MILLBROOK—Michael Mann has felt the heat for being part of the international scientific consensus behind man-made climate change.

For a decade, the soft-spoken 45-year-old physicist, who runs the Earth System Science Center at Penn State, has been a self-described lightning rod for those opposing science that shows fossil fuel emissions are causing the planet to gradually warm.

“There is an orchestrated denial machine for climate change. Science is on a collision course with powerful vested interests,” Mann said during a packed lecture Friday at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies.

In 2001, Mann published a report that showed temperatures have risen dramatically during the previous two decades compared with the previous 1,000 years—which included a temperature chart known as the “hockey stick” because of its distinctive shape.

Mann’s work is part of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a report incorporating the work of thousands of scientists, which concluded that rising emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas released by combustion of coal, oil and natural gas, were behind an increasing greenhouse effect.

Now, conservative commentators repeatedly attack Mann by name, causing his email inbox to swell with angry messages accusing him of being a liar and a fraud. The attorney general of Virginia, who denies climate change, is investigating Mann’s past work at the University of Virginia. A conservative think tank is trying to obtain practically every word Mann has written or received during his six years at Penn State.

Mann also found himself swept up in the 2009 hacker theft of emails from an English climate science center, where opponents claimed the messages proved a massive global conspiracy by scientists to fake data.

That contention has been disproved by four separate investigations, including by Penn State and the British House of Commons.

A decade after the “hockey stick” chart was published, Mann said observations from around the globe continue to support ongoing climate change. Average global temperatures have risen for three consecutive decades. Average snowfalls continue to decline and glaciers around the world keep melting.

While some contrarians claim Earth is warming because the sun is getting stronger, the temperature of the upper atmosphere is dropping, while the lower level atmosphere warms, which Mann called the “fingerprint” for the man-made greenhouse.

Last month, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. a 163-year-old national scientific body that includes more than 260 groups, defended Mann and other scientists from “personal attacks” meant to “harass and intimidate.” The group warned that such attacks “could well have a chilling effect on the willingness of scientists to conduct research.”

In Pennsylvania, Mann’s university records are being sought by a group called the American Traditions Institute, a conservative think tank headed by members of other conservative groups that claim global warming is a fraud—the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Cooler Heads Coalition.

Both groups are funded by Koch Industries, the nation’s largest privately held corporation, owned by two conservative Kansas petrochemical billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch. Another Koch-affiliated organization, Americans for Prosperity, which works closely with the tea party movement, is suing to bounce New York out of a greenhouse gas control program, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

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See why the arctic changes are cyclical and natural here.