Michael E. Mann, PH.D.
RECIPIENT OF THE HONORARY DEGREE
In schoolyards, congressional hearings, and courtrooms, Michael Mann has fended off bullies. Despite massive pushback from the fossil fuel industry and its powerful political allies, he has made watershed contributions to our knowledge about climate change.
Dr. Mann double majored in Physics and Applied Math at the University of California, Berkeley, and went on to earn an M.S. in Physics from Yale University. Drawn by the prospect of investigating an important real-world problem, he became interested in natural climate variability. He dug into that topic for his Ph.D., which he earned from Yale’s Geology and Geophysics department.
Dr. Mann continued this work as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where his discoveries led him into the contentious arena of human-influenced climate change. He used surrogate measures of climate to estimate historical temperatures and, in the late 1990s, he and colleagues reported that the planet had begun to heat up at the beginning of the 20th century. Their analysis pointed toward greenhouse gases as the culprit and their studies produced a compelling and easy-to-grasp image that became a symbol of human-induced global warming, the so-called hockey-stick graph.
Climate-change deniers jumped on Dr. Mann and his results, using multi-pronged intimidation tactics to disrupt his work and equanimity. The threat of congressional subpoenas loomed, his emails were hacked and misrepresented in an organized effort to discredit him, and he received death threats. Throughout, Dr. Mann persevered in his research and his commitment to explain his findings and their implications.
Dr. Mann has written six books for lay audiences and he is currently crafting a seventh, with vaccine expert Peter Hotez, about the anti-science movement. He co-founded the website RealClimate.org, which aims to educate the public and journalists about a range of topics pertaining to climate science and relevant context. He is currently Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He also directs the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media. His distinctions include membership in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society, and he has earned many honors, including the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the Leo Szilard Award of the American Physical Society. In 2023, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the year.