Michael E. Mann

Michael E. Mann (born 1965) is an American climatologist and geophysicist, currently director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.

Michael E. Mann in 2010

Quotes

• ...If we fail to act to bring down our carbon emissions over the next decade, this will lock in disastrous melting of the ice sheets, sea level rise, and a rise in devastating weather extremes down the road. (2019) [1]

Quotes about Mann

• this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized global economy by mid-century. But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming.
  • Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

• "There's no question that climate change has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense hurricanes, and supertyphoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still being debated within the scientific community.'
  • Naomi Klein This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (2014)

• According to Ben Santer, “Professor Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous 'hockey-stick' temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.” [2]

• At the other end of the spectrum are stories that it's too late, that it's all over, that there's nothing left to do. Misinterpretations of the data lead some to declare that the Earth itself is going to die or human beings are going to die out in the near future, stories that clash with what the evidence tells us. They make people feel terrible, and they make them passive. Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios.
  • Rebecca Solnit Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (2023)