Climate warrior
After leading the College of Arts and Sciences for a dozen years, Professor Cyrus Taylor is on a new and urgent quest: saving the world from global warming.
By Zachary Lewis
Cyrus Taylor teaches Introduction to Climate Change, a course he designed, in the Rockefeller Building in February 2024.
No data, chart, or text related to climate change stirs physicist Cyrus Taylor like his two photos of Mount Kilimanjaro.
It isn’t that the photos, taken by him 33 years apart, conjure memories of trips with his daughter, of two valiant but unsuccessful attempts to climb the African peak. No, what’s most poignant to Taylor is how very different the images are.
Holding the photos side by side in his Shaker Heights dining room, where Greta Thunberg’s “The Climate Book” rests prominently atop a stack of related volumes, the otherwise matter-of-fact scientist’s voice wavers as he contrasts the large snowy cap in the image from 1984 with the mostly brown slope of 2017.
Scaling Kilimanjaro “was the dream of a lifetime for me,” Taylor says. Seeing how global warming has affected the majestic peak, however, “I literally had tears in my eyes. The snows of Kilimanjaro will not be there much longer.”
Taylor isn’t going to let those snows melt without a fight. He’s channeling his dismay into bold action in and around Case Western Reserve University and becoming an environmental leader in the process, all in hopes of driving change that might ultimately save his beloved Kilimanjaro – and the planet.
Tall and affable, Taylor is highly recognizable on Case Quad. Many still think of him as the “dean of deans,” the straight-talking administrator who led the College of Arts and Sciences from 2006 to 2018.
An ultra marathoner, Cyrus Taylor ran in the Black Canyon Ultra in Arizona in February 2019.
Mount Kilimanjaro midsummer 1984. Photo by Cyrus Taylor.
Mount Kilimanjaro midsummer 2017. The glaciers visible in 1984 have mostly melted away. Photo by Cyrus Taylor.
Now he’s the Albert A. Michelson Professor in the Department of Physics, where he quickly impressed students with his dedication and sincerity. One year after returning to the classroom in 2020, Taylor won the Carl F. Wittke Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the highest honor CWRU students can bestow upon a professor.
Despite his public persona, some of Taylor’s most impactful work has taken place behind the scenes. Stephanie Corbett, Director of Energy, Sustainability, and the University Farm at CWRU, said Taylor has been a tireless force for change on campus committees, supporting her efforts to establish the Climate Action Network, which unites far-flung departments and stakeholders around environmental initiatives.
She also attributes the success of CWRU’s annual Climate Action Week (in October) in part to Taylor, as well as the university’s 2011 Climate Action Plan and 2020 update. He fostered a supportive, collaborative environment in which all voices were welcome, she said. Now, as a result, instructors across campus include environmental topics in their curricula, further increasing awareness.
“He’s had an impact that is unparalleled,” Corbett said, noting that because Taylor was a dean, “He’s been able to make a difference in ways I don’t think others could have. To me, he is the linchpin. Nothing would have happened without him.”
Taylor hasn’t confined himself to the conference room. He’s also engaging in climate-related research on and off campus and taking his case to the public, to as many people as will listen.
Standing up for science
On a late September evening in CWRU’s Thwing Center, Taylor conjured former Vice President Al Gore’s presentation of “An Inconvenient Truth” with a public lecture and slideshow. It was the first of two lectures in a series called “Climate Change: The Effects Are Real and the Consequences Are Dire.”
His opening, an overview of climate science and climate science history, was rather academic. Bit by bit, however, the situations Taylor described and the data he presented grew more dire. Unless humanity slows its “prodigious” release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, he said, oceans will rise and acidify and storms and droughts will grow stronger and more frequent. He mapped out a clear, frightening trend.
In a later interview, responding to the U.S. National Climate Assessment released in November 2023, Taylor warned of “profound” economic impacts as well. As the climate continues to change, the U.S. can expect more and stronger extreme heat events, like those that did $1 billion in damage between 2018 and 2022, the report noted. Agriculture will suffer and infectious diseases will spread as insect hosts thrive. Coastal communities and some major cities will be inundated by rising oceans.
Cyrus Taylor helped start CWRU’s Climate Action Week, which takes place in October.
“As we continue to pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the frequency and magnitude of these disasters will continue to increase,” Taylor said.
Surprisingly, perhaps, environmental science is not Taylor’s first field. At CWRU, where he joined the faculty in 1988, Taylor has primarily taught physics, specifically particle physics and string theory. As dean, he earned accolades for launching scientific entrepreneurship programs.
Then came his second assault on Kilimanjaro, and along with it, the eye-opening realization that climate change is occurring, perhaps more rapidly than he or most people understood.
Further energizing to him was his discovery of a leaked document from the American Petroleum Institute, showing that oil companies have been aware of their industry’s harmful impact on the environment since at least 1982, long before the general public associated fossil fuels with climate change. He saw how effective those companies had been at controlling the narrative, simply by sowing doubt.
In a virtual instant, Taylor’s academic and personal focus shifted to climate change, a subject he saw as more urgent and more potentially impactful. In 2020, back in the class room, he developed “Introduction to Climate Change,” a course covering both the science and the politics surrounding global warming.
“The physics is going to get done, whether I do it or not,” Taylor said he concluded. “As beguiling as it [string theory] is, it didn’t seem likely to connect with the general public in my lifetime. That turned out to be an accurate prediction.”
Taylor continues to do scientific work related to the environment. Often hand-in-hand with students, he is exploring how the effects of climate change will vary around the globe, in the tropopause layer of the atmosphere. What he’s finding is that some of the worst effects will be felt by the developing world, whose contribution to the problem has been minimal. But it is as a spokesman and activist that Taylor has made, and continues to make, his boldest inroads.
Into the political arena
One of Taylor’s longest-running endeavors related to climate change has been a focus study group. Again with help from students, and in collaboration with the Sociology Department, he has been part of a detailed review of public opinion, taking the temperature, so to speak, of how CWRU’s immediate neighbors in Cleveland think and feel about the environment.
Through that work, he came to realize that the battle for the planet is largely a battle for hearts and minds, against forces that are well-organized and well-funded but not especially well informed. When it comes to climate change, Taylor said, “People [will] say things that would just floor you. Our major challenges right now are not technological or financial but political.”
And so, increasingly, Taylor has moved into the political arena, taking his fight for the snows of Kilimanjaro to the government centers of Ohio.
For that, Northeast Ohio should consider itself fortunate, said Matthew Hodgetts, a visiting assistant professor in CWRU’s Department of Political Science. If anyone in this region is equipped, motivated, and positioned to advocate for the environment, he said, it’s Taylor.
Greater Cleveland is “lucky to have [Taylor] championing this cause,” Hodgetts said. “[He] has brought a seemingly tireless dedication to promoting climate change awareness…Where he finds the time for all he does, I do not know.”
Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne agrees. He came to know Dean Taylor during his previous job, as president of University Circle Inc.
“I’ve seen him in action, and admired him,” Ronayne said. “He’s been a beacon…He has been, and will continue to be, a great resource.”
One of Taylor’s boldest forays into the public realm was to a January 2023 meeting of the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA), the planning group that oversees federal transportation spending in and around Greater Cleveland. The agency sought public input on a Climate Action Plan to cut emissions and pollution, and Taylor went to argue in its favor, specifically for the plan to include the terms “climate change” and “greenhouse gases.”
Not all at the NOACA meeting felt the same. Taylor found himself outnumbered by climate-change deniers and others spouting what he called “lunatic conspiracy theories,” often to hearty applause.
“This was a whole new level of crazy…on a scale I had never dreamed of,” he said.
Luckily for Taylor and other local environmentalists, reason prevailed at NOACA. The board sided with the science. Early in 2024, the Climate Action Plan was proceeding, scientific terms in place.
He’s also making his voice heard at the state level, in opposition to Ohio Senate Bill 83, a sweeping measure that would ban discussions of several “controversial” topics at public universities. Near the top of the list of taboo topics is climate change.
Fearing a measure that would undermine climate science, Taylor traveled to the Statehouse in Columbus and added his name to a long list of citizen opponents. “If this bill passes, it’s actually more insidious than what’s been done in Florida,” he warned.
As of early January 2024, the bill had passed in the Ohio Senate but did not appear to have enough votes to pass in the House, even as several lawmakers pledged to continue fighting for it.
Cyrus Taylor delivers a public lecture on climate change in the Thwing Center in September 2023.
Despite the battles and the misinformation, Taylor remains optimistic about humanity’s chances of saving the planet. At the federal level, the Biden Administration has done “quite amazing things,” he said, by promoting electric vehicles and making renewable sources of energy competitive with or even cheaper than fossil fuels.
Over time, green options will grow more attractive, he believes, especially in contrast to the cost of insuring against floods, storms, and fires, which will skyrocket in a warming world.
The key question, he said, is whether government can continue to shift “from a stance of trying to stop the tide to one of embracing the coming changes.”
If the planet as we know it is to be saved, many more will need to understand and appreciate the science of climate change. On this point, too, Taylor remains sanguine. He knows the planet is interconnected, that what happens to Kilimanjaro depends in part on what happens everywhere else, including his own backyard. He recently installed solar panels on his roof.
Positive developments are “already happening,” Taylor said. “I do believe that what four or five years ago seemed the likely outcome, it’s not as bad as that.”
There’s hope, he says, if people believe in the power of science to solve problems — and believe in their own ability to adapt and change.
Zachary Lewis, a Cleveland freelance writer, is a former award-winning reporter for The Plain Dealer. To comment on this story, please email casealum@casealum.org.
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