Philadelphia, November 20, 2023 – Recognizing the growing urgency worldwide to address the crisis of global warming, a panel of nationally-renowned scientists have named two of the world’s leading scientific voices on climate change to receive the prestigious 2023 John Scott Award.

The Scott Awards, presented annually in Philadelphia to honor the scientific legacy of Benjamin Franklin, will this year recognize pioneering researchers Dr. Michael E. Mann and Dr. Robert H. Socolow, two of the world’s leading experts on global warming and what must be done to sustain life on Earth.

The Awards, which include the Scott Medal and a cash prize of $10,000 for each of the winners, will be presented at the American Philosophical Society — founded by Benjamin Franklin — at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, November 20, 2024. The Award ceremony is hosted by the Board of Directors of City Trusts, which administers the John Scott trust in addition to 118 other public charitable trusts on behalf of the City of Philadelphia.

Dr. Mann is the 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. His research on climate change, including the groundbreaking and influential “hockey stick graph,” has made him a leading voice in the call for climate action.

Dr. Socolow is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. He is recognized around the world for his interdisciplinary research on climate and environmental science, specifically involving carbon management and energy use.

The Scott Awards will be presented at the American Philosophical Society – founded by Dr. Franklin – at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, November 30th. The Award ceremony is hosted by the Board of Directors of City Trusts, which administers the John Scott trust in addition to 121 other public charitable trusts on behalf of the City of Philadelphia.

“We believe that if Dr. Franklin were alive today, he would be one of the world’s leading voices in the battle against global warming,” said Board President Bernard W. Smalley. “It is a privilege to recognize Dr. Mann and Dr. Socolow in his honor.”

Endowed in 1815 by Scottish chemist and pharmacist John Scott, the Scott Award is presented annually in honor of Ben Franklin to “ingenious men or women who make useful inventions” that have contributed to the “comfort, welfare and happiness of mankind.”

Over the years, the Scott Award has become one of the most prestigious honors in science. Among the previous awardees are 20 winners of the Nobel Prize, including Marie Curie, Guglielmo Marconi, R. Buckminster Fuller, Baruch Blumberg, Kary Mullis, K. Barry Sharpless, and most recently, 2023 Nobel laureates Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman, whose breakthrough mRNA research led to the development of vaccines to fight COVID-19 and other viruses.

“I am humbled and gratified to receive this award, which is built on the legacy of Dr. Franklin’s scientific achievements,” said Dr. Mann. “Ben Franklin was an activist, and I have no doubt that if he were alive today, he would be out front in demanding climate action.”

Over the last 30 years, Michael Mann has become one of the world’s foremost climate change scientists, thanks largely to his research leading to the creation of the “hockey stick” graph, which presented the Earth’s mean temperature record of the last 1,000 years, based on qualitative climate reconstructions. The graph shows a relatively flat line until 1900, when it spiked sharply upward through the course of the 20th century – effectively creating a graph that resembles a hockey stick, with the 20th century spike representing the stick’s blade.

The graph provides compelling visual evidence of global warming, which as Dr. Mann described it, “thrust me into the center of the debate on climate action almost overnight,” to the point where Bloomberg News named him as one of the 50 most influential people in the world in 2013.

Trained as a geophysicist and climatologist, Dr. Mann emphasizes that climate change “exacerbates virtually every facet of modern life on the planet.”

“We’ve never seen this rate of warming,” he said, “and there are now eight billion people on the planet all tied intrinsically to infrastructure – roads, bridges, buildings – that is heavily weather-dependent.

“We’ve reached the point, as evidenced by the Canadian wildfires last summer, where the impacts are so obvious to people on the street that climate denial is becoming untenable.”

The urgent question for many instead has become, are we too late to save the planet? It is the subject of Mann’s latest book, published last month: Our Fragile Moment: How Lessons from the Earth’s Past Can Help Us Survive the Climate Crisis.

“The record of the Earth’s history tells us that if we act with urgency to address the crisis, no, it’s not too late,” he said. “But we have to act now.”

Named in 2022 as Director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & Media at Penn, Dr. Mann is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and six books. After completing his undergraduate degree at Berkeley, he earned two Master’s Degrees and a Ph.D in geology and geophysics from Yale University. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2020, and has earned numerous honors for his research, including the “Friend of the Planet” Award from the National Center for Science Education, the Climate Communication Prize from the American Geophysical Union, and the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geophysical Union.

“There is something very poignant in winning the John Scott Award as we celebrate the 300th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s arrival in Philadelphia,” said Dr. Mann. “I am deeply honored to be connected through this award to the great legacy of his scientific achievements.” The Franklin legacy is important to Dr. Robert Socolow as well.

“Benjamin Franklin was a man of many interests,” said Socolow. “He was a citizen of the world, but he was also a world-class scientist and those roles often overlapped.”

For more than 50 years, Socolow’s research has focused on science that could make a social and global impact, particularly on the importance of preserving the planet.

In the wake of the 1969 Moon Landing and the early Earth Day celebrations of the 1970s, Socolow said, “we were forced to look at the planet as a whole and to consider how it worked as a system.

“No one had a real answer on how to do it,” he said, “but I knew that it would require looking at all sides of the problem: people, our behaviors, public policy, technology, and of course, climate science. That’s what attracted me – there was no single solution and no single approach.”

He highlighted this same approach as a co-author of Patient Earth – a primer published in 1971 that addressed the “intellectual complexities of environmental problems.” The book led physicists and engineers at Princeton University to recruit Socolow to lead a new center for interdisciplinary environmental research. He was charged with finding ways to connect the scientific research community with the rapidly growing environmental interests.

In this role, Socolow focused his research initially on how to reduce the impact on Earth of human energy use, inspired by the concepts of thermodynamics so central to physics, his initial discipline. His first project looked at how energy was used in residential buildings and how it could be used more efficiently. The team looked at the architectural design, building construction, the appliances in the home and how they were used, and more, and they found many paths to reduce energy consumption and reduce impact on the environment and climate.

Throughout his career, Socolow has studied energy production as well. He helped pioneer the field of industrial ecology, which focuses on the flows of materials in the economy, framing fossil fuel use as a flow of carbon. Working with his colleague, he focused on the climate-respectful option, called carbon capture and storage, where fossil energy continues to be used but chemicals capture the carbon dioxide that is produced when the fuel is burned so that the carbon dioxide cannot reach the atmosphere. Instead, the carbon dioxide is pumped into deep geological formations similar to the formations that the fossil fuels came from – a “circular economy” for carbon. Socolow’s work in this area caught the attention of several external stakeholders and led to the creation of one of Princeton’s longest collaborative partnerships with industry: the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) at Princeton University, founded in 2000. With Socolow as co-director, the CMI has pursued research on climate science, energy technology, and policies that can slow down climate change. Writing from this experience, Socolow co-authored his most widely cited paper, which introduced a diagram based on “stabilization wedges” that helps non-experts to visualize the job of slowing down climate change and to discuss the job quantitatively. Each wedge is a strategy that is pursued aggressively for 50 years: a wedge of improved automobile fuel economy, a wedge of wind power, etc. The message of the diagram is hopeful: humanity can make significant progress slowing down climate change using a portfolio of strategies already available today. The paper made humanity more confident that it could create a safer world. Ambitious targets for the reduction of global greenhouse gas emissions ensued.

Socolow acknowledges that the world’s views of environmental action have become more polarized, especially recently, and that this is making progress dealing with climate change more difficult. He seems himself “building the middle” by identifying common ground and fostering communication where there are strong disagreements about the relative priority of slowing down climate change. To encourage bridge-building, he focuses on the potential risks and shortcomings of the many nominal “solutions” to climate change.

“We finally have broad agreement that climate change is real and that human beings are causing it. The next step of the conversation is naturally ‘how important is climate change compared to other challenges?’ I think all can agree that this step is complicated, that we need to do some serious listening, and above all, that we need to continue the conversation.”

Winning the Scott Award, Socolow said, is “a validation of the credibility of the climate science enterprise that many of us have been studying climate science and human responses with the highest scientific standards.”