Climatic Research Unit - History

History

The CRU was founded in 1971 as part of the university's School of Environmental Sciences. The establishment of the Unit owed much to the support of Sir Graham Sutton, a former Director-General of the Meteorological Office, Lord Solly Zuckerman, an adviser to the University, and Professors Keith Clayton and Brian Funnel, Deans of the School of Environmental Sciences in 1971 and 1972. Initial sponsors included British Petroleum, the Nuffield Foundation and Royal Dutch Shell. The Rockefeller Foundation was another early benefactor, and the Wolfson Foundation gave the Unit its current building in 1986. Since the second half of the 1970s the Unit has also received funding through a series of contracts with the United States Department of Energy to support the work of those involved in climate reconstruction and analysis of the effects on climate of greenhouse gas emissions.

The first director of the unit was Professor Hubert Lamb. He had led research into climatic variation at the Met Office and was chair of the UN's World Meteorological Organisation, which already studied climate trends and the effect of pollution upon them. He was then known as the "ice man" for his prediction of global cooling and a coming ice age but, following the UK's exceptionally hot summer of 1976, he switched to predicting a more imminent global warming. The possibility of major weather changes and flooding attracted attention to the unit and sponsorship by major insurance companies wanting to mitigate their potential losses. Prior to the Unit's establishment, it had widely been believed by the meteorological establishment that the climate was essentially constant and unvarying. Lamb and others in the climatological community had for years argued that the climate system was in fact highly variable on timescales of decades to centuries and longer. The establishment of the CRU enabled Lamb and his colleagues to focus on this issue and eventually to win the argument decisively.

Hubert Lamb retired in 1978. His successors were Tom Wigley (1978–93), Trevor Davies (1993–1998), Jean Palutikof and Phil Jones (jointly 1998-2004), and Phil Jones (2004–present), with Peter Liss as acting director during investigations between December 2009 and July 2010. In 1984, the unit moved to a new cylindrical building designed by Rick Mather. In 2006, this was named the Hubert Lamb Building in honour of the first director.