Dr David Frame

Dave Frame is an interdisciplinary scientist with a background in physics, philosophy, economics, and policy. He has substantial research experience in climate modelling and has published in the world’s leading scientific journals as well as the specialist climate literature. Dave also has real world policy experience in a core government policy agency, having worked in the New Zealand Treasury’s Policy Coordination and Development group prior to moving to Britain. He holds a visiting lectureship in the Department of Physics at Oxford and is College Lecturer in Geography at Jesus College.

Dave looks at new ways in which advances in climate change research can improve the physical science inputs into climate change policy. His current research has two main strands:

Bridging the divide between climate science and policy; and
Methodological and philosophical issues in environmental modelling.
Dave holds a PhD in Physics and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Physics from the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand. Prior to joining the Smith School, Dave was James Martin Fellow in the Environmental Change Institute, having previously worked in the Climate Dynamics Group in the Department of Physics as coordinator of the highly successful climateprediction.net project.

Recent publications

Frame, D.J. (in press) The problems of markets: science, norms and the commodification of carbon. Geographical Journal.

Ackerley, D., Knight, S.H.E., Booth, B.B.B., Highwood, E.J., Frame, D.J. & Allen, M.R. (in press) Sensitivity of 20th century Sahel rainfall to sulfate aerosol and CO2 forcing. Climate Dynamics.

Frame, D.J., Aina, T., Christensen, C.M., Faull, N.E., Knight, S.H.E., Piani, C., Rosier, S.M., Yamazaki, K., Yamazaki, Y. & Allen, M.R. (2009) The climateprediction.net BBC climate change experiment: design of the coupled model ensemble. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 367, 855-870.

Meinshausen, M., Meinshausen, N., Hare, W., Raper, S., Frieler, K., Knutti, R., Frame, D.J. & Allen, M.R. (2009) Greenhouse gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C. Nature 458, 1158-1162.

Ackerley, D., Highwood, E.J. & Frame, D.J. (2009) Quantifying the effects of perturbing the physics of an interactive sulfur scheme using an ensemble of GCMs on the climateprediction.net platform. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 114, D01203.

Allen, M.R., Frame, D.J., Huntingford, C., Jones, C.D., Lowe, J.A., Meinshausen, M. & Meinshausen, N. (2009) Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne. Nature 458, 1163-1166.