Michael Mann, author of some of the best books on climate science (including The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, and Dire Predictions, 2nd Edition: Understanding Climate Change) and discoverer of the Hockey Stick (the graph, not the actual stick) has been very appropriately awarded the coveted Stephen H. Schneider Award.

Michael Mann, distinguished professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center, Penn State, will receive the seventh annual Stephen H. Schneider Award for Outstanding Climate Science Communications from Climate One at the Commonwealth Club.

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 jurors for the award state that Mann exemplifies the rare ability to be both a superb scientist and powerful communicator in the mold of Schneider.

“Professor 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,” said Ben Santer, climate researcher, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “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.”

Mann will receive the award — presented by Climate One, a project of the Commonwealth Club of California and underwritten by Tom R. Burns, Nora Machado and Michael Haas — in December during the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in New Orleans.

Mann is the author of more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and has written “Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change” and “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.” He is also co-author with Tom Toles, Washington Post editorial cartoonist, of “The Madhouse Effect.” He is co-founder of the science website RealClimate.org.

“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 Communications,” said Mann. “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.”

The first recipient of the Schneider Award was Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Penn State.