![]() They’re doing their job.”Ĭhanging 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. Most segments ended up getting cancelled because they found something more ratings-friendly. “There so many aspects to that crisis that feel more urgent than the contextual approach. 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. 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. 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. 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. As one of America’s best-known scientists, Michael E.
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