UMD News Releases

Michael Mann

Duluth, MN — Paleoclimatologist and geophysicist Michael Mann will present a lecture entitled “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: The Battle Continues” on October 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the Life Sciences Building, room 175, at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Mann is a distinguished professor of meteorology at Penn State University and is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). He has traveled the country speaking out about the danger posed by global climate change. Mann will address the social dynamic of this important topic in the Thursday evening lecture. The lecture is free and open to the public, and afterward, Mann will sign copies of his newest book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.

This event is sponsored by the Large Lakes Observatory, the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Swenson College of Science and Engineering.

MORE ABOUT MICHAEL MANN

In 1999, Mann and his team used cutting-edge statistical techniques that they had researched to produce a climate reconstruction of the last 1000 years. Their research techniques involved using a variety of signals collected from tree rings, coral, and polar ice cores. Their data was used to create the visualization MBH99, also known as the ‘hockey stick curve’. The phrase was coined to describe the shape of the graph.

Mann was one of the eight lead authors of the 2001 “Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report. In that document, a graph based on MBH99 was highlighted numerous times, drawing much publicity to the findings of Mann and his colleagues.

This graph was so important to the spread of climate awareness that the IPCC acknowledged that his work, along with that of many others, contributed significantly to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the IPCC and former vice-president Al Gore. At the same time, it drew the criticism from some who are skeptical of human-caused global warming.

The group’s findings have been echoed by numerous independent scientific studies, and all seem to indicate the same thing: the world is heating at an unprecedented rate and is currently the warmest it has been in over a thousand years. Nevertheless, many skeptics remain unconvinced.

The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars continues the narrative past the mid–2000s, filling the public in on changes in the fight against global climate change.