Profile: Michael Mann

“We can control our own destiny,” says Michael Mann, Director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center and a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If humans can limit the peak in CO2 emissions to sometime in the next 10 years, and then bring emissions substantially below 1990 levels by mid-century, some of the catastrophic effects of climate change might be avoided. He is co-author of “Dire Predictions: Understanding global warming”.

By Nancy Gaarder in WORLD-HERALD BUREAU (8 April 2011):

Here’s how the climate joke goes:

Two polar bears are sitting on an ice floe barely large enough to hold them when the first one says to the other:

“Did you hear that global warming was a hoax?”

To which the second bear responds: “Shut up and paddle.”

Michael Mann, one of the nation’s leading climate researchers, used a bit of levity Thursday night to convey a fundamental aspect of climate change:

Ice knows no politics.

Mann said regardless of what Republicans or Democrats might be saying on the polarizing issues of climate change and reducing greenhouse gases, ice melts and recedes because of the physical laws of the Earth’s climate systems.

Mann is director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore in 2007.

He spoke Thursday to a standing-room-only crowd in the small auditorium at Hardin Hall on the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s east campus.

Mann said there is still time to act, although the window is narrowing.

“We can control our own destiny,” he said.

If humans can limit the peak in carbon dioxide emissions to sometime in the next 10 years, and then bring emissions substantially below 1990 levels by midcentury, some of the catastrophic effects of climate change might be avoided.

As it stands now, the news on the climate front is grim, he said.

Scientists thought it would be a number of years before humans could detect the loss of ice in the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland. Instead, it has been detected in the past five years.

Additionally, it was expected that it would be at least 50 years before the Arctic would be ice-free in the summer. Instead, it might be only a decade or two.

“In many ways, our predictions have been conservative,” Mann said.

Evidence of climate change, he said, is all around in the physical world and not dependent on the short time period that humans have been keeping records.

Mann said he realizes that people have a hard time accepting climate change, based on how much the weather changes in a given location.

“Some people say ‘Well, we’ve had a few cold days in Omaha, how can it be climate change?’ ” Mann said, echoing conversations around numerous water coolers.

“Climate change simply shifts the weather odds. We’ll still have cold snaps, but we’ll have more warm days and more days of record warmth.”

Fifty years ago, newly set temperature records were about evenly split between record warmth and cold, Mann said. Now, about twice as many record high temperatures are being set as opposed to low.

Source: www.omaha.com

Earlier this year – reported 22 January 2011 in www.NPR.org – Michael Mann pointed out that tree ring evidence pointed to climate influences on the fall of Rome.

That’s because trees create a new ring each year. A big ring occurs in times of good climate, and a small ring occurs in years of drought or extreme temperatures. Wood samples from this time period show a climate flip-flopping unpredictably, which would have been bad for the Roman Empire.

Rome may have fallen hundreds of years ago, but much of the civilization the Romans built still dots the landscape today. One team of scientists recently unearthed a different kind of Roman artifact that may hold a strange clue to the empire’s downfall.

A study of tree rings recently published in the journal Science provides evidence of climate shifts that, perhaps not coincidentally, occurred from A.D. 250 to 550, a period better known as the fall of the Roman Empire.

Ulf Buentgen and his team of researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research collected tree-ring data from ancient wood found in medieval castles and Roman ruins. They created a detailed history of climate change over the past 2.5 millennia and found the data point to the end of the Roman Empire as a period of exceptional climate change.

Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Penn State, was not a member of the research team, but explains how the information found in tree rings changes what we know of the last centuries of Roman imperialism.

“They were able to tease out two pieces of information from these trees,” Mann explains. “They can get some idea of how warm the summers were, and how wet the sort of late-spring/early summer was.”

That’s because trees create a new ring each year. A big ring occurs in times of good climate, and a small ring occurs in years of drought or extreme temperatures. Wood samples from this time period show a climate flip-flopping unpredictably, which would have been bad for the Roman Empire.

“Like any large civilization — including the civilization we have today — it was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources,” Mann says. “It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries.”

But while the tree rings show variability, there is no data for why these climate changes occurred. Global warming contributes to modern climate change, but Rome fell from power long before industrialization.

“Presumably it was some combination of these external natural factors like solar variability and volcanic eruptions, and just the pure sort of chaotic variability of the climate system,” Mann speculates.

This new research may not establish cause-and-effect, but it does contribute another factor to explain Rome’s fall. It also creates another clue for scientists sleuthing their way into an uncertain climate future.

Source: www.npr.org

By Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump

Available at Amazon.com and other booksellers

Publisher’s Book Description

Dire Predictions: Understanding global warming

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable to the general public who may still question the validity of climate change.

Esteemed climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, have partnered with DK Publishing to present Dire Predictions-an important book in this time of global need. Dire Predictions presents the information documented by the IPCC in an illustrated, visually-stunning, and undeniably powerful way to the lay reader. The scientific findings that provide validity to the implications of climate change are presented in clear-cut graphic elements, striking images, and understandable analogies.

Professor of Meteorology

Joint Appointment with the Department of Geosciences

Director, Earth System Science Center

Dr. Michael E. Mann received his undergraduate degrees in Physics and Applied Math from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.S. degree in Physics from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Geology & Geophysics from Yale University. He was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report, and has served as chair for the National Academy of Sciences ‘Frontiers of Science’. He has received the outstanding publication award from NOAA, and in 2002 was selected as one of the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology by Scientific American. He is author of more than 120 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and recently co-authored the book “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming” with colleague Lee Kump. He is also a co-founder and avid contributor to the award-winning science website “RealClimate.org”.

Source: www.essc.psu.edu