Michael Mann (scientist)

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Michael Mann

Michael Mann is a well-known American climatologist and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. He has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate which feature a graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph" for the shape of the trend line. In August 2005 he was appointed Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Director of the university's interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. He previously taught at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Environmental Sciences (1999 - 2005).

He was a Lead Author on the “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report (2001). 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. Dr. Mann has been the recipient of several fellowships and prizes, including selection as one of the 50 leading visionaries in Science and Technology by Scientific American, the outstanding scientific publication award of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and recognition by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for notable citation of his refereed scientific research. Mann is one of several climate scientists who contribute to the RealClimate blog.

He is best known for his paleoclimate 'hockey stick' reconstructions of the past several millennia from tree ring, ice core, coral and other data. See temperature record of the past 1000 years for more details and dispute. Mann's recent work has been on modelling El Niño, and he has warned that "we are already committed to 50 to 100 years of global warming and several centuries of sea level rise" and that reduction in fossil fuel emissions is required to slow the process down to a level that can be coped with.

[edit] "Hockey Stick" graph

The neutrality of this section is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Reconstructions of the temperature history of the last 1000 years. The MBH '99 version is in blue

Main article: Hockey stick controversy

Scientific American magazine described him as the "Man behind the Hockey Stick", referring to his reconstruction of temperatures, originally published in 1998. The hockey stick was a term coined for a chart of temperature variation over the last 1,000 years, which suggested a recent sharp rise in temperature caused by human activities. The high-profile publication of the data led to the "hockey stick" being used as a key piece of supporting evidence in the third assessment report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 [1].

Dr. Mann has been personally involved in the debate over climate change. In testimony before the US Senate in 2003, he stated:

It is the consensus of the climate research community that the anomalous warmth of the late 20th century cannot be explained by natural factors, but instead indicates significant anthropogenic, that is human influences... More than a dozen independent research groups have now reconstructed the average temperature of the northern hemisphere in past centuries... The proxy reconstructions, taking into account these uncertainties, indicate that the warming of the northern hemisphere during the late 20th century... is unprecedented over at least the past millennium and it now appears based on peer-reviewed research, probably the past two millennia.

[edit] Selected publications

Mann, M.E., Cane, M.A., Zebiak, S.E., Clement, A., "Volcanic and Solar Forcing of the Tropical Pacific Over the Past 1000 Years", Journal of Climate, 18, 447-456, 2005.
Schmidt, G.A., Shindell, D.T., Miller, R.L., Mann, M.E., Rind, D., "General Circulation Modeling of Holocene climate variability", Quaternary Science Reviews, 23, 2167-2181, 2004.
Andronova, N.G., Schlesinger, M.E., Mann, M.E., "Are Reconstructed Pre-Instrumental Hemispheric Temperatures Consistent With Instrumental Hemispheric Temperatures?", Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L12202, doi: 10.1029/2004GL019658, 2004.
Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., "Climate Over Past Millennia", Reviews of Geophysics, 42, RG2002, doi: 10.1029/2003RG000143, 2004.
Mann, M.E., "On Smoothing Potentially Non-Stationary Climate Time Series", Geophysical Research Letters, 31, L07214, doi: 10.1029/2004GL019569, 2004.
Shindell, D.T., Schmidt, G.A., Mann, M.E., Faluvegi, G., "Dynamic winter climate response to large tropical volcanic eruptions since 1600", Journal of Geophysical Research, 109, D05104, doi: 10.1029/2003JD004151, 2004.
Mann, M.E., Jones, P.D., "Global surface temperature over the past two millennia", Geophysical Research Letters, 30 (15), 1820, doi: 10.1029/2003GL017814, 2003.
Mann, M.E., Ammann, C.M., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Oppenheimer, M., Osborn, T.J., Overpeck, J.T., Rutherford, S., Trenberth, K.E., Wigley, T.M.L., "On Past Temperatures and Anomalous Late 20th Century Warmth", Eos, 84, 256-258, 2003.
Mann, M.E., Schmidt, G.A., "Ground vs. Surface Air Temperature Trends: Implications for Borehole Surface Temperature Reconstructions", Geophysical Research Letters, 30 (12), 1607, doi: 10.1029/2003GL017170, 2003.
Mann, M.E., Rutherford, S., Bradley, R.S., Hughes, M.K., Keimig, F.T., "Optimal Surface Temperature Reconstructions using Terrestrial Borehole Data", ;;Journal of Geophysical Research;;, 108 (D7), 4203, doi: 10.1029/2002JD002532, 2003.
Rutherford, S., Mann, M.E., Delworth, T.L., Stouffer, R., "Climate Field Reconstruction Under Stationary and Nonstationary Forcing", Journal of Climate, 16, 462-479, 2003.
Mann, M.E. , "The Value of Multiple Proxies", Science, 297, 1481-1482, 2002.
Mann, M.E., Rutherford, S., "Climate Reconstruction Using 'Pseudoproxies'", Geophysical Research Letters, 29 (10), 1501, doi: 10.1029/2001GL014554, 2002.
Mann, M.E., Hughes, M.K., "Tree-Ring Chronologies and Climate Variability", Science, 296, 848, 2002.
Mann, M.E., Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Cole, J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, J.M., Overpeck, J.T., von Storch, H., Wanner, H., Weber, S.L., Widmann, M., "Reconstructing the Climate of the Late Holocene", Eos, 82, 553, 2001.
Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E.,Mann, M.E. "Medieval Climatic Optimum", Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, London, UK, pp. 514-516, 2001.
Mann, M.E. "Little Ice Age", Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, John Wiley and Sons Ltd, London, UK, pp. 504-509, 2001.
Shindell, D.T., Schmidt, G.A., Mann, M.E., Rind, D., Waple, A., "Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum", Science, 7, 2149-2152, 2001.
Bradley, R.S., Briffa, K.R., Crowley, T.J., Hughes, M.K., Jones, P.D., Mann, M.E., "Scope of Medieval Warming", Science, 292, 2011-2012, 2001.
Folland, C.K., Karl, T.R., Christy, J.R., Clarke, R. A., Gruza, G.V., Jouzel, J., Mann, M.E., Oerlemans, J., Salinger, M.J., Wang, S.-W., "Observed Climate Variability and Change", in 2001 Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Houghton, J.T., et al. (eds), Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 99-181, 2001.