Berrien Moore III, who for decades spearheaded cutting-edge climate science at several universities and research institutes as well as at NASA, died on Dec. 17 in Norman, Okla. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter, Leila A.C. Moore.
His contributions to science spanned the theoretical and the practical, giving birth to new fields of study in earth sciences. He strove to explain them to the general public through a nonprofit news organization and by testifying numerous times before Congress.
Berrien Moore III was born on Nov. 12, 1941, in Atlanta to Berrien Moore Jr., a golfer, and Mary (Large) Moore, who worked for Southern Bell and was a television host.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina in 1963 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Virginia in 1969, Dr. Moore joined the faculty at the University of New Hampshire. When he was a young professor specializing in applied mathematics, few if any of his academic peers had tried to apply mathematics to studying the earth’s natural systems. Colleagues at the time remember Dr. Moore bucking at the sensibilities of the field he was trained in.
Most researchers thought of their field as “localized” at the time, said Robert Corell, an oceanographer and engineer whose career had many parallels with Dr. Moore’s. Dr. Moore, he said, “really helped awaken us.”
Dr. Moore and his colleagues operated in an age of refrigerator-size supercomputers that were both few in number and highly coveted by scientists awed by their ability to process reams of data. Dr. Corell remembered Dr. Moore vying for time on one belonging to the University of New Hampshire with Jochen Heisenberg, the son of the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg.
It was also an era when the relationship between human activity and climate change was little understood. Dr. Moore set about illuminating the links between different research disciplines, which helped form the backbone of the scientific world’s widely accepted consensus on climate change, through data analysis.
“He was very instrumental in popularizing the concept of the world as a system,” said Charles Vorosmarty, founding director of the Environmental Sciences Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center in New York City and a longtime colleague of Dr. Moore’s. “Berrien created the bona fides for how you study that with precision.”
That work led him to NASA, where he was a member of the space and earth advisory committee from 1984 until 1988, when he was promoted to chairman. He held that position until 1992 while also serving as a member of NASA’s advisory council.
During his time at NASA, Dr. Moore was an outspoken advocate for the agency’s satellite programs. The data they could gather, he argued, would fundamentally alter our understanding of the planet’s health by providing insights into the planet’s all-important carbon cycle.
In 1992, he was awarded the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the agency’s highest civilian honor.
Dr. Moore and the departments he ran continued to contribute to the scientific literature; at one point, Dr. Vorosmarty recalled, he churned out funding proposals for new studies at the rate of one a day. He also took his insights to the public. He spoke with journalists; left the University of New Hampshire in 2008 to found Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization; and served as a lead author for the third report, released in 2001, of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations scientific body whose work serves as the basis for our general understanding of the most current climate science.
In 2007, the panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore.
Dr. Moore joined the faculty of the University of Oklahoma in 2010 and served as the dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences until his death. He was also the director of the National Weather Center in Norman, Okla.
He was chairman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research review team from 2004 to 2005 and later a liaison between the administration and the National Weather Center. He received a NOAA Administrator’s Award for his contributions.
In 2016, NASA selected the Geostationary Carbon Cycle Observatory as its second earth venture mission. Dr. Moore was the architect and principal investigator of the mission, which was slated to launch in the early 2020s. The goal was to measure changes in the global carbon cycle and monitor plant health and vegetation stress in the Americas.
Although the mission was canceled in 2022, the team completed the instrument and delivered it to NASA in 2023.
Dr. Moore was dismayed to see the growing scientific consensus being warped by politicians with vested interests in fossil fuels — the burning of which, Dr. Moore’s work helped to show, was a leading cause of global warming.
“You will find people saying things like, ‘We don’t know that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere or if that increase has anything to do fossil fuels,’” Dr. Moore said in an oral history compiled by NASA in 2011.
But, he noted, scientists knew precisely how fast CO2 was increasing in the atmosphere, from modern measurements and ice core data before that. They also knew that the rapid rise was definitively linked to human activity.
“There’s no debate about that,” Dr. Moore said in the NASA oral history. “Yet the body politic thinks that that’s some big uncertain scientific question.”
In addition to his daughter, Dr. Moore is survived by his wife, Lucia. His first wife, Gail Thurman Moore, died in 2018.
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