Michael Mann Elected Fellow of the Royal Society

Michael Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, has been elected a fellow of the Royal Society, the national academy of sciences in the United Kingdom. He joins more than 90 researchers worldwide—less than one-third of whom come from outside the U.K.—recognized for their “substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science, and medical science.”
 
“This new cohort have already made significant contributions to our understanding of the world around us and continue to push the boundaries of possibility in academic research and industry,” says Sir Adrian Smith, Royal Society President. “From visualizing the sharp rise in global temperatures since the industrial revolution to leading the response to the COVID-19 pandemic, their diverse range of expertise is furthering human understanding and helping to address some of our greatest challenges.”
 
For more than three decades, Mann, who also directs the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability, and the Media and who holds a secondary appointment in the Annenberg School for Communication, has studied human-induced climate change. In the late 1990s, he and colleagues mapped temperature changes for the past 1,000 years, determining a dramatic uptick around the year 1900—a jump that aligned with increases in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases. The finding, which pointed clearly to the part humans were playing in a warming planet, put Mann at the center of the climate change debate.
 
Today, he’s an outspoken advocate for accurate depictions of climate science in the media, actively debunking misinformation from climate deniers. His current research involves modeling climate systems to better understand what triggers an ice age to begin and end and how changes in climate affect extreme weather. He has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, numerous op-eds, and commentaries, as well as five books: Dire Predictions, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, The Madhouse Effect, The Tantrum that Saved the World, and The New Climate War.

Image: Eric Sucar/University Communications