Prof. David Stainforth - Homepage

Professorial Research Fellow, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change
and the Environment
at the London School of Economics
and Political Science

Honorary Professor, Department of Physics, Warwick University

LinkedIn and Twitter: @climatehat


Contact details:
Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment,
London School of Economics,
Houghton Street,
London,
WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7622
Email: d(dot)a(dot)stainforth at lse.ac.uk


My book, "Predicting Our Climate Future: what we know, what we don't know and what we can't know"is published by Oxford University Press on 12th October 2023.

It's available now from Oxford University Press directly as well as from bookshop.org, Blackwells, Waterstones and Amazon.

Somewhat related is a piece in The Guardian newspaper: The big idea: can we predict the climate of the future?




Publications

CV

Opinion and non-academic
pieces and videos



Bio:

I work at the London School of Economics. I am a physicist by training and a climate modeller by experience. My interests and my research span many different fields but tend to focus on uncertainty, its implications and how we understand and respond to climate change.

Some time ago I co-founded the climateprediction.net project at Oxford University with Prof. Myles Allen and I continue to work on how we design large climate modelling experiments, how we interpret them for science, how we interpret them for policy decisions, and how we communicate climate science to the public and decision makers. I also work on the processing of observations to inform adaptation planning, economic assessments of climate change, decision making under deep uncertainty in the context of climate adaptation, conceptual questions linked to how we understand climate and climate change, nonlinear dynamical systems and integrated assessment models.

Upcoming talks and events in October and November 2023:

  • Thursday 12th October 2023, 6:30-8PM. LSE public event. Join me, Tom Sheldon of the Science Media Centre and Kathryn Brown, Director of Climate Change at the Wildlife Trusts, to launch and discuss my book.
  • Friday 20th October 2023, 6:30-8PM. Oxford Climate Society. Join me, Prof. Jim Hall, Dr. Stuart Jenkins and Ms. Shirin Ermis to discuss uncertainties in climate predictions.

  • Tuesday 31st October 2023, 6-7PM. University of Warwick, Department of Economics cross disciplinary event.

  • Thursday 9th November 2023, 1530-1700. Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Potsdam, Berlin

Some recent papers

  • Rising, J., M. Tedesco, F. Piontek and D. Stainforth. The missing risks of climate change, Nature. Oct. 2022.

  • Katzav, J., E. Thompson, J. Risby, D. A. Stainforth, S. Bradley, M. Frisch. On the appropriate and inappropriate uses of probability distributions in climate projections and some alternatives, Climatic Change, Nov 2021.[Local author copy]

  • Baldissera Pacchetti, M., S. Dessai, S. Bradley and D. A. Stainforth. Assessing the quality of regional climate information . Bulletin of the America Meteorological Society, March 2021. [Local copy]
    This paper presents a framework for assessing the quality of climate information provided for use in support of adaptation planning and resilience building. It aims to help climate services and users of climate information to identify when a particular source of climate information is suitable for their needs and if not, in what way it is lacking.

  • Calel, R., S.C. Chapman, D.A. Stainforth and N.W. Watkins. Temperature variability implies greater economic damages from climate change . Nature Communications, October 2020. [Local copy including SI] Winner of the Lloyds Science of Risk Prize 2021
    This paper uses a stochastic energy balance model to produce a collection of trajectories of plausible future global mean temperatures (GMTs). From them it assesses the distribution of damages associated with various scenarios of future emissions of greenhouse gases. The risk premium associated with the distribution of damages is then calculated. The results find an additional $10Tr to $50Tr of damages associated with climate change. The character of these damages means they must be addressed primarily by adaptation rather than mitigation. The social cost of carbon is ill suited to capture these damages.

  • Stainforth, D.A. and R. Calel New priorities for climate science and climate economics in the 2020s . Nature Communications, August 2020. [Local copy]]
    This comment piece calls for new approaches to research on climate change in both the physical and social sciences / economics. It argues for a change of focus in these disciplines and a significant scale up of efforts to understand the conceptual challenges in physical climate change predictions and assoiated economic assessments. Such efforts would lead to research outputs being much better suited to support policy makers and societal planning.

  • Chapman, S.C., N.W. Watkins and D.A.Stainforth. Warming Trends in Summer HeatWaves. Geophysical Research Letters, 156, Issue 1-2, pp69-86, 10.1007/s10584-019-02520-8, Jan. 2019. [Journal copy] [Local copy of paper including supplementary information.]
    This paper demonstrates methods for quantifying changes in temperatures, duration and return periods of summer heatwaves in England.

  • Harrison, S., T. Mighall, D.A.Stainforth, P. Allen, M. Macklin, E. Anderson, J. Knight, D. Mauquoy, D. Passmore, B. Rea, M. Spagnolo and S, Shannon. Uncertainty in geomorphological responses to climate change . Climatic Change, 46, 10.1029/2018GL081004, Sept. 2019. [Journal copy]
    The sensitivity of nonlinear systems to small uncertainties in the initial state - a characteristic of mathematical chaos - is well known and widely studied. The implications for uncertainties in our projections of climate change are increasingly in the spot light - see for instance the Hawkins et al paper below. It is often assumed, however, that landscapes respond to climate in a relatively linear and predictable way. This paper demonstrates that this is unlikely to be the case and calls for a more probabilistic approach to the study of geomorphological responses to climate change. This is something which is of practical importance for infrastructure planning and management in the context of climate change.



Contact details:

Grantham Research Institute on
Climate Change and the Environment,
London School of Economics,
Houghton Street,
London,
WC2A 2AE
United Kingdom

Tel: +44 (0) 20 7955 7622
Email: d(dot)a(dot)stainforth at lse.ac.uk