Science and Storytelling

If you are a Columbia/Barnard affiliate with campus access, please use your Columbia/Barnard email when registering.

Each attendee must have their OWN registration and email address.

Registration for external guests closes at 4PM on October 26. Registration will automatically close at that time. Columbia/Barnard affiliates may register at the door.

Event Description

This roundtable brings together scientists and scientific storytellers to ask: What narrative strategies have been useful and effective in communicating scientific knowledge about climate change and thereby moving citizens to action?

Series Description:

This series of events aims to re-energize interdisciplinary conversations at Columbia about the climate emergency, at a moment when confronting the urgent and ever-growing challenges posed by global warming feels extraordinarily difficult. In the context of diminished funding for climate science and other federal actions that aim to roll back or obstruct climate action, it’s easy to be shocked into silence and despair, or to be burned-out to the point of wondering, what’s the point? In this difficult moment, what are we not talking about, and why? Given the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, this war on climate action seems, at best, extraordinarily stupid. How can we counter arguments that climate concern is “woke” or that climate action is “radical” or economically harmful? What can we learn from previous environmental setbacks? How can we reckon with climate change without being overwhelmed by climate anxiety? What modes of intelligence—in the university and beyond—can help us to counter these tendencies toward silence, stupidity, and despair? How can we forge a new common sense about the necessity and possibility of climate action?

About the Speakers

Emily Cooperdock is Assistant Professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental & Planetary Sciences at Brown University. Her research focuses on the role that exhumation and fluid-rock interactions have on tectonic and geochemical processes. She is also interested in the history of diversity in the geosciences and efforts to make the discipline more inclusive.

Miranda Massie is the founding director of the Climate Museum, the groundbreaking organization that boosts civic engagement with climate by uniting arts, learning, and activism. The Museum’s work empowers visitors who are worried about climate change but unsure what to do—a majority of US adults—to feel their own agency and to inspire others. Miranda left an award-winning career in social justice litigation to launch the Museum. Her many honors include serving as a Climate, Earth, and Society Distinguished Fellow at Columbia Climate School and a Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Kate Marvel is a climate scientist and one of the premier science communicators working today. A former cosmologist, Marvel received a PhD in theoretical physics from Cambridge University. She led the “Climate Trends” chapter in the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, has given a TED Talk, appeared on Meet the Press and The Ezra Klein Show, and testified before the U.S. Congress. She has written for Scientific American, Nautilus magazine, and the On Being Project. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.