Michael Mann

Penn State Professor Michael Mann describes himself as a climate change "advocate."

(Anna Orso)

STATE COLLEGE – When Michael Mann presents public lectures on climate change, he almost always ends with the same PowerPoint slide. It’s a photo of his daughter, Megan.

The now-8-year-old is standing in a plexiglass tunnel beneath a polar bear exhibit at the Pittsburgh Zoo, looking up at the tank that holds the massive arctic creatures. For Mann and his climate change supporters, it’s symbolic.

“I’d hate to leave behind a world for her where she might return to this zoo in 50 years and point to those creatures and talk about how they used to exist in the arctic,” Mann said, “but we melted their home.”

Mann, the director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State and the author of “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines,” said there’s no question having a young daughter has shaped the course he takes in engaging in the climate change debate.

The distinguished professor of meteorology recently penned an op-ed in The New York Times titled, "If You See Something, Say Something." The piece, which Mann said he approached a New York Times editor about writing rather than the other way around, describes Mann's relatively newfound philosophical view on the role of scientists: "It is no longer acceptable for scientists to remain on the sidelines."

He said in an interview that that crux of the argument is deciding what is scientists’ role and what is their responsibility.

“My view of this has evolved, in part, because of my role and the way that I’ve found myself in the center of this debate,” he said. “I’ve found myself subject to attacks, and those attacks have awakened me to the fact that scientists have to fight back. And it isn’t just to protect ourselves and to defend our integrity, but it’s because of the larger implications.”

Mann says the path of being in the center of the climate change debacle wasn’t a chosen one. Rather, he submits he was forced into the fray after developing what’s become known as “the hockey stick graph” about 15 years ago.

The graph shows 1,000 years worth of climate data, including a steep increase in temperatures beginning in the 20th century. Mann and other climate scientists contend this uptick, or the blade of the hockey stick, is caused by humans pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“This was a debate I never really signed up for,” he told a room of 54 scientists at Penn State on Wednesday. “I became an accidental and reluctant public figure.”

The climate change debate, while it's been underway for some time, is still very real. Times columnist Nicholas Kristof asked readers this month what journalists should cover more aggressively in 2014. About 1,300 people responded, and many, Kristof wrote, "made a particularly compelling case for climate change."

President Barack Obama discussed climate change during his State of the Union address Tuesday, while simultaneously advertising his energy policy efforts. Obama said, “the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact.”

Others aren’t so sure.

Mann’s found himself in the figurative and scientific crosshairs on more than one occasion, but one incident in particular sent him into a defamation lawsuit in 2012, and that case is ongoing.

Prior to the suit, a writer from The National Review and a scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute accused Mann of fraud, and drew a parallel between Mann and convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky.

The assertions came from 2009 and 2011 email leaks from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, an instance that became better known as “Climategate.” Climate change skeptics point to emails as evidence that climate scientists manipulated data in order to push a point of proving global warming.

However, Penn State, and several other entities, investigated the claims and found no evidence of data manipulation. The Environmental Protection Agency also asserted that the data manipulation claims were false.

Following the debacle, in July 2012 CEI scholar Rand Simberg wrote that Mann is "the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data."

Sandusky, a former Penn State defensive coordinator, is currently serving a 30- to 60-year prison sentence for molesting 10 boys on the Penn State campus and in his State College home.

While Simberg's passage was deleted and the CEI called it "inappropriate," National Review writer Mark Steyn quoted the passage and took it a step further, calling Mann's hockey stick graph "fraudulent." Steyn didn't respond to requests for comment.

Mann’s defamation suit is moving forward. Last week, a Washington, D.C. judge ruled that, despite a motion for dismissal from the defendant, the case can move forward into a discovery phase.

Suing for defamation is one way to not stand on the sidelines. But for Mann, engaging with the community and disseminating what he believes is true information is the important part of his role as a climate scientist.

The professor operates active Twitter and Facebook accounts. In several weeks, he'll take part in an "Ask Me Anything" session on Reddit. For him, it's about engaging with the community.

“For me to be able to get my message out there without a middle man works, and so I enjoy it, and I’m very engaged in that,” he said. “Getting young people involved is critical. The solution is getting younger people engaged.”

He did that Thursday in front of 54 people, some of which were undergraduate and graduate students studying astronomy and astrophysics. Still, they gathered en masse to listen to Mann, a professor of meteorology, speak. Some students stayed after for a closer experience with the now-famous Penn State scientist.

But Mann couldn’t stay too long after. He had to pick up Megan from daycare.