The climate scientist who popularized the term “global warming” has died. Wallace Smith Broecker was 87.
Columbia University said the longtime professor and researcher died Monday at a New York City hospital. A spokesperson for the university’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory said Broecker had been ailing in recent months.
Broecker brought the term “global warming” into common use with a 1975 paper that correctly predicted rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere would lead to pronounced warming.
Broecker was also first to recognize what he called the ocean conveyor belt, a global system of ocean currents circulating water and nutrients. And according to Columbia University, he was a pioneer in radiocarbon and isotope dating, which allows scientists to create maps of the Earth’s past climate fluctuations dating back to the Pleistocene period.
Broecker was born in Chicago in 1931 and grew up in suburban Oak Park.
He joined Columbia’s faculty in 1959 and was known in science circles as the “grandfather of climate science.”
He was presented with the National Medal of Science by former U.S. president Bill Clinton in 1996 and the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 2002.
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