Benjamin D. Santer

Honors Santer received a B.Sc. in environmental sciences and a 1987 Ph.D. in climatology from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. He has also received the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award and a Distinguished Scientist Fellowship from the U.S. Department of Energy and the Norbert Gerbier/MUMM award from the World Meteorological Organization. In 2024 he received the Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal of the American Meteorological Society.

In 2011, Santer was elected as a fellow of the American Geophysical Union and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

1995 AR2 Chapter 8

Santer was the convening Lead Author of Chapter 8 of 1995 IPCC Working Group I Report (AR2 WGI), which addressed the global warming issue.

Santer and 40 other scientists responded to The Wall Street Journal that all IPCC procedural rules were followed, and that IPCC procedures required changes to the draft in response to comments from governments, individual scientists, and non-governmental organizations. They stated that the pre- and post-Madrid versions of Chapter 8 were equally cautious in their statements; that roughly 20% of Chapter 8 is devoted to the discussion of uncertainties in estimates of natural climate variability and the expected signal due to human activities; and that both versions of the chapter reached the same conclusion: "Taken together, these results point towards a human influence on climate."

Gold Standard Paper

On February 25, 2019, Santer et al. published the paper Celebrating the anniversary of three key events in climate change science in Nature Climate Change, stating that evidence had reached the 5-sigma "gold standard level" of statistical proof of human influence in global climate change using three sets of satellite data.

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