The Past as Prologue: Learning from the Climate Changes in Past Centuries

Michael Mann

Tuesday, May 7, 2013 2:00 P.M. in the H.J.E. Reid Auditorium

Abstract

Dr. Mann will review work over the past decade aimed at establishing the nature of, and factors underlying, patterns of large-scale climate variability in past centuries. He will discuss evidence from proxy climate reconstructions spanning the past millennium, the comparison of proxy reconstructions with simulations with climate model simulations forced by past natural and anthropogenic forcing, and results from climate modeling experiments in which proxy evidence is assimilated directly into coupled ocean-atmosphere model simulations. He will also discuss recent work suggesting the possibility that equilibrium climate sensitivity may have been underestimated in some past studies comparing model simulations and paleoclimate reconstructions.

Speaker

Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University, and directs the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC). He was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Change chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report. His awards include NOAA’s outstanding publication award, selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology, and the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He contributed, with other IPCC authors, to the award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. Dr. 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 is author of more than 150 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books on climate change.