Renowned climate scientist, author and Nobel laureate Michael E. Mann, whose research asserts that humans are causing the Earth to grow hotter, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 10, in the Nott Memorial.
His talk, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars" takes its title from his best-selling book published earlier this year. The talk is free and open to the public.
Mann was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when it was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007. He was inducted as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union in 2012. Mann is on the faculty at Penn State University, where he directs the Earth System Science Center.
Mann’s research indicated that modern day temperatures are significantly higher than at any time in the past thousand years. His "hockey stick" graph, published in 2001, illustrates recent rapid rises in global temperatures and become an iconic symbol of global warming due to human activities. It also has made Mann a lightning rod for those who believe global warming is a fraud, making him the subject of numerous death threats and lawsuits.
Last month, a judge in Virginia rejected a conservative group’s attempt to obtain thousands of Mann's emails from when he was a professor at the University of Virginia. The records have been sought by the American Tradition Institute, which adamantly rejects the assertion by Mann and other climate scientists that decades of heat-trapping carbon gas emissions into the atmosphere are responsible for global warming.
Mann is the author of more than 140 peer-reviewed and edited publications. He is also the author of 2008's Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming.
His talk is sponsored by Environmental Science, Policy and Engineering.
Last spring, the College Republicans, through the Conservatives for a Constructive Tomorrow, hosted a talk by Christopher Monckton, the UK Independence party's head of research and a high-profile skeptic of global warming.