Speakers
AbstractDr. A. Barrie Pittock
Honorary Fellow, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research, Australia
Barrie Pittock obtained a Ph. D. from Melbourne University in Australia in 1963, working on stratospheric ozone. He did a postdoctoral year at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, in 1963-1964, and joined CSIRO in 1965, where he worked initially on atmospheric ozone.
Later work included patterns of climate change and variability, the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, solar-weather relations, the environmental effects of nuclear war, and the greenhouse effect. He spent two years at the University of Arizona in 1977-1979 working at the Laboratory of Tree-ring Research.
He has been on the editorial board of several scientific journals, and remains on that of the journal Climatic Change. He has over 250 scientific publications.
Barrie was the founding leader, in 1988, of the then CSIRO Atmospheric Research division’s Climate Impact Group, and officially retired in 1999. Since then he has made major contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Third Assessment Report, published in 2001. He was a Lead Author of three chapters in Working Group II (impacts and adaptation), and of the overall Synthesis Report. Currently he is a Lead Author of chapter 19 of Working Group II, Fourth Assessment Report.
In 2004, he was the editor of Climate Change: An Australian Guide to the Science and Potential Impacts, for the Australian Greenhouse Office. In 2005, he published another book on the enhanced greenhouse effect for a world audience, covering the science, impacts, adaptation, mitigation, and policy issues, entitled Climate Change: Turning Up the Heat (CSIRO Publications and Earthscan, UK). Barrie’s first scenario for climate change in Australia was published in 1980 in Carbon Dioxide and Climate: Australian Research, Australian Academy of Science, Canberra, edited G. I. Pearman, pp.197-209. It stands up remarkably well today.
Links and Publications
http://www.dar.csiro.au/impacts/index.html
Climate Change: An Australian Guide to the Science and Potential Impacts, ed. Barrie Pittock, 2003 (PDF, 1.4MB).
Climate Change: Turning up the Heat, Barrie Pittock, September 2005.
