David Titley

David W. Titley is a professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University and the founding director of their Center for Solutions to Weather and Climate Risk. He is also NOAA's chief operating officer. Before assuming these positions, he was formerly a rear admiral in, and the chief oceanographer of, the U.S. Navy, in which he served for 32 years. He also initiated the Navy's Task Force on Climate Change, and serves on the CNA Corporation's Military Advisory Board. He was formerly a climate change skeptic, but later changed his mind after looking at the evidence of what factors influence climate--which are, according to Titley, "what are the larger things doing - what is the ocean doing? What is the sun doing? And what's our atmosphere doing?" Since then, he has described climate change as "one of the driving forces in the 21st century" and said that it contributed to the 2011 Arab Spring.