There And Back Again: Talk Focuses On Climate Change

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May 06, 2013, 02:38 ET

HAMPTON, Va., May 6, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The key to understanding our extended climate forecast may lie in the distant past.

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On Tuesday, May 7, at NASA's Langley Research Center, meteorologist Michael Mann will present, "The Past as Prologue: Learning from the Climate Changes in Past Centuries," at 2 p.m. in the Reid Conference Center here.

Mann will be available to answer questions from the media during a news briefing at 1:15 p.m. that day. Media who wish to do so should contact Chris Rink at 757-864-6786, or by e-mail at [email protected], by noon on the day of the talk for credentials and entry to the center.

That same evening at 7:30, Mann will present, "The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines," for the general public at the Virginia Air & Space Center in downtown Hampton. This Sigma Series event is free and no reservations are required.

At the Langley talk, Mann will review work over the last decade aimed at establishing the nature and factors of large-scale climate variability from the past. He will also discuss recent studies that suggest climate sensitivity may have been underestimated in past studies that compare model simulations and paleoclimate reconstructions.

For the Sigma series presentation, Mann will tell the story behind, "The Hockey Stick" a graph constructed to depict changes in Earth's temperature in the last 1,000 years. The graph became an icon in the debate over human-caused climate change.

Dr. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Meteorology at Penn State University and directs the Penn State Earth System Science Center. 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 selection by Scientific American as one of the 50 leading visionaries in science and technology. Mann and other IPCC authors received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. He is a Fellow of both the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society.

Mann received his undergraduate degrees in physics and applied math from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of Science degree in physics from Yale University, and a doctoral degree in geology and geophysics from Yale University. He is author of more than 150 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books on climate change.

For more information about NASA Langley's Colloquium and Sigma Series Lectures, visit:
http://colloqsigma.larc.nasa.gov

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SOURCE NASA