Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Senior Scientist, CAS Section Head

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Statement on Hacking of Climate Files

Kevin Trenberth: "It is quite clear from the paper that I was not questioning the link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and warming, or even suggesting that recent temperatures are unusual in the context of short-term natural variability."

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About Kevin

Dr. Kevin E. Trenberth is Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. From New Zealand, he obtained his Sc. D. in meteorology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of the 1995, 2001 and 2007 Scientific Assessment of Climate Change reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize which went to the IPCC. He served from 1999 to 2006 on the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) and he chairs the WCRP Observation and Assimilation Panel. He has also served on many national committees. He is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), the American Association for Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, and an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. In 2000 he received the Jule G. Charney award from the AMS and in 2003 he was given the NCAR Distinguished Achievement Award. He edited a 788 page book Climate System Modeling, published in 1992 by Cambridge University Press. He has published over 430 scientific articles or papers, including 45 books or book chapters, and over 185 refereed journal articles and has given many invited scientific talks as well as appearing in a number of television, radio programs and newspaper articles. He is listed among the top 20 authors in highest citations in all of geophysics.

Research Interests

Kevin Trenberth has been prominent in all aspects of climate variability and climate change research and is a leader in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessments and in the World Climate Research Programme. In recent times his primary research has focused on the global energy and water cycles and how they are changing, and his work mainly involves empirical studies and quantitative diagnostic calculations. Trenberth is a primary advocate for the need to develop a climate information system that is an imperative for adaptation to climate change. However, Trenberth has published on many topics and is highly cited. He has evaluated many datasets and been the primary promoter of the need to reanalyze global data into fields in ways that meet climate requirements for continuity and consistency. He has determined the mass of the atmosphere as a fundamental physical quantity and how it varies as water vapor varies, and utilized the conservation constraint to evaluate datasets. [more]