Name Michael Kelly Role Physicist | Awards Hughes Medal | |
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Education Victoria University of Wellington | ||
Michael Joseph Kelly FRS FREng (born 14 May 1949) is a New Zealand-British physicist. He is Professor of Solid State Electronics and Nanoscale Science in the Division of Electrical Engineering, University of Cambridge. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1993 and won its Hughes Medal in 2006. He was formerly the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Department for Communities and Local Government. He was elected in 1998 as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
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Education
Born in New Plymouth, New Zealand, Kelly went to Francis Douglas Memorial College in his High-school years, graduating he then went on to study at the Victoria University of Wellington for a BSc and MSc. He came to England in 1971 to study for a PhD at Cambridge under Volker Heine.
Views on Climate Change
In 1984, Kelly appeared in a TV documentary concerning the climatic effects of widespread nuclear war called "On The Eighth Day". Kelly postulated that the planet could experience a day to day temperature change of between no change at all and a 40 degree C temperature drop, depending on wind frequency and direction.
In the same documentary, Kelly is credited (1984) as working in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
In 2010, Kelly was named by the Royal Society and the University of East Anglia to an independent scientific assessment panel to investigate the Climatic Research Unit email controversy. The panel concluded that there was "no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit."
In 2011, Kelly wrote a letter to the editor arguing against the scientific consensus on global warming.
In 2012, Kelly was a co-signatory of a Wall Street Journal op-ed questioning the scientific consensus on global warming.