate disruption and the environment. In a 2020 interview, she said climate change was one of the “horrific situations that we find ourselves facing right now,” especially young people. And with her carbon credit purchases, she’s demonstrated her willingness to try out solutions. We hope she’ll consider these steps to raise the urgency of the climate issue.

STEP 1: Investments > offsets

Taylor Swift is in a position to make some very big statements about the mess we are in. In October, Bloomberg reported her net worth had hit $1.1 billion. If we may be so bold, why not create a climate fund to help finance renewable energy in developing countries? She could seed it with $100 million plus 10% of the future gross revenues of all her music and concerts. She could get other musicians to kick in money the way Bill Gates gets other billionaires to boost his efforts.

STEP 2: Get out the youth vote again and then some more

Another great strategy is one she has deployed already on a small scale. Taylor registered nearly 40,000 people last September after posting an Instagram Story for 24 hours urging her fans to do so at Vote.org.

Experts say a boost in young voter turnout could make the difference this year in swing states like Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Young people and women—her audiences—care about climate. A November poll found that climate-focused youth were much more likely to say they would vote in 2024.

Taylor can motivate political engagement and drive change. She can make another several major pushes nationally and in key states—first for voter registration and then for actually getting out to vote. Given her huge fan base, she truly could be the one who makes the difference.

STEP 3: We need a great climate anthem

Finally, Swift can devote some of her world-class storytelling talents to writing a catchy and smart—really, does anybody do it better than her?—climate song or two. She’s already written one political anthem in “Only The Young,” for her blockbuster 2019 Netflix documentary Miss Americana. A 2021 analysis of her albums Folklore and Evermore found she “uses nature-themed words seven times as frequently as the other pop songs do.” Nature metaphors spring up everywhere in her songs: “With you, I’d dance in a storm in my best dress fearless” and “The drought was the very worst when the flowers that we’d grown together died of thirst.”

That last line is a metaphor for the death of a once-flourishing relationship and the dreams and hopes that withered as a result. If Taylor comes to see that one of the greater things she could do is become a climate hero, maybe global warming won’t wither her fans’ dreams and hopes.

So come on, Taylor Swift: Give us a climate ballad of epic proportions, one that will last for generations.

Joseph Romm is a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and has authored 10 books including, “Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.” He is writing a book about Taylor Swift’s storytelling secrets.

Separating myth from reality on climate change

By Scott Condon for Aspen Daily News – originally published on January 9, 2024.

Carbon offsets for air travel, carbon capture and storage in wells drilled far underground, heat pumps for heating and cooling of buildings and replacing fossil fuel burners with electric vehicles.

What’s real and what’s hype in the battle to save the planet from climate change? Joseph Romm is coming to Aspen to help those interested sort it out. And he said we all have skin in the game.

“People have to understand climate change simply because it’s going to have a very big impact on their lives and the lives of their children. It’s not going to go away,” said Romm, a senior research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

Romm will speak at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Limelight Hotel as part of the Aspen U speaker series hosted by Aspen Skiing Co. The title of his presentation is “Dangerous Climate Myths vs. Real Solutions.”

He was invited by Skico Senior Vice President of Sustainability Auden Schendler, who despite a good sense of humor has little tolerance for B.S. when it comes to acting on climate change. He thinks Romm is the right person to cut through the B.S.

“It’s gotten pretty clear that climate change now threatens everything we care about,” Schendler said in an email. “But what has become confusing is what exactly we ought to do about it. And the answers have become corrupted by convenience and money.”

Romm has put decades into researching some proposed solutions. He will share what’s real and scalable versus what’s “vaporware,” Schendler said.

Romm has 10 books on climate change, clean energy and communications. He was named a “Hero of the Environment” and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger” by Time magazine in 2009. Romm holds a PhD in physics from MIT and he has connections to the Roaring Fork Valley. He was a researcher at the Rocky Mountain Institute from 1991 to 1993 and co-authored the 1994RMI report “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line: Increasing Productivity Through Energy-Efficient Design.”

Despite the impressive pedigree, Romm has an easy way with words and brings climate science to a level a layperson can understand. He told the Aspen Daily News on Friday that his job is to look at “practical considerations of things that may seem good on paper but what would it be like in the real world? I kind of kick their tires and look under the hood.”

On carbon capture, for example, he said there is “nothing terribly wrong with it.” But so far, the economics of capturing carbon from a coal plant, for example, just haven’t proven economic because of the need to build vast, unpopular pipelines to deliver the carbon to a place where it can be safely stored. The expense of capturing the carbon at the plants is also prohibitive.

“If you look at the history of carbon capture and storage, it’s been a spectacular failure,” Romm said.

He is also “annoyed” that much of the carbon captured thus far has been crammed into mostly depleted wells to squeeze the remaining oil from them.

“Are you really permanently storing CO2 if you’re using that CO2 to squeeze out oil that you’re going to burn to produce more CO2?” Romm asked. “That’s not my idea of a climate solution.”

What the countries collectively need, he said, is a World War II-scale effort where all players realize “we win this fight or we’re in very big trouble.”

“We are at the point where we’re starting to get serious about climate change, but we should have been serious two decades ago,” Romm said.

Among the people who research the problem and solutions, he said the path forward is “pretty well understood.”

“The most straightforward thing to do is to decarbonize the electric grid, to shift the electric grid to carbon-free technologies,” Romm said. “Indeed, this country has been doing that. It’s been replacing coal plants pretty steadily for 10, 15 years with gas plants and renewables. Gas plants are not zero carbon. What we really need to do is have a zero-carbon grid. That is phase one. And phase two is to electrify as much of the economy as possible so it can run on a carbon-free grid. The obvious way to decarbonize the transportation sector is electric vehicles.”

He is optimistic about the possibilities though he said scaling up solar or wind to the level needed to prevent reaching the tipping point on global warming won’t be easy. There are no slam dunks but the necessary effort is obvious. He said it will take 20 to 30 years to switch most of the economy to renewable energy sources. The efficiency of electric vehicles, he argued, will make them the ultimate winner in the marketplace.

“The point is, we are in the process of developing and introducing technologies that replace fossil fuel use combustion with an electric device,” he said. “So the two-fold kind of strategy that we need to pursue for the next 20-plus years is (to) build as many carbon-free sources of electricity to replace fossil fuel sources on the grid and develop and deploy all of these electric technologies.”

The doors open at the Limelight at 5:30 p.m. so attendees can grab a beverage at the bar if they so desire. Seating is limited. Romm said the presentation will be time well spent.

“I think everybody needs to be informed on this subject because it’s going to increasingly affect all of us,” he said. “I spent a lot of time trying to understand the solutions to climate change, which are the real ones and which are the overhyped ones. I think if people want to stay on top of that, this is going to be a good speech.”

Post-Doctoral Researcher Opportunities with Michael Mann and PCSSM

Join our team! Please see below for current opportunities.

Civic Science Fellow – Deadline is January 15, 2024.

Civic Science Postdoctoral Fellowship in Climate Communication and Action at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania
Are you passionate about using science to positively impact society? Are you motivated to find innovative ways to conduct science in partnership with communities? Do you want to join a network of individuals and organizations who are committed to advancing science and society through meaningful collaboration between scientists and community members? With support from the Rita Allen Foundation and Burroughs Wellcome fund, we’re recruiting a Postdoctoral Fellow who will serve as a 2024-2025 Civic Science Fellow and develop civically-oriented research projects focused on the science of climate communication, action, and resilience at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania (APPC), working with APPC’s Climate Communication and Action and Science Communication Divisions, with APPC’s partner center the Penn Center for Science Sustainability and the Media, and with the university’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships. This appointment is expected to last 24 months, with an initial appointment from March 2024 to February 2025, and a second year, contingent on funding and satisfactory performance, from March 2025 to February 2026.

For more information, click here.

Sustainability and Conservation Science Postdoctoral Fellowship – Deadline is February 16, 2024.

PROGRAM GOALS
This postdoctoral fellowship program aims to bridge the excellence in academic research at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and in conservation practice at The Nature Conservancy (TNC) to confront climate change, while creating a new generation of sustainability and conservation leaders who combine the rigor of academic science with real-world application.

Penn and TNC join in recognizing climate change as the single greatest environmental threat to humanity. Climate change is an issue that tightly integrates the health of the planet with the economy, access to clean and reliable energy, water, and food production, and equity. To tackle these challenges, our world needs science that blends climatology, physics, economics, business, chemistry, engineering, technology and communications with conservation and ecology. As well, it must marry the best academic research with opportunities for rapid testing and deployment in the real world to address human well-being.

The specific program goals are to:

Invest in the talent potential of a new generation of climate change leaders
Recruit scientists who bring a diversity of culture, experience, and ideas to Penn and TNC
Support innovative and impact-oriented research that helps deliver TNC outcomes
Provide the fellows and Penn research community as a whole with access to real-world conservation professionals and issues.

Postdoctoral Fellows will be supported annually with a $65,000 stipend and benefits, a $10,000 research fund, and up-to $2,000 for professional travel. A one-time relocation reimbursement of up-to $2,000 is also available. Fellows will be eligible for support for up-to two consecutive years.

For more information, click here.

Penn to Host Annual Society of Environmental Journalists Conference

The Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM) is thrilled to share that along with Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) we are hosting the annual conference for the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) at the University of Pennsylvania from April 3-7, 2024 in Philadelphia, PA.

From Michael Mann on upcoming SEJ conference:

On behalf of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media (PCSSM), we are thrilled to host the annual SEJ conference at the University of Pennsylvania next April in partnership with Annenberg Public Policy Center, not only the home of PCSSM but also the home of FactCheck.org and its SciCheck project. Journalists play a key role in informing and communicating climate crisis and the need for action on climate change to the public. We have many exciting opportunities, panels, and events planned for the conference and look forward to connecting attendees to Philadelphia’s unique environmental stories and the greater Penn and Philadelphia community.

PCSSM Director Michael Mann and APPC Director Kathleen Hall-Jamieson will be co-leading a workshop at SEJ and we anticipate that many PCSSM and APPC partners and researchers will be attending and sharing research. We strongly recommend registering and signing up for our newsletter to learn of upcoming opportunities to get involved with the conference.

From the SEJ conference website:

Mid-Atlantic journalists have much to share with you about their corner of the world: the huge national battle over fracking and LNG versus renewable energy, such as wind and solar; the paradox of a city that wants to be modern and future-facing but is held back by issues of poverty, environmental racism, infrastructure challenges and development problems; flooding and sea level rise; pollution and land management; and much more. Come to Philadelphia and let your community help you figure out which stories demand your attention, learn how to tell them and find the support you need through the tough road that lies ahead.

We’ll be exploring these issues and more at our 33rd annual conference and hope to see you there! We’ve lined up three affordable hotel options for #SEJ2024, and it’s never too early to secure your room under SEJ’s special rates — we sold out last year in Boise. And be sure to check out the draft agenda!

Your #SEJ2024 conference chairs:

Meg McGuire, Founder/Publisher, Delaware Currents
Kristine Villanueva, Editor, The Phillypinos Oral History Project, and Lecturer, Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, City University of New York

For more on SEJ and the conference, please click here.

Register for SEJ annual conference here.

Clams and climate

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.

Carbon Capture Won’t Save Us From Climate Change

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.

Princeton and Penn scientists win Philly award for their climate change work

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.

Michael Mann: ‘Sticky’ myths

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.”

Mann said myths are often offered up as facts, creating a “stickiness” that’s hard to dislodge.

“So if you’re trying to educate people, you first have to dislodge the misconceptions that have been driven by a concerted misinformation campaign,” Mann said. “One of the rules is that you’ve got to replace that misconception with something that’s just as sticky, just as memorable.”

Robert Socolow: Common ground

Socolow, 85, professor emeritus in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton, is recognized for his research on climate and environmental science. With a focus on carbon management and energy use, his work led to creation of a partnership between Princeton and industry — the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI). Socolow, known for seeking middle ground in a solution to climate change, retired in 2019.

“It’s an amazing honor,” Socolow said of the award. “I just feel deeply grateful that this goes back to a person who admired Benjamin Franklin. That still sends chills down my spine. You certainly don’t imagine this kind of recognition.”

Socolow said he’s honored to be among his predecessors, which counts 20 Nobel Prize winners, most recently, 2023 Nobel laureates Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, of Penn, for their breakthrough into mRNA research.

Socolow said he’s been interested in climate change for 50 years. But addressing it, he said, will cost money. He cited the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s as an examples of how government can tackle big environmental problems.

“When we when we cleaned up the air, it cost money to do that,” Socolow said. “We did a rather extraordinary job.”

Socolow said he’s interested in an approach that builds alliances so that most efforts are spent collaborating “not fighting each other.” He’s led the CMI’s research into how to capture carbon dioxide that’s released by burning fossil fuels.

He said the oil and gas industry has impeded progress on climate change, which he hopes can be addressed at COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held starting Nov. 30 in Dubai. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the United Arab Emirates president of COP28, has urged attendees to seek “common ground” over the future of fossil fuels. Al Jaber is also CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. It’s the first time the U.N. has named the head of a fossil fuel company to run COP.

Socolow coauthored a recent Washington Post commentary he hopes can be discussed at COP28. The piece calls for transitioning away from fossil fuels in the next few decades. After the transition, fossil fuels would only be allowed for a use if carbon dioxide would not end up in the atmosphere. Remaining carbon dioxide could be captured and stored under ground or converted into products in a circular system, he wrote.

“I was, from a very early age, encouraged to think globally about our role as human beings on the planet,” Socolow said, ”and that we had a common fate that transcended nations.”

Trump 2.0: The climate cannot survive another Trump term

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.

We are three years further down the carbon emissions highway, and the devastating consequences of the 1C (1.8F) warming we have already caused are now apparent in the form of unprecedented dangerous, damaging and deadly extreme weather events. As yet, we have not taken the exit ramp needed to avoid a far worse planetary warming of 1.5C (3F).

Yes, real progress has been made during the Biden era, with “staggering” green energy growth nearly on track to reach the needed reductions in carbon emissions in the power generation sector. But power generation is only a slice of the carbon emissions pie, responsible for about one-fifth of total carbon emissions. The rest comes from transportation, industry, agriculture and buildings. And collectively, we are not meeting the targets, including a 50 percent reduction in worldwide carbon emissions by 2030 and zero emissions by 2050, required to limit warming to 1.5C/3F.

There is, once again, some good news. The COP26 international climate summit of 2021 in Glasgow yielded enough progress to limit warming below 2C (3.6F) if all pledges are met and met on time.

The bad news? That’s still too much warming. And the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure by the nations of the world is incompatible with the 1.5C (3F) goal.

Promises are nice. But they must be kept. And they have not been as yet.

What is needed for further progress? For one, developing countries must also agree to ramp down emissions — a last-minute holdout by India was an obstacle to a more aggressive agreement at COP26. But diplomacy and leadership by the U.S. is required to make that happen.

Consider what happened during the Obama era. Stymied by Republicans in Congress, President Obama nonetheless used his executive authority to promote incentives for renewable energy and tighter emissions restrictions on polluters, bringing China to the table and achieving a bilateral agreement that set the stage for the successful Paris summit. China ended up exceeding its commitments and began decommissioning coal-fired power plants.

But that all came to an abrupt halt with Trump. When he was elected, he turned over the reins of our government to fossil fuel interests and promised — and eventually made good on — a unilateral pullout from the Paris climate agreement. That signaled to other countries, like China and India, that the U.S. was no longer willing to keep up its end of the bargain, and in turn, they slacked off in their own efforts.

It is clear that the U.S. must lead — and that when we do, other nations join us.

What does leadership mean here? As the world’s largest cumulative carbon polluter, an average effort won’t cut it. We have an obligation to achieve something closer to 60 percent reductions in emissions by 2030. The climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, if fully implemented — and not blocked by GOP-stacked courts — get us only partly there (around 40 percent). We will need further climate legislation — and a president and Congress willing to pass it.

Leadership also means helping out other nations that have had a far lesser role in creating the climate crisis and are already suffering the consequences. While the 2022 COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh was disappointing from the standpoint of decarbonization, it did pave the way for progress at COP28 next month in Dubai by establishing a historic loss and damage fund.

Critical to getting countries like India to do more is getting industrial nations, like the U.S., to provide funding and assistance to poorer nations to help them both deal with the devastating consequences they are already experiencing and to encourage them to leapfrog past fossil fuels to clean energy as they seek economic development. That’s what the “loss and damage” agreement does, and it could lead to a greater willingness by India and other developing countries to ramp up their own commitments to decarbonization.

All of this progress is in jeopardy, however, if Trump wins the presidency again, particularly if Republicans hold or, worse, expand their control of Congress. Congressional Republicans have already indicated their intent to eliminate loss and damage funds. And this speaks to an even larger problem. While we have seen renewed leadership on climate by the Biden administration, other nations are wary of what a second Trump presidency could portend, particularly on climate where they fear he will refuse to honor our commitments to the rest of the world and derail four years of progress on climate.

The GOP has threatened to weaponize a potential second Trump term against domestic climate action. In the event they also keep the House of Representatives and retake the U.S. Senate, they will fast-track the most climate-averse policy agenda in the history of our nation to be signed into law by Trump.

Republicans have already written a climate plan for a prospective second Trump term with the innocuous title “Project 2025.” This radical plan would block efforts underway to scale up renewable energy and create a clean energy grid. It would defund climate programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and clean energy efforts at the Department of Energy. It would also bar other states from adopting California’s clean energy policies and put the fossil fuel industry fox in the environmental henhouse by turning over regulation of polluters to Republican state legislatures.

So, we are truly at a “fragile moment.” Global climate action lies on a knife edge, hinging upon American leadership that is threatened by a prospective Trump second term and a radicalized GOP intent on undermining climate progress both here and abroad.

It is not an overstatement to say, one year out, that we face an American election unlike any other. It will determine not only the course of the American experiment but the path that civilization collectively follows. On the left is democracy and environmental stewardship. On the right is fascism and planetary devastation. Choose wisely.

Michael E. Mann is presidential distinguished professor and director of the Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media at The University of Pennsylvania. He is author of the new book “Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.