Ben Santer

Ben Santer is a prominent climate scientist who left the United States for the United Kingdom on the UK's Global Talent visa, taking up an honorary professorship in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA) — his alma mater, where he completed both his undergraduate degree and PhD.

Santer retired from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in September 2021 after nearly 30 years with its Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison, having joined in 1992. He earned his PhD in climatology from UEA in 1987 under Prof. Tom Wigley, then spent five years at the Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany working with Prof. Klaus Hasselmann on developing climate fingerprint methods.

Santer's research identifies natural and human "fingerprints" in observed climate records, and his early work contributed to the historic 1995 conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate," for which he served as lead author of the relevant IPCC chapter. He has since identified human fingerprints across atmospheric temperature, water vapor, ocean heat content, and sea surface temperature in hurricane-formation regions, among other climate variables.

Explaining his decision to relocate, Santer told The Independent that speaking out on climate change had become "difficult... without negative consequences to my U.S. collaborators," and that at UEA he could return to research and public communication without fear of causing harm to colleagues still in the United States. His honors include a MacArthur Fellowship (1998), membership in the US National Academy of Sciences (2011), the Department of Energy's E.O. Lawrence Award (2002), and the National Academy of Sciences' John J. Carty Award (2024). He has become a prominent public communicator of climate science, writing for Scientific American and appearing on Late Night with Seth Meyers.