[5][6] While in school in the Netherlands, he received a scholarship to go to Lester B. Pearson College in Victoria, British Columbia, in Canada.
[6] Van Oldenborgh started his teaching and research career at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, where he studied elementary particles before returning to Leiden in 1994.
[6] He also created the digital platform, Climate Explorer, that serves as a digital repository of vast troves of climate-linked data including global temperature measurements, ozone levels, sea ice levels, rainfall measurements, ocean temperatures, and historical records of cyclones, hurricanes and droughts.
[6] He was known as a pioneer of attribution science, which has been instrumental in driving public awareness of how climate change is linked to extreme weather.
[2][3][4] Along with other scientists, Van Oldenborgh contributed to studying linkages between climate change induced by human actions and catastrophic events such as droughts, floods, forest fires, and heatwaves.
[6] One of the group's studies of the 2021 Pacific Northwest heat wave, which spread across the west coast of the United States and Canada, found that the events were directly linked to climate change.
[8] Some of their studies were also released prior to a peer review, with the argument that the basic models and techniques had already been peer-reviewed and published in scientific journals.