Geert Jan van Oldenborgh

Geert Jan van Oldenborgh (22 October 1961 – 12 October 2021) was a Dutch climatologist and physicist. Through his career he studied climate modelling of adverse weather events and was known as a pioneer of attribution science, driving public awareness of how climate change is linked to extreme weather events. He was also the creator of a digital platform, Climate Explorer, an online meteorological data repository and platform for climate data analysis.

He was a recipient of the Order of the Netherlands Lion in 2021. He was also named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021.

Early life Geert Jan van Oldenborgh was born on 22 October 1961 in Rotterdam to Jan van Oldenborgh and Wil Lijbrink. His father was a lawyer while his mother was a psychoanalyst. While in school in the Netherlands, he received a scholarship to go to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada. During his time there, he studied Chinese. He obtained his master's degree in theoretical physics from Leiden University in the Netherlands in 1986. He also studied mathematics and Chinese in the university. He completed his PhD from the University of Amsterdam and the Netherlands Institute of Nuclear and High Energy Physics in 1990. Together with the German climate researcher Friederike Otto, he developed a method to determine the role of climate change shortly after major weather disasters. This led to the establishment of World Weather Attribution, an international network of climate scientists and institutes. Some of their studies were also released prior to a peer review, with the argument that the basic models and techniques had already been peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals. Van Oldenborgh died from it on 12 October 2021, aged 59, in Gouda, South Holland.