IRVINE : National Academy Honors UC Scientist

A UC Irvine scientist who performed pioneering research into the phenomenon of global warming has been named to the National Academy of Sciences.

Ralph J. Cicerone said he received a telephone call at 6:20 a.m. Tuesday from Washington. The caller, UCI colleague F. Sherwood Rowland, told him about his lifetime appointment to the prestigious body of about 1,600.

Rowland said he talked to Cicerone “for several minutes just to make sure he was awake. I wanted him to make sure it wasn’t a dream.”

Sixty new members were named Tuesday.

“It certainly makes you feel good to be one of them,” Cicerone said.

Cicerone, 46, joins nine other UCI faculty members and one foreign associate in the academy.

Cicerone is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the “greenhouse effect,” or the warming of atmospheric gases that could increase the temperature of the earth.

The work of Cicerone and a colleague provided a key building block for Rowland and Mario Molina of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as they determined the effect of chlorofluorocarbons on the ozone layer.

“Science is fun for me,” Cicerone said. “All the work we were doing turned out to be important for humanity.”

Cicerone joined the faculty at UCI last year. He is overseeing creation of a new geosciences department as its founding chair. The department, part of the School of Physical Sciences, is expected to study the greenhouse effect, the depletion of the ozone layer and the transfer of energy among continents, oceans and the atmosphere.