Michael Mann is an American climatologist and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed journal publications. He has attained public prominence as lead author of a number of articles on paleoclimate and as one of the originators of a graph of temperature trends dubbed the "hockey stick graph" for the shape of the graph. The graph received both praise and criticism after its publication in an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In August 2005 he was appointed Associate Professor at Pennsylvania State University, in the Department of Meteorology and Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, and Director of the university's interdepartmental Earth System Science Center. He previously taught at the University of Virginia, in the Department of Environmental Sciences (1999 - 2005).
He was a Lead Author on the “tar/wg1/048.htm" target="_blank">Observed Climate Variability and Change” chapter of the _Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report (2001). He has been organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences ‘Frontiers of Science’ and has served as a committee member or advisor for other National Academy of Sciences panels. He served as editor for the Journal of Climate and has been a member of numerous international and U.S. scientific advisory panels and steering groups. Dr. Mann has been the recipient of several fellowships and prizes, including selection as one of the 50 leading visionaries in Science and Technology by Scientific American, the outstanding scientific publication award of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and recognition by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) for notable citation of his refereed scientific research. Mann is one of several climate scientists who contribute to the RealClimate blog.
He is best known for his paleoclimate 'hockey stick' reconstructions of the past several millennia from tree ring, ice core, coral and other data. See temperature record of the past 1000 years for more details and dispute. Mann's recent work has been on modelling El Niño, and he has said that "we are already committed to 50 to 100 years of global warming and several centuries of sea level rise" and that reduction in fossil fuel emissions is required to slow the process down to a level that can be coped with.
Michael Mann (1942-) is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California - Los Angeles (UCLA) and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and U.S. citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971.
Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Edvisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.
In 1984, Mann published "The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results," in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.
Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century from the alleged Armenian genocide in Turkey to the Nazi Holocaust and Rwanda's anti-Hutu extermination campaigns. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.
Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series.
A student of London's International Film School, Michael Mann began his career in the late 70s, writing for TV shows like "Starsky and Hutch" (1975). He directed his first film, the award-winning prison drama Jericho Mile, The (1979) (TV), in 1979. He followed that in 1981 with his first theatrical release, Thief (1981) starring James Caan (I) as a safecracker who falls under the spell of the mob. He followed with Keep, The (1983), an adaptation of F. Paul Wilson's novel about a mysterious force within a Nazi fortress. He hit it big in 1984, when he produced and created the long-running TV series "Miami Vice" (1984), which made Don Johnson (I) a household name. He followed that up in 1986 with a disastrous, lesser-known TV series, "Crime Story" (1986), and the superb thriller Manhunter (1986) a precursor of Silence of the Lambs, The (1991). He spent the next few years involved in television, directing films like L.A. Takedown (1989) (TV) and producing films like the Emmy-winning "Drug Wars: The Camarena Story" (1990) (mini). In 1992, he returned to feature film with the box-office hit Last of the Mohicans, The (1992), which starred Daniel Day-Lewis and Madeleine Stowe.
