William Nierenberg

William A. Nierenberg

William Aaron Nierenberg (February 13, 1919 – September 10, 2000) was an American physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and was director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography from 1965 through 1986. A building on that campus is named after him, as is the Nierenberg Prize.

Life and Career

Nierenberg was born on February 13, 1919, at 213 E. 13th Street, on the Lower East Side of New York, the son of very poor Jewish immigrants from Austro-Hungary. He went to Townsend Harris High School and then the City University of New York, where he won a scholarship to spend his junior year of university abroad, in France at the University of Paris. He entered graduate school at Columbia University in 1939, but spent the war years from 1942 seconded to the Manhattan Project, working on isotope separation, before returning to Columbia to complete his PhD.

In 1948 Nierenberg took up his first academic staff position, as Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan. From 1950 to 1965 he was Associate and then Professor of Physics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he had a very large and productive low energy nuclear physics laboratory, graduating 40 PhD’s during this time and publishing about 100 papers. During that period he took a one-year leave to serve as the director of the Columbia University Hudson Laboratory. Later, he oversaw the design and construction of the “new” physics building at Berkeley. Much later (1960-1962) he took leave once again as Assistant Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in charge of scientific affairs, where he oversaw many international studies on physics and advanced defense technologies.

In 1965 Nierenberg was asked to run one of the most prestigious oceanographic institution in the world, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). His background in sonar research and other naval-related science, his knowledge of and interest in geophysics dating from his college times and his many friendships in the community made him intellectually and professionally eager to go. By then he had also developed the many necessary international relationships. As SIO’s longest serving director, he quadrupled the funding for the institution and developed a fleet of five modern research vessels.

Nierenberg gained national recognition for his achievements and contributions to science. In 1965, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the Council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1979. He was also elected to the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He served on a large number of prestigious committees, primarily after he returned from NATO. In 1971 he was appointed chairman of the National Academy of Sciences National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere and served on this committee until 1977. Nierenberg served on various panels of the President's Science Advisory Committee. He was a member of the National Science Board from 1972 to 1978 and was appointed for another term from November 1982 to May 1988.

Nierenberg was a consultant to the National Security Agency, and served on many military-related panels. In 1976 he was appointed one of two senior consultants to the then newly formed White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). He was a member of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Advisory Council from 1978 to 1982 and served as its first chairman. He was Chairman of the OSTP Acid Rain Peer Review Panel, whose report "Acid Rain" was published in 1984. The report encouraged the administration to curb acid rain emissions.

In October 1980, during the Carter presidency, Nierenberg was appointed by congress to chair a committee to produce a new report on the risks of global warming, which two previous reports for the Carter administration had highlighted as a potential major problem. The scientific facts of the report were largely in line with the previous reports. However, the synthesis chapter, written by Nierenberg, rejected the conclusion that CO2 rises were a problem. Its key points were:

• the most probable date of CO2 "doubling" (to 600 ppm) was 2065 (page 21)
• global warming due to doubling CO2 is is likely to be between 1-5-4.5 oC, as suggested by the Charney report. Careful review of dissenting inferences suggesting negligible CO2-induced climate change shows these to be based on misleading analysis (page 28)
• warming at equilibirium would be 2-3 times as great over the polar regions as over the tropics; and probably greatere over the arctic (page 30)
• sea level might rise 70 cm over a century from thermal expansion, and melt of alpine glaciers. There was great uncertainty of the fate of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet; disintegration could lead to sea-level rise of 5 to 6m over several hundred years (page 42)
• CO2 is a cause for convern but not panic; a program of action without a program for learning would be costly an ineffective (page 61)
• a careful well-designed program of monitoring and analysis is needed to detect the CO2 signal on climate (page 76)

He subsequently became a co-founder of the George C. Marshall Institute, and outspokenly hostile to concerns about man-made climate change.

External links

• Oral History interview transcript with William Nierenberg, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library and Archives, 6 February 1986
• Obituary, Daily Telegraph, August 23, 2001
• Obituary, Physics Today, June 2001
• In Memoriam: William A. Nierenberg, UCSD campus notice, September 26, 2000
• Remembering Bill Nierenberg, George C. Marshall institute website, September 12, 2000