Michael E. Mann
Michael E. Mann (born 1965) is an American climatologist and geophysicist, currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, who has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past 1000 years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change, and to isolate climate signals from "noisy data." As lead author of a paper produced in 1998 with co-authors Raymond S. Bradley and Malcolm K. Hughes, Mann introduced innovative statistical techniques to find regional variations in a hemispherical climate reconstruction covering the past 600 years. In 1999 the same team used these techniques to produce a reconstruction over the past 1,000 years (MBH99) which was dubbed the "hockey stick graph" because of its shape. He was one of 8 lead authors of the "Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report published in 2001. A graph based on the MBH99 paper was highlighted in several parts of the report, and was given wide publicity. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of the many other lead authors and review editors, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which was won jointly by the IPCC and Al Gore. He was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003 and has received a number of honors and awards including selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. In 2012 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and was awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. In 2013 he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, and awarded the status of distinguished professor in Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. Mann is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books: Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming in 2008 and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, published in early 2012. In 2013 the European Geosciences Union described his publication record as "outstanding for a scientist of his relatively young age". He is also a co-founder and contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.