Gavin Schmidt | |
|---|---|
 Gavin A. Schmidt | |
| Nationality | British [1] |
| Education | BA (Oxon); PhD (London), both in mathematics |
| Alma mater | Jesus College, Oxford University College London. |
| Occupation(s) | Climate modeller, Climatologist |
| Employer | Goddard Institute for Space Studies |
| Website | Schmidt's homepage |
Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the climate science blog RealClimate. [2]
He was educated at The Corsham School, earned a BA (Hons) in mathematics at Jesus College, Oxford, and a PhD in applied mathematics at University College London. [3] Schmidt worked on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models (GCMs). He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models. He helped develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs to improve the representation of the present day climate, while investigating their response to climate forcing. [4]
As of 2024, Schmidt heads NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. [5] He was named for the director position in June 2014 as its then deputy director, becoming to the third person to hold this post, which had been vacant after the retirement of James E. Hansen. [6] In an interview with Science News, Schmidt said that he wanted to continue the institute's work on climate modeling and to expand its work on climate impacts and astrobiology. [7]
His main research interest is climate variability, both its internal and the response to climate forcing, investigated via ocean-atmosphere general circulation models. He also uses these to study palaeoclimate by working on methods to compare palaeo-data with model output. Schmidt helps to develop the GISS ocean and coupled GCMs (ModelE). This model has been "isotopically enabled" to carry oxygen-18 tracers, allowing the model to simulate the pattern of δ18O observed in ice cores, cave records and ocean sediments. [2]
Schmidt has appeared on various occasions in the media, often he is asked about his expertise on climate related study findings, current events or gives lectures. [2] Schmidt worked with the American Museum of Natural History, the College de France, and the New York Academy of Sciences for education and outreach. [3] Schmidt and eight other colleagues founded in 2004 the RealClimate blog. The blog provides critical commentary on climate science with the scope on outreach to the public and for journalists. [2] [8] Additionally, the blog features frequent guest posts by experts in their field. Articles and commentary have defended scientific research against allegations made about the hockey stick graph. [9] During the 2009-2010 Climatic Research Unit email controversy, he strongly defended the scientists involved, including Michael E. Mann and Phil Jones. Journalist Fred Pearce noted, "Schmidt wrote that the emails merely showed how scientists interact in private", and that "Gravity isn't a useful theory because Newton was a nice man." [10]
Schmidt was EarthSky Science Communicator of the Year in 2011. [11]
In 2011, the American Geophysical Union awarded Schmidt the inaugural Climate Communications Prize, for his work on communicating climate-change issues to the public. The award news release noted his outreach work including co-founding and contributing to the RealClimate blog. [12] [13] He was a contributing author [14] of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the work of the IPCC, including the contributions of many scientists, was recognised by the joint award of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Schmidt was named as one of Scientific American's "Top 50 Research Leaders" of the year 2004. [15]
Schmidt has published over 100 studies in peer-reviewed journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Science , and Nature , on various climate related topics. [3] [16]
He is the co-author, with Joshua Wolfe, of Climate Change: Picturing the Science (2009), which has a foreword by Jeffrey D. Sachs. The book combines images of the effects of climate change with scientific explanations. [17]
His Erdős number is four. [18]
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Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their currents.
Numerical climate models are mathematical models that can simulate the interactions of important drivers of climate. These drivers are the atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. Scientists use climate models to study the dynamics of the climate system and to make projections of future climate and of climate change. Climate models can also be qualitative models and contain narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
A general circulation model (GCM) is a type of climate model. It employs a mathematical model of the general circulation of a planetary atmosphere or ocean. It uses the Navier–Stokes equations on a rotating sphere with thermodynamic terms for various energy sources. These equations are the basis for computer programs used to simulate the Earth's atmosphere or oceans. Atmospheric and oceanic GCMs are key components along with sea ice and land-surface components.
The instrumental temperature record is a record of temperatures within Earth's climate based on direct measurement of air temperature and ocean temperature. Instrumental temperature records do not use indirect reconstructions using climate proxy data such as from tree rings and marine sediments. Instead, data is collected from thousands of meteorological stations, buoys and ships around the globe. Areas that are densely populated tend to have a high density of measurement points. In contrast, temperature observations are more spread out in sparsely populated areas such as polar regions and deserts, as well as in many regions of Africa and South America. In the past, thermometers were read manually to record temperatures. Nowadays, measurements are usually connected with electronic sensors which transmit data automatically. Surface temperature data is usually presented as anomalies rather than as absolute values. A temperature anomaly is presented compared to a reference value, also called baseline period or long-term average, usually a period of 30 years. For example, a commonly used baseline period is the time period from 1951 to 1980.
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years, he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.
Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mining exploration company director, a former minerals prospector and semi-retired mining consultant whose work has included statistical analysis. He is the founder and editor of Climate Audit, a blog which analyses and discusses climate data. He is a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has made statistical critiques, with economist Ross McKitrick, of the hockey stick graph which shows that the increase in late 20th century global temperatures is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years.
Drew Shindell is a physicist and a climate specialist and professor at Duke University's Nicholas School of the Environment. He is listed as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. He was a chapter lead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) October 8, 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C as well as on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. He has testified on climate issues before both houses of the US Congress, at the request of both parties. His research concerns natural and human drivers of climate change, linkages between air quality and climate change, and the interface between climate change science and policy. He has been an author on more than 200 peer-reviewed publications and received awards from Scientific American, NASA, the EPA, and the NSF.
The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) is a laboratory in the Earth Sciences Division of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center affiliated with the Columbia University Earth Institute. The institute is located at Columbia University in New York City. It was named after Robert H. Goddard, American engineer, professor, physicist and inventor who is credited with creating and building the world's first liquid-fueled rocket.
In climatology, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) is a collaborative framework designed to improve knowledge of climate change. It was organized in 1995 by the Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP). It is developed in phases to foster the climate model improvements but also to support national and international assessments of climate change. A related project is the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP) for global coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation models (GCMs).
The Educational Global Climate Model or EdGCM is a fully functional global climate model (GCM) that was ported for use on desktop computers for use in education. It operates through a graphical user interface and is integrated with a relational database and scientific visualization utilities, all of which aim at helping improve the quality of teaching and understanding of climatology by making real-world research experiences more accessible. EdGCM was designed to permit teachers and students to conduct in-depth investigations of past, present and future climate scenarios in a manner that is essentially identical to the techniques used by national and international climate research organizations.
Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Coupled Model is a coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation model (AOGCM) developed at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the United States. It is one of the leading climate models used in the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, along with models developed at the Max Planck Institute for Climate Research, the Hadley Centre and the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
ECHAM is a general circulation model (GCM) developed by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the research organisations of the Max Planck Society. It was created by modifying global forecast models developed by ECMWF to be used for climate research. The model was given its name as a combination of its origin and the place of development of its parameterisation package, Hamburg. The default configuration of the model resolves the atmosphere up to 10 hPa, but it can be reconfigured to 0.01 hPa for use in studying the stratosphere and lower mesosphere.
Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.
Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, climate models, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She was a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63, coinciding with her public climate change skepticism.
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