02/25/2011 - Rice yields and electricity demand – these are two topics Max Auffhammer hopes to make good progress on while staying at PIK. Being a resource economist, he focuses on the distributional impacts of climate change. Auffhammer is a professor at the University of California in Berkeley and known for numerous seminal contributions to the science of environmental change. A fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation, he chose PIK to spend a sabbatical which started this February. “PIK’s reputation as a world leader in climate impact research made this an easy choice”, he says. “I was very much attracted by the interdisciplinary group of scholars here.”
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The fellowship to him means having access to a worldwide network. “It creates an academic connection back to Germany, which otherwise would be hard to maintain alone.” Auffhammer himself was born in Hof/Saale and finished his A-levels there. He has two passports now, US and German. But “football to me is played by a team of 11, bread is made from rye flour and I speak to my two year old son in German.”
Auffhammer currently also works as a lead author for the next IPCC report. He contributes to the chapter on detection and attribution of observed impacts of climate change, coordinated by Wolfgang Cramer, co-chair of PIK-research domain Earth System Analysis.