Life and Times of Climate Science Pioneer, Harvard Professor Michael B. McElroy
Behind the stories and voices you hear on Living on Earth is a dedicated corps of volunteers who help make it all happen, and sadly, cancer has taken one of our most generous and brilliant supporters, Harvard atmospheric science Professor Michael B. McElroy.
Mike was a long-time board member of the World Media Foundation, which produces Living on Earth, and a key member of the science and technology brain trust that keeps our reporting accurate.
He could also be a lot of fun with his big smile easily opening into a laugh under an unruly carrot top of hair that spoke of his Northern Ireland origins, and his penchant to buzz about in a diminutive Mazda Miata sports car, preferably with the top down.
Mike's vision included the need to be creative as well as correct, so the expertise he developed during his 86 years on this planet went beyond just the nuts and bolts of science and tech.
Looking to the future needs of society, he inspired the birth of Harvard’s undergraduate program in Environmental Science and Public Policy, as well as its Earth and Planetary Sciences department for more advanced studies.
He also brought diverse disciplines together in a university-wide center on the environment and launched the long running Harvard China Project to promote Sino-American understanding about energy, the economy, and the environment in a way that also considered diplomacy and social psychology.
But some of the best things about Mike go beyond his more public resume.
One was the understanding of his own genius. He was so comfortable in his own skin that he didn’t have to prove to anyone how smart he was. In fact, he was generous with his time and care with those less capable. That made for nice team building in the highly competitive, and at times even rough and tumble, part of academic politics at Harvard.
Yet, he did not accept the unacceptable. He had a nice portfolio for a time as the founding faculty director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment (HUCE). But his days at HUCE were numbered when then Harvard president Larry Summers insisted that HUCE co-sponsor the appearance of Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist.
Lomborg was a skeptic of taking climate action, viewing the Kyoto Protocol as ineffective policy. When he spoke in Harvard's Geological Lecture Hall on April 21, 2015, it was the day before Earth Day.
Lomborg declared renewable energy development was a waste of money, costing more that it would save in the long run. He also claimed trying to keep average global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees centigrade would cost as much as any benefits it might provide.
Rather than endorse Lomborg's appearance and thereby deny the risks of climate change that Mike had understood from his own research over decades, he resigned as head of HUCE.
Of course, history has proven Lomborg wrong and Larry Summers as well. In Summers's various positions in Democratic Administrations, from economic advisor to Secretary of the Treasury, Summers slow walked climate action and eventually supported the export of American oil, which stimulated more carbon emissions and boosted the fortunes of US fossil fuel interests.
Mike did not make any public fuss about his disagreement with Summers about Lomborg and climate denial but quietly continued his work as Harvard's tenured Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Science.
His work had started as an applied mathematics PhD student at Queens University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, using math to understand and model atmospheric physics.
After he finished his degree in 1962, he began working at Kitt Peak observatory in Tucson developing theories to model planetary atmospheres. Mike then came to Harvard at the age of 31 in 1970, becoming one of its youngest tenured professors and was soon working on the Viking Mars lander.
The following year, he urged NASA to explore Venus to get insights on whether increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth could lead to a runaway greenhouse effect like the one observed on Venus.
Early on in his career, Mike also helped deduce some of the chemistry rapidly opening a hole in the ozone layer and later chaired a task force for then US Vice President Al Gore on the use of US intelligence and satellite imaging resources for environmental research and security concerns about the climate. And, in later years, he chaired the aforementioned Harvard China project.
Just weeks before his death, he was still working, this time on how aircraft might reduce their impact on the climate by using jet fuel made from recycled municipal waste.
Mike had no desire to be a publicly feted Harvard professor. But for years he included Io in his Harvard email address, a playful paean to the innermost of the moons of Jupiter recorded by Galileo.
Like Mike, Io appears diminutive from a distance in comparison to the others, as it is the smallest of the four. But closer examination reveals it is the densest, with hundreds of volcanoes, and has the most surface gravity of any of the natural satellites in our solar system.
That was Mike McElroy. Perhaps less noticed than some, but likely to erupt with brilliance and laughter, dense with integrity and decency, and truly a scientific heavyweight.
Steve Curwood
Host and Executive Producer
