Why top U.S. climate scientist moved to Philly | Will Bunch Newsletter

Ever since, oh, around 2015, I’ve taken to Twitter to exclaim, “What a time to be alive!” — in sarcastic exasperation. But now, with the Phillies just minutes away from a playoff showdown with the Braves, the Eagles off to a 5-0 start, and the Union starting the MLS Cup playoffs with a real shot to win it all, I really mean it! Is this a great fall, or am I just setting myself up for ... a great fall, if you know what I mean?

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As one of America’s best-known scientists, Michael E. Mann has seen the debate over climate change go from the abstraction of the now-famous “hockey stick graph” — from a paper he co-authored in 1998, tracking 1,000 years of temperatures and implicating human-made pollution — to the reality of wildfires, epic droughts, and killer floods that can be linked to global warming on the TV news almost nightly.

Mann, who just moved to Philadelphia to launch a new high-profile gig at the University of Pennsylvania after 16 years at Penn State, says the media is finally connecting the dots — but only to a point. When Hurricane Ian strengthened practically overnight from a Category 1 to just short of the highest Category 5 as it passed over the overheated Gulf of Mexico before slamming Florida, he said CNN and MSNBC booked him seven times to make the climate connection, yet they only put him on air twice.

TV producers “thought it was much more interesting to cover the rescue operation,” Mann said as we spoke at a watering hole near his new neighborhood, in Rittenhouse Square. “There so many aspects to that crisis [of Hurricane Ian] that feel more urgent than the contextual approach. Most segments ended up getting cancelled because they found something more ratings-friendly. I don’t get mad. They’re doing their job.”

Changing attitudes to get the media, their fickle viewers — and, ultimately, the politicians who listen to them — to find climate science not only interesting but central to other big stories, from national security to immigration, is a critical mission for Penn’s new Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media that’s led by Mann.

The answer, Mann told me, centers on “rethinking how we cover this issue and getting away from the notion that climate is its own niche issue ... Now, climate is the underlying stress on all the problems we are feeling today.”

Mann’s evolution from geophysicist and meteorologist steeped in the obscurity of modeling ancient temperatures to his current focus on the role of communication and media offers a fascinating glimpse into where the race to end greenhouse-gas pollution and prevent the most dire projections of an overheated planet stands in 2022.

He noted that while the science still matters, existing research — and the now impossible-to-ignore run of record temperatures and 1,000-year-floods — has reached the stage where scientists can now say with certainty that human pollution is behind these weather catastrophes. The biggest problem now is how to communicate the urgency of that scientific certainty so that society will act to stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. No wonder that, in the name of Mann’s new venture at Penn, “media” gets equal billing with “science” and “sustainability.”

To carry out such a critical mission, Mann — now 56, who became a national figure, ironically, because of failed, ridiculous efforts by the political right to discredit him — could have gone anywhere. He went to Penn.

In one sense, the Philadelphia gig is a bit of a homecoming for Mann. Although he grew up in western Massachusetts, the son of a Penn-educated math professor, his grandfather was a prominent physician in South Philadelphia’s then-large Jewish community and Mann visited his Ritner Street home frequently in summers and holidays. He’s never forgotten a frigid Mummers Parade from the mid-1970s, and he says The Inquirer is the first paper he read regularly.

Despite fond feelings for Penn State and his time in State College, Mann said it was time for a change. He acknowledged that the politics of a public university — looking to conservative lawmakers in Harrisburg for financial support, amid controversy over oil- and gas-industry funding of research — can loom large over an issue like climate. “I would say there are certain constraints on what you can do at a large state university that is answerable to all sort of state interests,” he said.

In contrast, Penn — although it already had a strong team of climate scientists in Earth and Environmental Science, where Mann is now a professor — is eager to up its game on such a critical issue. That is partly to keep pace with rivals like Harvard, Yale, and Columbia that have done the same, and partly because of widespread support for climate action from students and faculty on a progressive-minded campus, as well as many others in the Penn community.

“My job visit a year ago happened to be during Climate Week at Penn and there was just so much activity on campus,” Mann said, while things were quiet back in Happy Valley. “There was a lot of excitement and passion there.” Last month, some Penn student protesters erected a tent encampment outside the main administration building, demanding that the university join Harvard and other schools in divesting from fossil fuels.

But an added factor that lured Mann to the Penn campus is the school’s reputation — through the prominence of the Annenberg School for Communication and its involvement with the political fact-checking site, Factcheck.org — for zeroing in on the role that media plays in driving politics and policy in the 21st Century. It jibes with Mann’s newest book — The New Climate War, published this year — which outlines how disinformation by fossil-fuel advocates has changed now that the reality of climate change can no longer be denied, and offers strategies for pushing back.

Mann brings personal perspective to the climate war as someone who spent years under attack, including the widely publicized hacking of his emails, along with other scientists, in 2009. He said those kind of assaults have slowed. “Part of why they’re not going after people like me is that they’re not focused on the science, they’ve lost that battle,” he said. These new strategies by those Mann calls “inactivists” include deflection — blaming individual behavior to keep the focus off corporations — as well as exploiting divisions among climate activists, encouraging the “doomerism” that it’s too late to do anything, or backing vague solutions that kick the can too far down the road.

Mann’s core mantra is to counter that “doomerism” with an optimism that humans can make realistic policy choices right now that can stave off the worst climate outcomes. He recently said the environmental provisions in the President Biden-backed Inflation Reduction Act will make a real difference. In this critical autumn, Mann’s vital message for America hasn’t changed — just his zip code, and maybe his sense of urgency. “This,” he said pointedly, ”could be where I end up finishing my career.”

Question: What’s your best guess for an October Surprise? — Via Steve Murray (@stephenpmurray) on Twitter

Answer: Steve, I think it’s already happened. The term “October surprise” — a massive last-minute event, crisis, or bombshell revelation meant to upend an election’s dynamic at the last-possible moment — was born in 1980 over talk that Jimmy Carter could win with a deal to free Iran hostages, or that Ronald Reagan could win by secretly and perhaps illegally squelching that. It’s fitting, perhaps, that 2022′s “October Surprise” also comes from the Persian Gulf and America’s ceaseless addiction to fossil fuels. It’s the announcement by OPEC, led by Saudi Arabia and its murderous Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), and in legion with Russian war criminal Vladimir Putin, of a cut in oil production that could sharply raise U.S. gas prices just before Election Day. That will undercut President Biden, who alienated MBS by criticizing him in his 2020 race. MBS’s killing of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi should have been the last straw, but wasn’t. This must be the last straw for the Saudis. It’s past time to cut off weapons supplies to an alleged ally that’s been acting like America’s enemy for more than 21 years.

The recent history of the hip-hop megastar and fashion icon who started his odyssey as Kanye West but is also known as Ye (and more other names than this boomer can keep pace with) has alternated between new music or clothing lines aimed at staying relevant, and bizarre public behavior that has not only undercut that idea, but sparked a loud debate around his mental health. Already under fire for a fashion launch while wearing a “White Lives Matter” shirt, West certainly found a way to tap into 2022′s dark zeitgeist with a dead-of-night Twitter post full of anti-Semitic tropes that said he was about to go “death con 3″ on “JEWISH PEOPLE.”

The tweet inspired some humor-tinged correction — it’s “defcon,” not “death con,” and 3 is a lower level than “defcon 1″ — but mostly shock and well-deserved revulsion at such open, hateful prejudice. His words not only raised new questions about a pop star clinging to a widespread following, but also tapped into the dark vein that has seen increasing antisemitism in America’s broken discourse, even in political campaigns like Doug Mastriano for Pennsylvania governor. Still, it took action from Twitter — which deleted the tweet and locked West’s account — for mainstream outlets to glom onto the story.

And with the media’s tweets and headlines came a secondary shock: just how hard it seems for mainstream journalists to call out a case of clear and obvious hate speech. ABC News, on Twitter, called it “a tweet he wrote aimed at the Jewish community.” Reuters referenced “alleged anti-Semitic posts,” while the Wall Street Journal went with “purported,” the New York Times wrote of a tweet “widely criticized as anti-Semitic,” and the initial language of choice at AP was “widely deemed as anti-Semitic.” To be fair, most of these outlets dropped the weasel words after they were called out by readers, but it should not have come to that. In a fraught moment when hate speech is suddenly everywhere, including the podium at large political rallies, it’s critical for the media to call out this toxicity for what it is. A failing democracy won’t be saved by floundering journalism. We need reporters, not “purporters.”