Christopher Graham Rapley CBE (known as Chris Rapley) (born 8 April 1947) is a British scientist. He is Professor of Climate Science at University College London, a Fellow of St Edmund's College Cambridge, a member of the Academia Europaea, Chair-elect of the European Science Foundation's European Space Sciences Committee, Patron of the Surrey Climate Commission, a member of the Science Museum’s Science Advisory Board, and member of the UK Clean Growth Fund Advisory Board. His previous posts include Director of the Science Museum, Director of the British Antarctic Survey, Chairman of the London Climate Change Partnership, President of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, Vice President of the European Science Foundation's European Polar Board, Executive Director of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, and founder - leader of UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory's (MSSL) Remote Sensing Group. In the 1970s he was instrument scientist on two Skylark rocket payloads flown from Woomera, Australia to study the Soft X-ray Diffuse Background, on four Aerobee flights for White Sands, New Mexico in collaboration with the Lockheed Missile and Space Co's (LMSC) Palo Alto research laboratory to test a new design of solar X-ray spectrometer. He was instrument scientist for the Bent Crystal Spectrometer and Flat Crystal Spectrometer detector package flown on NASA’s Solar Maximum Mission as part of the X-Ray Polychromator provided by UCL MSSL, LMSC and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. In 1994 whilst on a sabbatical at NASA's Jet Propultion Laboratory he contributed to the design of the Cassini RADAR instrument. He led numerous ESA funded studies on the use of radar altimeters to study Earth’s polar ice, land and inland water, underpinning the ESA Earth Observation satellite series ERS-1, ERS-2, and Envisat. The MSSL group provided the on-board calibration sources for the UK Along-Track Scanning Radiometer flown on the same spacecraft. He was Chair of the International Council of Science - World Meteorological Organisation's International Planning Group for the International Polar Year 2007-2008 and a member of the IPY Steering Committee. From 2012-2016 he was a member, then Chair, of the European Space Agency Director General’s High-Level Science Policy Advisory Committee. His current interests are in the role of climate scientists in society, the communication of climate science and the need to better balance the discovery of new facts about the climate system and the delivery of benefit to society. He is Chair of the UCL Policy Commission on Communicating Climate Science. In 2014 Prof Rapley and the playwright Duncan Macmillan wrote the acclaimed play ‘2071’ which Prof Rapley performed in 2014/15 at the Royal Court theatre and in Hamburg and Brussels. The book is available from John Murray. More recently Prof Rapley was the Science Consultant on BBC1’s ‘Climate Change – The Facts’ presented by Sir David Attenborough. He has recently been appointed as the science advisor on a BBC1 four-part series on the Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg. In 2003 Prof Rapley was appointed CBE by Her Majesty the Queen. In 2008 he was awarded the Edinburgh Science Medal for having made 'a significant contribution to the understanding and wellbeing of humanity'