John Firor, 80; sounded alarm on changes in climate
John W. Firor, a former head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research whose clearly stated analysis of the effects of increasing carbon dioxide on the climate sounded an alarm about global warming, died Nov. 5 in Pullman, Wash. He was 80 and had Alzheimer’s disease.
Firor, who led the Boulder, Colo.-based agency from 1968 to 1980, was skilled at translating scientific research into language that could be understood by the public.
His 1990 book, “The Changing Atmosphere: A Global Challenge,” was translated into nine languages. Although longtime New York Times science writer Malcolm Browne called it “about as agreeable as a dose of ipecac,” he also said it was “persuasive because it is based more on evenhanded analysis than on advocacy.”
Trained as a physicist, Firor became an expert in public policy matters and often gave engaging lectures in which he combined anecdotes from the history of science with insights into the problems facing researchers who attempt to alert the public to looming problems.
“Why are we resistant to doing what’s necessary?” he asked in 1999, then quoted Harlan Cleveland, a former ambassador to NATO, saying this kind of environmental problem would require hundreds of millions of people to do something, or to stop doing something. “The stop doing something seems to be the problem. The general exuberance of modern society does not favor stopping,” Firor concluded.
Born in Athens, Ga., John William Firor interrupted college at the Georgia Institute of Technology to enlist in the Army near the end of World War II. He served at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, that convinced him to study physics when his military service was over. He graduated from Georgia Tech, then received a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago in 1954.
He worked at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C., in the late 1950s.
He moved in 1961 to Boulder to become director of the High Altitude Observatory, which soon became part of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He was appointed director of the center in 1968 and executive director in 1974. After he stepped down in 1980, he ran the center’s advanced study program.
A 1988 editorial that he wrote in a scientific journal prompted environmentalists, several European governments and a few U.S. legislators to call for a 20% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2000, a Washington Post article reported in 1990.
“The sooner we get busy trying to slow down our emissions, the better we are,” Firor said. “It is going to take decades to get people organized to reduce emissions. To say we can wait a decade before we start may be a perfectly sound calculation, but it is not a good political calculation.”
A 2002 book, “The Crowded Greenhouse: Population, Climate Change and Creating a Sustainable World,” which he wrote with his second wife, Judith E. Jacobsen, spelled out some of the adverse effects of too-rapidly growing population.
He was a past chairman of the board of the Environmental Defense Fund, now known as Environmental Defense. He was also a trustee of the World Resources Institute.
His wife of 29 years, Merle Jenkins Firor, died in 1979. His second wife died in 2004.
Survivors include four children from his first marriage; a sister; a brother; and three grandchildren.
