Leif Svalgaard
During his more than 40 year long career Leif Svalgaard has worked both as a computer
software specialist and as a space and solar physics scientist.
Through the 1970’s he worked as Senior Research Physicist at Stanford University, with
special responsibility for computing facilities at the Institute for Plasma Physics. In this
period he published extensively on solar magnetism and sunspot activity, the interplanetary
magnetic field, and the influence on geomagnetic activity.
In the following twenty years he made a career as a software engineer and worked for a
number of different companies in the US and Europe. However, at the turn of the millennium
he returned to Stanford and has been extremely visible in solar and space physics for the last
ten years, focusing on the variability in solar activity and its relation to Earth magnetism,
space weather, and Earth climate.
At present he is part of a team associated with the NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory,
which recently began its five-year science mission to study the sun. He is also very active in
the ongoing scientific debate on the role of secular trends in solar activity in climate change.
Here he has presented very well-documented results which indicate that the sun’s output over
the last 400 years has been much more constant than generally assumed.
David Stainforth
Dave Stainforth is a Senior Research Fellow in the Grantham Research Institute on Climate
Change and the Environment at The London School of Economics. The Institute is chaired by
Lord Stern of Brentford, author of the 2006 Stern Review on The Economics of Climate
Change, and brings together international expertise on economics, finance, geography, the
environment, international development and political economy to establish a world-leading
centre for policy-relevant research and training in climate change and the environment.
Stainforth is a physicist by training and has many years experience of climate modeling.
While a researcher at Oxford University he co-founded and was chief scientist of the
climateprediction.net project, the world's largest climate modeling experiment.
He has been both a NERC Research Fellow and a Tyndall Research Fellow at Oxford
University. His current research interests focus on how we can extract robust and useful
information about future climate, and climate related phenomena, from modeling
experiments. This includes issues of how to design climate modeling experiments and how to
link climate science to real-world decision making in such a way as to be of value to industry,
policy makers and wider society.
Rasmus Benestad
Benestad is also a physicist by training and is affiliated with The Norwegian Metorological
Institute. He has a D.Phil in physics from Atmospheric, Oceanic & Planetary Physics at
Oxford University. Recent work involves a good deal of statistics, but he has also some
experience with electronics, cloud micro-physics, ocean dynamics/air-sea processes and
seasonal forecasting. In addition, he wrote the book ‘Solar Activity and Earth’s Climate’
(2002), published by Praxis-Springer, and recently coauthored a book on “Empirical
statistical downscaling”, published by World Scientific.
Benestad is a permanent contributor to the science blog “RealClimate”, and an active
contributor in the public debate on climate change in Norway as well as internationally.