Michael E. Mann

Michael E. Mann
Born	(1965-12-28) December 28, 1965 Amherst, Massachusetts
Nationality	American
Education	A.B. applied mathematics and physics (1989), MS physics (1991), MPhil physics (1991), MPhil geology (1993), PhD geology (1998)
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley, Yale University
Occupation	Climatologist
Employer	Pennsylvania State University
Known for	Temperature record of the past 1000 years, hockey stick controversy, Climategate
Awards	Phillip M. Orville Prize NOAA Outstanding Scientific Publication John Russell Mather Paper of the Year American Geophysical Union Editors' Citation for Excellence in Refereeing 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with other IPCC members)
Website	Mann's home page RealClimate

Michael E. Mann (born December 28, 1965) is an American climatologist, currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is best known as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends over the last thousand years, called the "hockey stick graph" because of its shape. The graph was highlighted in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, receiving both praise and criticism, and has been the subject of a long-running controversy. Mann is also known as a founding member of the RealClimate blog, to which he and a number of other scientists contribute, and is the co-author with Lee R. Kump of Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (2008).

Mann came to widespread public attention in November 2009 when over 1,000 emails written by him and other climatologists were leaked and posted on the Web, triggering what became known in the media as Climategate.

Early life

Mann was born at Amherst, Massachusetts. He obtained an A.B. in applied mathematics and physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989, then transferred to Yale University. He obtained an MS there in physics in 1991, an MPhil in physics the same year, an MPhil in geology in 1993, and a PhD in geology in 1998.

Career

Academic posts and publications

From 1999 to 2005 Mann taught at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Environmental Sciences. In 2009 he was promoted to professor at Pennsylvania State University in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and since 2005 has been director of the university's interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. He has been organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences 'Frontiers of Science' and has served as a committee member or advisor for other National Academy of Sciences panels. He served as editor for the Journal of Climate and has been a member of numerous international and U.S. scientific advisory panels and steering groups.

He is the lead author or co-author of over 90 scientific publications, the majority of which have appeared in leading peer-reviewed scientific journals. He was a Lead Author on the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001). Between 1999-2010 he served as principal investigator or co-principal investigator on five research projects funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and four more funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and co-investigator on other projects funded by the NOAA, NSF, Department of Energy, United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Hockey stick graph

File:Hockey stick chart ipcc large.jpg

The hockey stick graph. The blue lines are temperatures estimated from proxy indicators, red lines are temperatures from thermometers, and the gray areas represent estimated error bars.

Main article: Hockey stick controversy

Mann is best known for his work on the temperature record of the past 1000 years, which has involved reconstructing climatic fluctuations over the past several millennia, based on evidence from tree rings, ice cores, corals and other physical proxies. In 1998 Mann, Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes co-authored a study titled Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries which included a graph showing an abrupt rise in global temperatures in the late 20th century after centuries of relative stability. In 1999 they extended their study to cover ten centuries, in a paper titled Northern hemisphere temperature during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties and limitations. The equivalent graph from the 1999 paper was dubbed the "hockey stick" for its shape. His most recent work has focused on the contribution that changes in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation have made to the pre-industrial climate.

The hockey stick graph has gained iconic status and triggered controversy, its appearance in the IPCC Third Assessment Report in 2001 making it the focus of attacks from those opposed to the scientific consensus on climate change. The conclusions represented by the graph were endorsed by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in a 2006 report, and Mann has said his findings have been "independently verified by independent teams using alternative methods and alternative data sources." More than a dozen subsequent scientific papers produced reconstructions broadly similar to the original graph, and almost all agreed that the warmest decade in the last thousand years was probably that at the end of the 20th century.

Awards

Man was awarded the Phillip M. Orville Prize in 1997 for an outstanding dissertation in the earth sciences at Yale University. His co-authorship of a scientific paper published by Nature won him an award from the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) in 2002, and another co-authored paper published in the same year won the NOAA's outstanding scientific publication award. He was named by Scientific American as one of fifty "leading visionaries in science and technology." The Association of American Geographers awarded him the John Russell Mather Paper of the Year award in 2005 for a co-authored paper published in the Journal of Climate. The American Geophysical Union awarded him its Editors' Citation for Excellence in Refereeing in 2006 to recognize his contributions in reviewing manuscripts for its Geophysical Research Letters journal. Mann's work and that of several hundred other scientists who contributed to the IPCC's Third Assessment Report received recognition with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

Climatic Research Unit emails

Main article: Climatic Research Unit email controversy

The Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

In November 2009, a number of Mann's e-mails with climate researchers at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were stolen and published on the Internet, sparking the what became known n the media as "Climategate". Patrick Michaels, a climatologist working for the Cato Institute, said the e-mails show Mann had encouraged colleagues to block the publication of papers disputing his work. Mann rejected the allegations, saying the e-mails had been "misrepresented, cherry-picked ... [and] completely twisted to imply the opposite of what was actually being said".

Pennsylvania State University (PSU) commissioned two reviews, which reported in February and July 2010. They cleared Mann of misconduct, stating there was no substance to the allegations, but criticized him for sharing unpublished manuscripts with third parties. Mann welcomed the findings, and the outcome was well-received by other scientists and academics. Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists said the report "shows that universities and scientists have effective systems in place to police themselves." Former Republican congressman Sherwood Boehlert of the Project on Climate Science, an environmental advocacy coalition, called the reviews "a welcome return to common sense" in the face of "a manufactured distraction". The outcome was criticized by Patrick Michaels. Josh Roskam of the Institute of Public Affairs said the PSU reviews had not answered questions "about why data was missing; why data was not shared; why there hasn't been a full and open, transparent process." Republican Representative Darrell Issa said the reviews called into question Mann's work, and former Fox News contributor Steven Milloy said they were "set up to be a total whitewash and the panel made no effort to investigate."

In April 2010 Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, on the basis of the CRU email leak, served the University of Virginia, where Mann worked from 1999 to 2005, with a civil investigative demand (CID) for documents relating to five Mann grant-funding applications. The Attorney General's office wrote that the CID was based on Virginia's 2003 Fraud Against Taxpayers Act. In exchanges with the university—which the ACLU of Virginia said was "hard to conceive of ... as anything but a 'fishing expedition'"—a brief from Cuccinelli asserted that Mann and other scientists had manipulated scientific conclusions to produce results that could be used to support the regulation of carbon dioxide. The demand prompted criticism from the academic community. After initially suggesting that they would comply, university officials instead asked a state court to dismiss the demand as "fundamentally legally flawed," not least because four of the five grants received by Mann were federal, and one preceded the 2003 Act.

Selected publications

• Mann, Michael; Kump, Lee R. (2008). Dire predictions: understanding global warming. DK. ISBN 0-7566-3995-6. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Mann M.E. (2009). "Defining Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference". Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 106 (11): 4065–6. doi:10.1073/pnas.0901303106. PMC 2657409. PMID 19276105. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Mann M.E.; Bradley R.S.; Hughes M.K. (1999). "Northern hemisphere temperatures during the past millennium: inferences, uncertainties, and limitations" (PDF). Geophysical Research Letters. 26 (6): 759–762. doi:10.1029/1999GL900070. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Mann M.E.; Bradley R.S.; Hughes M.K. (1998). "Global-scale temperature patterns and climate forcing over the past six centuries" (PDF). Nature. 392 (6678): 779–787. doi:10.1038/33859. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Mann M.E.; Jones P.D. (2003). "Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia" (PDF). Geophysical Research Letters. 30 (15): 1820–23. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Mann M.E.; Lees J.M. (1996). "Robust estimation of background noise and signal detection in climatic time series" (PS). Climatic Change. 33 (3): 409–445. doi:10.1007/BF00142586. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |author-separator= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |authormask= ignored (|author-mask= suggested) (help)
• Shindell D.T., Schmidt G.A., Mann M.E., Rind D., Waple A. (2001). "Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum" (PDF). Science. 294 (5549): 2149–52. doi:10.1126/science.1064363. PMID 11739952.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)

External links

External image
Michael Mann with tree rings

• Mann's home page
• Realclimate.org RealClimate is a Climate science weblog to which Mann is a contributor.
• Appell D. (2005). "Behind the Hockey Stick". Scientific American. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
• Science popes and conflict of interests, Natuurwetenschap & Techniek article
• "Climate legacy of 'hockey stick'". BBC News. 2004-08-16.
• "Interview" (RealAudio). Radio 4. BBC. 2005-02-24.
• Mann M.E. (2003-07-29). "Testimony before Committee on Environment and Public Works" (RealAudio). United States Senate. f:92381.wais. transcript {{cite web}}: External link in |quote= (help)
• "Interview" (RealAudio). NPR. 2002-03-29.
• Mother Jones, 18 April 2005, "The Man Behind the Hockey Stick" - interview
• Thacker P.D. (31 August 2005). "How a global-warming skeptic became famous". Environ. Sci. Technol. 39 (21): 436A–7A. doi:10.1021/es053378b.