Peter Stott
University of Exeter
professor of detection
Peter Stott
Peter studied Mathematics at Durham University (BSc 1983), Part III Maths at Cambridge University (Master of Advanced Studies, 1984) and researched the environmental consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear accident for his PhD at Imperial College, London (PhD, 1988).
He then investigated stratospheric ozone depletion in a post-doctoral position at Edinburgh University before joining the Met Office Hadley Centre in 1996 to work on the detection and attribution of climate change.
During his career, Peter has made important contributions to advancing the knowledge about how anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants are affecting our atmosphere and oceans. He led the team that provided the most important demonstrations to date (in 2000) that human activities were to blame for global warming.
He also led the first study to link an individual weather event – the 2003 European heatwave – to human-induced climate change. He was a lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (published in 2007) and a coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (published in 2013).
His current research is focused on the development of “operational attribution” systems to provide regularly updated assessments of extreme weather events and their links to climate variability and change. He has also had a long-standing interest in the communication of climate science to a wide variety of people.
His book Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial was shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize in 2022 and he appeared on The Life Scientific on BBC Radio 4 in 2024.
He was awarded the LG Groves award for meteorology in 2014 and the Climate Science Communications Prize of the Royal Meteorological Society in 2018. As well as being shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize, Hot Air was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Christopher Bland Prize. Peter was awarded the MBE in the 2024 New Year Honours for services to climate science.
