Michael E. Mann

Michael E. Mann (born December 28, 1965) is an American physicist and climatologist, currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. He is well known as lead author of a paper produced in 1999 on temperature trends over the last thousand years, which introduced new statistical techniques for hemispherical climate reconstructions and produced what 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, and the graph was highlighted in several parts of the report. The IPCC acknowledged that his work, and that of each of its other members, contributed to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC, jointly with 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.

Dr Mann is author of more than 140 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. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the climatology blog RealClimate.