2017 Stephen H. Schneider Award Bestowed upon Dr. Michael Mann
June 19, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO --- Climate One at The Commonwealth Club announced today that Dr. Michael Mann will be awarded the seventh annual Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. The $15,000 award is given to a natural or social scientist who has made extraordinary scientific contributions and communicated that knowledge to a broad public in a clear and compelling fashion. The award was established in honor of Stephen Henry Schneider, one of the founding fathers of climatology who died suddenly in 2010.
The award jurors are Dr. Larry Goulder (Economics Professor, Stanford University), Dr. Ben Santer (Climate Researcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and Cristine Russell (Senior Fellow, Environment and Natural Resources Program, Harvard University). The jury solicited nominations from a broad spectrum of anonymous experts in the fields of science and communication. The jurors decided that Dr. Mann exemplifies the rare ability to be both a superb scientist and powerful communicator in the mold of Stephen Schneider.
Juror Santer said, “Prof. Mike Mann has been a world leader in scientific efforts to understand the natural variability of the climate system, and to reconstruct global temperature variations over the past two millennia. This critically important work led to the famous "hockey-stick" temperature reconstruction. The hockey stick provides compelling evidence for the emergence of a human-caused warming signal from the background noise of natural fluctuations in climate.”
Dr. Mann will receive the award in New Orleans in December during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. More details about time and place will be released at a later date. The award is presented by Climate One, a project of The Commonwealth Club of California, and underwritten by Tom R. Burns, Nora Machado, and Michael Haas.
Dr. Michael Mann
“Stephen Schneider was a role model and mentor to me and I am truly humbled to receive the Stephen Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communication. While none of us can fill the very large shoes Steve left behind, we can honor his legacy by doing our best to inform the public discourse over human-caused climate change in an objective, clear and effective manner.” - Dr. Mann
Dr. Michael E. Mann is Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science at Penn State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Geosciences and the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute (EESI). He is also director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center (ESSC).
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. His research involves the use of theoretical models and observational data to better understand Earth's climate system.
In 2001, Dr. Mann was a Lead Author on the Observed Climate Variability and Changechapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Scientific Assessment Report and was organizing committee chair for the National Academy of Sciences Frontiers of Science in 2003. He has received a number of honors and awards including NOAA's outstanding publication award in 2002 and selection by Scientific American as one of the fifty leading visionaries in science and technology in 2002. He made Bloomberg News' list of fifty most influential people in 2013. In 2014, he was named Highly Cited Researcher by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and received the Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, the American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dr. Mann is author of more than 200 peer-reviewed and edited publications, and has published two books including Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, with a third The Madhouse Effect, co-authored with Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles that was released in 2016. He is also a co-founder of the award-winning science website RealClimate.org.
Dr. Stephen H. Schneider
Dr. Stephen H. Schneider was the Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor of Biological Sciences, Professor (by courtesy) of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a Senior Fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford University. Dr. Schneider received his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering and Plasma Physics from Columbia University in 1971. He studied the role of greenhouse gases and suspended particulate material on climate as a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in 1972 and was a member of the scientific staff of NCAR from 1973-1996, where he co-founded the Climate Project. In 2002, Dr. Schneider was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Internationally recognized for research, policy analysis and outreach in climate change, Dr. Schneider focused on climate change science, integrated assessment of ecological and economic impacts of human-induced climate change, and identifying viable climate policies and technological solutions. He also consulted with federal agencies and/or White House staff in the Nixon, Carter, Reagan, G.H.W. Bush, Clinton and G.W. Bush administrations. His work is chronicled at climatechange.net.
Past Winners of The Stephen H. Schneider Award Presented By Climate One
2016 Dr. Naomi Oreskes, Professor of History of Science and affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University
2015 Dr. Chris Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution for Science
2014 Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Distinguished Professor, Oregon State University
2013 Dr. Nicholas Stern, Chair, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change
2012 Dr. James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
2011 Dr. Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences, Penn State University