Raymond Thomas Pierrehumbert is the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.

Education and awards

He earned a degree in Physics (A.B) from Harvard College and a PhD in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996, which was used to launch collaborative work on the climate of early Mars with collaborators in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and has been named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the Republic of France. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015 and sits on the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. In 2020, Pierrehumbert was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Research

Pierrehumbert's central research interest is how climate works as a system and developing idealized mathematical models to be used to address questions of climate science such as how the earth kept from freezing over: the faint young sun paradox. Pierrehumbert contributes to RealClimate and is a strong critic of solar geoengineering research. He also is very active in the study of the climate of Exoplanets.

Personal life

Pierrehumbert is married to Janet Pierrehumbert, professor of Language Modeling at the University of Oxford.

Selected papers