Greenhouse gases in the Earth system: setting the agenda to 2030

Eric Wolff is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Cambridge. After graduating as a chemist, he has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 30 years, using them mainly to understand changing climate. Until June 2013, he worked at the British Antarctic Survey. He chaired the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which produced 800,000 year records of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core and co-chairs the international initiative to coordinate future ice core research. He has published over 150 papers, many of which have been highly cited. He chaired the Royal Society team in an RS/NAS report on climate science, published in November 2013. 

"John Ashton is an independent commentator and adviser on the politics of climate change.  Best known as a leading climate diplomat, from 2006-12 he served as Special Representative for Climate Change for three successive UK Foreign Secretaries, spanning the current Coalition and the previous Labour Government. He was a cofounder and, from 2004-6, the first Chief Executive of the think tank E3G. From 1978-2002, after a brief period as a research astronomer, he was a career diplomat, with a particular focus on China.

He is a Distinguished Policy Fellow at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College. He holds visiting professorships at the London School of Economics and the London University School of Oriental and African Studies. He is a Trustee of the UK Youth Climate Coalition and Tipping Point. He is also a non executive Director of E3G."

Philippe Ciais is a senior researcher at CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) and deputy director of the LSCE (Climate and Environmental Sciences Laboratory). In the early 1990's, he confirmed the existence of a large sink of CO₂ in the North Hemisphere terrestrial vegetation using isotopic measurements. His research interests include the carbon cycle, global change and their interactions with society. Philippe Ciais authored or co-authored more than 150 articles in A-ranking scientific journals, including many in Nature and Science. Philippe Ciais is co-chairman of Integrated Global Carbon Observations task of GEO, and co-chair of the Global Carbon Project. He acted as a lead author of IPCC AR4 and SRLULUCF reports, and coordinated several European research projects. Since 2006, he is the coordinator of the preparatory phase of ICOS (Integrated Carbon Observation System), a research infrastructure dedicated to monitoring the greenhouse budget of Europe and adjacent regions. 

Peter Cox is Professor of Climate System Dynamics and leader of the Climate Change and Sustainable Futures theme at the University of Exeter. His personal research has focussed on interactions between the land-surface and climate, including the first climate projections to include vegetation and the carbon cycle as interactive elements. Professor Cox was a lead-author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 4th and 5th Assessment Reports. He is also a member of the NERC Science and Innovation Strategy Board (SISB), as well as being co-chair of the international IGBP-AIMES project. He was a member of the UK Royal Society expert groups on “Ground-level ozone in the 21st century” and “Geoengineering the climate”, and is currently serving as a member of the working group on “Human resilience to climate change and disasters”. Professor Cox is listed as a highly-cited researcher in Geosciences (http://highlycited.com/).

Ed leads a project to determine the global distributions of atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and sulfur hexafluoride. He is responsible for the quality of the observations, ensures that they are made available to the GHG research community, and interprets the data to quantify the global and continental scale budgets of these gases. In particularly, Ed has exploited long-term trends and interannual variability in the growth rate of CH₄ to help understand processes responsible for its emission and loss. Ed was a lead author of IPCC's third and fifth WGI assessment reports and chaired the WMO Global Atmosphere Watch scientific advisory group on greenhouse gases from 2003–2015.

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Corinne Le Quéré is Professor of Climate Change Science and Policy at the University of East Anglia and Director of the Tyndall entre for Climate Change Research. She conducts research on the interactions between climate change and the carbon cycle. Professor Le Quéré was author of the 3rd, 4th and 5th (ongoing) Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. She co-Chairs the Global Carbon Project, a non-governmental organization that fosters International research on the carbon cycle and publishes annual updates global emissions and sinks of carbon dioxide.

Professor Le Quéré is originally from Canada. She completed a PhD in oceanography in University Paris VI (1999), an M.S. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences from McGill University and a BSc in physics from University of Montréal. She has conducted research at Princeton University in the United States and at the Max-Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Germany.

Ingeborg Levin studied Physics at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg later gaining her PhD at the Institut für Umweltphysik, University of Heidelberg. She then went on to become a Researcher and in 1986 became Head of the Carbon Cycle group at the Institut für Umweltphysik. Ingeborg Levin was awarded Venia Legendi for Physics, and approval as Privatdozentin in August 1994. In 2005, she was approved as Außerplanmäßige Professorin by the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Ingeborg Levin's main research interests are the study of the biogeochemical cycles of long-lived greenhouse gases and their recent and past changes using isotope tracer measurements and global and regional modelling. 

After graduating from Ecole Polytechnique, Marina Lévy prepared her PhD thesis on the oceanic carbon cycle in the Mediterranean Sea at the University of Paris 6. In 1998, she worked under a post-doctoral fellow-ship at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and obtained, in 1999, a permanent position at CNRS.  She was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2004 for her pioneering work on the interactions between sub-mesoscale physics and phytoplankton productivity. Her approach combines numerical modelling, satellite data and field observations. She is now head of the Bio-Physical Interactions group at the Oceanography and Climatology Laboratory LOCEAN in Paris. She is PI of the project TANGGO (Toward AN eddying Global Green Ocean) which aims at improving the predictability of primary production, and involves over 25 institutes. She is a regular visiting scientist of the Earth Simulator Center, in Yokohama, Japan and of the National Institute of Oceanography in Goa, India. 

David MacKay was appointed as Chief Scientific Advisor to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) on 1st October 2009. The Chief Scientific Advisor’s role is to ensure that the Department’s policies and operations, and its contributions to wider Government issues, are underpinned by the best science and engineering advice available. David MacKay studied Natural Sciences at Trinity College, then went to Caltech to complete a PhD in Computation and Neural Systems. In 1992 he returned to Cambridge as a Royal Society research fellow at Darwin College. In 1995 he became a university lecturer in the Department of Physics, where he was promoted in 1999 to a Readership and in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 2009. David MacKay’s research interests include reliable computation with unreliable hardware, and communication systems for the disabled. He believes that what the climate-change discussion needs is clear, simple numbers, so that we can understand just how big our challenge is, and not be duped by wishful thinking. His book on the subject (Sustainable Energy - Without The Hot Air: David MacKay, UIT Cambridge, 2009) has received endorsements from all sectors and from all political parties; The Economist called it “a tour de force”, and The Guardian called it “this year's must-read book”.  

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Martin Manning has worked across several areas of science including: theoretical nuclear physics, the carbon cycle, atmospheric chemistry, and climate change science more broadly. From 2002 to 2007, he was Director of the IPCC Working Group I Technical Support Unit for the Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change to governments when they won the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. He has been author of more than seventy peer reviewed publications, two this year, and more than twenty book chapters on climate change. As inaugural Director of Victoria University of Wellington’s Climate Change Research Institute, he led the first interdisciplinary study of New Zealand’s capacity to adapt to climate change. His current work includes analysis of 30 years of ¹⁴CO data to determine changes in atmospheric oxidation rates, and being on an advisory panel to establish community-led coastal adaptation in Kāpiti, Wellington, New Zealand.

Prof. Dr. Justus Notholt graduated in Solid State Physics at the University of Kassel in 1985. In his diploma thesis he studied the structure of amorphous semiconductors using X-ray spectroscopy. He received his PhD degree in Physical Chemistry at the same University in 1989 in the field of Surface Enhanced Raman Scattering, working in the area surface science and electrochemistry. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Joint Research Centre of the EC in Ispra/Italy, he switched to atmospheric science where he advanced a DOAS-system for simultaneous measurements of atmospheric trace gas and aerosol concentrations. In September 1990, he moved to the Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research. There he began atmospheric trace gas observations in both Polar Regions and developed measurement and analysis techniques for using the moon as infrared light source during the polar night. Furthermore he started ship borne FTIR measurements to obtain the latitudinal variability of atmospheric trace gases. In April 2002 he obtained a professorship at the University of Bremen. His activities now comprise development and application of spectroscopic observations from the microwave via the infrared to the visible spectral region, using ground-based and satellite instruments. Scientific topics are greenhouse gas observations, stratospheric and mesospheric studies, and sea-ice remote sensing.

Peter Rayner studied theoretical physics at the University of Melbourne. He obtained his doctorate from the same university in 1991 for his studies on glacial-interglacial cycles.  In 1989 he was awarded a CSIRO Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Division of Atmospheric Research (DAR) which included a one year stint at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado.  In 1991, Peter joined the Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at Princeton University where he began his research on the global carbon cycle.  In 1994, Peter joined the Cooperative Research Centre for Southern Hemisphere Meteorology (CRC-SHM) as a member of DAR.  In 2004 he moved to the Laboratory for the Science of Climate and Environment in France.  In 2002, Peter was awarded the Priestley Medal of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographical Society, the major research award in this field within Australia.  In 2004 he was noted by Essential Science Indicators as among the top percentile of cited authors in the Earth Sciences.  He has published over 70 papers in leading journals and has contributed to the last 3 IPCC reports. 

Sir Crispin Tickell KCVO GCMG  is a leading international authority on climate change and environmental issues. The holder of over twenty honorary doctorates, a senior government advisor, and member of numerous committees and working parties, his areas of expertise range from Global Warming to Potentially Hazardous Near-Earth Objects. Businesses, scientists and academic institutions throughout the world have benefited from his wisdom and practical analysis.

Having worked extensively on projects concerned with climate change, population, and biodiversity, Sir Crispin has advised Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair, for whom he served on two task forces. 

Andrew Watson is an Earth System scientist, with a special interest in the processes controlling atmospheric CO2 and oxygen concentrations, and their connection to the Earth’s climate. He has contributed to a wide variety of topics, including the atmospheres of other planets, physics and biogeochemistry of the oceans, paleoclimatology and astrobiology. His research group at the University of Exeter specialises in making and interpreting ocean and atmosphere measurements to high accuracy. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2003.

Ray Weiss is a Distinguished Professor of Geochemistry and Associate Dean at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego.  He holds a BS in chemistry from the California Institute of Technology and a PhD in earth sciences from Scripps.  His career has been devoted to the use of chemical and isotopic measurements to study natural processes in the oceans, lakes and the atmosphere.  Among his principal research accomplishments are: the first experimental proof of the existence of deep-sea hydrothermal vents; using dissolved atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons to determine the rates of ventilation, transport and mixing processes in the deep ocean and in deep lakes; discovery of the global rates of increase and distributions of atmospheric nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gases; and calibrating the global abundance of the atmospheric hydroxyl radical, the atmosphere's primary cleansing agent.  Professor Weiss is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Geophysical Union.  He leads the measurement component of the Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE), an international program to trace and model the emissions, global distributions and atmospheric lifetimes of a wide range of anthropogenic and natural greenhouse gases and ozone depleting substances. 

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