Michael E. Mann

At 58 years old, Michael E. Mann physical status not available right now. We will update Michael E. Mann's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

In 1999, Mann secured a position as a tenure-track assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia. He left Virginia in 2005 to become an associate professor in the Department of Meteorology (with joint appointments in Department of Geosciences and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute) at Pennsylvania State University, where he was also appointed the Director of its Earth System Science Center. He was promoted to full professor in 2009 and to "Distinguished Professor of Meteorology" in 2013.

Before the publication of MBH98, Mann had been nominated to be an author on the IPCC Third Assessment Report. Late in 1998 he heard that he had been selected as a lead author for the "observations" chapter of the Working Group I report. He was to work with the numerous contributing authors in preparing an assessment of the state of knowledge of the paleoclimate record, starting by soliciting input from the leading experts in that field.

Mann was one of eight lead authors of the "Observed Climate Variability and Change" chapter of the report, working under the two co-ordinating lead authors for the chapter. The report was published in 2001.

Mann continued his interest in improving methodology to find patterns in high-resolution paleoclimate reconstructions: he was the lead author with Bradley and Hughes on a study of long term variability in the El Niño southern oscillations and related teleconnections, published in 2000. His areas of research have included climate signal detection, attribution of climate change and coupled ocean-atmosphere modeling, developing and assessing methods of statistical and time series analysis and comparing the results of modelling against data.

The original MBH98 and MBH99 papers avoided undue representation of large numbers of tree ring proxies by using a principal component analysis step to summarise these proxy networks, but from 2001 Mann stopped using this method and introduced a multivariate Climate Field Reconstruction (CFR) technique using a regularized expectation–maximization (RegEM) method which did not require this PCA step. In May 2002 Mann and Scott Rutherford published a paper on testing methods of climate reconstruction which discussed this technique. By adding artificial noise to actual temperature records or to model simulations they produced synthetic datasets which they called "pseudo proxies". When the reconstruction procedure was used with these pseudoproxies, the result was then compared with the original record or simulation to see how closely it had been reconstructed.

In August 2003 Mann with Phil Jones published reconstructions using various high-resolution proxies including tree rings, ice cores and sediments. This study indicated that that Northern Hemisphere late 20th century warmth had no precedent for roughly 2,000 years, dwarfing Medieval warmth, but proxy data was still too sparse to evaluate the Southern Hemisphere.

More recently, Mann's areas of research have included hurricanes and climate change, and climate modelling. His work using comparisons with the results of climate models indicated that cooling from large volcanoes was not fully shown by tree ring reconstructions, and suggested that in extreme cases cooling caused by eruptions could result in trees showing no growth, and hence no tree ring for that year. The result would be that tree ring reconstructions could understate climate variability, and there has been scientific debate about the methodology and validity of these findings.

A paper published in April 2014 by Mann and co-authors set out a new method of defining the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) in place of a problematic method based on detrending the climate signal. They found that in recent decades the AMO had been in a cooling phase, rather than a warming phase as researchers had thought. This cooling had contributed towards the recent Global warming hiatus in surface temperatures, and would change to enhanced surface warming in the next phase of the oscillation.

In 2018, Mann explained that the west Antarctic ice sheet may lose twice as much ice by the end of the century as previously thought, which also doubles the projected rise in sea level from three feet to more than six feet.

In 2020, Mann raised the hypothesis that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), hitherto regarded as internal oscillations of the climate system, are due to noise and anthropogenic sulfate aerosols.

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