Chris Smith

Itinerant climate scientist

prof_pic.jpg

Building T2.51,

Pleinlaan 2,

1050 Brussels, Belgium

I am a senior scientist in the bclimate group at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium and a guest research scholar in the Energy, Climate and Environment Program at IIASA, Austria. Until very recently I was at the University of Leeds with a short spell at the UK Met Office.

I am the lead maintainer of the fair simple climate model and co-chair of the radiative forcing model intercomparison project for CMIP7.

I am involved in developing climate projections from socioeconomic scenarios and interested in improving integrated assessment models by incorporating process-based climate feedbacks to build more realistic and useful climate scenarios. See here for full list of my current projects.

Over the years I’ve become involved in a broad spectrum of climate research and enjoy continuing to collaborate in diverse topics. I’m always looking for new and exciting things to keep me busy. Please reach out if you are interested in working together.

news

Jun 19, 2025 Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024 is now published in Earth System Science Data. This is the third annual update of IPCC-assessed physical climate metrics. VUB press release
May 12, 2025 “Risks of unavoidable impacts on forests at 1.5 °C with and without overshoot” led by Greg Munday is now available online in Nature Climate Change.
Mar 30, 2025 “Neglecting future sporadic volcanic eruptions underestimates climate uncertainty” led by May Chim is now published in Communications Earth and Environment. Here we show the importance of including volcanic forcing in scenario projections. bluesky thread

latest posts

selected publications

  1. Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence
    Piers M. Forster, Chris Smith, Tristram Walsh, William F. Lamb, Robin Lamboll, Christophe Cassou, Mathias Hauser, Zeke Hausfather, June-Yi Lee, Matthew D. Palmer, Karina Von Schuckmann, Aimée B. A. Slangen, Sophie Szopa, Blair Trewin, Jeongeun Yun, Nathan P. Gillett, Stuart Jenkins, H. Damon Matthews, Krishnan Raghavan, Aurélien Ribes, Joeri Rogelj , Debbie Rosen, Xuebin Zhang, Myles Allen, Lara Aleluia Reis, Robbie M. Andrew, Richard A. Betts, Alex Borger, Jiddu A. Broersma, Samantha N. Burgess, Lijing Cheng, Pierre Friedlingstein, Catia M. Domingues, Marco Gambarini, Thomas Gasser, Johannes Gütschow, Masayoshi Ishii, Christopher Kadow, John Kennedy, Rachel E. Killick, Paul B. Krummel, Aurélien Liné, Didier P. Monselesan, Colin Morice, Jens Mühle, Vaishali Naik, Glen P. Peters, Anna Pirani, Julia Pongratz, Jan C. Minx, Matthew Rigby, Robert Rohde, Abhishek Savita, Sonia I. Seneviratne, Peter Thorne, Christopher Wells, Luke M. Western, Guido R. Van Der Werf, Susan E. Wijffels, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, and Panmao Zhai
    Earth System Science Data, Jun 2025
  2. Effective radiative forcing and adjustments in CMIP6 models
    Christopher J. Smith, Ryan J. Kramer, Gunnar Myhre, Kari Alterskjær, William Collins, Adriana Sima, Olivier Boucher, Jean-Louis Dufresne, Pierre Nabat, Martine Michou, Seiji Yukimoto, Jason Cole, David Paynter, Hideo Shiogama, Fiona M. O’Connor, Eddy Robertson, Andy Wiltshire, Timothy Andrews, Cécile Hannay, Ron Miller, Larissa Nazarenko, Alf Kirkevåg, Dirk Olivié, Stephanie Fiedler, Anna Lewinschal, Chloe Mackallah, Martin Dix, Robert Pincus, and Piers M. Forster
    Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, Aug 2020
  3. Climate and air-quality benefits of a realistic phase-out of fossil fuels
    Drew Shindell, and Christopher J Smith
    Nature, Sep 2019
  4. FAIR v1.3: a simple emissions-based impulse response and carbon cycle model
    C J Smith, P M Forster, M Allen, N Leach, R J Millar, G A Passerello, and L A Regayre
    Geoscientific Model Development, Jun 2018