Sir David Anthony King (born 12 August 1939)[1] is a South African-born British chemist, academic, and head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG).

[2][3][4] His elder brother, Michael Wallis King (born 1937), was director of the FirstRand bank and vice-chair of the multinational mining company Anglo American plc.

[1][10] During his time at Cambridge, King had, together with Gabor Somorjai and Gerhard Ertl, shaped the discipline of surface science and helped to explain the underlying principles of heterogeneous catalysis.

[12] In that time, he raised the profile of the need for governments to act on climate change and was instrumental in creating the £1 billion Energy Technologies Institute.

[13] During his tenure as Chief Scientific Adviser, he raised public awareness for climate change and initiated several foresight studies.

King advised the government on issues including: the foot-and-mouth disease epidemic 2001; post 9/11 risks to the UK; GM foods; energy provision; and innovation and wealth creation.

[citation needed] In April 2008, King joined UBS, a Swiss investment bank, as senior science advisor.

[6][16] He left UBS to return to the UK government when he was appointed the Foreign Secretary's Special Representative for Climate Change in September 2013.

[22][23] He strongly supports the work of the IPCC, saying in 2004 that the 2001 synthesis report "is the best current statement on the state of play of the science of climate change, and that really does represent 1,000 scientists".

[25] In 2004, King gave evidence to a House of Commons select committee confirming his view that "on a global and geological scale that climate change is the most serious problem we are faced with this century", and illustrated it with a statement that "Fifty-five million years ago was a time when there was no ice on the earth; the Antarctic was the most habitable place for mammals".

[28] At the end of the 2007 programme "The Great Global Warming Swindle", broadcast on Channel 4, Fred Singer ridiculed the reported view of the "chief scientist"; King's complaint to Ofcom that the programme was unfair and had not given a chance to clarify was upheld, despite Channel 4's arguments that King was not named and had not challenged earlier reporting.

[29] King became head of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group in 2021, basing public meetings on a similar format to Independent SAGE, and publishing reports advising emission cuts and carbon dioxide removal.

[30] He promotes the CCAG's 4R planet pathway: Reducing emissions; Removing the excess greenhouse gases (GHGs) already in the atmosphere; Repairing ecosystems; strengthening local and global Resilience against inevitable climate impacts.

In 1983, he married, secondly, charity administrator and former head of a commercial law team,[44] Jane Margaret, daughter of general practitioner Hans Eugen Lichtenstein, OBE,[45] of Llandrindod Wells, Powys, Wales, a Holocaust survivor from a family that owned leather goods shops and an umbrella factory in Berlin.