Thomas Stocker

Thomas Stocker (born 1959) is a Swiss climate scientist. Born in Zürich, Stocker obtained a degree in physics at the ETH Zurich. He was active in research at the University College London, at McGill University in Montreal and at Columbia University in New York. Since 1993, he is professor and head of the department of Climate and Environmental Physics at the University of Bern. The focus of Stocker's research is the development of models of climate change based on, among other, the analysis of ice cores from the polar regions. He significantly contributed to creating the "hockey stick graph" that shows a growing increase of global mean temperatures in recent times. Since 1998, he contributes to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and is co-chairman of the IPCC Working Group I (assessing scientific aspects of the climate system and climate change) from 2008 to 2015. In 1993, Stocker was awarded the Swiss National Science Foundation's National Latsis Prize, and 2009 the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geosciences Union. He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and a member of the Academia Europaea and the American Meteorological Society. Stocker is featured in the film Taking Earth's Temperature: Delving into Climate's Past. On February 18, 2015, the Swiss government announced it would nominate Dr. Stocker as a candidate for the next chair of the IPCC to succeed Dr. Pachauri.