Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, will give a lecture on global climate change on Wednesday, May 10, at UC Santa Cruz. His talk--"Global Climate Change: Past and Future"--will take place at 7 p.m. at the Seymour Center at UCSC's Long Marine Laboratory. The event is free and open to the public.
Mann is one of the leading authorities on global climate change. His research has been central to establishing the growing human influence on climate and, as a result, has been the target of criticism from skeptics of global warming. Mann will present the evidence for a human influence on the climate of recent decades. Such evidence includes instrumental measurements available for the past two centuries, paleoclimate observations spanning more than a millennium, and comparisons of the predictions from computer models with observed patterns of climate change. He will also discuss future impacts of human-induced climate change that are significant for the United States, including possible influences on the intensity and frequency of hurricanes and on water supplies in the western states.
Mann, an associate professor of meteorology at Penn State, is a cofounder of the web site RealClimate.org, chosen as one of the top 25 science and technology web sites by Scientific American in 2005. He was named as one of 50 leading visionaries in science and technology by Scientific American in 2002.
