David Stainforth

David Stainforth is a Professorial Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and an Honorary Professor in the Physics Department at the University of Warwick. He carries out research on climate science and its relationship with climate economics and policy. He focuses particularly on uncertainty analysis and on how academic assessments can better support decision-making in the context of climate change.

David believes in presenting an accessible approach to the climate crises, addressing how we can move forward on another track. He explores how climate change science works and where it doesn’t work, how climate change will look if we act and if we don’t act and how our response to climate change should be presented in order to engage the maximum number of people across the whole of society. He also addresses the need to rethink how we go about studying climate change and working with big models.

David has a BA in Physics from Oxford University, an MSc in “Energy Systems and Environmental Management” from Glasgow Caledonian University, and a DPhil in “Uncertainty and Confidence in Predictions of Climate Change” again from Oxford University. He was co-founder and chief scientist of climateprediction.net - a large, public resource, distributed computing project designed to explore the consequences of model error in complex climate models. He has published on a diverse range of subjects including the costs and risks of climate change, climate information to support adaptation and resilience building, climate modelling and model interpretation, climate physics, nonlinear dynamical systems, the philosophy of climate science, climate economics, hydrology, geomorphology, etc. His new book, Predicting Our Climate Future, has recently been published by Oxford University Press.