Science Friday - Valley Fever And COVID-19, Structure of Conspiracy Theories, New Climate Wars. Jan 15, 2021, Part 2

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

How The West Is Battling COVID-19 And Valley Fever For the past year, the COVID-19 crisis has taken up much of our attention. But the pandemic can come with complications: Some states face an onslaught of pre-existing diseases. In the American West, doctors, scientists, and patients continue to battle valley fever, a respiratory illness caused by breathing in the fungus Coccidioides. In desert hot spots, communities are now facing what doctors at Kern Medical’s Valley Fever Institute in Bakersfield, California are calling it a “triple threat”: COVID-19, valley fever, and the flu. Valley fever is already a commonly misdiagnosed disease. Initial symptoms often overlap with other respiratory diseases, raising concern that the pandemic could further delay proper diagnosis. SciFri producer Lauren Young tells the story of patients who have encountered both COVID-19 and valley fever. She speaks with Valley Fever Institute clinicians Rasha Kuran and Arash Heidari about diagnosing the disease, and checks in with UC Merced immunologist Katrina Hoyer on delays in valley fever research during the pandemic.  How To Spot A Conspiracy Theory 2020 was a fruitful year for conspiracy theories: QAnon gained followers, COVID-19 misinformation proliferated in viral YouTube videos, and in November, President Trump helped proliferate the entirely false narrative that the election he’d lost was, in fact, stolen. The details holding these falsehoods together get complicated quickly. But according to a group of researchers at UCLA and the University of California, Berkeley, even the most convoluted of conspiracy theories has a distinct structure. That’s different from real-life scandals, which tend to unravel as new evidence emerges—take former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s ‘Bridgegate’ scandal, a completely verified event in which several of the governor’s staff and appointees colluded to close toll bridge lanes during morning rush hour, intentionally clogging traffic to the town of Fort Lee, New Jersey. The researchers wrote in the journal PLOS One in June that applying machine learning tools to conspiracy theories reveal them to be less complex than things that actually happen. Ira talks to UC Berkeley’s Tim Tangherlini, a co-author on the research, about how these analyses might help actually disarm dangerous conspiracy theories. A New President, An Ongoing Climate Crisis In The New Climate War, author and climate scientist Michael Mann writes that climate messaging is distorted. To prevent a climate crisis, individual actions are useful, but insufficient. In the past, focusing on individual action distracted viewers from focusing on the harm of industrial polluters. For real change, we have to fight the vested interests of the fossil fuel industry.  On January 20th the United States has a new opportunity to do just that. The incoming Biden Administration will have a full plate of issues to tackle—among them, hustling to re-engage with foreign allies, and reversing the climate damage of the last four years. But there is room for cautious optimism. President-elect Biden campaigned more aggressively on climate issues than any of his opponents, and has appointed John Kerry to the newly created position of Climate Envoy within his administration.  Climate scientist Michael Mann joins Ira to discuss what President Biden can do in his first 100 days to show he’s serious about enacting climate policy, and his new book The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back our Planet. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. As you know, for the past year, the COVID-19 crisis has taken up much of our attention. The U.S. is still setting record numbers of infections. But COVID can come with complications. In some states, an onslaught of pre-existing diseases. And that's what's happening in the West, where doctors and scientists are continuing to battle Valley Fever, a disease caused not by a virus, but by a fungus. Last year, sci-fi producer Lauren Young reported on the patients and communities struggling with Valley Fever. You can read her original story up on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash Valley Fever. And Lauren is back with an update, the new challenges faced by Valley Fever patients and doctors during the pandemic. Welcome back, Lauren. Thanks so much for having me back, Ira.

Before we begin, remind us, what is Valley Fever? Sure. So Valley fever is caused by breathing in a soil fungus called coxidiotees or coxie for short. So this fungus is commonly found in dry regions of the southwest. Arizona and California are major hotspots for this disease. In these areas, valley fever has been around for decades. And anyone can get it just by breathing it in. A dust storm or construction can kick up the fungus.

Even an earthquake can trigger a valley fever outbreak. So most of the time symptoms are pretty similar to the cold or the flu. People can even clear this disease without knowing they had it at all. But sometimes valley fever can be even more severe. The fungus can spread out of the lungs to the rest of the body. And certain groups are at higher risk of getting a severe case. So immunocompromise people, Native Americans, and African Americans are some of the groups that are more at risk of valley fever. And Ira, you might remember, from my original story, I talked to Art Charles. He's one of those high-risk patients,

and he told me about his battle with Valley Fever. You know, I just felt like I didn't have a drop of energy at all. That was the first time I've ever felt like I can't do anything. I just felt helpless. I've never felt so weak and so beat in my life. Art lives in Bakersfield, California, and he was diagnosed with Valley Fever in 2017. His immune system hasn't been able to clear it,

so he's still taking antifungal medications. In rare cases, the fungus can even cause death. That's what happened to Art's older sister, Deborah. She died of Valley Fever when Art was only in the sixth grade. You know, Lauren, this is all sounding so familiar. These Valley Fever stories remind me of what some COVID-19 patients are describing. Yeah, right. Well, you know, since reporting the story last year,

I couldn't help but notice some similar themes between Valley Fever and COVID-19. So hearing all this, I really wanted to check back in with Art and see how he was doing during the pandemic. Hey, Lauren, how are you? It's really great to hear your voice. Oh, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Art first told me about his story back in December of 2019, when neither of us could even imagine the devastation of COVID-19. Art is still dealing with his valley fever and the pandemic hasn't made it any easier. He still has to go to the hospital occasionally to check in on his lungs.

but a doctor's visit that used to take an hour now is a four-hour wait. And he is concerned about getting COVID-19. He had a small scare when one of his sons got COVID earlier last year. My wife was, like, amazing. He touched the doorknob. She was behind me with Clorox and with Lysol, and she made sure that I stayed clear of all that because the last thing I needed on top of the valley fever is COVID-19, you know.

Lauren, how are Art and his son doing now? Thankfully, Art hasn't gotten COVID-19. and his son has recovered. In fact, Art told me that his son is expecting to have a baby soon. But if you live out West Valley Fever and COVID-19 are both a concern. There haven't been many cases of people catching both, thankfully. But it has happened. Anna Antonowicz is a nurse practitioner in Northern California, and she caught both diseases.

In the summer of 2019, she got a pretty bad case of Valley Fever, you know, bad shakes, persistent fever, short of breath. She recovered, but a few months later, she got COVID-19 too. I realized on day two of my sore throat that this wasn't a cold, something else was going on. She got treated for COVID-19, and she thought she was in the clear. But, Ira, she got those symptoms again. And at this point, she and her doctors weren't sure what she had. And I'm thinking, oh, my God. And so my doctor's like, okay, could this be valley fever?

Her lungs cannot catch a break. So Anna's pulmonologist was trying to sort out her symptoms. Was it due to Valley Fever or was this still COVID-19? And her test came back positive and it was COVID-19. She's feeling better now and no longer has COVID, but some of those side effects are still there. And this is a problem when it comes to Valley Fever. It is already a commonly misdiagnosed disease. And the pandemic and the flu season are colliding to make a perfect storm.

In Valley Fever hotspots, doctors are calling this a triple threat. People everywhere else, they've been dealing with influenza versus COVID. But for us here, it's three things instead of two. That's Rasha Coran. She's a doctor at Kern Medical's Valley Fever Institute in Bakersfield, California. And Dr. Coran says this triple threat is making it trickier to diagnose patients. And despite being very different in terms of Valley fever being a fungal infection and influenza and SARS-COVID infection are viruses, they do present very similarly. And someone coming in before you do the test, they could be sometimes impossible to tell apart at the beginning. So it really is a challenge. COVID-19 and Valley Fever are

both respiratory diseases and have similar symptoms. So how can doctors distinguish the diseases one from another? Right. Well, as you said, they're both respiratory illnesses, but there are key differences. COVID-19 is contagious. Valley fever isn't. You only get Valley Fever. You only get Valley fever by breathing it in from the soil or dust. And one is a virus and the other is a fungus. And they attack the body very differently. A fungus has kind of two different life cycles. That's Katrina Hoyer.

She's an immunologist and professor at UCMersed who studies Valley Fever. So it has a really small form, the spores, that then when they get bigger, because they're bigger, that makes it harder for the immune cells to deal with them. It's like trying to take too big of a bite, whereas virus particles are very, very tiny. They're in some ways they're a little bit easier to deal with, but in other ways, they can hide a little bit better because they're smaller. So there's different immune cells that are important for each of these types of infections, but there's also a lot of overlap in what those responses look like. And the trick is trying to figure out what are those differences so that you can help the clinician diagnose. So there are many types of immune cells that protect us, but their immune response sometimes can result in the same types of symptoms.

doctors have found a few symptoms that are unique red flags for COVID-19. You know, the sore throat, the loss of smell and taste, but as we know, there's still a lot that doctors are trying to figure out. We've been hearing about many diseases slipping under the radar during the pandemic. Is this true with valley fever also? Right now, everyone is on the lookout for COVID-19, especially when you talk about respiratory illnesses, and the pandemic could be causing valley fever to be somewhat underdiagnosed. Arash Adari is another doctor at Kern Medical's Valley Fever Institute, and he and his team say

co-infection is rare, the odds of getting both are low, but he is trying to make sure that valley fever isn't getting overlooked in communities where the fungus is still present. You've got to make sure in our community and any other community that might have fungal infections like ours. They need to be tested for that endemic fungal infections, including valley fever, which is ours. Dr. Haydari wants to be sure that Valley Fever patients are being treated for the right disease. He says valley fever numbers are actually predicted to be lower in general compared to previous years. And all of this mask wearing and staying indoors to stop the spread of COVID may be helping decrease valley fever infections too. But again, the doctors say

those lower numbers could be because people are going undiagnosed. All of a sudden this year, a significant drop to almost have a half might be probably collection day issues. People are probably not willing to go and tested. So we might get maybe a higher than ever cases next year when people come up with complications after effect. And Katrina Hoyer at UC Merced has similar concerns. Her research has slowed down. She had just received funding for a Valley Fever study on T cells when everything came to a standstill. I basically just wrote my progress report to the NIH and had to explain why we have no data for them over a year. I say that's for Valley Fever, but this is true for pretty much

everything that's not COVID-related, we are not making progress on other diseases right now. And I'm concerned about what that's going to do for the other health problems that we have to deal with when we get through COVID. Right. Really, one can hope that they will get the resources they need and can get back to their research. Yeah, so researchers are really eager to fully go back to the lab, but they are using this time to ask questions that they can explore from home. So Katrina's team, for instance, is currently looking at existing data on wildfires and Valley Fever. And after the pandemic, she says that the research will still be waiting for them. And when I talked to art, it was interesting hearing how Valley Fever had, in some ways, prepared him for today's health crisis.

People used to laugh at him for wearing face masks on a dusty day. Now it's an everyday reality. It's kind of funny. I never thought I'd see that day where everyone is wearing masks. Art stopped working at his recreation center job. These days, he's keeping busy scouting baseball players for the Tampa Bay Rays with full health safety precautions, of course. And he's having fun being a grandfather. I did want to ask him if he felt like having Valley Fever made him think differently about COVID-19.

You know what? I see people dying. When I see people dying, then that's a real thing to me. So I think people looked at me like, ah, you're just like that because you're sick. it's serious to me. You know, it's serious to me. I have a grandchild and, you know, I've got kids here and I don't want to see any of them suffer or have to deal with any of this ever.

For COVID-19 and Valley Fever, you hear the numbers of infections and the deaths and about how stretched out our health care system is. And for me, art is a reminder of the actual people who are bearing the brunt of all of this and finding a path forward. Great story, Lauren. Terrific story. Thanks so much, Ira. I want to thank my guests. Art Charles is a Valley Fever patient in Bakersfield, California. Anna Antonowicz is a nurse practitioner in Northern California who had Valley Fever and COVID-19. Katrina Hoyer is an associate professor of immunology at UCMersed, and Doctors Arash Hadari and Rasha Koran, infectious disease physicians at Current Medical Center and Associate Medical Directors of the Valley Fever Institute. And you can read a lot more of Lauren Young's stories, her original report.

She later interviewed a number of Valley Fever patients. You can read the full report and listen to those stories. Open our website, sciencefriday.com slash valley fever. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. You know, it's hard to give a simple description of conspiracy theories like PizzaGade and QAnon, the baseless claims involve political figures, child sex trafficking, and secret codes, and despite the fact that they've been disproven, these theories are still popular enough

to drive people to take violent actions, like bringing a rifle to a pizza parlor, or storming the capital of the U.S. But at the end of the day, a conspiracy theory is a story. And my next guest is part of a team of researchers that has wondered, can machine learning tell us something about these stories, how they're structured, how they break from reality? all in the aim of disrupting conspiracy theories in the future. Dr. Tim Tangarini is a professor of folklore at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome, Tim. Thank you for having me on, Ira, and I would be remiss if I also didn't mention my colleague,

Vwani Roy Chowdhury, who I did all of this work with at the Narrative Modeling Group. Credit where credit is due. You know, I couldn't help but notice your academic affiliation as I introduce you. You're a folklorist. How are conspiracy theories folklore? That's a great question. Ira and remember that folklore is cultural expressive form circulating informally on and across social networks. And one of the things that conspiracy theory does is it links together lots of different

stories that we're familiar with as a way of explaining what's going on in the world. So it's a totalizing approach to explain all of the things, often threats or worries that we have in the world. You know, in the past, I know my image of conspiracy theorist was the lone guy in the garage with a bulletin board and all those newspaper clippings. But that's very much changed, hasn't it? Right. So the original image that we have is the person in their garage or basement with the wall of crazy, taking little red thread and connecting all the parts of this narrative world that they're pulling together, all of the beliefs and narratives, which are more or less. accepted on faith and kind of are linking them together. What the social media platforms have allowed is more people to be part of the process. So then it becomes kind of a crowdsourcing of

these otherwise disparate parts, these little stories or story parts that are circulating. And people pull them together. They try some out and they discard others. So all of the norms, all of the beliefs, all of the values that we have are negotiated. often through the process of storytelling and negotiation of the parts of those stories. When you say negotiating, you mean everybody's bringing a little bit of what they want the story to be like, and then you negotiate what the final story is? Yeah, it's a little bit like the noisy bar problem. So I walk into the bar and people are sitting around and they're talking,

and I can hear little bits and pieces of those conversations. And what people are doing in conversation is they're often telling parts of stories or complete stories, and people are interrupting and saying, well, that's not how it went, or Amy didn't say that, or Ira didn't go to the lake like that, or somebody comes to the conversation, you aren't going to believe what I just heard about our good friend Bob. And then that becomes part of the conversation, and that process is, like I say, negotiated. Some people say, no, that's not what happened. Other people try to emphasize one part of the story or another. And in this context, most importantly, we're talking about narratives that often are structured as threat narratives or disruption narratives.

Can folklore theory tell us why people latch on to conspiracy theories in the first place? Well, conspiracy theories are attractive because they help explain things in these low information environments when we've either got poor access to information or low trust in the information that we have access to or a combination of the both, instead of turning to information sources that might be coming from or perceived as coming from outside our community, we turn to our community members. They're the ones who have raised us. They're the ones who have protected us, and they're the ones who can give us information about what's going on. And conspiracy theory is what I call it attractive because it helps explain all parts of the world. Interesting. Okay, but your work

isn't just analyzing stories, but doing it with help from computers, from machine learning. How do you apply computation to something as subjective as human storytelling? That's a great question, and one that we struggled with. I think it wasn't until I met Wani Roy Chowdhury that we were able to come up with a strategy for working computationally with all of the conversations that were taking place on social media. Social media, in some ways, became the world's, largest self-archiving folklore collection. And so we had all of this data, and the challenge was, how could we find in these conversations the underlying generative narrative framework that was

allowing people to contribute to this group storytelling of how the world is really put together? I mentioned Pizagate earlier, and in the research we're talking about today, I understand that you applied this methodology to two different stories, the Pizsigate conspiracy theory and Bridgegate, which was an actual conspiracy. Can you refresh our memories about these, please? Bridgegate was a political payback operation, launched by Chris Christie's advisors and people in the board authority to shut down several lanes of the George Washington Bridge as a way to create traffic chaos in Fort Lee, New Jersey, because the mayor of Fort Lee, Mark Sockley. which had refused to endorse Chris Christie's bid for re-election as governor of New Jersey.

Like all conspiracies, actual conspiracies, these are factual events comprised of malign actors who work covertly, often in an extra legal manner to affect some sort of outcome beneficial to those actors. So it's a very small group. And they don't want their story to come out, right? They're deliberately keeping that hidden. And so that story came out through the work of investigative journalists. On the other hand, we have PizzaGate, which actually has in subsequent years fed into the much larger, much more totalizing Q&on conspiracy theory that was centered on a pizza parlor in northwest Washington, D.C. It also involved the Podestas and Hillary Clinton and allegations of them all being in cahoots to run a pedophilic, satanic, child.

trafficking ring in tunnels underground in northwest Washington. So when you run your artificial intelligence about the difference between the conspiracy theory and the real conspiracy, what does the artificial intelligence say? So it's a little bit more complicated like so many things with artificial intelligence and machine learning are. So we run a pipeline to try and extract the main actants, that is to say, the people, the characters, the places, the things. And the relationships between those that are embedded in the conversations themselves to figure out the underlying what we call narrative framework, the connections and the relationships between all of

these different actors as a graph. The conspiracy theory graph, this is the Pizagate graph, came together very quickly, seemed to have a large number of characters and places and was connected in such a way that when we deleted the links that were coming from WikiLeaks, each of those communities that we had discovered in the graph, democratic politics, the pedestas, Satanism, and casual dining, fell neatly apart so that they were no longer connected. In Bridgegate, the graph had certain features that would not allow us to do that. We could delete, in fact, all of the actors coming from Bridgegate and their relationships,

and the graph would stay as one single, what's called a giant connected component. And so we could even delete Bridgegate from the entire graph and New Jersey politics would continue for better or worse. Does this seem to hold true for other conspiracy theories? QAnon, for example, are those surrounding the pandemic this year? Yeah, so that's a great question. and it's one that Vwani Roy Chowdhury brought to our group. And as you recall, as the virus and the pandemic took hold in March, we had less information than probably all of us wanted. And there

had been several years of erosion of trust in the information sources that we had. So this was a perfect opportunity for people to collectively start to come up with explanations for what was going on. So we did a lot of work in this narrative model. group. And what we found was that there were multiple belief narratives emerging, and a lot of those were sort of linking up to form larger cycles of belief narratives, which is the precursor to a fully formed conspiracy theory. A lot of these stories are what we would call threat narratives, right? There's some sort of threat, and then people in the storytelling figure out strategies to deal with that threat. This is a classic Ghostbusters question. When ghosts appear in the neighborhood,

who are you going to call? And the answer to that question is always ideological. So here we have a threat, the pandemic, and we have different ways of dealing with that narratively. Some people say, well, it's a hoax. So that's a way of saying it's not a threat at all. Other people see it as a threat. And then what are the strategies for dealing with that threat? Okay, so what do we do now? we know this. I'm asking how do we apply, knowing the structure for dismantling or disrupting conspiracy theories before people take actions and then endanger others? I think there are two ways that we can work now that we have a tool that allows us to, from any large set of conversations on the internet, through this process of we find the actants

in all of their mentions and all of the contexts in which they're mentioned, and we aggregate them, and then we find all the relationships between these actors, and we aggregate them so that it's not a hairball. We can now find this underlying narrative framework graph. So that would allow me to make a selection of actors and their relationships and generate a story so that I could be part of the conversation. So that's a powerful tool. It's a generative model of storytelling. And it rests on this underlying idea that within any conversation, there's a limit on who you can mention and the relationships between them. Well, just can you give me an example of how can you, can you disrupt a forum,

an internet forum, by using the techniques you're talking about? So in some ways, what we did was we reversed engineered what was going on already. We wanted to figure out how these. conversations are generated. Once you have that, then you can generate stories to introduce into that conversation if that's what you want to do. I think ethically, one has to start to be very cautious. As a researcher, that's not my position. But we do recognize that it can be used to, if not disrupt, at least contribute to a conversation, perhaps steer it. We have an understanding of the underlying narrative framework. And then we also have an understanding of the strategies that

people are proposing to deal with the threat. Someone could introduce strategies that are perhaps not disruptive or not violent or not leading to chaos, but rather strategies that are much more conciliatory. And perhaps those would get some uptake in various communities. I'm Ira Plato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. In case you're just joining us, We're talking with Dr. Tim Tangarini, Professor of Folklore at the University of California in Berkeley. So are you saying that if I wanted to be a counterintelligence officer, for example, or I wanted to disrupt a potentially dangerous forum, I could introduce a strategy that is a little bit less dangerous to other people? So the standard belief narrative structure is I set up the story, the who, the what, the where, the when.

And that basically creates a sense of community between me and you. We're basically telling stories about us or people like us. And then there's some sort of disruption or threat. And then we come up with a strategy, right? What are you going to do about it? In the case of most belief narrative, it's retrospective. They did this and this is what happened. Right.

And so that's how we come up with a sense of norms and values and beliefs. right? If you do this, this is what's going to happen. But in rumor, in these periods of intense lack of access to or lack of trust in information sources, the narrative stops. It says, here's the threat, here's the disruption. And it says, what are you going to do about it? And that's what pushes people into taking real world action. And so if we can find those moments where a threat is being either overcharged, right, and diminish that sense of threat, or if other community members can suggest strategies that are less disruptive, less violent, less harmful, than that would be where you would feel that you had done something quite successful.

On the other hand, of course, this could be used in a very different, it's a very different and negative ends, too. What do you mean by that? Well, I mean, what we're talking about here is what somebody quite jokingly referred to as weaponized folklore. And I think storytelling has always had the chance to be weaponized. We see this in a lot of paroxysms of violence through history, genocide, actual witch hunts, where people are killed and entire communities are destroyed on the basis of storytelling. They pose a threat.

what are we going to do about it? Here's our choice. Isn't that what we just saw in Washington, the attack on the Capitol? Indeed it is. We saw that there was a narrative that the election had been stolen and that the actual elected officials of our government were the threat to democracy. And so what are we going to do about it? And the group decided that with certain encouragement that they were going to march on the Capitol. In your AI research, would there be or could there be any way? to combat that. We would certainly be able to find that these were strategies or certain things were being

represented as threats. And then it would be up to public safety officials to work with that information that we could provide them that this is where the story is going or these are the story parts that we see. And then other people would make a decision based on that. It sounds like because we have so many folkloric type of conspiracy theories now that possibly the FBI or other investigative bodies might want to employ a folklorist as part of their strategy. Well, I'm always in favor of people employing computational folklorists. Folklore really is one of the first big data fields in the humanities where we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of versions of stories told by thousands.

of people. And so to really get a sense of what is going on in those stories and how they're changing and how they influence the norms, beliefs, values, everything that we live by, everything that we've grown up with. I think it's important that we look at the informal cultural processes, and we can do it now because a lot of these are circulating on and across these social media networks. Thank you, Dr. Tangarini. Dr. Tim Tangarini, Professor of Folklore at the University of California at Berkeley. Thank you, Ira. Thanks for having me on this morning. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, President the elect Biden has a new

opportunity to fight climate change, and climate scientist Michael Mann joins us to discuss where and how to move forward. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Back in the early 1970s, when the environmental movement was just beginning, a very prominent ad caught the eye of TV viewers. It showed litter being tossed carelessly onto the roadside, crashing at the foot of a Native American who was weeping at the site. The punchline of the ad? People start pollution. People can stop it. The ad was intended to distract you from casting your gaze at industrial polluters. Missing were pictures of rivers so clogged with industrial wastes, they actually caught fire, air so thick with smoke and soot, headlights were turned on during the day.

Michael Mann devotes a chapter in his book The New Climate War to the parallels between this Madison Avenue figure, the crying American Indian, and what the fossil fuel industry is doing today, distracting us from holding drivers of climate change from accountability, the fossil fuel industry. But Mann writes, there's room for hopeful optimism. President-elect Biden campaigned aggressively on climate issues. So, what can President Biden do in his first 100 days to show us he's serious about enacting climate policy? Michael Mann is here with some advice.

He is professor of atmospheric science, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, author of the New Climate War, the fight to take back our planet. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks so much, Ira. always a pleasure to talk with you. You know, it's interesting. It seems that that crying Indian is gone, but 51 years later, the message is still the same. You dedicate a whole chapter in your book, as I say, to the image of the crying Indian.

What does that image have to do with the fossil fuel industry today? Yeah, so it's a classic example of a deflection campaign. It's the defining example, perhaps, of a deflection campaign, which is aimed at distracting us and deflecting attention from the needed systemic changes, policy changes, to individual behavior, as if individual behavior, us being better people is how we solve these problems. And, you know, it was extremely effective. And so the fossil fuel industry has sort of taken that same playbook and run with it in their effort to deflect attention from the need for carbon pricing and incentives for renewable energy

and leveling the playing field in the energy industry so renewables can compete fairly. They don't want any of that. So they'd rather make it about individual behavior, our diet, whether we fly. And, hey, if they can get us pointing fingers at each other and behavior shaming each other, it's a twofer because then they divide and conquer the climate advocacy community. And we no longer speak with a unified voice demanding change. So if the Biden administration came to you, and I don't know if they have or not, and said, Michael, we need your help.

Tell us what we can do in our first year in office. That would be the fastest. What would be the most effective for combating climate change? What advice would you give them? Yeah, I would say in part continue doing what you guys are doing. I think they've gotten off to a great start on climate. The first and most important thing was to communicate to the world community that we're serious about this, that the U.S. is willing to not only,

only support global efforts, the Paris Agreement and going beyond the Paris Agreement, but to once again be a leader on this issue as we were under President Barack Obama and has signaled that to the world community by, for example, appointing John Kerry as the special envoy on climate, the so-called climate czar. John Kerry helped negotiate the Paris Summit, the bilateral agreement between the U.S. and China. He has a real diplomatic bona fides in the world community. But he also helped Shepard one climate bill about 10 years ago. It didn't ultimately pass Congress, but he's advanced legislation as well.

So we've got a very serious, you know, actor in place to help convince the world that we're back and we're willing to do our part and we're willing to lead. And meanwhile, Biden has also integrated. climate policy into every single cabinet and every single appointment that he's made, which is sort of a revolutionary idea. In the past, climate action has sort of been confined within the executive branch to the EPA and maybe the Department of Energy. But here, it's really spread out across all of the various cabinets and agencies. And it's a recognition that this is now a problem that permeates every sector of modern life. And to solve it, we need to advance policy

measures in every sector. Well, give me an idea of what advancing policy, what kind of legislation, how do we hold the fossil fuel industry responsible, and what do we do to get past that? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, that's sort of the carrot, but we need to stick, too. We need to disincentivize polluters, carbon polluters, and there are various ways to do that. One can certainly do that by no longer providing subsidies for additional fossil fuel infrastructure, and Biden has indicated that he won't do that, and won't promote the building of new pipelines, like the Keystone XL pipeline that was greenlighted again under Trump. But, you know, we also need a price on carbon.

Polluters have to pay for the fact that they're doing damage to the planet, and we need to level the playing field in the energy marketplace. So renewable energy can truly compete fairly against fossil fuel energy. And so I think that there are ways to do carbon pricing such that it is progressive, in fact. And that's the way it's been implemented in places like Canada and Australia, where lower income individuals and families have actually benefited. So it's essential that we make sure that any of these mechanisms are done. in a way that's just and that doesn't put undue burden on those who have the least resources and have the least responsibility of creating the problem. And I hope that there might be room now for some sort of bipartisan compromise climate legislation. Look, we probably won't get a Green

New Deal and expands of new climate Green New Deal through a 50-50 Senate. But I think we can get some meaningful legislation accomplished in the next two years. Speaking of the Green New Deal, do you think progressives are going to be against things that fall short of the terrific expansion of the economy and the kind of things they want to see happen in the Green New Deal? So I am a little worried about the perfect becoming the enemy of the good here within sort of some enclaves in the environmental community. There is this notion that, for example, carbon pricing, which I think is one of the essential tools in the toolbox, it's not a magic bullet. None of these things are. But it's one of the tools. And we need to use every tool

we're available, that's available to us if we're going to conquer this problem. So I think we have to make it clear that carbon pricing can be done in a way that's just, that that doesn't hurt lower income and frontline communities. And it's not, again, the silver bullet. One of the criticisms against carbon pricing is, well, you know, the price won't be high enough to make a real difference to get us the emissions reductions we need. Well, that depends on the price that's set. And of course, There's going to be a political battle over that. The fossil fuel industry doesn't want to see a high carbon price. But that is part of the negotiation, and it is just one of the tools in the toolbox.

So carbon pricing, along with subsidies for renewable energy and all these executive actions that are moving forward under Biden and our engagement with the global community, all of those things collectively together can lead us down the path where we avert catastrophic warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3 degrees Fahrenheit. some of these targets we talk about that we don't want to go beyond. There's still a path forward, and I'm optimistic, given this shift in the political winds, that we can do it. Speaking of optimism, I sort of detect, when we talk about the public in general,

that there has been a paradigm shift in accepting climate change as a real thing. And that seems to be, you know, pretend well for the future. Do you get that also? Yeah, I do. And that is sort of one of the favorable developments. I would say that have come together to put us really in a uniquely favorable position to see meaningful climate action. There's the fact that climate change has become so obvious to the person on the street. We're seeing the impacts play out in real time now.

This isn't just about polar bears up in the Arctic decades from now. It's about unprecedented super storms, wildfires, heat waves, floods that we see play out now in real time on our television screens. Now, that's part of what has led to this new climate war, the fact that the forces of inaction, the inactivists, as I call them, sort of fossil fuel interests and those doing their bidding, recognize that they can no longer credibly deny that climate change is real or even that is caused by us. And so instead, what they've done is to engage in this multi-pronged campaign, this new climate war that I described consisting of various tactics, including the deflection that we talked about,

but also the promotion of false solutions like geoengineering or, hey, we can just capture the carbon and bury it and continue to burn fossil fuels. And we really have to look out for doom mongering. There has been an effort for them to sort of fan the flames of doomism. If you really believe it's too late to do anything, then that potentially leads you down the same path of inaction as outright denial. And look, the activist, the fossil fuel interests behind this, they don't care about the path you take. They just care about the destination. They want you not to be out there demanding action on climate. So you sound optimistic. I mean, you end your book on an optimistic note that things can really turn. Yeah, well, you know, there are a number of developments that

have come together and sort of forgive the expression of perfect storm of circumstances that really have placed us in a position where we finally may see that tipping point in public consciousness, a recognition that now is our time and we have to act now. There is great urgency, but there is also agency. We can solve this problem. We started our conversation by talking about what individuals can do and what individuals have been told to do. What advice would you give to people who say, I'm inspired to do something? I want to read your book and then go out and take action on the climate crisis. What can I do? What do you say to those people? Yeah, it's sort of a two-pronged response. I say, do all those things that you can do in your everyday life that reduce your environmental footprint. I mean, look, they save you money. They make you healthier. They make us feel better. They said a great example for other people. Why shouldn't we do these things? So, of course, we need to do those things, but we can't allow that to be viewed as a substitute for the needed systemic changes. We need subsidies for renewable energy. We need to accelerate the green energy transition. We do need some sort of carbon price.

in my view. And look, as individuals, we can't implement those things. So we need politicians, we need policymakers who are willing to do our bidding, bidding of the people they're supposed to represent, rather than the bidding of fossil fuel interests, which is too often been the case. And look, we took the first step in this last election. Voting is one of the most important ways that we can sort of express ourselves politically. And we came out, we turned out, and we elected a Democratic president and a Democratic Congress now that are willing to act. But we can't stop there. We have to continue to put pressure on our policymakers, on our politicians, because we know there's

huge amounts of pressure being placed on them by the fossil fuel interests. And it's the squeaky wheel. If we don't push back against that pressure and demand accountability, then unfortunately, even those we view as our political allies may not do what's necessary to be done. So be out there using your voice, talking about this issue, writing to your local politicians, speaking out, writing letters to the editor, and just making sure that this is at the forefront of our conversation in the next hundred days as we move forward and we have a real opportunity for meaningful action.

Talking with Michael Mann, author of the new book, The New Climate War on Science Friday from WNYC Studios. As you're saying in your book that there's urgency, but we also have agency. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's critical to communicate both. And it's critical to recognize that the science actually supports that. Most of the doomism that we see these days is predicated on a distortion of the science. And in some cases, the misrepresentations by doomists are almost as egregious, if not as egregious as the, misrepresentations by outright climate change deniers. For example, the idea that we're already in a position where runaway warming is inevitable. There's nothing we can do to prevent a massive escape of methane that'll warm the planet beyond livable conditions. The science doesn't support

that at all. In fact, the best available science now indicates that if we stop burning carbon, if we were to go cold turkey right now on burning carbon and carbon emissions went to, to zero, the surface temperature of the planet would stabilize in a few years. And that's an important revision of sort of the understanding we used to have, where we thought that the planet would still warm up for decades because of what we call thermal inertia, the ocean's slowly warming up in response to the greenhouse gases that are there. That is true. But as we do more realistic modeling experiments that incorporate the full Earth system,

the role of the oceans and the biosphere in absorbing carbon, we've learned that if we stop burning carbon, the oceans as they continue to take carbon out of the atmosphere will actually draw down atmosphere carbon. It will come down. In that effect, offsets this sort of committed warming thermal inertia effect. And in the end, you get sort of a flat line. If we stop burning carbon now, surface temperatures stabilize almost immediately. That is extremely important. It means our actions do indeed have agency. It means that there's an immediate and direct response. to our reductions in carbon emissions. Didn't we see an example of that during COVID-19 when people were hunkered down at home

and not driving and industries were shut? Wasn't there a tremendous decrease in greenhouse gas emissions? Yeah, absolutely. What we saw was that our actions can make an immediate difference with our greenhouse gas emissions. And for the year 2020, it looks like they're going to come down about 7%. They'll be down 7%, which is the biggest drop we've seen in modern history in carbon emissions. That's the good news.

The bad news is we've got to do that every year for the next 10 years at least to remain on that path for stabilizing warming below catastrophic levels, 1.5 degrees Celsius, roughly 3 Fahrenheit. That means an additional 7% this year, and then an additional 7% the following year and so on. And it quickly becomes obvious that sort of the sorts of changes that we made, the social distancing, the lockdowns, the largely behavioral changes, the reduction in transportation, that got us that 7% reduction. That saturates pretty quickly. To go beyond that and get additional similar reductions in subsequent years, we really need to decarbonize our economy. We need to stop burning fossil fuels for transportation,

for power generation, for industry, et cetera. And that requires major structural changes. So there is sort of a mixed message. Yes, our actually. make an immediate difference, and we see that in the drop in carbon emissions this year. But it also drives home the point that there's only so much that we can do based on sort of behavioral changes to go beyond that. We need to decarbonize our civilization, and that means a lot of work over the next few years.

Thank you, Michael. Michael Mann, Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, author of a really terrific new book, The New Climate War, The Fight to Take Back Our planet. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. Good luck with the book. Thanks so much, Ira. Like I said, always a pleasure to talk with you. And you can check out an excerpt of his new book, the new climate war, up on our website at Science Friday.com slash climate war. And that's about all the time we have. If you missed any part of the program, or you would like to hear it again. Yeah, subscribe to our podcasts or ask

your smart speaker to play Science Friday. And of course, we're on social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram all week. You can get in touch with us at our email address. SciFri at ScienceFriday.com. Send your feedback. Tell us what you'd like us to cover. We'll see you next week. I'm Ira Flato.