Distinguished Lecture Series: Dr. Gavin Schmidt

Piecing Together the Climate Story

Linking past, present and future in the climate story

All good stories need a beginning, middle and an end. For our climate story though, we have strangely started somewhere in the middle with little idea about how it's going to proceed. I will discuss how new observations of past climate change allow us to go back to the beginning and gain a better appreciation of where we are now. And further, how, through the use of climate models, those observations are giving us a better view of the end(s). Climate change turns out to be one of those 'choose your own adventure' stories...

About the lecturer

Gavin Schmidt is an expert in climate modeling, who began his career at NASA GISS in 1996, and is now Director. His primary area of research is the simulation of past, present and future climates. He has worked on developing and improving computer models that integrate ocean, atmosphere, and land processes to simulate Earth’s climate, and is particularly interested in how they can be used to inform decision-making. Schmidt received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University in 1988 and a doctorate in applied mathematics from University College London in 1994. He came to New York as a 1996 NOAA Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research. In addition to more than 100 published, peer-reviewed articles, he is the co-author of "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" (W.W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers. In 2011, he was awarded the inaugural American Geophysical Union Climate Communications Prize.